Ed_Haynes

Two sent by friends, origins unsure. 1- Azerbaijan Medal For the 1946 invasion?

OK, still lots of unanswered questions - date of entry into theatre? any sign of a clasp qualification? Not sure what advice you got, Doc, but there's way to go yet!

We have no (or little) control over what others do to the things that come to us (though, if we know, we can strive to avoid monkeyed-with items). We do have great (almost total) control over what WE do to the items in our custody.

Repairs and damage (even modifications) done by the recipient are one thing; "repairs" (or "restorations") done by later custodians (including dealers) are something else entirely!

A shame someone mucked with the enamel on that one. On some things (very few) I am a conservative (conservationist?).

My latest, to a small unit, the Indore Imperial Service Transport.

Efforts to represent enameled ribbons in painted domed plastic: 1- Red Banner of Combat Valor, Order of the Polar Star, Order of the Polar Star 2- Honorary Medal of Combat, Medal "We Won" 3- Honorary Medal of Labor, Honorary Medal of Labor / Medal "25 Years of the MPR", Soviet Victory over Japan, Medal "We Won" (out of order, of course)

An enameled ribbon bar of: 1- Honorary Medal of Labor 2- Medal "We Won" 3- Medal "25 Years of the MPR"

Medal "25 Years of the MPR"

Medal "We Won" Sorry, no cloth ribbon.

Honorary Medal of Labor

Honorary Medal of Combat

Order of the Polar Star

Order of Combat Valor (Only a fairly grungy single cloth ribbon, sorry.)

Order of the Red Banner of Labor Valor

Order of the Red Banner of Combat Valor (I don't have the cloth ribbon bar, sorry.)

One of the most delightful things about Mongolian awards are the early (pre-1961) enamel ribbon bars. Can we show our solo bars (with the later cloth bars, if possible) and any enamel ribbon bar groups here? If possible, can we also show the official post-1961 cloth ribbon bars too? (As much fun as the domed plastic bars are, they are unofficial and often bizarre examples of artictic [?] inventiveness.) I have all but the Sukhbaatar (help??) in enamel.

I am glad others have the same problem as I do! Army Service Corps.

A nice collection and avery nice presentation, Brian. While these may raise more questions than they answer, every little bit of evidence we can get in untangling "things Ethiopian" may, someday, somehow, help. Thanks again.

Would guess it has to do with the restrictions -- probably completely illogical -- put forward by the libraries that owned the copies that Google scanned. That is to say: Randomness. On one level, I am amazed that they allow anything to be scanned. You have to think like a librarian in this age where no one knows what copyright laws if any really apply and so many feel they are absolutely free to steal things and redistribute them.

Since I still have A&T out, even at the risk of getting , here are the WWII honorary MMs: U.S.A. - 310 Free French - 185 Poland - 63 Belgium - 24 Greece - 24 Norway - 23 Czechoslovakia - 18 Netherlands - 9 U.S.S.R. - 4 And, as with WWI, these numbers may be low and incomplete.

These are nice and the long-term promise of the projhect is even nicer. One hopes, though, they don't wind up "lifted", burned to CD, and put up for sale on e$cam. Presumably, the limitations placed are there for a reason?

You should get his MIC from the National Archives (online) and see if he qualified for the clasp. While we might have wished for a more uncommon surname than "Cooper" a quick look finds no mention of him on the often-cranky CWGC site, so, presumably, he survived the war.

I suspect there is a good deal of mixed urban myth and intentional misunderstanding at work here. Rather like the Iron Cross that was "given" to Captain P. B. Bhuracha, DSO, IMS (the first Indian DSO, by the way) by a German officer he was treating. Sure, the German "gave" him an Iron Cross; it wasn't "awarded to" him. (This is rather different from the Iron Cross said to have been awarded to the brother of Jemadar Mir Dost, VC, IOM, Bahadur, 55th Coke's Rifles, the second Indian to get the VC. Mir Dost's brother -- also in the 55th -- defected to the German side and is said to have been awarded the Iron Cross as a political/propaganda award.)

Abbot and Tamplin (2nd ed., p. 227) list 5,688 honorary MM awards for WWI (and freely admit their list is incomplete). By country: France - 2,472 Italy - 1,320 Belgium - 442 U.S.A. - 413 Czechoslovakia - 320 Rumania - 259 Serbia - 171 Greece - 149 Portugal - 76 Japn - 68 Russia - 7 For comparison, for WWII, there were only 660 honorary awards.