Signal Patch
(Winker-Abzeichen)
Original Imperial German Army specialty trade insignia (Tätigkeitsabzeichen) identifying the wearer as a Winker — the flag signaler trade within a Maschinengewehr-Abteilung (Machine Gun Detachment) of the Imperial German Army. The patch is constructed as a circular feldgrau (field-grey) wool disk approximately three inches (76 mm) in diameter, with the trade device embroidered directly into the wool ground: two crossed signal flags, the left flag in white and the right in red, mounted on yellow embroidered staves crossed in saltire.
The white-and-red flag combination depicted is the standard pair of Imperial German Army visual-signaling flags used for the Winker (flag-wave) signaling system, the pre-electric communication method by which infantry units exchanged short messages across line of sight. The two-flag set permitted attention signals and the indication of letters and numerals through a semaphore-like alphabet. Within the Maschinengewehr-Abteilungen — independent machine gun detachments first established in 1899 and expanded rapidly through the years that followed — the Winker was an essential link in the chain that connected gun positions to battalion and regimental command. Machine gun fire is most effective when concentrated and shifted in coordination with the infantry advance, and the visual signaler carried responsibility for receiving and relaying fire commands when telephone wire could not be laid or had been cut. The trade was therefore a specialist role within a specialist arm, and the men who held it were granted a distinguishing sleeve patch worn on the lower right arm of the field-grey tunic.
The Imperial German Army established the Maschinengewehr-Abteilung as an organizational form in 1899, attaching the first detachments at brigade and regimental level under the personal sponsorship of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had taken an immediate interest in the Maxim system after demonstrations in the 1890s. By August 1914 the army fielded a substantial establishment of MG-Abteilungen, and during the conflict their number multiplied dramatically as the conditions of trench fighting made the machine gun the dominant infantry support arm of the period. Personnel within an MG-Abteilung filled a range of specialist trades — gunners, loaders, range-takers, ammunition carriers, telephone operators, and visual signalers — each of which carried its own trade badge worn on the sleeve. The crossed signal-flag device of the Winker is among the more historically resonant of these badges, in that it documents the persistence of nineteenth-century visual signaling alongside the firepower of the new century that came to define Imperial infantry doctrine in its final form.