There is a woman standing on the surface of the sea. In her right hand, she holds a trident, and in her left an olive branch; below her right foot rests a shape that nearly everyone who has handled the medal mistakes for a sand dune. It is not a dune; it is the bow of a submarine; next to her left foot is not a desert butte but a conning tower of the same — periscope, fairing, and all. The woman is not wandering a beach; she is standing astride the very instrument that killed more merchant seamen than any other agency of the Second World War, and the crest of a deep wave. She is doing so in triumph.
This is the obverse of the Merchant Marine World War II Victory Medal. I had always assumed the medal was designed by John R. Sinnock, since each reference I consulted mentioned as much, and I also assumed it was issued without controversy in the post-war shine of victory. My assumptions changed when I was presented with a cache of documents from the Army’s Institute of Heraldry dating to 1946 and happened upon the minutes from the Commission of Fine Arts from 1947. I began looking a little deeper and spent some time trying to learn where the medal came from, who made it, and why a federal commission charged with maintaining the artistic standards of the Republic looked at the medal’s central figure and pronounced her, in a single devastating word, insipid. The answer, when it finally assembled itself, turned out to be a story not really about a medal at all. It is a story about who the merchant seaman was understood to be in 1946, and what the institutions of the United States were prepared — and pointedly not prepared — to say about him.
The published record is no help. It attributes the medal to a single man, names no one else, and describes the design dispute that produced it not at all. What I found is more crowded, more contentious, and a great deal sadder.
Thus, it is necessary to begin with the men, because the entire quarrel turns on the question of what they were owed, and that question cannot be weighed without knowing what they had done.
The American merchant seaman of the Second World War occupied a position of extraordinary danger and almost no standing. He carried the cargo on which every theatre of the war depended — the fuel, the ammunition, the food, the men themselves — across oceans that the enemy had turned into killing grounds. Of perhaps a quarter of a million who served, something on the order of 9,500 did not return; a death rate of roughly one man in twenty-six, which exceeded that of any of the uniformed services. Some seven hundred and more ships went to the bottom. Mariners were among the first Americans to die in the war, killed before Pearl Harbor, and among the most casually disposed of during it — in the early Atlantic theatre, survivors in the water were machine-gunned, and the figures were suppressed lest they injure morale and instruct the enemy. Several hundred were taken prisoner; a portion of those died in captivity.
The men who did this work were not what the recruiting posters of the uniformed services depicted. They ranged in age from boys of sixteen to men past seventy. A great many had been turned away by the Army and Navy for some physical defect and had found in the Merchant Marine the only door that would open for them to do their bit in the war. It was the only American sea service that was racially integrated. Many came up through the maritime unions, and that association with organized labor would be used against them, then and afterward, with a persistence that does no credit to those who wielded it.
And here is the fact that hangs over everything: when Franklin Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill in 1944, he said in plain words that he trusted Congress would soon extend comparable provisions to the men of the Merchant Marine, who had risked their lives again and again for their country. Congress did not. The hope was recorded and then ignored. The men who carried the war did not receive the benefits the war conferred on those they carried — not the schooling, not the home loans, not the standing; that refusal is the silent partner in every document I read. The dispute over the medal was, at bottom, a proxy for the dispute over the merchant seaman: was he a veteran or was he not, and what would the Republic permit itself to say about it in bronze. Although I am often apt to say that the award of any medal is a political act, this medal was much more.
To further understand the quarrel, one must understand the peculiar grammar of the awards the Merchant Marine already held by the war’s end, for the merchant seaman was not without honors. He was without standing, which is a different thing, and the awards had been carefully built to keep the two apart.
By 1946, the Merchant Marine possessed a complete hierarchy of decorations. At its summit stood a Distinguished Service Medal, established in 1942; beneath it a Meritorious Service Medal; the Mariners Medal for those wounded in action; a Combat Bar for engagement with the enemy; a Gallant Ship citation for vessels of distinguished conduct; a set of War Zone ribbons for the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the Pacific, and a Defense ribbon for old salts who sailed before and through the war. These had been assembled piecemeal, through acts of Congress and executive orders across the war years, and they had been assembled according to a single governing principle that is easy to overlook until one finds it stated outright in the Navy’s own memoranda: each was to resemble its military counterpart without becoming it.
The Mariners Medal corresponds to the Purple Heart. The Gallant Ship citation compares with the Presidential Unit Citation. The seaman’s awards spoke the medallic vocabulary of valor and sacrifice, but were held deliberately one degree apart from the genuine article. This was not an accident of design; it was the design. Two executive orders, numbers 9472 and 9692, had said so explicitly, forbidding the duplication of any medal or ribbon awarded by the War or Navy Departments. The Merchant Marine was to be honored as something adjacent to the armed forces — near enough to confer dignity, yet far enough to foreclose any claim of identity.
Congress, in July of 1945, had authorized a World War II Victory Medal for the armed forces under Public Law 135 — a medal struck for all who had served on active duty in the war, designed by Thomas Hudson Jones, bearing the figure of Liberation. A year later, in August of 1946, it authorized a separate Victory Medal for the Merchant Marine under Public Law 698. The merchant seamen had asked for this; the War Shipping Administration and the Maritime Commission had petitioned Senator Bailey of the Commerce Committee in the spring of 1946, submitting a draft bill, S. 2236, framed in language deliberately parallel to the armed forces measure. But Public Law 698, as enacted, said nothing about design; it authorized a medal, and was silent on what the medal should or should not look like.
Into that silence the Maritime Commission stepped, and decided that the simplest and cheapest course would be to adopt the actual armed forces Victory Medal — the same disc, the same figure of Liberation, the same ribbon worn by soldiers and sailors. This was not a procurement decision; it was a proposal to collapse the very distinction upon which the entire honors system had been erected — and the War and Navy Departments understood it as such within hours.
What I had not expected, reading through the twelve documents in the Army’s file, was how much of the conflict was waged in bad faith by the Maritime Commission. The sequence is thus: early in 1946, before Public Law 698 had passed, the Bureau of the Budget asked the War Department for its views on the proposed Merchant Marine medal; Secretary of War Robert Patterson replied, on the thirtieth of January 1946, that he had no objection — provided the design would distinguish the medal from those awarded by the Army. The condition was set down in plain English. In no equivocal language, there could be no misreading of the Department of War’s position.
The Maritime Commission proceeded to misread it anyway, treating a conditional non-objection as though it were unconditional consent. It then compounded the matter; having been authorized to seek a design, the Maritime Commission asked the Army’s own Heraldic Branch to prepare one — and the Branch did so — which the Maritime Commission set aside — and reached instead for the military Victory Medal design that Patterson’s letter was written expressly to exclude.
Then came the flanking movement. Unable to extract genuine agreement from the War Department, the Maritime Commission approached the Navy to seek its acquiescence, without informing the War Department that such an approach was underway. The logic is transparent: secure the agreement of one department, present the other with an accomplished fact, and make the cost of objecting exceed the cost of letting the thing pass. The War Department learned of the maneuver only at the end of October, by word of mouth from the Navy. The head of the Maritime Commission’s award committee, Admiral Fairfield, then told the War Department by telephone that the Maritime Commission saw no legal impediment, considered the War Department already to have concurred, and would proceed to issue the medal unless a formal objection were lodged — failing which it would simply notify the Department of its decision after the fact. This is the language of a man who believes he has already won and is extending his adversary the courtesy of a final word for the record.
The Navy, for its part, did not oblige him. On the fifth of November 1946, Rear Admiral R. W. Hayler set down for the Secretary of the Navy the considered objection of the Navy’s Board of Decorations and Medals, and his memorandum is the most substantial piece of reasoning in the entire file. The Merchant Marine, he wrote, was not part of the armed forces for the purpose of sharing the Victory Medal, because its officers and men were essentially civilians: not subject to military discipline, and, while they had shared the hazards of war to some degree, compensated generously in wages precisely to offset that exposure. He traced the legal history of the prohibition — Executive Orders 9472 and 9692, and the prior instances in which the Maritime Commission had been denied the use of the armed forces’ theatre medals — and argued that a new exception would sit inconsistently with the whole established framework. And he named, in the plainest terms, the consequence the Navy most feared: that the use of the armed forces’ design by the Maritime Commission might establish a precedent by which the men of the Merchant Marine could afterward claim qualification for other benefits provided by law to servicemen, such as those of the G.I. Bill.
The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, forwarded this memorandum to Patterson on the sixth of November, and he was candid about the Department’s awkward position. His own Judge Advocate General had found no legal basis on which to object: Public Law 698 had prescribed no design at all, and the law therefore left the Maritime Commission free to adopt whatever design it pleased. And, there was, in plain terms, no bar to be raised at law. The Navy’s Board of Decorations and Medals had nonetheless strongly recommended against the design on the grounds Hayler had given, and Forrestal plainly shared them. Hence, unable to forbid the medal as a matter of law, the Navy fell back upon a matter of status — and the deepest stratum of that status, stated without embarrassment, was the fear of the benefit claim. The objection to the medal was, in the end, an objection to the men behind it: to the possibility that a shared symbol might one day ripen into a shared entitlement.
The War Department’s own staff work, consolidated in a Summary Sheet of the thirteenth of November 1946 and signed by Major General W. S. Paul, identified the central falsehood squarely: the Maritime Commission’s claim that the January letter had constituted concurrence; it had not. Five days later, on the eighteenth, Patterson sent two letters. To the Secretary of the Navy, he wrote three sentences agreeing that the proposed use was “particularly inappropriate.” To the Chairman of the Maritime Commission, he wrote that the War Department “strongly objects” to the use of any of its medal, ribbon, badge, or button designs — and offered, with what may have been genuine grace or merely good tactics, to help the Maritime Commission design something distinctive of its own. The bluff was called; the military design was already dead.
It should be mentioned that every institution in this quarrel was, at the moment it spoke, already dissolving.
The War Shipping Administration — which had co-signed the earliest letter in the whole sequence, the petition to Senator Bailey — was abolished on the first of September, 1946, before the ink on Public Law 698 was a month dry; its functions were folded into the Maritime Commission for liquidation. The Commission itself was shedding its wartime bulk at a furious rate. It had built a fleet of some 5,777 oceangoing ships and was now selling them off into a contracting peace; its combined workforce with the Administration, near sixteen thousand in the summer of 1946, fell by close to three-fifths within the single year that followed. The Commission would be abolished outright in 1950, with its functions parceled out to the Federal Maritime Board and the Maritime Administration.
And Patterson, defending the prerogatives of the War Department with such vigor in November of 1946, was at that very moment helping to negotiate that department out of existence. He laid before Congress in the spring of 1947 a plan for the reorganization of the entire military establishment under a civilian Secretary of Defense; the National Security Act was signed that July; the Office of the Secretary of War was abolished in September of 1947, ten months after his letters were sent, and Patterson himself had resigned by then. The interests he guarded so jealously belonged to an institution with less than a year to live in its existing form.
None of these bodies was a permanent bureaucracy protecting a permanent stake. They were institutions in their twilight, dismantling themselves and being dismantled, and the medal was very nearly the last thing several of them would ever contend over. This matters because it explains the temper of what followed. The immediacy, the corner-cutting, and, at last, the willingness to issue an inadequate medal rather than fight on; these are the marks of an organization running out of time and will, fighting a final battle for a constituency that had no other champion left.
The Maritime Commission, having declined the Army’s authored design and lost the military design, turned to the Mint. It is in the minutes of the Commission of Fine Arts that the medal at last acquires its true authorship.
On the third of April, 1947, the Director of the Mint, Nellie Tayloe Ross, wrote to Gilmore Clarke, Chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), submitting plaster models of the proposed Merchant Marine Victory medal for judgment as to their artistic merit. The medal, she wrote, had been designed in the Mint at the Maritime Commission’s request by John R. Sinnock, the Chief Engraver — the man who gave us the Roosevelt dime. But the obverse model, the woman on the sea, had been prepared by Gilroy Roberts, then Assistant Engraver, who would in time become the ninth Chief Engraver and the author of the Kennedy half dollar. And the reverse, the anchor wound about with the motto Firmitas Adversaria Superat — “the strength to overcome the adversary” — was the work of a sculptor named Engelhardus von Hebel, who joined the staff of the Philadelphia mint in the late 1940s. So the medal that some thirty thousand seamen would eventually wear was the work of three hands, not one. Sinnock supervised the workshop, and Roberts and von Hebel did the actual design and execution.
Clarke’s reply came eighteen days later, on the twenty-first of April, and it is a small masterpiece of professional disdain. The models had been shown — by photograph — to Lee Lawrie, the sculptor member of the CFA, whose own figures stand at Rockefeller Center and the Nebraska Capitol, and who was not, therefore, easily impressed by an engraver’s allegory. Lawrie recommended that the obverse be disapproved. The female figure, he said, was insipid and hence unsuitable for a medal meant to honor men who had served in the war; in her hand she held not the berried laurel of triumph, but the olive branch of peace. The reverse he allowed to be “workmanlike,” which, from Lawrie, was barely a courtesy, but found it “lacking in artistry.” Two further commissioners — Finley and Murphy — concurred, as did Clarke. The models were returned without the CFA’s approval. And Clarke, in closing, told the Mint where it ought to have looked: he recalled two earlier medals struck for the Merchant Marine, of outstanding design, prepared by Mr. Paul Manship. In the same passage of the minutes that records this disapproval comes a quieter notation: the Secretary reported that Mr. Sinnock had suffered a stroke and was dangerously ill. He died on the fourteenth of May, three weeks after Clarke’s letter.
When the Maritime Commission had first wished to create the Distinguished Service Medal, back in 1942, it had submitted a design to the Commission of Fine Arts; the CFA rejected it with the recommendation to contract Paul Manship. On that occasion, the Maritime Commission listened. It engaged Manship, who produced quickly under wartime pressure, a medal of distinction, drawing on the archaic Greek idiom he had spent a career perfecting and on his earlier work for the Navy. The same arrangement yielded the Meritorious Service Medal and the Mariners Medal. These were the medals Clarke invoked in 1947. He was not putting forward a stray suggestion; he was holding a mirror to the Maritime Commission’s own past and saying, in effect, “preserve the precedent of good design for the Merchant Marine’s system of honors.”
The difference between 1942 and 1947 is that the whole tragedy was reduced to a small scale. In 1942, the Maritime Commission heeded the advice and obtained a medal worthy of its men. In 1947, it did not. There is no record of any reply to Clarke — no revised model, no second submission, no further mention of the matter anywhere in the remainder of the year’s minutes. The medal that Lawrie had called insipid was simply struck and issued, unaltered, over the disapproval of the very body that had been asked to bless it. This was legally permissible; the CFA advised, it did not command, and no statute obliged the Maritime Commission to heed it. But the Maritime Commission had itself invited the review by sending the models, and having invited it, ignored its result.
By April of 1947, the Commission had been fighting for this single medal for more than a year — through the misrepresented letter, through the rebuffed approach to the Navy, through Patterson’s flat refusal. The Administration that began the fight had been abolished beneath it. Its own staff was being cut in half. Sinnock was dying. To begin again: to contract Manship, to negotiate, to await new models, to submit a second time — all would have demanded an institutional will the Maritime Commission no longer possessed. In its last gasp, it was at the point where it would sooner issue an inadequate medal than prolong the fight for an adequate one. The same exhaustion that explains the bad faith of 1946 explains the resignation of 1947.
In my opinion, Lawrie was right in some respects and not wholly fair. He was working from photographs of plaster models, at the scale of a coin, and I am all but certain he never saw the submarine. Almost no one does. The submarine’s bow beneath her foot reads, to nearly every eye that has fallen on it, as a sand dune and a piece of vague landscape beside it. Even now, with the struck medal in hand, observers take it for a desert butte and have to be told that the curved hummock is a medallic wave and the slender vertical is in fact a periscope.
When read correctly, the figure’s whole meaning snaps into focus; it is neither generic nor insipid. She is the answer to the U-boat; the trident in her right hand is the ancient emblem of dominion over the sea — the attribute of Neptune, and of Britannia after him; the branch in her left hand is the peace that dominion has secured; and her foot upon the submarine’s hull is the exact mirror of the figure on the armed forces’ own Victory Medal, Liberation who stands in triumph upon the broken helmet of the god of war. The soldier’s particular enemy was Mars; the merchant seaman’s was the submarine; and here she stands, having beaten it. Altogether, properly seen, the elements are rather eloquent.
What failed was legibility. The single element that gave the figure her specific meaning could not survive reproduction at an inch and a half of bronze, and once it had become illegible; the figure became precisely what Lawrie said she was — a woman holding objects, signifying nothing in particular. All the symbols were present; they simply could not be seen without a magnifying glass. Whether this is a failure of Roberts’s hand, or an inherent impossibility of the subject at that scale, I cannot yet say; the two men’s formations point in different directions, and the question is worth setting down. Roberts was trained in the engraving of coin — figurative, exact, calibrated for the small circulating disc. Manship, whom Clarke wished for, was trained in monumental sculpture of an archaic cast, an art that prized formal severity and symbolic density, the iconic weight that makes a commemorative medal feel, in the hand, like the record of something that mattered. Clarke was not asking for cleaner execution. He was asking for a different conception entirely; and, it must be admitted, by 1947 he was asking it of an idiom, Manship’s own, that the modern movement was already leaving behind. The medal Clarke wanted was, in some sense, a medal of the war just ended. What was struck instead is a medal of the peace that followed: pragmatic, adequate, made under constraint, and bearing the marks of the exhaustion in which it was made.
In the end, there are two questions the documents do not answer. I do not know who precisely decided to proceed despite the Commission’s disapproval. Clarke addressed his letter to the Director of the Mint, not to the Maritime Commission, and whether Mrs. Ross forwarded it, what reply she had, and whose hand finally directed that the medal be struck unaltered is not recorded. Nor do I know what became of the medal design the Army’s Heraldic Branch prepared and the Maritime Commission discarded. The Heraldic Branch’s modern successor has confirmed that the twelve documents I hold constitute the entire file; the design itself is not among them. If it can be found, the comparison would be the single most illuminating addition to this account: that is, the rejected Army design at one end of the affair, the disapproved Mint-yet-issued design at the other.
There is something almost unbearably apt in the whole of it. The Merchant Marine did the most dangerous work in the most necessary cause, and was told, when it asked for recognition, that it was civilian, that it was well paid, that it was not quite of the armed forces, and must not be permitted to seem so. The G.I. Bill was denied, despite the Commander-in-Chief’s hope that it would be granted. It was made to take a medal distinct from the soldier’s, lest the likeness ripen into a claim. And the distinct medal it was given encoded its finest hour: the defeat of the submarine that had hunted its men across every ocean of the world, in a symbol struck so faintly that the world has mistaken it, ever since, for a sand dune. The triumph was there in the bronze, and no one could see it.
Merchant seamen waited until 1988 to be recognized as veterans of the country they had served, by which time the schooling and the loans were forty years moot, and most of them were old. They waited until 2021 for the nation’s Congressional Gold Medal. And the medal they were handed in 1947 carried their victory in a figure too small to read, disapproved by the Republic’s own arbiters of art, issued by an agency too spent to do better, designed by a dying man’s subordinates, and credited ever after to the dying man alone.
There is, too, the matter of the woman on the medal’s name — or rather the want of one. The victory medals of the United States had always borne a named allegory. The medal of the First World War carried a winged Victory, the angel, as she was popularly called, the Nike of the ancients, given American dress; the armed forces’ medal of the Second carried Liberation, a figure with a recorded program and a recorded meaning, her face turned to the dawn of a new day, her foot upon the helmet of the god of war. These women were known; they had identities, and the identities were written down. The woman on the merchant seaman’s medal has none. Clarke did not name her; no design paper that survives gives her a name; and the published record, unable to agree, has guessed at Athena, at Nike, and at nothing at all. She is, alone among the victory figures of the nation, anonymous. Where the soldier was given Liberation, and the doughboy before him was given Victory, the merchant seaman was given a woman whom no one troubled to name.
The woman astride the wave and submarine is not insipid; she is merely unseen. There is a difference between the two, and it has taken a long while and two half-forgotten archives to be in a position to say so.
Legislation
Public Law 78-251, 56 Stat. 213
79th Congress
AN ACT
Providing for a medal for service in the merchant marine during the present war [S. 2236]
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the United States Maritime Commission is authorized and directed to procure a medal and suitable appurtenances of appropriate design, including an honorable discharge lapel button, to be awarded to (1) each person who served honorably in a war zone as an officer or member of the crew of vessels owned by or operated by or for the account of the Maritime Commission or the War Shipping Administration for thirty days during the period beginning December 7, 1941, and ending with September 3, 1945; and (2) each person who is entitled to receive a certificate of substantially continuous service pursuant to the provisions of Public Law 87, Seventy-eighth Congress, approved June 23, 1943 (57 Stat. 162). The medal may be awarded posthumously and, when so awarded, shall be presented to such representative of the deceased as shall be prescribed in the applicable regulations. Awards under this Act shall be made pursuant to regulations prescribed by the Maritime Commission.
SEC. 2. The Maritime Commission is authorized to expend out of any funds available for expenditure by the Maritime Commission such sums as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of this Act.
SEC. 3. The manufacture, sale, possession, or display of any insignia, decoration, medal, award, or device, or the ribbon, button, or rosette thereof, or any colorable imitation of any insignia, decoration, medal, award, or device, provided for in this Act, is prohibited, except as authorized under such Act or any rule or regulation issued pursuant thereto. Whoever violates any provisions of this section shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $250 or by imprisonment not exceeding six months, or both.
Approved August 8, 1946.
By 1966, 31,269 Merchant Marine World War II Victory Medals were awarded for service during the Second World War; this medal, like most Merchant Marine medals of the period, required merchant seamen to petition the Maritime Commission for its award. Since most merchant mariners had left the service for jobs on the beach, a majority of eligible seamen did not apply for nor receive the decoration.
References
- Public Law Public Law 78-251, 8 August 1946, 56 Stat. 213.
- TIOH heraldic file (WDGPA 200.6), August–November 1946.
File No. WDGPA 200.6, War Department, Personnel and Administration Division, Welfare Branch. Contents: War Department Summary Sheet, 13 November 1946 (Maj. Gen. W. S. Paul); Letter, Patterson to Chairman W. W. Smith, 18 November 1946; Letter, Patterson to Secretary Forrestal, 18 November 1946; Letter, Forrestal to Patterson, 6 November 1946; Memorandum, Rear Admiral R. W. Hayler to Secretary of the Navy, 5 November 1946; Letter (copy), Patterson to Bureau of the Budget Director Harold D. Smith, 30 January 1946; Letter (copy), Chairman W. W. Smith to Patterson, 21 August 1946; Joint Letter (copy), Macauley and Conway to Senator Josiah W. Bailey, 25 March 1946; S. 2236 (copy); War Department Bulletin No. 12 (copy), 16 July 1945. - Minutes of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, April 1947.
Contents: Letter, Nellie Tayloe Ross to Gilmore D. Clarke, 3 April 1947; Letter, Gilmore D. Clarke to Nellie Tayloe Ross, 21 April 1947; Notation of John R. Sinnock’s stroke and death, 14 May 1947.