DDR Waste, Duplication, & Utter Irrationality

[Guest Rick Research]

This has been puzzling me:

Why were DDR Medals issued with TALL cloth ribbon bars with complex but flimsy pronged on pins just like the full sized medal attachments BUT

what was actually WORN as ribbon bars were much lower and those horribly tawdry colored paper under plastic things?

I don't mean early medals versus late ones. From what I've seen reading threads here, awards being handed out as the Wall came atumblin' down all of which were presented with a style and size of ribbon bar which was never WORN

thus resulting in needless expense and wastage of the People's Property, Comrade Procurator.

WHY?

[Kev in Deva]

WHY?

Errr... because they can? could? did etc.. etc..

show us more of the goodies you got this weekend.

Kevin in Deva.

[Gordon Craig]

Rick,

An obvious question but one I never thought of. Another instance of a "good idea" which fell short of the mark?

Why they continued to produce both is a mystery but I can think of a couple of reasons to move to the paper ribbon bars, although there were other options. If you look at the post I just made to the thread on police medals you will see what happens to a cloth IS over time. It gets very dirty and almost unrecognizable. It would have made more sense to plastic coat the IS as was done by, or for, some General officers and not produce the paper ribbon bars at all. Particularly as they did not print paper sections for foreign awards which led to some problems for those who assembled bars for senior officers.

Thanks for your observation. Made me think again for a change!

Regards,

Gordon

Edited March 12, 2007 by Gordon Craig

[Guest Rick Research]

Yup! Nice example of a single ribbon being worn. But then why KEEP issuing the large individual cloth ribbons for those cumulative rows of long services which were NOT worn alone?

Here's an example I should have posted when I started this last night, but that was a spur of the moment thing:

Cuban individual ribbons of exactly the same type as issued with DDR awards (don't have any but same size and construction) versus the awful paper DDR norm:

Since these individual ribbons were NOT tabbed onto multip0le awards backings, why on earth did they bother?

Such waste! Such ineeficiency!!!