Ed_Haynes

Some Honorary Medals of Combat and Honorary Medals of Labor. 1- Honorary Medal of Combat (Type 1.2, #3390) 2- Honorary Medal of Combat (Type 2.3, #21118) 3- Honorary Medal of Labor (Type 1.1.2, #5596) 4- Honorary Medal of Labor (Type 1.2.1, #19393)

Some low-quality images of some cased items. Some have been seen elsewhere here. 1- Order of the Red Banner of Military Valor "3" (#5) 2- A documented Order of the Polar Star (Type 3.1, 3 December 1955, #1217) - this is the document with, apparently, a "naighty" added-in photo - see http://gmic.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=4238&st=30 and following posts.

Right, the one of the two Mongolian cosmonauts who actually went into space. I assume Shishkov & Muzalevsky are using a Russian version of his Mongolian name (which Battushig gets correct). This HSU/Lenin was part of that whole "guest cosmonaut" program (that also included Sharma from India).

Hi Torsten, You may have to change the name of the file or shrink it down a bit more. One thing about this forum, if I try to load a picture that is too large and resize it, I find that I need to give it a new name. There is some sort of persistent forum memory about file sizes, and it remember the old size. It can get frustrating at times. When you get settled in, you may want to glance at my few DDR items: Good luck, Ed

Yeah, I usually resise to something like 666 (nothing Satanic, just easy to type) pixels for the largest dimension.

A cosmonaut award. The Soviets also received the Ashoka Chakra (which required special modifications to the notification for the award). Have been promised a chance to meet Sharma and photograph his medals when next in Bangalore.

Welcome, Torsten! We need more DDR experts here.

Still not quite sure what you are counting. You say "British" but for something like the Southeast Asia , the operations (and the overwhelming majority of casualties) were Indian Army operations (the last under theoretical British command). Do you want Indian Army casualty figures included here (or for others?). And we are counting killed only? Not died or wounded?

The latest of the WWII POW lists has been reprinted in several volumes. Others are available (I have used them in the NAM, though I am sure copies exist elsewhere).

Thanks, Kim. It was, as I feared, a birthday present.

Put me down for one of each, should there ever be a revised, expanded, and ILLUSTRATED 2nd edition. Both signed, please.

Right, Gilbert. Unless from a good auction house or a 100% reputable dealer, they aren't worth a second look. DNW did have a nice "John Chard" miniature pair a few sales back, with good provenance.

Intreresting. Sorry, I don't have the POW rolls for natives (of the British Isles).

And you are defining "British" as legally/ethnically British? (Gorkhas etc. excluded?)

Oh, OK, I await, thanks . . . .

And also by more generic anti-fascist Germans? -- but maybe those two populations were the same No comment on who made up the BRD

Unnamed? Do you have solid evidence thst it is his, and not Montgomery's?

Yes, and where did you think the DDR came from??

Thanks, Gerd! Am told the family still has them all (except the Victory orders) . . .

Interesting. If Honecker got it, it smells of a Brezhnev-era ("You get ours, we get yours") swap. Citation/reference for the Honecker award, Mike? I find it interesting that, as far as Mongolia is concerned, neither Choibalsan nor Tsedenbal ever got the HSU, though Comrade Leonid got everything Mongolian that wasn't nailed down, even an award specially created JUST FOR HIM (he must have loved THAT).

Many Germans were anti-Nazi, after all.

Thank you, Dave. And it isn't clear to me whether we have been talking about the Soviet or Russian hero title/star.

It was normal in most countries for their to be an avalanche of marginally deserved awards in 1945 and 1946, what I think of as the "Thank God We Won" (or, in this case, "Thank Lenin We Won"?) honors lists. Giving victory goodies to those who contributed in smaller ways to the victory may be seen as devaluing the wartime awards, but, frankly, I think the victors had just cause to celebrate and play free with the goodies.

I, too, am thinking nobleman. I look at this chap and further think genro. The name is elusive.

Peter, I am not sure that any of us automatically approve or endorse the acts of the issuing bodies of any of these medals. For example, I surely don't celebrate British imperialism in India in my main collecting field! The difference with Nazi stuff is the swastika, and the power of that now-offensive symbol is such that special treatment is needed. And, as you know, this generates ongoing problems for Hindus. I see no use -- on this forum, though I am told that Another Forum still plays gleefully in this sewer -- to get into the "whose atrocities were bigger", especially when this game is usually played with the conscious intent of asserting that Adolf and his "Aryans" weren't all THAT bad, when compared to ___. If we were to be brutally honest, there are few "saints" among the folks who issued any of the medals we study and that the deeds these medals represent were often "war crimes". Everyone is or can be a "murderous b***ard"? We are, I hope, approaching all this as historians and not as patriots or politicians? Ed