The Medal of Honor: For Some an Honor too Far

The standards to award the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award for valor in combat, are exacting — as they should be.

The recommendation, review and approval processes are equally rigorous and time consuming. Each step is subject to intense scrutiny, often resulting in delays of a few years between the date of action and the award date.

The Congressional Medal of Honor Society:

All recommendations require thorough reports on the act itself, the battlefield and its setting. Every aspect of the action that led to the nomination is documented, from eyewitness statements to the actions itself, to weather reports…every piece must be examined and verified…

This is followed by equally lengthy and complex evaluation and approval processes.

Although current criteria require that recommendations for the Medal must be submitted within 3 years of the valorous act and the Medal must be presented within 5 years, it often takes a significantly longer period of time.

Sometimes it is not the process — the bureaucracy, “red tape” — that causes inordinate delays, even denial of the Honor, but rather something more insidious: prejudice, religious or racial bias, ethnic discrimination.

Even as Jewish men and women – more than 600,000 – have faithfully and patriotically served in every branch of our armed forces since the American Revolution, they have had to struggle against prejudice, constitutional bias and antisemitism and many have been denied high military honors.*

It took nearly a century for Jewish World War I hero Sergeant William Shemin, son of Russian immigrants, to posthumously be awarded the Medal of Honor.

Reflecting on the historic injustice, President Obama said, “Sergeant Shemin served at a time when the contributions and heroism of Jewish Americans in uniform were too often overlooked…It is my privilege on behalf of the American people to make this right.”

It was more than half a century after their acts of conspicuous valor before two other soldiers of the Jewish faith, Korean War heroes Private First Class Leonard Kravitz and Corporal Tibor Rubin, were awarded the Medal of Honor.

In the case of Rubin, a 1993 study commissioned by the Army determined that Rubin had been denied the Medal of Honor because of religion.

Army Sgt. Joe Hayashi, a California-born son of Japanese parents who emigrated to the U.S from Japan at the beginning of the century was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery during a World War II battle near Tendola, Italy in April 1945.

“It wasn’t until about a half-century later that a Congressional inquiry revealed that many Nisei service members like Hayashi had been passed up for the nation’s highest honor for valor due to racial bias and ethnic discrimination,” writes Katie Lange at DoD News.

She continues: “That wrong was finally remedied on June 21, 2000 — 55 years after Hayashi’s death — when his medal was upgraded to the Medal of Honor and he was promoted to Sergeant.”

During the June 21 ceremony, Hayashi was one of 22 Asian American soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their World War II heroism.

Although 1.2 million Black Americans served in the military during World War II, none was among the original recipients of the Medal of Honor awarded in the conflict. The Army commissioned a study in the early 1990s to analyze whether Black troops had been unjustly overlooked during an era of widespread racism and segregation in the military. Ultimately, seven Black World War II troops were awarded the Medal of Honor in 1997.

The quote above was part of an Associated Press piece on 21-year-old African American combat medic Waverly B. Woodson Jr. assigned to the only African American combat unit to land in Normandy on D-Day.

“His landing craft took heavy fire, and he was wounded before even getting to the beach,” write Rebecca Santana and Kevin Wolf, “but for the next 30 hours he treated 200 wounded men while under intense small arms and artillery fire before collapsing from his injuries and blood loss…”

Woodson was awarded the Bronze Star for his bravery, but the “Shaw Commission” found evidence that Woodson “may have been recommended” for the Medal of Honor along with three other Black World War II heroes.

Eventually, 52 years after the end of World War II, three of those four soldiers where the commission had found evidence that they “may have been recommended” contemporaneously for the Medal of Honor, were awarded the nation’s highest military honor along with four other African American heroes.

Woodson, however, was not one of them. But a little over one month ago, on June 3, 2024, almost 80 years after Woodson’s acts of heroism, he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest medal for combat valor.

Sen. Chris van Hollen who, along with other legislators and support groups, has been on a quest to award the Medal of Honor to Woodson, acknowledged that Woodson “has never received the full recognition that his actions clearly merited – largely due to the color of his skin.” Van Hollen continues to make the case for Woodson to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

Sadly, such bias has also been documented with prospective Hispanic American,** Native American, and Pacific Islander Medal of Honor recipients.

Thanks to studies, investigations, pressure from numerous organizations and due to military and Congressional actions in recent decades, the bias that these veterans have suffered is slowly being corrected.

Fortunately, such instances of bias, albeit tragic, are a small percentage of the 3538 Medals of Honor that have been awarded to-date.

As previously mentioned, other factors such as bureaucracy, inefficiency, “lost paperwork,” the “fog of war,” etc. have caused acts of valor to go unacknowledged for decades.

But how about for more than a century-and-a-half?

On July 3 of this year, President Biden posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to two Army soldiers for their heroic actions during the Civil War.

Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson, two of the famous Andrews’ Raiders and participants in the daring but ill-fated Civil War “Great Locomotive Chase,” finally received the honor posthumously, 162 years after their service was “cut short by a hangman’s noose in Atlanta”.

The two soldiers were “inadvertently” left out of a group of a score of Raiders who participated in the raid, nineteen of whom had been awarded the Medal of Honor in previous years.

In fact, in 1863, six of these men became the very first Medal of Honor recipients, just a year after President Abraham Lincoln authorized it.

Please read more about these men and their epic actions that led to the award of the nation’s highest award for valor HERE.

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* Dorian de Wind. “Remembering and Honoring Eighteen Jewish Medal of Honor Recipients.” The Moderate Voice, March 2024

** Dorian de Wind. “Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta: An Honor Too Far?” The Huffington Post, Nov. 2015

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