Ulsterman

A REALLY useful captured item ( @ 1942/43):

Have you tried member demir?

One was for sale @ 3 months ago on eBay. i stumbled across it looking for an early Korean issue Korean War campaign medal (which Turks were also allowed to keep). There were also Turkish "Korean war badges" made and issued! These were worn by vets although i do not know if they were allowed on uniforms or only on specific parade days. A box (!) of these also sold recently on eBay. Do a search on 'Korean veteran medal' under completed items and they should pop up.

Cool!! I LOVE the table Kivalo medals.

wow!! So this is a Northern Alliance medal for the Mujahadeen?

...Hesse Cassel troops weren't at Waterloo. They were part of the North German Federation "Army" under the very ill General von Kleist. In reality the "Army" was more of a Corps and actually never more than @ 18,000 strong under Prussian control and leadership. Established by the Prussian king in late March, Hesse-Cassel's troops formed the majority of the Corps with two of the Corps' three Infantry divisions and two elite Hussar regiments, a staff and a battery of guns. The third Division was made up of Lippians, Reuss, Anhalt, Schaumbergian-Lippians, Oldenburgers, Mecklenbergers, Sonderhauseners etc. etc.. Hesse Kassel troops, famous mercenaries for over a century (indeed, several officers in 1815 had served at Trenton!!) formed the core of the famous Confederation of the Rhine troops-the Westphalians. Westphalian troops were superb, fought in Spain, Russia and Germany and a hard core remnant @ 3000 or so, remained loyal to (King Jerome) Bonaparte until just before Paris fell in 1814. The North German Army took quite a while to assemble and organize and it didn't actually make it over the border until AFTER Waterloo. Before then they were in bivouac in the Ardennes. The Mecklenberg contingent did not actually catch up with the Corps until July! The Hessians spent most of 1815 skirmishing and attacking forts on the frontier. There were some spectacular smaller battles, with earthworks overrun and retaken at bayonet point, massive gunfights in the streets of smaller towns and lots of company-sized skirmishes. The final actions took place in late August, long after Napoleon was on his way to St. Helena and mostly concerned small forts on the Dutch border that the Dutch and local French forces (soon to be Belgians) both were eager to claim. Estimates vary and there is much confusion as to the makeup of the regiments (as a confederated forces troops drifted in weekly and seem to have been assigned sometimes where they were needed), but it seems as that about 50% of the Hessian contingent was comprised of veterans on 1811/12/1813/14- who had fought hard and well, FOR the Emperor. Who knows, it may even be that you own a medal that was once worn by a veteran of Trenton and Brandywine! Hurrah! Oh and its estimated that there were NO More than 8,000 of the Hessian medal made.

There was a nice paperback that came out @ 5 years ago entitled "Afghan Wars" that was good. The complete HM Publishing reprint on the 1919 Afghan campaign was done @ 8 years ago and can be found cheap sometimes. Helion publishing also has some good stuff. Of course, there is also Flashman, which is also very good.

Well, I have looked and looked and while there are several of these "unknown" medals out there in cyberspace (for sale) the 'key" is whatever it says on the reverese. Owain? I can tell you that it appears similar to the royalist Afghani merit medal, probably @ 1940-1970.

whoa!!! The Napoleonic award (s) is fantastic!

The 3rd Madras were also at Assaye.

Definitely a shako plate. I think its a bell top shako plate (@ 1830-1840s), but the back looks new-esp. with the screws in place. My guess is 3rd Madras cavalry.

Nope-maddening isn't it? He was planning on redoing it, but died before he got to complete it. He would have LOVED the Ancestry files on-line.

Whoa- you are speaking Waaaaaaay above me here on that last one. Only about 600 RIC men quit after the IRAs' "kill the RIC" campaign in 1920/21? Is that correct? they were replaced by Tans and Auxies (@ 50,000 in all?) as well as Bs and Cs in Ulster?

Do you mean the Coleman medal? It was for sale on eBay @ 2 years ago. BigJar may have kept a record of the sale. If the Museum sold it (and that does happen sometimes) OR it was stolen (!) may be we can help you get it back. Could it have been a replacement medal? OR someone has sold a faked up CSM. I have sent an email to the Major/curator at the Fusilers' Museum to see if they still have the medal. The phone # is on their website.

Well, the one book on the subject was quite polemic. however, I have looked at the violence statistics for Ireland 1919-1922 (which seem quite comprehensive) and the Tans and Auxis clearly weren't the Vikings they were portrayed to be. Mind you, they weren't exactly the restrained response of the Security Forces in Ulster in the 1980s either. Who was killing whom in Ireland in the 1920s is an interesting tale. As I recall, one sociologist/historian thought that up to 10% of irish casualties were NOT war related, but criminal murders. The murderers then put a "Tout" sign upon the corpse. Similar criminal conduct plagued all the paramilitaries in Ulster, most appallingly the UDA. The PIRA however, also had BIG problems with certain "cells" and "companies". My best friend once saved the life of a PIRA "officer" who was running naked (except for his sox) down the street of Omagh at 3AM being chased by two other PIRA men shooting at him with a WW2 era Colt! The naked man had been caught in bed with one of the other mens' wives.

Ambuscade and shoot-n-scoot is one thing, shooting unarmed people in front of their kids is another. Of course there's also burying people alive in sand up to their necks and watching as the tide comes in ..... and burning people alive. As you know, a LOT of people in Ireland know and remember these things. I knew lots of horsey-type Fianna Gael supporters who could tell you exactly who, what and when did for their parents and disliked DeVelera because of it.

My error regarding the "nine counties". (Note PK did the same with the 32) 1. My Wehrmacht comparison was apt I thought. The vast majority of Wehrmacht soldiers in France behaved themselves -indeed, probably 99%. The 1% that did not were beastly and so were many of the Tans. It wasn't all IRA propaganda. 2. I interviewed surviving Auxis. and a couple of Tans in 1985/1986 for my MA. thesis. All of them confessed to regularly beating up known IRA suspects and one recounted a cold blooded murder of a man they'd been told was an IRA officer, but later may just have 'only' deflowered the informant's daughter! Again, I still have the cassette tapes upstairs. 3. Can you point me as to the RIC stats in Ulster? I just went back to the library and had a look and lo and behold, discovered that one couldn't be in the Orange Order AND be a copper until 1920! Also, I had no idea that the Londonderry RIC arrested armed UVF squads and gaoled them for disturbing the peace. Good discussion-interesting sister forum. Can you id the truncheons?

My only Specials badge.

Its actually backwards. Odds are its #2 of a two or even three bar set as everyone with the Korean war medal got the UN medal. Occupation medals are common- @ 1.25 million or so were awarded.

I have NEVER seen a German mini-medal bar-ever-that was pre-1957. ...and i have looked at tens of thousands of contemporary TR photos. They wore them on lapel chains. Also, the medal bar looks like an English one.

Well, there's an enormous of amount of literature on this subject much of which is good and some of which is really bad (polemics run amok). However, the RIC was generally regarded as much the same as the Garda-before 1918 that is. In the early Troubles not a few RIC men were murdered and more than one " kindly old village cop on the beat" got shot by some youngster who was in the IRA. Dan Breen himself kicked off the Troubles by executing a nice old RIC man who was unarmed. Some of these murders kicked off family feuds that continued as political divisions in the Republic well into the 1970s. However, the RIC was unable and in many cases somewhat unwilling to deal with the IRA in the 1920s. That is why the British recruited the "Black and Tans ", ex-WW1 vets (not a few of whom had been officers and NCOs in the British army) and these men were NOT trained as community policemen. The Tans had the finesse of the Wehrmacht in occupied France. In Ulster meanwhile (at the time 9 (whoops) counties, but after partition six), the local RIC was solidly Unionist and the IRA never got much a toehold before being hunted down and often, killed. There are accounts of 13 year old teenagers being beaten to death with pick axe handles in 1920 for daring to put up pro-Sinn Fein posters in Belfast. Not a few prominent Nationalists had their houses burnt to the ground and their families beaten. There were riots and shootings in Ulster in the Troubles, but on the whole the Unionist majority (at the time there were 3.75 Protestants to every one Catholic)kept the lid on. Had the civil war been exported northwards, the old IRA might have found itself in very real trouble, as the Unionists were willing to "burn and kill everything that got in their way down to Cork". During the "Independence War" the IRA was lucky if it fielded @ 2,500 men in toto. Most units were no more than @ 35 in size and rarely fought in the open. They were shoot-and-scoot guerrillas. The UVF had over 115,000 men on its rolls in 1920 (and not a few of these had served in WW1) and these were organized into battalions, companies, platoons and squads, complete with a Red Cross section, staff and even a 'navy'! The UVF also had lots of guns and lots of ammo.. Back in @ 1980 Pluto Press (the UKs' Communist Party publishers) put out an interesting book on how the Unionists armed themselves right through the mid 1930s. Ulster was awash with guns in the 1920s and the VAST majority were in Protestant hands. Before the recent police reforms in Ulster the RUC (reformed twice since 1969) had @ 8-10% Catholic membership. The highest it ever got was 13% in @ 1975 I think. Ulster had @ 30-35% Catholic population at the time. Being a Catholic in the RUC was VERY tough in the 1970s and 1980s as the PIRA made a special target of you AND your family. The Protestant paramilitaries weren't exactly warm and fuzzy about RUC Catholics either (esp. the rabid dogs of the UVF and RHC) so it was a very isolated and scary situation to be in. Seamus Heaney in North wrote of his Ulster Catholic family's attitude towards the local RUC cop: His bicycle stood at the window-sill The rubber cowl of a mud splasher Skirting the front mudguard, Its fat black handgrips heating in sunlight, the spud Of the dynamo gleaming and cocked back, the pedal treds hanging relieved Of the boot of the law His cap was upside down On the floor, next to his chair. The line of its pressure ran like a bevel In his slightly sweating hair. He had unstrapped the heavy ledger, and my father Was making tillage returns In acres, roods and perches. Arithmetic and fear. I sat staring at the polished holster With its buttoned flap, the braid cord looped into the revolver butt.

Well, what more would you like to know? The Bs were local special constables organized in platoons and companies and wearing traditional police garb (not the Bobby helmet but the flat cap and sometimes armbands. They traditionally wore greatcoats when on patrol. In the old days t.v. cameras weren't around, training was minimal and the Bs were only called out in times of local disturbances, usually sectarian in nature. So, they tended to thump people that were causing trouble, notably Catholic teenage boys. They wouldn't touch a female, because that wasn't proper. They ranged in character from older gentlemen (in the classic British sense of the word: WW1 officer types) to rural thugs. they reported and were commanded directly by RUC officers (usually a station Sergeant acted as a company commander in an area). The Nationalists portrayed them as football hooligans in uniform, but most were in fact regularly employed, veterans, middle-aged family men who belonged to the local Unionist lodge and went to Presbyterian church every Sunday: sober salt-of-the-earth types who enjoyed a good beer and hated Eire and Irish Nationalists. My impression from the couple I met twenty-three years ago is that most later voted DUP. The Bs were strongest in rural Ulster and not nearly as prevalent in the cities or even the border towns. As was pointed out many, many Bs had ties to the old UVF of Carsons' day (which was the basis of the 36th Inf. Division in WW1 and the Ulster Home Guard in WW2), but their cross-over to the "newer" UVF , founded by 'Gusty Spense (whom I once called "Gutsy" by mistake )in the late 1960s was minimal-if limited to three or four individuals. The Northern Ireland Forum has a few chaps on it who are ex-UVF/UDA as well as a couple retired RUC who collect this stuff. They'd probably know exactly what it is and maybe even who owned it. It is VERY rare.

Excellent!! :cheers:

Indeed, Winchester wrote an enormous amount on Ulster before he became the superstar bestseller he is today. He was one of the "big five" early reporters on the ground before Op. Motorman. His book is entitled "In Holy terror" and was published by Faber and Faber (1974/1988). I always found it interesting he dedicated it to Jan Morris (the Oxford historian who had a sex change operation). I met Winchester via Max Hastings and -of all people- a rabidly Marxist Dutch reporter who decided he liked me after I pointed out he was being sexist because he "didn't like Margaret Thatcher because she was too manly"! No, I didn't write regularly for Varsity. I was too busy with girls, beer and OTC. One thing led to another. My Gaelic sucks- I pronounce it "Ar Desh". It was the regular one. I have been to three in all.

HELL-O!! Medal information as well. Off to subscribe to Ancestry!! Thanks for the tip!! :cheers: