I have to admit, I think that it should remain so but as Charlie-boy is the King and it was his gig, he ain’t going to listen to people like me.
However, I sincerely hope that the cadets of all flavours who were taking an active part on the day, receive the medal in a timely fashion. If I ever hear a jealous CFAV who DIDN’T get a KCM whinge about a cadet wearing one, I swear that I’ll knock his tootypegs so far down his throat that he’ll have to use his chocolate starfish to eat his dinner.
Ribbons on shirts, however, look just fine on every other uniform going (although possibly would necessitate a higher quality / cotton mix / thicker shirt in our case).
The thing is the Americans differentiate between ribbons and medals, to a large extent their “ribbon rack” is like a wearable CV, it tells the observer who they are, where they have been a LMF what they have done.
Interesting tidbit on Purple Hearts, they are still issuing ones made in preparation for the invasion of Japan that’s how high they expected casualties to be before they dropped the big one.
That’s crazy! Could also think with a ‘glass half-full’ mindset and think there haven’t been many causalities in the following conflicts (obviously not true just thinking of Vietnam alone).
So many purple.hearts were minted for the campaign to invade Japan that field commanders in the vietnam war, were issued medals to hand out immediatly rather than wait!
Even with Korea, Vietnam, Gulf 1 and 2 and Afghan campaigns… enough putple hearts remain to keep going a long time yet!
It’s the thing that makes all of the “the bomb was wrong” lot so ridiculous.
The US were expecting between 2 and 4 Million casualties with upto 800,000 of those being KIA. Japanese casualties were expected to be between 5 and 10 Million dead.
IIRC ACF regs allow CFAVs and Cadets to wear medals in MTP on remembrance parade. And I think the AAFC wear medals on their light blue shirts. Personally, if I had a cadet with a medal (Coronation/BEM etc) then I’d break the dress regs and tell them to wear it on their shirt on events where staff wear theirs.