Tag: medal

Introduction
On 29 August 1944, Executive Order 9472 established the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal (MM MSM), Gallant Ship citation plaque and ribbon, and Merchant Marine Defense ribbon. Unlike the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal (MM DSM) and the Mariner’s Medal before them, none rested on a separate act of Congress. The President’s order, apparently written for expediency, completed a system of honors the war had made urgent. The three awards rounded out that system for the wartime American Merchant Marine, each authorized specifically for the duration of the Second World War.

Like the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal [Pub. L. 77-524, 56 Stat. 217] and the Mariner’s Medal [Pub. L. 78-52, § 3, 57 Stat. 82], the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal carried no fixed deadline for award. Each limited eligible conduct to the war, and the order confined this medal to conduct “subsequent to September 8, 1939, or during the present war” [EO 9472, sec. 2(a)]. The new medal permitted the War Shipping Administration Seamen’s Service Awards Committee to consider a potential backlog of cases that did not warrant the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal, which is how the order defines the MM MSM: conduct or service of a meritorious character, but not so outstanding as to warrant the MM DSM [EO 9472, sec. 2(a)].

The medal was the second rung on a ladder of Merchant Marine decorations. Who drew the ladder?

Collins testimony, 1942
John J. Collins, an independent tanker union advisor, first sketched that ladder on 12 February 1942, two months before Congress created the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal. Testifying to the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries on H.J. Res. 263, he called it a thought not yet worked out in any concrete form, and described three kinds of recognition:

1. A decoration for exceedingly valiant or gallant action beyond the line of duty.
2. An award of merit for good service and particular acts that were not especially significant.
3. A certificate or emblem for every man on a torpedoed ship, with some recognition for the families of those lost.

He called the third very important, and compared it to the decorations given to men who fought at Chateau Thierry or Ypres. He said he drew on recognition for First World War veterans and on the Order of the British Empire; he also wanted ceremony attached, since an award’s value lies in what it stands for, not in the metal.

Congress acted that April with a medal for “outstanding conduct or service in the line of duty” [Pub. L. 77-524, 56 Stat. 217]. On my reading, that wording folded Collins’ first tier into a single medal and left his merit tier unfilled for two and a half years.

The Mariner’s Medal
Collins’ third tier came next. An act of 10 May 1943 authorized a medal for merchant seamen wounded, injured, or exposed to danger through an act of an enemy [Pub. L. 78-52, § 3, 57 Stat. 82]. The act does not name it; the name “Mariner’s Medal” first appears on WSA General Order 35, 23 September 1943.

The design was ahead of the law. Paul Manship, who designed the wartime Merchant Marine medals, reportedly had drawings ready, some of them sketched on napkins. A medal takes months to move from drawing to production, so the work must have begun far before the act passed. Yet, the medal appeared as a Commission of Fine Arts-approved design on August 5, 1943; CFA minutes describe a medal for “conspicuous service.”

However, this medal was not awarded immediately after announcement. The first award went to the widow of 3rd Assistant Engineer Philip C. Shera, honored for his heroic efforts on SS China Arrow. She received it at a Maritime Day ceremony on 22 May 1944, alongside Mariner’s medals awarded to the families of five merchant seamen missing at sea. The initial press called the new medal “the purple heart of the sea.”

Thus, I read it as a design conceived to recognize merit, then handed the more pressing job of honoring the dead, missing, and wounded. The phrase “conspicuous service” has a First World War echo: a citation signed by Gen. Pershing in April 1919 – the Meritorious Service Citation Certificate – awards “exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous services.” However, for the American Merchant Marine, Meritorious Service remained elusive.

The Purple Heart parallel
The military faced the same problem. Gen. George Washington’s order of 7 August 1782 created the Badge of Military Merit for any “singularly meritorious action.” When the Purple Heart was revived on 22 February 1932, holders of the Meritorious Service Citation Certificate could request it. A second certificate, the Columbia Accolade, was issued to those wounded or killed in the First World War and included a ribbon, then supplanted by uniform chevrons, and could also be exchanged for the Purple Heart.

In February 1942, when Collins testified, the Purple Heart still served for both wounds and meritorious performance of duty. The Legion of Merit followed by statute on 20 July 1942, and Executive Order 9277 of 3 December 1942 authorized the Purple Heart only for wounds, though some sources indicate that Army merit award of the Purple Heart continued until September 1943. By the time the Mariner’s Medal (the unnamed casualty medal) was authorized in May 1943 and awarded the following, the military system had separated merit from wounds. Merit once recognized by the Purple Heart went to the Legion of Merit, created in July 1942, and from February 1944 to the Bronze Star (E.O. 9419). The Merchant Marine followed the same split: a casualty medal authorized in 1943 and a merit medal created in 1944.

Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal Award
The Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal first reached the press on 29 August 1944, when an Executive Order designated the War Shipping Administrator as executor of the award. Afterward, the matter went silent until 10 October 1944 when its ribbon design was published; the medal itself was not finalized.

When the announcement was published, WSA cited that merchant seamen had received over 100 Distinguished Service Medals and 4500 Mariner’s Medals (OWI-3631, 9 October 1944). At the time, a critical shortage of merchant seamen and officers threatened to delay the delivery of supplies to the European and Pacific war theatres. As a recruitment and morale booster, the need for the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal must have been keen as the Western Allies prosecuted a major land campaign in Europe, which brought greater sacrifices, not all of which merited the MM DSM.

Although the administrative and artistic processes for ushering forward a medal’s production apparently worked in parallel, as evident for the Merchant Marine’s other medals – the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal and the Mariner’s Medal – Paul Manship must not have had a design in the hopper for the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal when the initial Executive Order was published. Instead, it appears he recycled a design he had used for United Fruit; the medal was first awarded in January 1944, and it is conspicuously similar to the Federal medal.

The medal was first awarded to Lieutenant Commander Henry B. Leitman, USMS, on 10 October 1944 for heroic action as Chief Mate aboard the SS William Tyler Page; he received his master’s license the day before the ceremony in New York City. In fact, rather than an administrative maritime office or public setting, the medal was awarded live on air in the course of an armed services radio program produced by Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in New York City, where Leitman spoke about commanding a lifeboat to rescue six wounded soldiers after their landing craft struck a mine off Normandy; and he was young: just twenty-three, showing the youthful face of those who were coming to man the United States’ merchant fleet. Unlike the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal and the Mariner’s Medal, the initial awards of the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal did not occur on a particularly auspicious day for the American Merchant Marine (e.g. National Maritime Day), and also unlike the aforementioned, the award of the MM MSM was not solely related to blue water or war shipping activities , and even the medal as a physical object itself was not initially awarded – it was to be sent to the awardees at a later date (per New York Times 17 December 1944).

The first group award occurred at an annual United Seamen’s Service art exhibit on 16 December 1944 to four tugboat captains:

Curiously, the tugboat captains who were awarded the MM MSM were also cited for the Bronze Star Medal; however, a Bronze Star did not automatically confer the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal such is the case for the seagoing tugboat captains below.

After these initial awards, a steady stream of medals reached the fleet. The medal was awarded for seamanship and salvage rather than combat gallantry, reflecting the stark realities of the merchant seaman beyond war. Throughout 1945, medals were awarded largely for actions from 1943 and 1944, concentrated for actions at Normandy, Sicily, and in the Pacific. By far, firefighting and damage control are the largest group, roughly a third. Examples are the SS James Buchanan crew (Barbara, Beisser, Daniels, Hobbs) after an ammunition dump explosion in a South Pacific port, Clapp and Elliott on the SS Juan Cabrillo at a naval air base pier, Connor on the SS John C. Calhoun, Collins on the tanker SS Harper’s Ferry at Taranto, and Beyer and Jackson on the SS Clevedon in Alaska, who both moved the burning ship away from the dock.

Rescue at sea or in port comes next. This includes Adams on the SS William Tyler Page at Normandy, Allen on the SS Cedar Mills transferring a French destroyer’s crew, Bishop on the SS David W. Branch rescuing eighteen men from a grounded ship, Eades on the SS Esso Little Rock recovering a Catalina’s eight-man crew, and Chowaniec swimming to a drowning seaman in the Thames.

Saving or reboarding a damaged ship is the third group. Conners and Hughes on the bombed SS Charles Morgan at Normandy reboarded the ship at low tide to pump and salvage. Gjersvik from the SS Kittanning volunteered to reboard a torpedoed tanker, and Boyer reboarded the torpedoed SS Matt W. Ransom. Andrianan stayed aboard the grounded SS William B. Ogden in India for months to protect it from salvage.

The remainder are individual cases. Holden went below on the SS Francis C. Harrington to aid wounded soldiers. Heard stayed at his engine room station on the SS Elihu Thompson after it hit a mine. Crosby and Dietz were recognized as masters who defended ships off Sicily under air attack. Blackwood maneuvered the SS Floyd W. Spenser clear of a suicide plane’s torpedo. Fanjoy cut a static-charged barrage balloon cable on the SS Lawton B. Evans. Bohn kept a radio working to send a distress signal after the SS City of Flint was torpedoed. Coas helped keep three lifeboats together for six days after the SS Honolulan sank. Benson stood watch for about three weeks on a broken foot. De Puey, master of the tug Watch Hill, towed two damaged ships out of a combat area off Formosa.

Using data from usmm.org, awards of the MM MSM for wartime activities are thus:

Year	Medals presented each year
1944	5
1945	47
1946	192
1947	50
1949	1
1958	1

• Dated entries: about 300 of roughly 380 listed at usmm.org with dates of presentation; remaining ~80 give only a name and ship with no date.
• Peak: 1946 holds about 64% of the dated entries. This shows when medals were handed out, not when the acts happened.
• Earliest and latest: the earliest dates are in late 1944 (Leitman, 10 October 1944; the El Estero tug masters, 16 December 1944). The last in the main run is 29 December 1947 (Price).
• Outliers: Louie B. Wood, SS Charles Morgan, is dated 14 January 1949, and Harrison, SS Gulfdeer, is dated 3 July 1958. The usmm.org roll gives no reason for either date, and I have found none.

Postwar, from 1946 through 1947, the awards recognized the same kinds of conduct as in 1945, with a few differences. In 1946, about 192 citations (the peak year) were for firefighting aboard ships carrying fuel or ammunition, rescuing survivors, and saving or reboarding damaged ships. Many cover gunnery leadership under air attack at Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, Leyte, and Okinawa. A few are individual survival or endurance cases (Greenlaw’s 39-day lifeboat passage, Finley at his radio key, Wagg’s swamped lifeboat), and a few are for seamanship. The Brooklyn Panuco fire and Hoboken Tug 32 are the domestic harbor cases. Like wartime awards, many of these actions date from 1942 and 1943, so the 1946 presentations are largely late recognition. In 1947, with around 50 entries, many repeat the earlier incidents. The one distinct award group is the SS Collingsworth crew (Godfrey, Horn, Woodruff), recognized for volunteering to man a blockade runner for Bataan relief, with the citation noting the mission’s failure.

The Meritorious Service Medal & precedence
When WSA wrote the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal into its chart of precedence in 1944, it ranked immediately after the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal and before the Gallant Ship Citation ribbon, with the Mariner’s Medal behind both. The First World War offers a model for that arrangement, though this is an inference. The Army’s Certificate of Merit, as authorized by Congress in 1847 and made a medal by War Department order in 1905, was superseded by the Distinguished Service Medal in 1918. The Meritorious Service Citation Certificate recognized valuable service, while its gallantry counterpart, the Citation Star, became the Silver Star Medal in 1932.

The military’s own Meritorious Service Medal did not exist until Executive Order 11448 on 16 January 1969, about twenty-five years after the Merchant Marine medal. As far as I can find, the MM MSM is among the earliest US medals to carry that title.

Comparing or drawing equivalencies between a military-adjacent honors system and a military honors system is problematic. In the case of the American Merchant Marine at war, such a comparison ignores the reality of the work and concerns of those at sea, and the WSA decorations were never built on military equivalency. The military itself mainly kept the two systems apart. For instance, a 1943 Navy bulletin, reproduced in the November 1943 issue of Neptune, announced the limiting of Navy awards to merchant seamen to the Silver Star and the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and only for direct combat with the enemy or especially meritorious service under combat conditions as part of a naval expedition, not normal overseas convoys. It directed naval commanders to forward recommendations for War Shipping Administration medals to the Navy Department for transmission to the WSA. This did not always happen: the Bronze Star, created in February 1944, was awarded to merchant mariners beyond the two medals listed, but the intent was present. Medal terminology may be similar, and medal designs may follow the same established design rubric, but the methods and means differ. As a rule of thumb, wartime Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal citations describe conduct recognized by the period Legion of Merit, Silver Star, Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and Bronze Star. The following considers known citations from usmm.org, the 1956 Seamen Awards Study, military medal criteria, and known Merchant Marine recipients of analogous military medals that honor merit. A military citation did not necessarily guarantee a WSA award. Moreover, do take into consideration that the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll mixes seamanship, salvage, rescue and firefighting, much of it in port or after accidents, with acts under enemy attack. The WSA drew one line, conduct “of a meritorious character” short of the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal, and did not divide combat from non-combat. That is the equivalency problem: the same roll maps to different military medals depending on whether the enemy was involved, a distinction the WSA never made.

Legion of Merit. This medal is for exceptionally meritorious conduct in outstanding services, usually of command or staff scale, and not for a single act at risk of life. The few Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal entries that read as sustained achievement are the closest, such as Ryan’s convoy navigation to Russia, Robinson’s radio work at Anzio, and Thunberg’s improvised pumping of the SS Northern Sword. Present research does not indicate that any merchant seaman received the Legion of Merit.

Silver Star. This medal is for gallantry in action against an enemy. A small subset of Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal citations might read that way, such as the Floyd W. Spenser torpedo avoidance, the Josiah Snelling suicide plane defense and the Alcoa Pioneer fires; muddying the waters a bit: the 1956 study places the highest-risk cases, those facing near or certain death, firmly in the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal camp, the criteria which are nearer to the Silver Star in the aforementioned cases. The usmm.org page on Army and Navy medals awarded to mariners lists only one Silver Star, to Percy Hauffman, master of the Hilary A. Herbert, for landing the ship at Anzio under bombardment. He does not appear on the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll. The roll does include Earl Robinson, the Hilary A. Herbert’s radio operator, recognized for the same eight days at Anzio, which shows the two systems recognizing different men for the same action.

Navy and Marine Corps Medal, or the Army Soldier’s Medal. These medals are a functional fit for much of the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll. They are for heroism not involving combat with an enemy. Most citations describe accidents, not combat: collision and dock fires (Brookfield, Caleb Strong, James Buchanan, Juan Cabrillo), swimming to rescue shipmates or survivors, and reboarding torpedoed or damaged ships. The services treated comparable conduct this way. Lieutenant Commander Arthur Pfister of the Coast Guard received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for the El Estero fire. Of the three mariners the usmm.org page lists for this medal, James De Puey, master of the tug Watch Hill, was cited for towing damaged ships off Formosa and also appears on the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll. An Atkinson, master of the Mormacwren, appears on the page for towing USS Pasig and on the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll. The third, Richard Bordeaux (Anzio), is not on the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal roll.

Bronze Star. This medal covers heroic or meritorious achievement in connection with military operations against an enemy, with the “V” device for heroism. That matches the citations that involve enemy action, such as the Leyte and Okinawa suicide plane fires, the Sicily and Anzio air attacks, the Normandy rescues, and the Bataan blockade runner volunteers. The usmm.org page lists thirteen tug masters among Bronze Star recipients but does not indicate which service awarded them: nine for Normandy and four for New York. The four New York awardees are the El Estero masters (Carlson, Ericksen, Gully and Striffolino), and they are the only tug masters on that list who also appear on the Meritorious Service Medal roll; the El Estero fire of 24 April 1943, was an accident at an Army ammunition depot, not combat. The military therefore used this medal for noncombat service connected with military operations, which is the same distinction the Merchant Marine medal drew. The domestic harbor cases on the roll without a Bronze Star listing, the Panuco pier fire and Tug 32 at Hoboken, suggest the WSA recognized harbor emergencies that the military awards did not reach, but that is an inference from two entries.

Used only as a rough guide, the Meritorious Service Medal sits a rung above the Mariner’s Medal, which the 1956 study describes as issued for injuries from enemy action and therefore comparable to the Purple Heart. Each of the military medals discussed above ranks above the Purple Heart in military precedence. The two systems also operated side by side. Four Meritorious Service Medal recipients (Maury, Hodak, Lowry and White, all of the Lyman Abbott) also appear among the Purple Heart recipients listed for the Bari air raid, an Army award. Only Maury’s roll entry includes a citation describing his conduct at Bari, so the other three medals were likely for the same night, but the record does not show that.

Nearly five decades after the 1943 ribbon chart, MARAD formalized the precedence of medals and decorations in a pamphlet published circa 1990, in the period before the plan to convert ribbons and bars to medals. The pamphlet above was a planning document used by the U.S. Army’s Institute of Heraldry (TIOH) for Merchant Marine medal design; precedence was printed and penciled in, and the checkmarks appear to mark items for which TIOH provided medal designs. Another marked pamphlet included equivalents for military campaign medals.

The record does not say why the WSA built its ladder this way. It lacked decades of experience and tradition, but the former military men who served on its Seamen’s Service Awards Committee had a vocabulary and structure to draw on. What resulted looks less like a copy of the military system than a ladder of its own, sketched by Collins in 1942 and completed in 1944.

Limbo
PostwarThe joint resolution of 25 July 1947 repealed the 1942 act authorizing the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal [Pub. L. 80-239, § 1, 61 Stat. 450]. It does not mention Executive Order 9472 or the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal, and the National Archives’ disposition tables list the order as amended by Executive Order 9692 (5 February 1946) with no revocation. The medal therefore rested on the order alone, but the order defined it by reference to the Distinguished Service Medal, whose statute had been repealed. The record does not answer whether the repeal legally affected the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal. It appears, however, to have chilled the award of decorations the repeal did not reach, since Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council (October 1956) records that a cautious Maritime Administration considered itself unable to issue decorations until Congress restored the authority. In 1956, Congress repealed the 1943 and 1946 acts [Pub. L. 84-759, § 5(a), 70 Stat. 606] and authorized the Secretary of Commerce to award a meritorious service medal “for meritorious act, conduct, or service in line of duty, but not of such outstanding character as would warrant an award of the distinguished service medal” [§ 1(a), 70 Stat. 605], placing the presidentially created medal on a statutory footing. Congress named the medal again in 1988 [Pub. L. 100-324, § 2, 102 Stat. 576], and the authority is now codified at 46 U.S.C. § 51901(b)(2) [Pub. L. 109-304, § 8(b), 120 Stat. 1584]. The 1944 order and the statutory authority since 1956 belong to one award’s history, but they are different legal authorities.

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Legislation

Executive Order 9472

Establishing Certain Awards for the Merchant Marine [Federal Register Doc. 44 13133; Filed, August 29, 1944; 2:38 p.m.]

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President and as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. (a) The Administrator of the War Shipping Administration, hereinafter referred to as the Administrator, is hereby authorized to issue a citation as public evidence of deserved honor and distinction to any United States ship or to any foreign ship operated by or for the account of the United States Maritime Commission or the War Shipping Administration which, subsequent to September 8, 1939, or during the present war has served or shall serve in outstanding action against attack or in gallant action in marine disasters or other emergencies at sea.

(b) The Administrator shall award a plaque to any ship so cited; and a replica of such plaque shall be preserved, under such regulations as the Administrator may prescribe, as a permanent historical record.

(c) The Administrator shall also award an appropriate citation ribbon bar to the master and each person serving on board such ship at the time of the action for which citation is made, as public evidence of such honor and distinction:
Provided, That whenever such master or person would be entitled hereunder to the award of an additional citation ribbon, a suitable device shall be awarded, in lieu thereof, to be attached to the ribbon originally awarded.

2. (a) There is hereby established the Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal, with accompanying ribbon and appurtenances, for award by the Administrator, under such regulations as he shall prescribe, to any master, officer, or member of the crew of any United States ship, or any foreign ship operated by or for the account of the United States Maritime Commission or the War Shipping Administration who, subsequent to September 8, 1939, or during the present war has been or shall be officially commended by the Administrator for conduct or service of a meritorious character but not of such an outstanding character as would warrant an award of the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal established pursuant to the act of April 11, 1942, ch. 241, 56 Stat. 217.

(b) No more than one Merchant Marine Meritorious Service Medal shall be awarded to any one person, but for each succeeding commendation justifying such an award a suitable device may be awarded to be worn with the medal and ribbon.

3. The Administrator is hereby authorized, until two years after the termination of the present war, to provide and issue, under such regulations as he may prescribe, a distinctive service ribbon bar to each master, officer, or member of the crew of any United States ship who shall have served at any time during the period beginning September 8, 1939, and ending December 6, 1941.

4. In case any person who is entitled to an award under this order dies before the award can be made to him, the award may be made to such representative of the deceased as the Administrator may deem proper.

5. The design of the plaque, medal, and ribbons herein authorized, shall not duplicate the design of any medals or ribbons awarded by the War or Navy Department. 6. The Administrator may delegate his authority hereunder and issue such other regulations as may be appropriate to carry out the provisions of this order.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The White House, August 29, 1944.

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Eligible conduct under EO 9472 began after 8 September 1939 [EO 9472, sec. 2(a)]. Congress authorized the medal by statute in 1956 [Pub. L. 84-759, § 1(a), 70 Stat. 605]

Legislation

Public Law 78-52

78th Congress

AN ACT

To provide for the issuance of devices in recognition of the services of merchant sailors [H. R. 2281]

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Administrator, War Shipping Administration, is hereby authorized to provide and issue

(a) a seamen’s service insignia of appropriate design to any person who, at any time during the period (hereinafter referred to as the war period) beginning December 7, 1941, and ending with the termination of the present war, serves on any vessel in the American merchant marine, and

(b) a seamen’s war zone insignia or device of appropriate design to any person who, at any time during the war period, serves on any vessel in the American merchant marine while sailing in any war or combat zone.

SEC. 2. The Administrator is authorized to provide and issue a seamen’s honor bar to any person who, at any time during the war period, serves on any vessel in the American merchant marine which, at the time of such service, is attacked or damaged by an instrumentality of war. The Administrator is further authorized to provide and issue a star (to be attached to such bar) to any such person who is forced to abandon such vessel when so attacked or damaged, with an additional star for each such abandonment.

SEC. 3. The Administrator is authorized to provide and award a medal of appropriate design and a ribbon, together with a rosette or other device to be worn in lieu thereof, to any person, who while serving on any vessel in the American merchant marine during the war period, is wounded, suffers physical injury, or suffers through dangerous exposure as a result of an act of an enemy of the United States.

SEC. 4. The Administrator shall prescribe appropriate conditions of eligibility for the issuance or award of insignia or medals under this Act. Not more than one insignia or medal of each type provided herein shall be issued or awarded to any one person, but. for each succeeding service of any person sufficient to justify the award of a medal under section 3 of this Act, the Administrator may award a suitable bar, emblem, or insignia to be worn with the medal. In case any person who performs service sufficient to justify the award of a medal under section 3 dies before the award can be made to him, the award may be made and the medal presented to such representative of the deceased as the Administrator deems proper. No award of any insignia, medal, or device shall be made hereunder after two years after the termination of the present war.

SEC. 5. The Administrator is authorized to approve a design for a seamen’s service flag which may be displayed, and a design for a service lapel button which may be worn, by members of the immediate family, of a person serving in the American merchant marine during the war period. In approving any design under this section, the Administrator may approve the design approved by the Secretary of War under the provisions of the Act of Congress approved October 17, 1942 (Public Law 750, Seventy-seventh Congress), but only if the Secretary of War shall consent thereto and the Administrator shall approve for use in connection therewith a distinctive insignia or other device designating service in the American merchant marine. The Administrator, upon approval of the design for such service flag and service lapel button, shall cause notice of such approval and a description of the flag and button to be published in the Federal Register.

SEC. 6. (a) The Administrator is authorized to prescribe such rules and regulations as may be appropriate to carry out the provisions of this Act.

(b) The Administrator is authorized to expend out of any funds available for expenditure by the War Shipping Administration such sums as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of this Act.

Approved May 10, 1943

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Further legislation determined that the award’s eligibility period was from 7 December 1941 to 25 July 1947.

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Essay: 1950 Merchant Marine Casualties of the Second World War

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.