Above & Beyond Duty

Of varying sizes, shapes, shades and significance are the medals with which nations honor their military heroes, living and dead. No. 1 Medal of the British Empire is the bronze, red-ribboned Victoria Cross, bearing the Royal Crest and the inscription FOR VALOUR. Since the close of the Crimean War in 1856, 1,155 persons have won it "for some signal act of valour or devotion . . . in the presence of the enemy." During the World War, when other medals were being passed out with feverish generosity, the V.C. went to only 633 fighters, proudly maintained its high prestige.

France's No. 1 battlefield honor is the Medaille Militaire. By a curious quirk, only generals commanding armies, noncommissioned officers and enlisted men can win the green-and-yellow-ribboned decoration, the former for their strategic vision, the latter for their bravery in direct action. Though the French War Ministry has no record of the number awarded since 1852, some 300,000 recipients are alive today.

Greatest honor the U. S. can bestow is the Congressional Medal of Honor, a five-pointed gold star, swinging from a bar on which is engraved VALOR, below a blue ribbon dotted with 13 white stars. To prod privates, ineligible for other decorations, on to harder fighting, Congress during the second year of the Civil War passed an act providing for 2,000 medals "to such ... as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action and other soldierlike qualities during the present insurrection." The first medals were bestowed by Abraham Lincoln on four Yankee sergeants and two privates for their "gallantry" in capturing a Confederate railroad train at Big Shanty, Ga.

After the U. S. entered the World War, Congress added $2 per month to the pay of past and future Medal-of-Honor men so long as they remained in the Army, limited its award to him who "shall, in action involving actual conflict with an enemy, distinguish himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty." Since under these conditions a Medal-of-Honor soldier generally has to act single-handed and without orders, the War Department makes a painstaking search of all available evidence before it picks its top-notch heroes. This process starts when a field officer first recommends a brave subordinate for a Medal of Honor. The case slowly passes up through the various Army divisions to the War Department's Decorations Board. From there the recommendation, if approved by the Secretary of War, goes to the President who presents the Medal in the name of Congress.

Last week this complicated procedure came to an end for the 100th World War veteran to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. From Atlanta to Washington went Samuel Iredell Parker, 45-year-old employe of a textile dye company. There in the presence of his wife, sister, son, daughter and brother, U. S. Circuit Court Judge John J. Parker (see cut), whose nomination to the U. S. Supreme Court by President Hoover was rejected by the Senate six years ago (TIME, May 19, 1930), he gravely accepted from President Roosevelt the $2 Medal which made him the 1,825th person in U. S. history to receive this No. i award.

It took the War Department nearly 18 years to decide that Hero Parker's heroics rated the Medal of Honor. On July 18, 1918, the 28th infantry of the A.E.F.'s First division found itself in a tough frontline sector near Soissons. Between it and a troop of French Colonials on its left was a jutting mound and rock quarry from which a nest of German machine guns spat a relentless enfilade fire. Seeing that the U. S. flank would soon be shredded to bits, Lieutenant Parker ordered his platoon and a group of wandering, disorganized French Colonials to follow him up the hill. Few minutes later Lieutenant Parker and his men had effectively silenced the German guns, captured 40 prisoners. Next day, when a bad foot wound left him unable to stand, he crawled on hands & knees at the head of his battalion, brought aid to a battalion under enfilade fire. There he stayed, refusing to be evacuated until the lines were consolidated.

Last week Hero Parker joined a distinguished company of Medal of Honor men which included: Major General Daniel Edgar Sickles, Union leader, who had a leg amputated on the Gettysburg battlefield; Major General Leonard Wood who, in the U. S. campaign against Apache tribes in 1886, voluntarily carried dispatches through a region infested with Indians; Sergeant Alvin York who killed 25 Germans, with six men captured 132 more; Brig. General Charles E. Kilbourne who mended a telegraph wire under fire in the Spanish-American War; Major Charles W. Whittlesey, commander of the A.E.F.'s "Lost Battalion"; Sergeant Samuel Woodfill, praised by General Pershing as the "greatest soldier of the A.E.F.," who killed 16 men, battered two to death with a pick and captured three machine-gun nests, all in one afternoon; Richmond Pearson Hobson who sank the Merrimac to block Santiago harbor in 1898; Major General Adolphus Washington Greely, whose ill-fated Arctic expedition in 1881 waged against no enemy but Nature, ended in the death of all but six of his 24 men (TIME. April 1, 1935).

In a transport of enthusiasm at a civilian exploit, Congress in 1927 broke its own rules limiting the award to military men in actual conflict with an enemy and voted the Medal of Honor to Charles Augustus Lindbergh for his flight to Paris.

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