Index of Decorations Announced in All Hands, 1950 -1980
Statistics:
Medal of Honor 31
Navy Cross 83
Navy Distinguished Service Medal 139
Silver Star Medals 326
Distinguished Flying Cross 1,397
Navy and Marine Corps Medal 452
Legion of Merit 937
Bronze Star Medal 1,940
Air Medals 80
Purple Heart Medal 19
Navy Commendation Ribbon / Medal 117
British Orders and Decorations 1
Vietnamese Orders and Decorations 11
*** This statistical listing likely does not account for all the decorations
and orders contained in the book, but is given here to demonstrate how much
information is contained in this book.****
Total Awards 5,538
This book has 112 pages
ISBN 978-1-932891-67-6
ISBN 1-932891-67-6
Library of Congress Control Number pending
This is a companion to the series of indices of general orders of all the divisions, corps, armies and commands of the US Army during WWII. Others will be published as they are completed.
This work includes all decorations announced in issues of All Hands published between 1950 and 1980. This magazine is the Department of the Navy’s primary means of releasing news and information throughout the fleet.
The magazine became a monthly periodical starting with issue number 308, which was released in November 1942. The June 1945 issue was printed with the banner “All Hands” proclaiming the defeat of Germany. This name stuck and since that issue the magazine has been known as All Hands.
Due to the Department of the Navy’s administrative policies of how decorations were awarded, this magazine is one of the best sources of information other than individual index cards at the Washington Navy Yard. I feel that this work is currently the most compressive representation of Naval decorations awarded during the Korean War. That is not to say that no decorations are missing; there are other works published that will likely have a greater number of Navy Crosses issued by the Department of the Navy. To this point there has not been a good source of information on the Navy’s lower decorations. I feel that the percentage of total awards during the Korean War of each decoration represented in this work decreases as you travel down the pyramid of honor. I have noticed that many of the lower decoration announcements were cut off at early surnames as the pages allotted to decorations were filed. The citations printed for lesser decorations, in most instances, are very brief and only a small percentage of Marine Corps awards are mentioned in these sources. There was a rather lengthy delay before the initial decorations awarded for service in Korea were announced in All Hands. In regard to individual decorations, announced after the conclusion of the armistice, the amount of information published in All Hands decreases. Most of these citations omit the individual’s assignment information.
All Hands announced many decorations in the period between Korea and Vietnam. Most of the decorations announced were Navy Distinguished Service Medals and Legion of Merits to senior naval officers and awards of the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. As happened after the outbreak of the Korean War, All Hands did not initially announce decorations awarded for service in Vietnam. Shortly after they did start announcing decorations, it was drastically curtailed. Therefore, only a small percentage of decorations awarded by the Navy during the Vietnam War are included in this work, as most were not announced in All Hands.
Decorations for service, other than during the Korean War, are annotated by the years covered, in parenthesis, after the assignment. Occasionally the year was not given. In these instances a question mark replaces the year.
I have listed entries in the following fashion: (AHJan1952) which is broken down as “AH” All Hands followed by the month and year of publication.
I have attempted to extract each instance of a reference to an individual decoration. On many occasions a photo would appear one or more issues after the decoration was announced. Or a decoration is announced in a later issue that had a lower number of Gold Stars than was announced in an earlier issue. These instances cause some confusion and each issue cited should be consulted to see if duplicate announcements were made, or if the announcements were released out of order. It is entirely possible that the later announcement could be an additional award. I can only surmise why these announcements were made: it could be due to the fact that the earlier decoration was not announced at the time it was approved due to operational security or it could also be due to the Department of the Navy’s decoration procedures of issuing temporary orders and later issuing permanent orders for the same decoration. The uncertainty of these situations have caused me to annotate the following statement after the source codes of the corresponding decorations recipients “*May be entitled to ______ to his ______.” I apologize for not being able to conclusively investigate each occurrence of this.
Due to the fact that service numbers were not published in the sources used, I have not been able to positively identify when the same person is mentioned in multiple issues. I have used common sense in merging entries. It is entirely possible that I may have merged a son with his father if they had the same name, similar ranks and served in similar branches of the naval service. For the most part I did not merge multiple entries if there was a vast disparity between the ranks or, for example, one entry was for an aviator and the other entry was for a submariner.
Many times a decoration is awarded for service earlier in the war after decorations were issued for later operations. Because of this it is difficult to arrange a recipient’s assignments if they were different. When it is possible, I have annotated that the assignments listed may be out of order. It is very probable that most recipients had additional assignments not mentioned in any of the citations for their decorations.
The naval enlisted ratings and their abbreviations have changed many times during the years, making it difficult to always know what some of the abbreviations stand for. One of these changes occurred shortly after the end of WWII. I have used the enlisted rating abbreviations as they appear in the text. When the complete rating is listed, then the full rating was given in the text. The February 1949 issue of All Hands published the new rating abbreviations on pages 48 and 49. I would assume that these were most likely in effect during the Korean War and should be consulted when necessary, but note that some of the ratings may have changed between the publication of the list and the publication of the citations indexed in this work.
Please note that many issues did not contain any decoration information.
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.