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Named WWII grouping to Staff Sergeant Martin J. Anderegg, U.S. Army XV Corps — including his signed XV Corps enlisted men’s club membership card, an XV Corps shoulder sleeve insignia, and a period U.S. Army matchcover.
The centerpiece:
- The heart of this grouping is a “Club 15 — The EM’s Club” membership card, No. 0159, issued by XV Corps and made out to Martin J. Anderegg, S Sgt, ASN 38454184. The card is signed in ink by Anderegg himself. Printed in black and teal on yellow stock, it carries the XV Corps insignia at left and the club’s offerings along the bottom — “MUSIC … DRINKS … INTERTAINMENT” (the misspelling is on the original card, a small human detail typical of unit-produced printing in the field). The card states it will admit bearer and one guest, and is marked non-transferable.
The reverse carries the club rules over the signature line “President, Club 15,” warning that anyone abusing the club’s privileges will have the card taken from him. Also visible on the reverse is a faint mirrored ink offset reading “No 0160” — a transfer impression from the adjacent card in the printed batch, exactly the sort of incidental artifact that period letterpress work produces and that would be very difficult to fabricate.
Enlisted men’s clubs like this one were a fixture of the occupation period, set up by units to give soldiers somewhere to go once the shooting stopped. XV Corps headquarters remained in Germany until it was inactivated on 31 March 1946, which is the window this card most plausibly belongs to. Named, signed, unit-produced ephemera of this kind rarely survives — it was disposable by design.
Reading the service number
Anderegg’s Army Serial Number, 38454184, is itself informative. Under the wartime numbering system the leading 3 indicates a man inducted under the Selective Training and Service Act rather than a volunteer enlistment, and the second digit 8 places his induction in the Eighth Corps Area / Service Command, headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and covering Texas and the surrounding southwest. Anderegg was, in other words, almost certainly a Southwestern draftee — consistent with the Texas estate this grouping came out of.
What XV Corps did:
XV Corps was activated on 15 February 1943 at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, and fought 307 days in the European Theater under Major General Wade H. Haislip — first under Patton’s Third Army, later under the Seventh Army. Its record is among the more remarkable of any American corps:
• Normandy breakout and Falaise: XV Corps drove through the Avranches gap and liberated Le Mans on 8 August 1944, swinging into the rear of the German Seventh Army. Its 5th Armored Division reached positions overlooking Argentan on 12 August. The corps was then famously halted at Argentan on 13 August by Bradley’s order before it could link up with the Canadians — the decision that left the Falaise Pocket open and remains one of the most debated calls of the Normandy campaign.
• First across the Seine: XV Corps was the first Allied formation to cross the Seine River, on 19 August 1944, and the first American troops to reach the Rhine, on 23 November 1944.
• Alsace and the winter fighting: Transferred to the Seventh Army, XV Corps held the line west of the Vosges during Operation Nordwind, the German offensive launched at the close of the Battle of the Bulge.
• Into Germany: Broke the Siegfried Line on 20 March 1945, took Homburg and Zweibrücken, and crossed the Rhine at Worms and Mannheim on 26 March. Took Bamberg on 13 April, then seized Nuremberg on 20 April 1945 after five days of house-to-house fighting — the ceremonial heart of the Nazi regime, taken street by street.
• Munich, Dachau, and the end: XV Corps took Munich on 3 May 1945 and reached Salzburg, Austria the following day, where its combat operations ended. It was General Haislip who warned his division commanders that a concentration camp lay near Munich; the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions, under his corps, reached Dachau on 29 April 1945.
XV Corps holds campaign credit for Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe.
Offered for context: this is the record of the corps Anderegg served with. His specific unit assignment and personal service record are not documented by these items, and are left for the buyer to research.
The grouping
1. Club 15 “The EM’s Club” membership card, XV Corps, No. 0159 — typed with Anderegg’s name, rank and ASN, and signed by him in ink. Club rules and “President, Club 15” on reverse, with mirrored offset of card No. 0160.
2. XV Corps shoulder sleeve insignia — embroidered blue disc with the quartered olive drab and white device forming the Roman numeral XV. Cut edge, no cheesecloth backing; construction consistent with wartime U.S. manufacture. Reverse photographed for the buyer’s own assessment.
3. U.S. Army matchbook, full and unstruck — deep blue with gilt Great Seal on the front, “U. S. Army” in gilt script on the reverse above “CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING MATCH.” Manufactured by the Diamond Match Company. All matches present and unstruck, striker strip intact. These are book matches (safety matches), not strike-anywhere.
Condition
Sold as-is from an estate. The membership card shows moderate foxing and age toning throughout with light surface creasing; all print and the signature remain fully legible. The patch shows light age soiling and some thread wear consistent with a period-used example. The matchbook shows edge wear, surface scuffing and staining to the cover; the matches are complete and unstruck, and there is a small insect casing visible among the matchsticks (shown in photos). Please examine all photographs closely — they form part of the description.
Why this one
Patches survive by the thousand. What almost never survives is the paper: a signed, numbered, unit-printed club card naming an individual soldier by rank and service number, from a corps with a combat record running from Falaise to Nuremberg to Dachau to Salzburg. This is a small grouping, but it is a named one, and the research trail it opens is real.
