15th Infantry Regiment Battalions

Modern Era, United States, Infantry

This second-pass battalion page ties each battalion icon more directly to the parent regiment's established story. Until a battalion-by-battalion lineage research pass is completed, the copy below should be read as regiment-specific context rather than as a final battalion lineage sheet.

1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment icon
1st Battalion

1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment

This entry now anchors the battalion page in the regiment's origin or defining early identity, giving the 1st Battalion slot a more specific historical frame than the first scaffold pass.

The 15th Infantry Regiment was constituted on 3 May 1861 during the Civil War expansion of the Regular Army. It served in the western theater and afterward moved into frontier duty and then overseas stationing, most notably in China. Because of that long China assignment, the regiment became known as the "China Hands," one of the most distinctive identities in the U.S. Army's infantry lineage system.

2d Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment icon
2d Battalion

2d Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment

The 2d Battalion entry uses the regiment's middle or operational arc to give the page a clearer sense of how the parent unit developed over time.

That same association continued in Korea. The 15th Infantry deployed with the 3rd Infantry Division and fought in the hard campaigns of 1950-53, helping define the division's combat reputation there just as it had in World War II. This gives the regiment one of the clearest twentieth-century divisional identities of any infantry regiment: its main mid-century wars were fought under the 3rd Infantry Division.

3d Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment icon
3d Battalion

3d Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment

The 3d Battalion entry now carries the regiment into its later or enduring modern identity, tightening the page around the way the lineage is remembered in the modern Army.

In later decades the 15th Infantry continued through battalions rather than as a field regiment in the old sense. Those battalions preserved the regiment's China Hands tradition while serving in the post-Korea and post-Cold War Army. The regiment's history therefore combines Civil War origins, long imperial-era service in China, and two major twentieth-century wars fought as part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Research note: This second pass replaces the generic scaffold text with regiment-specific context drawn from the parent regiment page. Dedicated battalion-level lineage research is still deferred to a later pass.

See Also

  • 15th Infantry Regiment
  • Infantry Regiment Index
  • Modern Era