Wednesday, February 17, 2016
WWII medals I found
I was cleaning out my storage building last weekend, and ran across a box of stuff my great grandmother had collected during WWII. Mostly it was newspaper clippings, but she also had the entire service book for Haskell County, Texas, which is very cool. I think every male old enough to fight was in it. I also found medals from one of my great uncle. My great grandma had two sons go off to war. One made it back, and died shortly afterwards when his tractor caught on fire with him too. Anyhow, I thought I'd post some of the stuff I found. If anyone knows what the medals are, let me know.
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The ones with the "Machine Gun" and "Rifle" clasps hanging from the cross are weapons qualification badges. The Rifle ones are at the "marksman" level (passing, nothing more). The Machine Gun one is "Expert". There are three levels: Marksman, Sharpshooter, and Expert.
ReplyDeleteThen there are some unit pins which have the particular unit's shield and motto. These were worn on caps, typically. There is a unit identifying shoulder patch (the blue and orange round thing), it would take some effort to track down the units for the pins and patch.
There are also a couple ribbons which wold also take some digging to determine what they are for. The ones shown look very similar except that one is faded and the other carries two small stars. Ribbons are award for various individual achievements (from successfully finishing a training or being award a commendation medal, or being in combat, as examples) or unit commendations for unit actions of various sorts. There are also ribbons corresponding to medals of valor or other achievement such as, for example, a Medal of Honor.
All these items are placed very precisely and carefully on dress uniforms in a particular order according to significance of the medal.
If you are interested in researching, here are some links:
http://www.medalsofamerica.com/content--name-Army-Medals-and-Ribbons-Chart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marksmanship_Badges_(United_States)
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/display/
Thank you. Its kinda fun to figure out this family history stuff.
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