August 1917 and organized twenty days later at Camp Sherman in Ohio, the 83rd Division (designated as 83rd Infantry Division in 1942) arrived in France 21 June 1918 and was designated a Depot Division and ordered to the Le Man area between Paris and St. Nazaire. The Division was broken up, with the 158th Artillery Brigade and other specialized units (Engineer regiment, Signal battalion, etc.) sent to the front as Corps or Army personnel; the remainder were saved to serve as replacement troops for units suffering combat casualties, earning the Division a World War I streamer but with no campaigns listed on it.
During the Second World War, the Division landed at Omaha Beach on 18 June 1944. After breaking out of the hedgerows of Normandy, the Division advanced steadily and resolutely until it reached the Siegfried Line, taking part in the fighting of Hurtgen Forest before entering the Battle of the Bulge two days after Christmas. The Division earned credit for taking part in five European Theater campaigns, with the liberation of a camp attached to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in mid-April 1945 marking one of the unit’s most memorable achievements.
Nicknamed the “Thunderbolt Division,” “Rag Tag Circus” and “Ohio, the 83rd Infantry Division was inactivated at Cleveland, Oho in 1965. Nearly fifty years later, the U.S. Army Reserve Readiness Training Center was redesignated the 83rd U.S. ARRTC, with Soldiers assigned to the organization tossing their old insignias away and replacing them with the black, inverted triangular patch that the Soldiers of the 83rd had worn almost one hundred years earlier in World War I.
The 83rd Infantry Division Shoulder Sleeve Insignia features a cipher with the letters “OHIO” placed on the triangle in a monogram. It is now designated as the 83rd U.S. Army Reserve Readiness Training Center Shoulder Sleeve.
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