Soviet/American Award Comparisons

[Matthias]

I was just reading Henry Sakaida's articles on the Cavaliers of the OoGs and I had a thought that doesn't seem to come up very often. How would people rank Soviet awards with their counterparts (or the nearest to them) from other nations, especially the USA?

I agree with his general analysis about the OoGs, except I am not convinced I would place every OoG in the same realm as the Medal of Honor. What about the DSC/NC/AFC?


---Matthias

[mcwirsk]

Dear Matthias

It would be a very good idea to try match, as best as it could be done, the Soviet awards to their American and British counterparts. The reason for this would really encourage non Soviet collectors to start colecting when theu understnd what the type of award is. I don't think that it would be a total match but it would be very interresting.

I am going to try list the British awards and what the Soviet equivalent will be. I may be a bit off but lets try a start. (I have left out the Naval awards)

Victoria Cross - HSU and cav of Glory
DCM - Glory 2nd class, Red banner, Lenin
MC/DFC/DFM/MM - Lenin, PW 1st class, Glory 3rd class, Red banner, Bravery medal, Nevsky
AFC/AFM - PW 2nd class
OBE/MBE/BEM - 2nd and 3rd class of Kutozov, Suruov, Bogdan
CB/CBE/CMG /DSO- Kutozov 1st class, Suruov 1st Class Bogdan 1st class
MID - Red star, Combat medal

One of the biggest problems is the class system of the British awards. MC to officer, MM to Non coms. Then their is the Soviet system of awarding stuff for long service.

Am I close or way off. Please comment

Kind regards from a land of sunshine

Munroe

[Matthias]

Seems to be like the BritComm ODM system is almost as tough as the Soviet system.

I don't have many high end items, except for a few American DSCs. I do have a few BritComm items up at that high, hard to decipher realm, such as CBEs, MBEs, BEMs etc. Well, BEMs arnt to bad money wise. WHat do you think is a good cross-medal for the civilian wards in the Soviet system vs British? Americans don't have anywhere near the amount many other nations do. Just a few DoD awards and a handful of higher ranking medals (ie Presidential Medal of Freedom etc).

---Matthias

[mcwirsk]

Dear Matthias

The British system is far more simple becuase they have awards for officers and a different set for non comms.

Also they have quite a good criteria for what the awards were for and they are much simpler than the Soviet system. For example if you see an OBE/MBE/BEM you will know that this is not for front line work. If you see an MC/MM/DCM then you know its for fighting.

As regards the civilian awards.

The George Cross and medal is the award for bravery to civilians or for bravery not in the face of the enemy. There is a civlian version of the Order of the British empire. Then there are a host of civilian societys that award bravery awards like the the Royal Humane Soc.

Also remember that the police and fire service have their own series of awards.

This is as long a topic as the Soviet awards and I have only just touched the surface.

Regards

Munroe

[otlichnik]

Munroe,

Umm.... For those of us who are just Soviet collectors could you decipher the acronyms for UK awards. I am very interested in this thread but don't know most of the "codes".

Shawn

[Ed_Haynes]

Fellow workers,

I recognize the necessity of asking questions such as this, and I think it is a useful topic to explore, but I think we need, from the outset, to recognize both the futility of ever "answering" the question and also the great value of struggling with it.

The difficulty is, to put it simply, the immense difference in philosophy between the Soviet and British conceptualizations of honor that are then manifested in these awards we collect and study (and I'll come to the US later, although I know less about it).

For the British, the underlying system of class created a set of honors in which the "ancient" orders of knighthood (Garter, Thistle, St. Patrick) were the models: honour was all about rank and not so much about achievement. As one knight of the Garter himself famously remarked, the nice thing about the Garter was that there was no bloody merit at all about it. As bravery decorations are later (and slowly) instituted, they build on this model, and the Order of the Bath is used (reinvented) to reward senior-most officers' services (Suvorov-like?). Only with the Crimean War and the Great War (ignoring events in India, which have their own trajectory) do the British adopt (reluctantly) the concept of decorations of bravery for all ranks (they'd had a hard enough time with the idea of campaign medals for others than the most senior). Eventually, a "pyramid" of honour evolves which is driven almost entirely by the number of pips on one's badge of rank: Order of the Bath (CB) for the senior-most, Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for field-grade officers, Military Cross (MC) for company-grade officers, Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) for enlisted personnel (though usually NCOs, at least that is my sense), and Military Medal (MM) for lesser deeds by enlisted personnel (and at the lowest ranks). Only the Victoria Cross (VC) was for all, in theory, but even there it was more class-ordered than it appears. While distinguished service was a parallel system, it was even more class-driven, with certain grades and ranks slotted in ex officio for certain orders (usually of the WWI multi-purpose "egalitarian" Order of the British Empire -- described by some at the time as "socialist" -- GBE, KBE, CBE, OBE, MBE, and BEM in the abbreviation-storm -- and which somewhat strangely still exists under the now-odd-sounding name). The current UK government has tried to erase many of these class distinctions and has gotten immense flack for this from the familiar conservative circles.

I don't need to tell this group about the Soviet system and how it differs from the pre-Revolutionary Russian assumptions of honor (which were, if anything, even more class-driven than the British). Standards of absolute socialist equality and of a self-aware revolutionary consciousness drove a system where, in theory at least, all soldiers, sailors, and workers were eligible for the same awards, both for achievement and for bravery (though the introduction of the senior-officer military leadership orders during the GPW clouds this issue and perhaps says something about the changing Soviet society that created them). The Order of Glory (based on the Cross of St. George) is a queer bird indeed and almost has to stand alone and to the side in any comparative analysis; the promotion in grade due to subsequent acts makes it hard to fit into ANY comparative framework (and my own work, which deals in part with the Indian Order of Merit, also consciously patterened on the Cross of St. George, I confront the same problems). Civilian service was, by and large, service in building the great socialist state and building a revolutionary economy to support it, so rather than receiving awards just for who your father was (in British or Czarist style), one gets their awards depending on how many eggs your chickens produced. (Ignoring, of course, our friends the senior party officials giving themselves awards simply for being senior party officials!)

The USA, however, self-consiciously "republican" (small "R") and revolutionary in the content of 1776, wanted to reject all that European feudal nonsense and resisted strongly any such foolishness. (The "Society" of the Cincinnati is an interesting exception -- a hereditary order in a revolutionary republican state!) The simple cloth sleeve badge created by Gen. Washington for bravery (and later reincarnated as the Purple Heart) was allowed to lapse. It was not until the Civil War (it is amazing how phaleristic innovations seem to come at moments of national crisis?) that a Medal of Honor was created for gallantry by all ranks (and often fairly slight levels of gallantry such as staying on the firing line when one's enlistment period expired). It was not until the Great War when, reluctantly and essentially haphazardly, a system of decorations was created, more or less along French lines (?), to "compete" with the ability of the allies to award decorations to their own troops. Like the grudging introduction of campaign badges (NOT medals in the official terminology) a decade earlier, the creation of decorations seems to have been driven by little policy, involved scant thought. (And I'm tempted, as an "American", to say "How very American"!)

So . . . if you've made it this far . . . perhaps the best comparisons we can make is to ask very general questions like "What is the highest medal for gallantry?" (VC-HSU-MoH) And then we can proceed from there to disentangle the philopohical differences between the systems of awards and the state psychologies that underly them.

Sorry for the length, but these are the kinds of issues my own academic research has been struggling with. . . .

Ed Haynes

[mcwirsk]

VC – Victoria Cross
CBE, OBE, MBE – Commander, Officer, Member of the British Empire
BEM – British Empire medal
Dear Shawn

DSO - Distinguished Service order
CB – Order of the bath – Commander grade
MC – Military Cross
MM – Military medal
DFC – Distinguished Flying Cross
DFM – Distinguished Flying medal
AFC _ Air Froce cross
AFM – Air Force medal
DCM – Distinguished Conduct medal
DSM – Distinguished service medal
DSC- Distinguished service cross
MID- mentioned in despatches.

I think I got them all. If not please say so and I will fill in the missing items.

Kind regards

Munroe

[Matthias]

Munroe and Ed --- Great responses! I think the American award systems are more equalizing in general in terms of rank (with a few exceptions, ie Legion of Merit). Most of the BritCOmm ODM I have are relatively common medals, tho I do have casualty groupings (which have insane prices at times, even by American grouping standards, especially for WW2s...tho I suppose we shouldn't complain because the recipient earned those the hard way).

The Medal of Honor is problematic though. Even in more recent times of tribulation (ie WW2), the medal has been awarded to people for actions, if you want to take the MoH for what it is described on paper as, that don't really qualify the individual for it. Certainly many of the ACW MoHs were nixed officially later on (some of em probably wouldnt rate but a Bronze Star today...maybe a Silver Star if you REALLY laid down the gas). Most HSUs and Cavs seem to be fairly well at their respective levels of expectation, and certainly many VCs were earned (some in spades).

I think, for me, the toughest guage are the "lower" valor awards...the Commendation with V device/Bronze Star with V device/Silver Star level equivs. I've seen citations for Order of Glory 3rd Class' that would probably rate at least a silver star...if not even perhaps a DSC (or in some extremely rare cases, the MoH). Then I look at the next citation for another OoG3C and it isn't a "bad" citation, but you read the first one, then the second, and you wonder who was asleep at what wheel. During the Vietnam War, the US Army issued tons of Green Weenies (ArComms...or Army Commendation Medals), including quite a decent number with "V" devices. I can't help but associate these with Red Stars, but sometimes you find something that should have been elsehwere, like a lifesaving incident that was awarded a Green Weenie w/V instead of the Soldier Medal he deserved (I have one of these in my collection and I believe one is for sale on tiac.com or whatever that huge antiques website nexus is called).

Who do people think are the worst "blowing out of preportion" ciationers? Soviets? British? Yanks? Japanese?


---Matthias

[mcwirsk]

Dear Matthias

Some of the citations for the Soviet awards are clearly blown out of proportion. If I add up the number of enemy soldiers killed in the groups I have I may have the medals to the guys who destroyed the whole German army. But I suppose that that was required in the citation in order to get the award.

The British citations are far more bland. I can post some if anyone wants just for comparison. The only problem with the British stuff is that there were also quota systems. This was especially true of the WW1. So if a unit had a few medals to be awarded then it did so and then the citations are rather bad. I have a ww2 group of MBE and ww2 medals. The guy told me that he got it for pulling a pilot out of a burning plane. When I pulled the official citation it was for general good work (typical for this type of award). Then I found a recommendation for an award for the event of pulling the pilot out of the plane. It was rejected becuase it was not properly formulated. So for 40 years this vetran thought he had his award for what he did. I had a Battle of Britian DFC awarded for shooting down a bomber with only a few round of ammo and some other good work. This was the 1st German bomber shot down over British soil. In Russia he may have received the HSU!!! for politicak reasons.

I have a ww1 group were the guy was court martialed and sentenced to 6 months hard labour. This was then commuted by the divisional commander becuase of his bravery in some action and he was awarded a French medal. No citation exists for the French medal but I recon it must have been a VC type event for a divisonal commander to overturn a 6 month sentance and give him a medal. I also had a group were the guy was put forward for a VC but his unit commander refused to sign it. His fellow officers put in a petition to the Brigade and it was refused becuase the unit commander would not sign. I wonder how many of these event took place that robbed guys of good awards.

In the modern SA army we did not have a lot of awards and our Chief of the Army commendation award was awarded for events ranging from kitchen work to saving of life. Also some of these were awarded to our SF guys becuase the award did not require to be published in government orders thus the real event could be hidden. Citations for the SA awards follow the British pattern and are quite bland in many cases.

However we must never forget that these awards whatever the citation were to guys who were putting their lives at risk. But value of an award or a group must be determined by the amount of research and type of citation.

Kind regards

Munroe

[Ed Maier]

Ed -- What a great post! Thank you very much for adding that to the forum. I think it is easy for us to forget that military decorations are not just a reflection of a uniform definition of "bravery" and "valor" but also a reflection of the society and culture which is awarding the decoration.

When we try to compare Soviet awards to their British and US counterparts, do not forget that the Soviet awarding structure changed in June of 1943. The creation of so many new awards changed the requirements and prestige of the earlier awards greatly. For example an early Order of the Red Star was one of the top awards for bravery in the Soviet system before 1943 and usually was earned through actions that would have warranted an award that we may view as a higher decoration in the post-1943 world. The fact that so many Red Stars were awarded after 1943 and that they were also issued for long service clouds their value for many of us.

Just a thought,
Ed