List of Bronze Star Recipients from WW II?

I have been looking for a list of Bronze Star Recipients from WW II on the internet, but have not found one. I tried searching the forums here, but was unsuccessful. Does anyone know of such a list? Or maybe it exists in some forgotten file cabinet in Washington?

 

Thanks. The only site I found was this one: http://en.ww2awards.com/award/245 Which has only 2,539 recipients so it is obviously missing a lot of names. I think the site relies on family members submitting award recipients.

I browsed the site and found Dick Winters page! http://en.ww2awards.com/person/34757

 

I fully agree with what was said above. There were probably hundreds of thousands of CIBs issued, and technically all recipients would also be entitled to a Bronze Star. This did not take place until 1947, and many veterans were unaware that they were entitled to the Bronze Star as part of their CIB. Furthermore, to my knowledge, most times a Bronze Star with V device was not issued with a specific citation (instead being issued for a specific battle, as opposed to say the Navy Cross that was awarded for specific actions detailed in the citation). These two factors greatly complicate matters.

Slightly off-topic, but 'Home of the Heroes' is an excellent site for WW2 medal citations: http://www.homeofheroes.com/verify/index.html

 

If you are trying to track down documentation of a Bronze Star Medal for a specific soldier, you'll be more likely to have success by researching the unit or units in which they served, that's assuming you have already tried to get their personnel records. On the other hand, if you are asking for general curiosity, I believe Slipdigit, Lou and GP have covered it well. By the way, check out the Home of Heroes website in GP's post. Very well done.

As far as "off-topic" posts are concerned, yours doesn't even register on the meter.

 

Thanks for the 'Home of the Heroes' web site reference.

Seems like there are several sites that are trying to aggregate award information, but none are complete. If only the government would pass the "Military Valor Roll of Honor Act".

 

I wouldn't hold my breath. Even if they did, the wheels of bureaucracy turn painfully slow. I think websites like HoH have the right idea. Rely on lots of individuals who are personally motivated do the research and provide the documentation. Division of labor is the best way to get a large task accomplished. I doubt that there can ever be a complete database of all medals and awards from WWII, regardless of who is aggregating it. However, I'd be happy just to see the best possible database put together.

 

Records aren't in Washington but housed in St Louis, Missouri. This is In Reply to #1 Post Cons.. . For our ancestor, we were told a fire destroyed the records, but we are still searching.

 

Rizzonelli,

Military Personnel Records as well as Unit Morning Reports are housed at the St Louis PRC, records of awards were published by units as General Orders, which are held at Archives II, Suitland, Maryland in RG 407 (among other record groups). The problem is the GO were published by units, usually by Army and then various sub-units published extracts for personnel under its command; my Dad's two Bronze Star awards were published as extracts by the 90th ID because his 537th AAA Bn was attached to it when the awards were confirmed. However, I was only ever able to locate his first award GO, the other was end-of-war and wasn't confirmed until 2005, the year before his death, because we made an inquiry with PERSCOM.

Cheers!

 

Many unit histories have a roster of personnel, rank and awards issued. If you are looking for a particular individual and know what unit he was attached, this might be an avenue.

 

Rich makes a very good point about sub-units, or units (i.e. AAA, Field Artillery, Tank Destroyers, etc.) that weren't organic to, but were attached to larger units (i.e. Divisions). This can make it a bit more complicated for those researching family members of those sub-units, especially if the unit was attached to multiple Divisions.