The First World War: the roll records no decoration

1917 – 1918

The roll read whole:Joseph County section of the Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll of 1921, entire, for every Mishawaka man who stands on it with a full record — Busschaert, Fullerton, Gehring, Oppelt, Richter, Shelton, Snyder, and Van Holsbeke, the eight of the city's twelve Gold Star dead whose entries the roll carries at full size. The roll records no decoration, citation, or gallantry award for any of the eight. The four closing-list men have no records in the roll at all. The dead themselves, and the count of twelve, stand in the Wars section; what belongs here is the decoration finding, and it is negative.

The silence is the roll's, not the men's: The same county section of the same roll shows that the roll does record honors where honors existed. For South Bend's men — boundary names, printed here only to prove the instrument works — the roll records one man "cited by Commander of the First Division for gallantry in action" and another "awarded British Military Medal." The roll's compilers wrote decorations down when the record gave them decorations to write. For Mishawaka's eight, they wrote none, and no other register reached supplies one: the searches for a Mishawaka Distinguished Service Cross of the First World War — the cross-level award a surviving or fallen Mishawaka soldier would stand in — returned none. Edward Richter's service makes the test concrete: a Mishawaka private of Company H, 339th Infantry, killed at Kasco in North Russia on 1 October 1918, in the one American campaign of that war where his regiment's dead are individually remembered. The Polar Bear record reached awards its Distinguished Service Cross in that fighting to a Cincinnati private, Victor Stier — not to Richter, and not to any Mishawaka man. The finding stands at the strength of the records named: in the published decoration record, the First World War gave Mishawaka no decorated name.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Commission, Indiana World War Records: Gold Star Honor Roll (1921), St. Joseph County section, read entire (Genealogy Trails transcription): the eight full Mishawaka records, and the South Bend entries recording a divisional citation and a British Military Medal.
2. The Polar Bear Expedition record (the 339th Infantry in North Russia), as reached, on the Distinguished Service Cross awarded to Pvt. Victor Stier of Cincinnati.