Talk:United States occupation of Veracruz

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I am interested in the reference that Carranza was more favorable to the US than Huerta.

[edit] Medal of Honor

If anyone runs across a reference actually discussing the high number of medals of honor awarded by the us, I would be interested. I;m sure the recipients were heroic, but 56 seems excessive by modern standards. Student7 (talk) 02:21, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Veracruz Medals of Honor

The story that the excess Medals were awarded by lot is sourced to RAdm Daniel Gallery's memoir Eight Bells.

Gallery did not enter the Navy till several years later, so he had no direct knowledge, but if the story was true it would have been common gossip. --Rich Rostrom (Talk) 02:18, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

The "counter" to the Gallery comment is refuted by what the Army records say. What do army records have to do with the Navy's awarding 56 medals to it's sailors? Student7 (talk) 21:43, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
Probably meant "Navy." But in this context, remark is WP:OR. Reader should not have to scan records. Nor is reader (nor are we!) capable of determining whether citations are true or false. Of course, the citations would read correctly! The people filling these things out weren't total fools! Student7 (talk) 21:56, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
An editor put raw data into this article. For starters, this is not a place for grandstanding military achievements. This would not be perceived as NPOV by Mexicans, for example. The nominations read wonderfully, but so what? It still fails to answer the question why so many medals were awarded for so small a battle. This wasn't Iwo Jima here! And the total number is staggering - 56 I think. Half what was awarded for all of WWII with millions of soldiers and thousands of battles. It makes no sense. The nominators weren't stupid. They knew we would be reading these things. That doesn't mean they happened in quite the dramatic manner presented or, with cooler heads, might have been for an important, but lesser medal. Gallery has no axe to grind over this. It is reported as hearsay from him. If there is credible refutation, that can be published as well. It never was. The main reason is that the accusation is true. Student7 (talk) 01:07, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
I do not claim to know whether or not Gallery's unsupported claim is true or not. Either positively affirming or denying this accusation without proof is a clear indication of bias. I used a legimate source that lists the awards of the Medal of Honor for this conflict. An accusation from the memoir of a person (Rear Adm Gallery) who wasnt even in military service at the time of the Occupation of Veracruz was posted in this article. Why should only hearsay be accepted, but factual information be witheld? The facts were included for balance, because there is no proof of Gallery's claim. A good standard for determining historical truth would be verifiable proof, not heresay. To say that Gallery's claim must be true because no one bothered to acknowledge his claim is ludicris. The problem that Wikipedia must address is that any accusation can be published here, no matter how outlandish they are. If such accusations are ignored by the media then they can be presented as an absolute truth no matter how silly the claim is... Any factual evidence presented to balance such claims can be deleted using justifications similar to Student7's.

Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Wait! Gallery's remark was inserted as his remark. Otherwise, it would read, "It was common knowledge that..." or (worse) "the medals were distributed by lot..." No one postulated Gallery's remark as the truth. Because he is a reliable source and believed to be unbiased, it is in there. But it can't be said to be "true" based on his one comment. I suspect he is correct based on the inordinate volume of medals. Probably the awardees should have gotten some medal. There is no doubt in anybody's mind, without looking, that the awards are going to look pretty. They have to in order to get by all the reviews they had then, the same as today. They knew the public would read these then and now. Beauty of the commendations is not an issue here, believe me! We all agree that they look just wonderful. The problem is: did the few thousand people who engaged in a few battles, deserve 56 medals of honor? There is nobody, except you maybe, who thinks that is a reasonable number for this tiny episode in American history. That alone justifies keeping the Gallery criticism. But we need more to make it a fact. Then we just skip the Gallery remark and print it as a fact with a footnote. But we can't do that yet until something else turns up out of somebody's box of letters in an unknown attic someplace. It will happen someday....
BTW, it is Gallery's remark that is the counterbalance to the huge quantity of awards. Student7 (talk) 23:29, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I never deleted Gallery's remark or advocated its removal. Yet to call Gallery an unbiased source is not logical either. He was a prominent member of the "Revolt of the Admirals" which hurt his career and he clearly had an axe to grind. Your arguments are emotional and rely on the hope that "something else turns up out of somebody's box of letters in an unknown attic someplace. It will happen someday." The fact remains that the list of medals clearly cites acts of bravery that justify the awards, but you delete any mention of this fact. Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 29 April 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.154.209.96 (talk)

The remark about Gallery being involved in the "revolt of Admirals" was interesting but not relevant to this discussion. The medals were awarded to a prior generation of sailors. That generation had mostly retired by the end of WW One and nearly all (with one notable exception) were gone by WW II. So it's not obvious from the "revolt..." that Gallery had any axe to grind except that he was obviously outspoken. Dared to say what everyone else was thinking!
I will say for the second time (at least) that these men may have deserved a medal. And there are lots of medals to be proud of. But there is nothing extraordinary in these citations that place them in the realm of Medal of Honor. There were 22 Americans killed. I guess awarding 56 medals with only 22 dead does not seem excessive to you. There are 4000+ dead in Iraq. Would awarding 10,000 medals of honor seem normal to you in that instance? Student7 (talk) 22:03, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

You say that my remark about Rear Admiral Gallery is not relevant to this discussion. Yet you stated that “Gallery has no axe to grind over this” and that he is “believed to be unbiased”.

On what factual information did you base these conclusions? Who believes him to be unbiased?

Gallery’s involvement in the “Admirals Revolt” lead to his confrontation with the Secretary of the Navy and the Naval establishment. He was nearly court-martialed and it cost him a promotion.

His book was published in 1965, five years after he retired and many years after the “revolt”. The man published a number of books that mocked and/or severely criticized the Navy establishment, not just his memoir. He was well known for humorous jabs at the Navy. So he couldn't possibly be an “unbiased” source.

Gallery was a 12 or 13 year-old schoolboy during the Occupation of Veracruz and is only passing on hearsay. I do not oppose including his unverified accusation, but the public record clearly relates concrete examples of heroism that shouldn’t be ignored because you feel that, “awarding 56 medals with only 22 dead” is proof of wrong doing.

You compared this data to casualties during the Iraq War, but in the Boxer Rebellion there were 59 medals with only 37 dead. Is this proof that medals were handed out by lot during that conflict as well?

http://www.militaryfactory.com/american_war_deaths.asp

http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/chinare.html

It is only proof that a lot of medals were handed out during these conflicts. It does not necessarily mean that foul play was involved. Until concrete proof is provided, all available data should be included in this article, not just a snide remark from a humorous memoir. Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 00:49, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Let's do a reset here. Do you see my question in the preceding section? I was doing some documentation on certain recipients of the medal. I was struck by the inordinate amount that were awarded with no idea why. The battle did not seem to me to merit them. Someone else came up with the Gallery quote. Gallery graduated from the Naval Academy in 1920. Most people he served with would have retired around the time of WW II. The Veracruz sailors would have retired from the Navy before that. So my question came substantially before the Gallery quote which I did not insert (or don't remember inserting) into the article.
The job of admiral is political. Winning old battles doesn't necessarily count unless there is a war on (there wasn't). Gallery proved to the world, if not to himself, that he didn't have what it takes to advance as an admiral. That is what comes out of the Admirals revolt. What good would it do him to make someone look bad in the 1914 Navy department, with an offhand remark buried in a book somewhere in 1965, about a 50 year old incident. The people making the Veracruz decisions were long dead. What on earth is Gallery doing with a two line "vendetta" in a book about an ancient Navy decision? Yes. If he made any cracks about the then current Navy administration, those would definitely be suspect.
The quantity of Veracruz medals must have attracted a lot of attention from anyone taking a close look. However, a person would have needed to be in the Navy not too long after the invasion. Gallery was on the trailing edge of that group and in a position to hear things.
It would be like a general writing an article today about making the Secretary of Defence in 1958 "look bad." I was alive then and can't even remember the SecDef! Who cares? I know - you do. And why do you care so passionately BTW about this 90 year old incident? Hmmm? Are you sure that you are NPOV? I have no axe to grind. What's yours? Student7 (talk) 11:24, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

OK, so what exactly would be my axe to grind in a 90+ year-old episode like this?

I could ask… why do you care so much about this article that you have mothered it since November 2007? Based on this fact I could have made a more convincing argument about you, yet I have refrained from making things personal. That’s not my style.

So lets go to your question. You asked, “What good would it do him (RAdm Gallery) to make someone look bad in the 1914 Navy department, with an offhand remark buried in a book somewhere in 1965, about a 50 year old incident?”

Rear Admiral Gallery made a decent amount of money by bashing the Navy establishment in a slew of books. One look at the body of work that he left behind reveals a man obsessed with attacking his old superiors.

The memoir, Eight Bells, may have been a humorous rant; but it certainly wasn’t a scholarly piece of work. While the book is not in print and my local library doesn’t have it in stock, I am confident that the book is very funny by the liner notes on the cover:

“Very Funny” Publisher’s Weekly

“Admiral Dan has done it again… Another breezy, salty and hilarious sea story.” New Orleans Times Picayune

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/B0007FXHQM/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0?ie=UTF8&index=0#gallery

On the back…

“As exciting as fiction... his book is witty, improbable and outrageous.” St. Louis Globe Democrat

Navy News calls it, “high-spirited rollicking, entertainment”.

Does it make sense to mistrust government documents more than a cartoon biography?

Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 11:04, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

I just assumed that you had an ancestor who had been awarded this medal at this battle. What motivation could I have? I want to make these particular Medal of Honor awardees "look bad?" I barely heard of Veracruz when I arrived at the article, doing research on the Medal. Even confused it recently with the Mexican War battle!
You have made one really good point here. One of us really needs to get a copy of "Eight Bells", scan it and find the reference. If anything, we should at least give an exact page. If it is poorly researched or "top of the head" stuff by Gallery, maybe it shouldn't be used.
If I were Gallery taking on the Naval establishment, I would try to present the Navy as being well-run like clockwork right up until the (then) present "group of clowns" (pretending to be Gallery here) took over. Then it all went downhill. If however, the Navy was poorly run all along, then how would this make his detrators look bad? They took over a bad organization and what could they do? It was already bad.
BTW, this is a bit like Bill Clinton vs the military when they wound the military down after the end of the Cold War. The military was not pleased. Pretty much the same after WW II. The military HAD to be wound down. It was a monster then consuming most of the budget. The timeframe shifts here since he was in during the 50s as well, but the WWII phasedown again under Democratic guidance, may have been what set Gallery and others off. I don't know.
Having disposed of Gallery, I (not you apparently) are still stuck with my pre-Gallery question of why so many Medals at Veracruz.
What I liked about Gallery, obviously, is that he answered my question, scholarly or otherwise. With no Gallery, the question still remains but with no obvious answer. And no, this was no Boxer Rebellion. Not nearly that exciting nor dramatic nor with those overwhelming odds. Student7 (talk) 12:47, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Until at least one concrete example of a medal of honor that was falsely given out is cited, we should be skeptical of this accusation. That would include the name of the recipient and the circumstances under which this act of fraud was committed.

Rumors cited in memoir that reads like a comedy are suspect. Especially when it is a proven fact that Rear Admiral Gallery was noted for his attacks against top military brass. Your projection of the best strategy for Gallery to undermine his former superiors is pure speculation. Just like you assumed that I had an ancestor who had been awarded this medal at this battle. It is a fact that Gallery was bitterly angry with the naval establishment and wrote many books attacking them. Lets stick with facts and we should also keep our arguments consistent.

Despite the fact that the Boxer Rebellion and the Occupation of Veracruz both involved similar American troop levels and proportional casualties, you are not adhering to your original argument because the number of medals issued in the Boxer Rebellion is still double that of World War II (with millions of soldiers and thousands of battles). You also stated that there are 4000+ dead in Iraq and you feel that awarding 10,000 Medals of Honor would be abnormal (in line with the ratio of medals given out after the Boxer Rebellion).

If you had just taken a look at the historical records you would have been able to answer your own question. The criteria for giving out these medals were much more relaxed in the early part of the 20th Century. This record of a Medal of Honor receiptant from the Boxer Rebellion is enlightening…

http://www.history.army.mil/html/moh/chinare.html

BOYDSTON, ERWIN JAY

“…Under a heavy fire from the enemy during this period, Boydston assisted in the erection of barricades.”

While this is indeed a brave act, such actions would hardly result in a Medal of Honor during WWII or the Iraq War. Otherwise, we would have awarded 10,000 Medals of Honor during the Iraq War, as you stated.

See the story of Pfc. Ross McGinnis who jumped on a grenade and saved four of his comrades in Iraq. He was a turret gunner in a Humvee and could have easily jumped out of the vehicle to save his own life, but instead he made the ultimate sacrifice. Yet he didn’t win the Medal of Honor for that action. McGinnis was awarded the Silver Star Medal. If someone performed a similar action during the Boxer Rebellion the serviceman would have undoubtedly won the Medal of Honor.

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/banner/archives/2006_12.html

Furthermore, the brass early in the 20th Century awarded the Medal of Honor to whole groups of servicemen for the same action. If you go back to the list of Medals of Honor handed out during the Boxer Rebellion, you will see a number of other servicemen that were awarded the Medal of Honor for the same action as Boydston. Some of those servicemen include…

FISHER, HARRY HORTON, WILLIAM CHARLIE MOORE, ALBERT UPHAM, OSCAR J.

While the standards of our nation’s highest honor may have been too low, your question could have been answered by checking the historic records.

Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 00:54, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

(We need a new thread. Hard to get to the bottom of this one anymore).
What you say may be true. My suspicion is that the Navy, having won the Spanish American War almost single-handedly, had to watch as a great PR agent, TR Roosevelt, grabbed a good deal of attention and credit. Probably (haven't looked) medals awarded, if any, tended to favor the army since they were risking their lives on a personal basis. The navy firing from afar. So when this little excursion arose I suppose they could take advantage of it. The military often thinks, between wars, that there will never be another war, so why not rain medals down?
Still, there is the spectacle of Frank Friday Fletcher managing to get a medal, though confined to the ship as task force commander, and making sure his nephew, Frank Jack Fletcher, got one too. The latter might have actually come under fire I suppose. This ensured that the latter made Captain (much later) and probably didn't hurt him on his way to Admiral either.
Fifty-six Medals of Honor? You think they were going to start handing them out slightly above purple hearts? Let's think about this. What we need is the medal awards for the whole business. There were a few thousand involved here. All got participation medals which is fine. There are levels of bravery for other medals, which, alas, I can not now name but may be forced to find out to argue with you!  :) So there should be a "pyramid" of medals, from "merely normal" acts of courage (and when someone is shooting at ME, I would imagine that anything I did productive should be recognized as courageous!) all the way up to "exceeds all believable forms or courage." You see what I am saying? How would the lesser medals be distributed and how many of them? If we had 300 "Navy crosses" or whatever, this would seem to justify what you are saying about "relaxed standards." So there was some spirit of generosity all the way up throught the series of medals and not just automatically awarding a Medal of Honor for everything and just skipping the medals in between. Of course, if we did find out, it would only justify our position and we couldn't include it anyway without finding a reference.
Incidentally, I am reading my naval history book from the 50s. It mentions Veracruz offhand as the first battle in which aircraft were used (for reconaissance). Otherwise nothing at all. So that is why I had never heard of the battle before I read it here in Wikipedia. History written at the same time as Gallery. Remember that although Gallery was fired and probably justly so, it doesn't mean that he was wrong, merely disobedient. "Revolts" in the US are usually started and abetted by high-ranking officers with nothing to lose. It doesn't mean that he didn't have a lot of support within the military. Another good reason to make sure he retired without promotion, as a warning to future admirals. I don't have a problem with either side of that.
Pretty much like any government official or internal critic of government that we have heard since. Arguments on both sides. The fact that there was more than one admiral leads one to the suspicion that they had a point. How important it was is another matter. But I don't think Gallery can be dismissed out of hand merely because he criticized government policy and civilian direction. Student7 (talk) 11:45, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I have never dismissed Gallery out of hand due to his bias or even for the fact that his memoir was more of a comedy than serious piece of scholarship. My argument is that in light of these facts we should view his comment with a grain of salt and balance this accusation with some factual information.

On the other hand, I have adequately answered your original question, "why 56 (medals awarded in this conflict) seems excessive by modern standards".

However, I think that you have hit on another good point which I overlooked. You wondered how many Navy Crosses or other lesser medals were awarded during this conflict. At the time there was no medal between the Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor (except in the Coast Guard). The Navy Cross and the Army Distinguished Service Cross werent issued until WWI. So there was no other medal higher than the Purple Heart that was available to recognize heroism under fire.

Therefore it is not so surprising that so many more Medals of Honor were issued during the Occupation of Veracruz and the Boxer Rebellion than were issued than during WWII and the Iraq War.

Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 23:47, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow! Do you have a reference on that medal history? Student7 (talk) 01:27, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
Never mind the reference unless it is easy to obtain. I just looked up what little Wikipedia has. What you say looks correct. I am amazed. This casts things in a whole new light. Student7 (talk) 02:43, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

There really was a need for more medals to recognize heroism under fire and it took the World Wars to finally instigate that change. The Medal of Honor today is now much more valuable than it was in 1914.

Ofhistoricalnote (talk) 10:08, 7 May 2008 (UTC)