Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine

This is Living History for Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine.

Today is Part One of a two part series on the Medal of Honor and how it found its meaning.

Before we begin, a quick note.

There is a restored U.S. Army newsreel from the Cold War television series “The Big Picture” that goes with this story. I cannot show you that film in audio, of course, but you can watch it on YouTube by going to today’s Living History edition of Dispatch and following the link there.

When most people think about the Medal of Honor, they picture the blue ribbon, the five pointed star, and a single name attached to almost impossible courage. We do not usually think about how new the very idea of a combat decoration once was in the United States, or how messy the early years became. It took decades of trial, error, and reform to turn the Medal of Honor into the rarest and most demanding award in American military life. Before we talk about individual recipients, it is worth spending time with the medal itself and how the Army chose to tell its story.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the United States had no official combat decoration at all. Medals were seen as something European, tied to aristocracy and ceremony, not to a republic that prided itself on simplicity. That attitude collided with the reality of industrial war. As casualty lists grew, commanders watched ordinary men perform extraordinary actions under fire. It became clear that the nation needed a formal way to recognize conspicuous bravery. In eighteen sixty one, Congress created a Medal of Honor for enlisted sailors and Marines. In eighteen sixty two, the Army followed with its own version for soldiers.

Because there were no other American combat decorations at the time, this new medal quickly became a kind of catch all. It was awarded for truly remarkable heroism. It was also sometimes given for things that would never qualify today. In the Civil War era, some Medals of Honor were awarded for reenlisting when a term of service was up, or for serving as part of the military escort at President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. These were honorable acts, but they were not the sort of life risking combat valor we associate with the medal now. Senior leaders gradually realized that if every kind of meritorious service could earn the Medal of Honor, the award would lose the meaning it was supposed to create.

By the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the language around the medal had grown much more demanding. The familiar phrase about “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life, above and beyond the call of duty” hardened into the benchmark. In nineteen seventeen, a review board went back through the rolls and struck more than nine hundred names from the official list in an effort to restore the medal’s integrity. Families kept the physical decorations, but the legal status of those awards disappeared from the records. It was a painful step that still sparks debate, but it sent a clear signal. The Medal of Honor was no longer a broad thank you. It was meant to be reserved for rare situations in which survival was unlikely and the choice to act still came.

As the standard tightened, the medal itself evolved as an object. The first Army Medal of Honor, issued in the eighteen sixties, had a distinctly Civil War look. It showed an American eagle, a cannonball, crossed cannons, and a star suspended from a spread winged eagle clasped at the chest. It was a pin worn on the uniform, not a neck decoration. At the turn of the century, the Army adopted a redesigned version sometimes called the Gillespie Medal, after General Gillespie, a Civil War recipient who took it upon himself to create a more refined design. That more stylized star, with laurel and oak leaves, carried the medal through two world wars and eventually became the basis for the neck decoration we recognize today.

The Navy’s path mirrored the Army’s in some ways and diverged in others. The original Navy Medal of Honor also carried strong Civil War imagery but added a distinctly nautical flavor, with anchors and rope and a sea service feel that set it apart from the Army’s version. After the First World War, the Navy introduced a new design sometimes known as the Tiffany Cross, a dramatic cross shaped medal meant to signal combat valor in a more modern way. It did not last. By the early nineteen forties, the service returned to a design closer to its Civil War roots, modified into the familiar neck decoration. That back and forth reflected a deeper tension that we still see today. How do you update an old symbol without breaking the continuity that gives it power?

The youngest of the three modern designs belongs to the United States Air Force. The Air Force became its own service in nineteen forty seven, but it did not finalize its unique Medal of Honor until nineteen sixty five. In the intervening years, airmen who earned the nation’s highest award did so under the Army’s medal. When the Air Force finally received its own design, it chose something strikingly different. At the center is the Statue of Liberty, framed by wings, with lightning bolts suggesting speed and power and the word “Valor” beneath it. You can still see traces of the older designs in its star and wreath, but the look is clearly from the mid twentieth century air age. The story of American air power is literally built into the metal.

And then there is the Coast Guard. In nineteen sixty three, Congress authorized a unique Coast Guard Medal of Honor, but the service has never designed, minted, or awarded its own version. The single Coast Guardsman to receive the nation’s highest decoration, Signalman First Class Douglas Munro, did so under the Navy Medal of Honor for his sacrifice at Guadalcanal. The fact that the Coast Guard’s medal exists only on paper is its own quiet story. It speaks to the small size of the service, the rarity of the award, and the way traditions of valor have often been shared across branches rather than kept in neat separate boxes.

This is where the film I mentioned earlier comes in. In the Big Picture episode that you can watch on YouTube through today’s Living History edition of Dispatch, the Army chose to tell the Medal of Honor story in a very mid century way. The camera walks viewers through a marble lined hall of heroes. The narrator speaks of “a company of heroes” whose ghosts stand watch from Shiloh to Bastogne to Korea. The language is polished and poetic, written for an era of Cold War anxiety and national pride. The film is less interested in specific dates and design debates than in atmosphere. It wants you to feel the weight of tradition and to believe that courage is a timeless, almost mythic quality carried from generation to generation.

If you listen closely to that narration, you will hear phrases that echo across official citations. “Above and beyond the call of duty.” “A company of heroes.” “Courage under the pressures of combat.” They sound smooth on film, but they point toward something rougher underneath. That is where the real work of living history begins. When we move beyond the narration and into individual citations, letters home, after action reports, and eyewitness accounts, a very different picture emerges. The men and women who earned the Medal of Honor were not marble statues. They were ordinary Americans who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

Those accounts describe people who were scared, cold, hungry, exhausted, and often angry. They were almost always under terrible pressure. In the moment that matters, they made a choice anyway. They left cover. They stayed at a position that was being overrun. They lifted off in aircraft that were unlikely to return. They ran toward danger when every instinct screamed to turn away. The medal does not demand perfection. It marks those rare moments when a person accepts that the odds of survival are slim and still moves forward because others are depending on them.

Today, the Medal of Honor sits at the crossroads of two stories. On one side is the mythology. The marble corridors. The gleaming stars. The ceremonial language that helps a nation express gratitude it can never fully repay. On the other side are the lives themselves, messy and human, where courage sits next to fear, doubt, and grief. The reforms that tightened the standard. The redesigns that refined the medal’s appearance. The government films that shaped public memory. All of these are part of a long process of figuring out how to honor that tension honestly.

In my ten volume series Beyond the Call, and in this Living History series for Dispatch, the goal is to live in that space between symbol and story. The history of the medal, from Civil War skepticism to mid century myth making, gives us a frame. Inside that frame are real people. Infantrymen in frozen foxholes. Pilots in burning aircraft. Corpsmen and medics under direct fire. Their decisions are preserved in a few tight paragraphs of official prose, but the human cost behind those words is much larger.

This concludes Part One of our Medal of Honor series. In Part Two, we will move from the design of the medal and the language of films like The Big Picture into specific World War Two recipients. We will follow their stories from North Africa to the Pacific and beyond, and we will put real lives back into the marble hall of heroes. If you would like to prepare, you can watch the Big Picture episode on YouTube through today’s Living History edition of Dispatch, and then join me again as we step into the stories behind the citations.