The squadron's insignia was designed by Elliot William Chess (1899–1962), an American pilot serving with the Polish Army during the Polish–Soviet War.

During World War II the Kościuszko Squadron was formed by refugee Polish pilots who joined the Royal Air Force and played an essential role during the Battle of Britain.

The Kościuszko Squadron emblem depicts the distinctive four-cornered Polish peasant cap characteristic to the Małopolska region with a peacock feather inside, set against a field of seven red vertical stripes on a white background (forming six white stripes as a result) from the flag of the United States, red and white also being two colors contained in both the Polish and American flags as well as representing the striped trousers of traditional małopolska men's folk dress.

[5] The rogatywka cap and scythes commemorate the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794: ten years after General Tadeusz Kościuszko returned to Poland from America, and led a Polish insurgency marked by peasant participation (himself donning the traditional folk dress of the peasants in the region of Kraków, where the uprising was proclaimed) in an attempt to liberate Poland from Russia and Prussia.

This later led to a mistaken belief that the simple to make polearms used by many footmen in the uprising were in fact actual scythes used for shearing wheat.