Index to the General Orders of the 11th Infantry Regiment, in World War II
Statistics:
Purple Heart 773
Combat Infantryman Badges 6,364
Combat Medic Badges 392
Expert Infantryman Badges 1,817
Total Awards 9,346
This book has 176 pages
ISBN 978-1-932891-89-2
Library of Congress Control Number Pending
The 11th Infantry Regiment was assigned to the
5th Infantry Division
WWII Campaigns
Normandy
Northern France
Rhineland
Ardennes-Alsace
Central Europe
This is the twelfth in a series of indexes of all the infantry regiments and independent infantry battalions of the US Army in WWII. Others will be published as they are completed.
This work includes all decorations cited in the general orders of the 11th Infantry Regiment. Please note that some decorations awarded to members of this regiment may have been cited in the general orders of other commands. This index lists all members of the 11th Infantry that were awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge or the Combat Medic Badge by the 11th Infantry Regiment. These awards are important, since the recipients are retroactively entitled to a Bronze Star Medal under Change 13 to Army Regulation 600-45, Department of the Army, 4 November 1947. This work also includes those Purple Heart Medals awarded by the 11th Infantry Regiment. Please note that most Purple Heart Medals were awarded by the hospital that treated the wounded man, and only a small amount of all those who were wounded received their Purple Hearts directly from the 11th Infantry Regiment. Unit Awards, awards of specific Battle Stars, and Good Conduct Medals are not included.
How to read the sources: (GO#12,1945,11INF) is broken down as “GO” (General Order), “#” (Number 12, 1945), “11INF” (11th Infantry).
The 11th Infantry Regiment awarded the Expert Infantryman Badges “for satisfactory performance of duty in action against the enemy.” The Expert Infantryman Badge in this respect seemed to have been issued as a junior award to the Combat Infantryman Badge. I have listed these awards of the Expert Infantryman Badge, as they may be convertible to a Bronze Star Medal under the change to Army Regulation 600-45 cited above. The Expert Infantryman Badge is a non-combat proficiency badge; the 11th Infantry Regiment use of the Expert Infantryman Badge in this context is unusual. The 5th Infantry Division also awarded Expert Infantryman Badges to members of the 10th Infantry Regiment in their general orders. It therefore seems that the awarding of the Expert Infantryman Badge under these circumstances appears to have been a divisional policy.
Company assignments were not noted in the actual text of the 11th Infantry Regiment’s General Orders. However some had the company designation annotated in the margin. When annotated, I assumed that each member in the column was a member of that company. I have also consulted 11th Infantry, 5th Division, the 11th Infantry’s unit history to attempt to determine some of the company assignments of soldier cited in the earlier general orders. Many of the replacements are missing from the rosters in the unit history, making it difficult to determine which company they were assigned to. This resulted in a problem; some soldiers appear in columns in different general orders which were determined to represent two different companies. In most of these instances one of the two companies was a non-line company and the other was a line company. This leads me to assume that the solider was original a members of the support company and either attached to the line company during the operation which the members of the line company was cited or was later transferred to the line company as a combat replacement.
Every effort has been made to minimize errors and misspelled names. An error may be attributable to the source document, or may have occurred while transcribing the names/units. Some of the original documents are of very poor print quality, making them difficult to decipher.