Paul L Murphy

Does anybody have the name of the colonel who commanded the 6th Battalion Chasseurs Laotians during the Indochina War ? I believe he made it to general rank afterward but I am not sure on this point.

Regards,

Paul

Ed,

I still think the eye candy in post four of this thread is better

Paul

Let me see what I can do. The medals are not with me here in Moscow but I will see if I can rescale that part of the photo which I have in order to show it better.

Or put it another way, if a 2nd Lt really is entitled to all that then they are pretty meaningless in terms of what they signify. Also, they must be extremely plentiful so you can expect a nice plunge in prices once the barriers come down !

Glenn,

Typo corrected, many thanks. The E and A keys are far too close to each other.

Cheers,

Paul

Look at that lovely embossed seal.

And we can finish off with a Letters Patent.....

.... and his second Bulgarian award. I do like the Bulgarian certificates, very impressive.

And now for his Bulgarian awards. Number 1 .......

Another one, this is much more impressive than it appears in the picture.

A nice certificate.

More awards .....

Now we know when he was born !

and more

More marching orders I believe ?

Followed by his Friedrich Cross

Next his Long Service Medal

I presume these are marching orders ????

His awards are : - 1914 Iron Cross 2nd Class, Friedrich Cross 2nd Class, War Combatant?s

Cross, Landwehr Long Service Medal 2nd Class, Bulgarian Military Merit Order Knight With Crown,

Bulgarian WWI Commemorative Medal For Combatants, Black Wound Badge, Dog Tag, Four Place

Ribbon Bar.

His documents are : - Commission Patent as a Leutnant in the Infantry dated 18 November 1905; Landwehr Long Service Medal dated 20 ? 1910; Iron Cross 2nd Class dated 4 November 1914 (Leutnant); notice of award of Friedrich Cross dated 12 December 1914; Auszug dated 24 March 1915; Certificate of Friedrich Cross dated 12 July 1915 (Oberleutnant); Bulgarian Military Merit Order dated 1918 (rank of Oberleutnant); orders (?) dated 10 March 1918 (Oberleutnant); Orders sending him to Rumania on 10 March 1918; Black wound badge dated 6 May 1918; Orders dated 16 April 1919 (Hauptmann); Kyffhauserbundes certificate for WWI service dated 8 February 1924; Bulgarian WWI Commemorative Medal For Combatants dated 25 February 1938 with German translation and forwarding slip (Hauptmann).

The documents follow on in no particular order .......

First up his Kyffhauserbund certificate

This lot belonged to Friedrich Dennert who ended the war as a captain in the 27th Infantry Regiment. I have not yet started to research him in any detail but I am sure there is plenty of good stuff to dig up.

David makes a very good point. It might work out cheaper for you (and take up less space on our bookshelves) if it were done on CD ROM. The Naval & Miltiary Press brought out the Casualties of the Great War in that format and it was a good success.

I am definitely interested in one of each.

The only consolation is that once you bang your head against a brick wall enough times it actually starts to feel comfortable. A nice deadening drowsy sort of feeling ...............

Exactly.

My next step is to go through Bate & Smith and see if it could be a combination of WWII and post war awards of the MM. They say there were only 2 double bar awards in WWII and do not mention any double bar awards subsequently. It is a thin hope but maybe they did not call it a 2nd bar unless it was awarded for the same conflict as the previous awards, ie. maybe a post war MM or a post war first bar is actually the second bar to the recipient. I'm not explaining this well but I'm sure you know what I mean.

I will trawl through their listings and see if I can find a match using this logic. If not, then I will see if it makes sense for DCM and MM plus single bar combinations. Perhaps the wearer decided to add a rosette for his first award and a rosette for his bar (sound of Murphy clutching at straws !).

Very interesting indeed. I know the photo you are talking about and he certainly looks constipated ! I am sure I have a copy of it somewhere so I just need to dig it out.

If the EK2 paperwork was late, and the award itself predates Feb 1916 then the date of the EK1 may not actually be unusual. Could it be possible that this certificate was just "setting things to right" for medals that he had been legitimately awarded and they issued it in the name of his unit at the time of the certificate, rather than the time when he won the awards ? I presume Major Bisher was the unit commander ?

I have managed to find out from some Turkish internet sources that he was entitled to the Turkish decoration so the only one that is definitely "dodgy" according to the medal rolls at the moment is the Karl Eduard Medal.

Any ideas how Kriebel died ? From his photo I would imagine heart attack and high blood pressure !