Dave Danner

Igazolv?ny a "T?zkereszt" visel?s?nek jogosults?g?r?l Krizs?n J?nos honv. r?sz?re. = "Certificate entitling private soldier J?nos Krizs?n to wear the Fire Cross" - Hungarians place family name first. Milyen fokozat visel?s?re jogosult _______ = "What class entitled to wear" - hard to read, but looks like "1st class, swords, something" H?nyszor sebes?lt _______ = "How often wounded" - looks like nothing written Sz?let?si ?v _______ = "Year of birth" - illegible Sz?l?anyja le?nykori n?ve _______ = "Mother's maiden name" - illegible except for Anna Azonoss?gi sz?ma _______ = "Identification number" - illegible The stamp is for the Royal Hungarian Military [something] Command. As for the text in the upper left, I am not sure what the abbreviation "ny.t.sz?m." means, other than sz?m means number. I assume it is the orders authorizing the cross. The first line is an abbreviation for a military command, with the second line probably the order # for 1943. Can't read the signature at the bottom.

The Angolan fraternal combatant medal ("A Medalha Fraternidad Combativa") has a ribbon of equal red, yellow and red stripes, separated by narrower black stripes. Medals mostly have pan-African colors - green (the wealth of the African soil), yellow/gold (the wealth under the soil), black (the wealth that works the soil) and red (the blood shed in the struggles against colonialism). Among Communist states, blue, white and red are more fitting for Cuba, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. BTW, it is actually mildly surprising that Soviet tailors would have difficulty with getting Cuban ribbons, as the medals were mainly made in the DDR.

Second on your bottom row is the Medalla "Por la Defensa de Cuito Cuanevale". Note the blue is to the right. The 30th Anniversary medal is the reverse - blue to the left. Also note the order of precedence - 30th Anniversary comes after the International Combatants Medal. BTW, it's not RAF, but FAR. This is one of those acronyms generally left untranslated in English. Otherwise too easily confused with that other RAF. You know, the Rote Armee Fraktion. No wait, that other RAF, India's Rapid Action Force. No wait, that's not the one I'm thinking of... it's "Rien ? Foutre" (basically "F___ it!"). Of course, FAR is also Forces Armees Rwandaises, Forces Armees Royales (Morocco), Fuerzas de Accion Rapida (Spain), Forces pour l'Action Republicaine (Comoros) and Florida Association of Realtors.

The late Major General William J. Maddox, Jr., who commanded the 13th Combat Aviation Battalion, 1st Brigade/25th Infantry Division and the 164th Combat Aviation Group in Vietnam, and who had served in World War II and Korea before that, amassed 127 Air Medals, which is the record. He also had the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters, the Legion of Merit with 4 Oak Leaf Clusters, the Distinguished Flying Cross with 7 Oak Leaf Clusters, the Bronze Star with "V" and 3 Oak Leaf Clusters, the Purple Heart with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters and the Army Commendation Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster.

Either someone used some "close enough" stock, and/or there was some serious fading of the blue on all of those. It would be: Order of the Star of Romania w/swords (probably Officer) Order of the Star of Romania w/swords (probably Cavalier) Medal for Steadfastness and Loyalty w/swords Commemorative Cross of the War 1916-1919 Interallied Victory Medal Medal "Crusade against Communism" Centennial Medal of the Reign of Carol I EDIT: Ed beat me to it, but a correction on the last.

By the way, where did you find that rackbuilder? Most of the ones I've seen don't let you put on devices. Lukasz Gaszewski's does allow for devices, but I don't see how one would be able to save the result as an image.

The rack you created may correspond to Maj. Bong's awards, but he never wore such a rack. He was killed in a test flight accident on August 6, 1945, before issuance of the Victory Medal. Here is what I believe was Bong's last official portrait:

I have my answer. The Quechua word for the bird was c u n t u r .

Condor is not a German word. It is a Spanish word, from Quechua ######ur (I wonder if that word will come through the filter?). Following the rules of German orthography, when "condor" is imported into German, it is spelled Kondor, just like Kalorie, Kamera and Kanada. So the boat becomes Kondor. Legion Condor, though, used the Spanish word condor, without conforming it to German spelling.

With all these WW1 and immediate post-war commemoratives, I have no idea what is "official" for Czechoslovakia. As far as I know this was authorized by that short-lived government before the Communist takeover in 1948.

Pametn? Medal "Za Vernost a Brannost", or Commemorative Medal for Loyalty and Military Ability (not the smoothest translation). Established in 1945-46, for members of the Slovakian Federation of Volunteer Combatants of 1918-19. Medal is backward; the chick should be the obverse. Not sure of the device's significance; my reference describes it, but not its purpose - "Na stuhu se upevnuje bronzov? ?t?tek slovensk?ho znaku podlozen? zkr?zen?mi meci a lipov?mi listy" or "On the ribbon is set a bronze device of the Slovak insignia underlaid with crossed swords and linden leaves" (some of the diacritical marks don't show up).

The decorations may "span" three wars, but Hack only served in two. Hack was eligible for the Victory Medal but he never held himself out to be a World War II veteran. Korea and Vietnam were his conflicts, and in terms of total number of valor awards he was the most decorated soldier of the post-war era (but not the most highly decorated soldier). Arguably, the most highly decorated soldiers of the post-war era were Lloyd L. "Scooter" Burke, Lewis Millett, Robert L. Howard, Patrick H. Brady and Thomas H. Tackaberry. Burke, Millett, Howard and Brady all received the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, as well as one or more Silver Star Medals and lesser awards. Tackaberry received three Distinguished Service Crosses. If you add in sailors, airmen and Marines, you also have several others with the Medal of Honor, America's highest award, and their service's second-highest award (Navy Cross or Air Force Cross), plus lesser awards, an accomplishment Hack didn't match.

I would disagree. It is not the collective DA for the Saxon Duchies; the obverse of that had text ("Treue Dienste bei der Fahne") and a crowned coat of arms device. That does indeed appear to be a Turkish Lifesaving Medal. Here is an image from Tim Tezer's site: http://www.turkishmedals.net/images/medal_tahlisiye.jpg On the 2nd medal, you're right that it's Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But by the image I don't think you can tell whether it is a Merit Medal of the Ducal Saxe-Ernestine House Order or a Duke Carl Eduard Medal (which could be given for lifesaving). The obverse was pretty much the same.

Yes, on at least two levels: 1. Montenegro would have to create its own decorations, uniforms and insignia, which presumably wouldn't be that different from existing stuff, other than coats of arms, but might involve resuscitating pre-1918 Montenegrin symbols like the Order of Danilo. 2. The Vojska Jugoslavije (Armed Forces of Yugoslavia) only recently renamed itself the Vojska Srbije i Crne Gore (Armed Forces of Serbia and Montenegro). All that new insignia now becomes surplus.

South Carolina was part of the United States of America. South Carolina did not secede from North Carolina or Delaware or Rhode Island.

His actions in the political arena are irrelevant to the question of whether he was a "war hero". Herrmann Goering was pretty indisputably a "war hero", but that is only one facet of the whole person. Ed listed the awards, none of which (except maybe the MID) would lead to a characterization as a war hero, though medals don't always tell that story accurately. What Musharraf was, before the coup, was a career military officer who had commanded among other units Pakistan's most elite unit, the Special Service Group (the SSG wings are on the right breast). As a long-serving officer and veteran of most of Pakistan's conflicts, naturally he has a lot of fruit salad. Here, by the way, is a picture with the full-sized medals:

Poor writing on AP's part. Montenegro couldn't secede from Serbia as it is not a part of Serbia. Serbia and Montenegro were separate republics of Yugoslavia until the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was renamed "Serbia and Montenegro". Montenegro was voting to break with the federation, of which it and Serbia are the last remaining members. It is no more a secession from Serbia than Slovakia's independence was a secession from the Czech Republic.

Turkmen is a Turkic language, and belongs to the same group as Tatar. Thus, unlike the eastern Turkic languages like Kazakh and Uzbek, Turkmen is not radically different from Turkish. Most of the base vocabulary is the same or close, e.g.: one - bir in both languages two - iki in both languages three - ?? in both languages four - d?rt in both languages five - b?ş in Turkmen, beş in Turkish six - alty in Turkmen, altı in Turkish seven - ?edi in Turkmen, yedi in Turkish eight - sekiz in both languages nine - dokuz in both languages ten - on in both languages year - ?yl in Turkmen, yıl or sene in Turkish month - a? in Turkmen, ay in Turkish day - g?n in both languages Military vocabulary, however, is mostly not of Turkic origin, but is made up heavily of Russian loanwords, e.g.: general - general colonel - polkownik major - ma?or captain - kapitan lieutenant - le?tenant sergeant - ser?ant or serzhant corporal - kapral (ki?i komandir is also used, meaning "junior commander") private - r?adowo? (from Russian рядовой) soldier - esger (cf. Turkish asker) or soldat division - divisi?a brigade - brigada regiment - polk company - kampani?a or rota platoon - wzwod (from Russian взвод) Some are a mix: medal - medal or nyşan badge - nyşan award - ba?rak (bayrak in modern Turkish means flag or standard)

I mistyped as I was revising one statement: what I meant was the Legion of Merit is most commonly seen as a retirement award for those three grades. Thus, for example, of 2,908 Legions of Merit awarded in 2003, 2,398, or 83%, were retirement awards. Of these, 757 went to O-6s, 485 went to O-5s, and 479 went to E-9s. Thus, retirement awards to colonels accounted for 26% of all LOMs and 32% of all retirement LOMs; for lieutenant colonels, 16.7% of all LOMs and 20.2% of all all retirement LOMs; for sergeants major, 16.5% of all LOMs and 20% of all all retirement LOMs. Most lieutenant colonels, though, receive the MSM at retirement. Of 1,110 retirement awards to O-5s in 2003, 589 (53%) were MSMs. 35 only received an ARCOM and one lieutenant colonel managed only an AAM. One caveat: this only covers lieutenant colonels who received retirement awards, not necessarily all lieutenant colonels who retired. I suppose there may be a few who received no retirement award because of the circumstances under which they were allowed to retire.

The Jubilee Medal for the 50th Anniversary of the Kaiser's reign (1848-1898), commonly called the "Signum Memoriae" medal. The good news is a replacement ribbon is easy: for military personnel it is all red. The civil version is slightly harder: half red/half white.

Colonels are junior to generals. You're right that DSM awards to them are not unusual, just far less common than to generals; they account for roughly 20%, with generals taking up the other 80% (awards to lower ranks are statistically insignificant*), yet there are roughly 10 times as many colonels as generals in the Army. The point is, colonels are at the bottom end of the spread of awards to Americans, but the top end of awards to Soviets. More importantly, the distribution of awards and the fact that they came in the same general order seems to indicate some sort of decision to allocate a group of awards to the Soviets, rather than apply the criteria we would to our own awards. Further evidence of this is that GO3 of 1944 not only awarded an even 20 DSMs to Soviets, but exactly 20 DSCs too. So likely someone in the War Department suggested recognizing our Soviet allies, and someone chose 20 of each as the number to be awarded. My guess is we left it to the Soviets to suggest recipients. For the Soviets, the distinction was less between bravery and meritorious service than it was that the DSC was higher than the DSM. Thus the breakdown for DSMs noted above and the breakdown for DSCs here: 4 lieutenant generals, 8 major generals, 2 colonels, 3 lieutenant colonels, 1 major, 1 junior lieutenant and 1 senior sergeant. By contrast, if you look at the other 33 awards of the DSC, which came though the Military Mission to Moscow, you see a grade distribution more typical to US Army awards of the DSC: 4 colonels, 1 lieutenant colonel, 3 majors, 2 captains, 4 lieutenants, 2 sergeants major, 3 senior sergeants, 6 sergeants, 1 junior sergeant, 2 corporals and 5 privates. Also, the citations I've seen for this latter group do read like typical DSC valor citations, e.g., Capt. Mikhail Vasilievich Pilipenko "... swam across the Dnepr to the Town of Svidovol [sic] at the head of a battalion under heavy artillery, mortar and hand machine gun fire of the enemy during the night of 13 November 1943, and engaged in a hand to hand struggle after penetrating into the trenches of the enemy on the right bank. He drove back 3 counterattacks of 20 tanks with enemy infantry and after disrupting enemy resistance occupied the Town of Svidovok on 13 November 1943, captured armored cars, cannon and tracked vehicles and destroyed 15 tanks, up to 400 enemy officers and soldiers and 7 tanks." (BTW, Pilipenko's name is misspelled in his citation as Pimpenko and in Gleim & Harris as Pilpenko). As a slight aside, you are correct that most colonels who receive the DSM receive it as a retirement award, but I would add that most colonels who retire at that grade do not receive a DSM. The Legion of Merit is the most common retirement award for colonels, LTCs and sergeants major, and a surprisingly large number of colonels only receive an MSM. ____ * During World War Two, the Army awarded approximately 9 DSMs to lieutenant colonels, 2 to majors and 2 to enlisted personnel: Joseph L. Lockard and George E. Elliott Jr., the radar operators who detected the attack on Pearl Harbor but whose report was dismissed by their superiors as the B-17 flight inbound from the States. Several of the LTCs and majors were officers involved in the defense of the Philippines and were killed or captured by the Japanese. Others were Army Air Corps/Army Air Forces officers killed in flight (often, a higher award is authorized in these cases based on the notion that death truncated an otherwise distinguished career that would have merited the award). These include LTC Townsend Griffiss, shot down accidentally by the RAF while returning from a mission to the USSR to design ferry routes, MAJ Lewin B. Barringer, an expert on gliders killed in a crash on a flight from North Africa, and MAJ William G. Benn, pilot of a B-25 declared missing on a reconnaissance mission over New Guinea in January 1943 (and not found until 1957). ____

This actually only appears to have been the case with the USSR. Going by Apgar's compilation of DSM awards from 1942 to 1969, the lowest-ranking British recipient was Brigadier Vivian Dykes, Chief of the Secretariat of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and then-Commodore Thomas H. Troubridge, RN, commander of Naval Task Force Centre in the North Africa landings. The only Canadian was then-Lt. Gen. Harry Crerar; the only Chinese Gen. Chiang Kai-Shek, the only Frenchmen G?n?ral d'Arm?e Alphonse Juin and G?n?ral Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (both later Marshals of France). What is odd is not that the DSM was awarded to junior personnel, but that it was only awarded to junior personnel: 2 colonels, 2 lieutenant colonels, 3 majors, 4 captains, 5 lieutenants, 3 senior sergeants and 1 sergeant. That seems to reflect a conscious decision to apply different award criteria and to distribute the awards among the grades.

The DSC recipient is Major General of Aviation Ivan Diomidovich Antoshkin (Иван Диомидович Антошкин). The DSM recipient is Junior Lieutenant Nikolai Vasilyevich Arkhangelskii (Николай Васильевич Архангельский). Both were cited in War Department General Order No. 3 of 1944. The photo caption, from a Russian aviation site, identifies the man in the middle as the "personal representative of the President of the USA Rickenbacker" (личный представитель президента США Рикенбекер), but he is far more famous as the top American ace of World War I. Antoshkin bio (in Russian): http://www.allaces.ru/p/people.php?id=4208 Arkhangelskii bio (in Russian): http://www.allaces.ru/p/people.php?id=4143

Not the best picture, but a twofer:

Prince Henry the Navigator was one of Portugal's most famous explorers. The order is called "Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique" (Order of the Infante Don Henry) in Portuguese. It was founded in 1960 and is for maritime merit to Portugal, so presumably your Schnellboot- Captain was doing something in the water after the war too.