I was a cub, scout and venture in the UK from the late 70s until early 90s.
From what I remember there were two hand signals. The shoulder-high pointing up “salute” wasn’t the salute as such. I’m pretty sure there was another name for it, but it is escaping me right now. It was used for things that took time. For example, the Cub Scout promise “Akela, we’ll do out best!/Cubs! Do you best!/ We WILL do our best!” Whereas the head salute was used when receiving badges and suchlike. And for the flag.
The gesture used for the oath-taking, I’ve usually heard as “raise your hand to the square” or simply “raise your right hand.” The hand salute, of course, I’ve only heard called “hand salute.”
I’ve been involved with Scouting in the U.S. since the mid-Seventies. All that time, and still today, Cub Scouts (including Webelos) salute with two fingers and Boy Scouts salute with three.
Completely different in the UK. I wonder what else is different? I’ve been in all three levels of Scouting that was available to me (Beavers weren’t around when I was that age) and I’ve never done a two-fingered salute. IN fact I have no idea what it looks like, it sounds like a rude gesture
As with everything, there’s a Wikipedia page about it. The shoulder-height one is the “Scout Sign”:
Oh on the general Scouting page it says that the UK and some other associations got rid of the two fingered salute when “they detached from the Jungle theme”. I’m not sure what this means though as apparently Cubs still have the Jungle Book theme, with Akela, Baloo etc.
It was, of course, adopted by many left wing activist groups from Earth First! to the Black Panther party. And just for the hell of it by practically every college student in the late sixties, early seventies. But those aren’t military use.
From the “student strike” days, I remember the popularity of the “fist” emblem stenciled on a blue denim shirt, with “STRIKE” stamped diagonally across it. I entered college towards the tail end of that time, but you still saw it - there had actually been a strike on my campus the year before I entered.
(I remember somebody having a “60s party” some time around 1990, and I went out of my way to dig up a blue denim shirt and recreate that logo, worn over a tie-dye tee shirt. A lot of the younger people at the party didn’t recognize it by that time. The older ones definitely did.)
When I was in Japan I saw several instances of what I had thought of as the Nazi salute, obviously with no Nazi reference intended. During sporting events such as middle school track and field day the kids making speeches on behalf of their school or class used it, and I also saw it in a flower shop commercial. It seemed to have that ancient Roman, “We swear we’re going to do our very best to make flower arrangements you’ll love, or die trying!” vibe.
