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Seeking Help/Ideas for Researching a WW2 Army Legion of Merit


Dave
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So I was able to get scans of the GOs from NARA today (remarkably fast considering they were shut down for a while!) What I discovered was a first for me. He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1943, but it was later rescinded and then awarded again, posthumously, to him in 1944. This is the first time I've ever seen an award rescinded and then re-awarded (as the same award) so it could then be posthumous vice non-posthumous.

Learn something new every day!

Dave

 

Here's a photo of the original GO:

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Now here's an odd twist. Thanks to Geoff at Golden Arrow Research, I received the morning reports for Gwozdz, covering his death. He is clearly listed as a Pvt. For a unit as small as his, you'd think they'd know his correct rank...so how does one go and drop from being a SSgt to a Pvt? That's dropping four ranks...I could see that happen because of a court martial, but he was still with his same unit the entire time (if he was a bad enough person to go to a court martial, chances are, they wouldn't have kept him in the unit...)

 

Hopefully some of his record still exists so I can figure out this twist to the story...

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It would be interesting to know what battalions of the 30th Infantry the medical detachment served with as it appears that SSgt/Pvt Gwozdz was killed during the Volturno River. They were fighting against the Herman Goering Panzer Division and the fighting was intense. The 3rd Division history is online and records their story like this:

 

 

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Dave, a few possibilities; his SSG rank may have been a temporary appointment and they reverted him to his actual rank upon his death. Also, in WWII guys who were subject to a court martial often went right back to their unit. Finally, I've researched hundreds of WWII Army records at this point and enlisted rank just worked very differently than it does today. In a nutshell, during WWII the unit owned the billet structure and a soldier's rank was adjusted to fit his assignment. Today, the Soldier "owns" the rank and is assigned to a billet commensurate with that. The most extreme example that I have personally documented is that of a pre war soldier who began WWII as a 1st Sgt. He volunteered to be a paratrooper and served in an airborne artillery unit stateside with his 1st Sgt rank. He apparently wanted to get in to the fight, so volunteered to go overseas as a parachute infantryman. He ended up assigned to the 502nd as a buck private. By the time Holland rolled around he was a SGT. He was awarded the Silver Star in Holland and finished the war as an NCO in the 502nd, ending as a TSGT. He had no disciplinary issues...the rank fluctuation was due solely to his billet assignments.

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Dave, a few possibilities; his SSG rank may have been a temporary appointment and they reverted him to his actual rank upon his death. Also, in WWII guys who were subject to a court martial often went right back to their unit. Finally, I've researched hundreds of WWII Army records at this point and enlisted rank just worked very differently than it does today. In a nutshell, during WWII the unit owned the billet structure and a soldier's rank was adjusted to fit his assignment. Today, the Soldier "owns" the rank and is assigned to a billet commensurate with that. The most extreme example that I have personally documented is that of a pre war soldier who began WWII as a 1st Sgt. He volunteered to be a paratrooper and served in an airborne artillery unit stateside with his 1st Sgt rank. He apparently wanted to get in to the fight, so volunteered to go overseas as a parachute infantryman. He ended up assigned to the 502nd as a buck private. By the time Holland rolled around he was a SGT. He was awarded the Silver Star in Holland and finished the war as an NCO in the 502nd, ending as a TSGT. He had no disciplinary issues...the rank fluctuation was due solely to his billet assignments.

 

 

You make some great points that I didn't take into account. Hopefully his record's still around or the IDPF might show some indication as to why the rank was different.

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Yes, you would really need to see the promotion history of his record to know what happened (if it still exists).

 

Another paratrooper rank saga that I've researched pertains to a double SSM awardee. He went from PVT to PFC to CPL to PVT to CPL to SSG to LT to SSG to CPT to MAJ!

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That's a great explanation Kadet! You learn something new every day when it comes to research.

 

Dave, this is an interesting find on your part and the story keeps getting better.

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At the risk of hijacking Dave's thread, here is the muster entry from the 502nd that adjusted Karl Riewe's rank from 1st Sgt to PVT....talk about a kick in the jimmy! He was an artilleryman by trade, but like most pre war professional soldiers had also served as an infantryman. His initial assignment was to the 464th PFAB. The 464th was one of the units that trained forever in the US and only deployed to combat late in the war. He sought an early overseas combat assignment with the 377th PFAB, but then transferred to the 502nd to be a parachute infantryman. My assumption is that the reduction had mainly to do with his MOS change..also note that the 502nd COMPLETELY screwed up his ASN and middle initial. There are actually three errors on this one muster report. His correct ASN was 6731612 and his MI was N

post-110-0-52279800-1549128986_thumb.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just got his IDPF in from Geoff at Golden Arrow Research and his report of burial initially listed him as a SSgt and then that was crossed out and changed to Pvt. I wonder if he was wearing the rank, but was a permanent Pvt? I thought only officers were frocked like that, but to Kadet's point, perhaps the SSgt came along with his job. No personnel file just yet...

 

 

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Dave, in this case I suspect that the final muster report entry is simply an error and that it carried over in to the paperwork done for him after he died. The people who arranged for the headstones would have no choice but to go with the rank on the official paperwork. One way to confirm is to see if there is another report memorializing his reduction. This would have been captured in an entry. Back to Karl Riewe....the 502nd used his incorrect ASN and MI on his Silver Star paperwork, so the GO is wrong. I assume this all carried over from those mistakes on the muster report.

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