On the Medal of Honor...

Shelby Foote had something to say on this point...

Originally, 864 Medals of Honor were awarded to the 27th Maine Infantry Regiment for re-enlisting prior to the Battle at Gettysburg, when only 311 men actually remained to fight in the battle. These Medals were all rescinded in 1911, but no effort was made to enforce the statute that said it was illegal to wear or display the Medal if it wasn't "officially" awarded (a statute that is still in effect). Obviously, this was a gross misappropriation of the Medals, and it was corrected (48 years after the fact...).

The Civil War saw more than 1,500 Medals of Honor awarded, while WWII saw just under 500... quite a disparity, I think... but Foote feels otherwise. The manner in which we fought in the 1860s was so radically different from how we fought in the 1940s (and today) that we sometimes forget just how hard it was to survive combat in the Civil War. I think our "Bund" trip to Gettysburg really brought that home to all of us. When you can stand on the edge of the Wheat Field, and look across that one mile of slope to the crest of Cemetery Ridge behind the Emmitsburg Road, and know that the men who stood there on July 3, 1863 knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were going to die before they reached the far side yet still made the march across, you begin to see just how different a time it was. You walked into that rain of 1 oz lead balls that would take off an arm or shatter a leg bone, while 9 lb explosive shells dug one foot craters into the dirt all around you and spread shard-sized bits of wrought iron 30 feet in every direction... but you kept walking. Each and every man.

I'm not sure that the real travesty lays not with the number of Medals awarded at Gettysburg or throughout the Civil War, but instead in the lack of Medals awarded in World War I... the last, great "war of attrition" to be fought by America. The means to fight a war hadn't changed radically since the Civil War... but the weaponry had improved by orders of magnitude, meaning the courage and dedication that was required to cross into the fields of Flanders and Central France is not reflected in the 124 Medals awarded for American service in France in 1918.