If you say their name, they're remembered.
The Navy Cross is the second-highest decoration for valor in the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. About 6,370 people have received it since 1919. This page tracks one job: finding each of them on the VA's Veterans Legacy Memorial, so that their names can be read aloud on the day they died.
17.5% of 6,370
Where the count stands
Progress over time
Share of recipients found, recorded each time the count is rebuilt. The first count is the baseline from the November 2026 matching work.
Count log
| Date | Found | Share | Review | Roll call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Nov 2026 | 1,112 | 17.5% | 43 | 1,092 |
| 5 Nov 2026 | 1,112 | 17.5% | 43 | 1,092 |
Roll call = names cleared to be read (found, death date known, no hold).
By war
Each bar is one era's recipients on the official lists. The dark part is found and confirmed; the lighter part is under review. Where a person holds awards from two wars, he is counted in the earlier one.
World War I is the long tail: 1,699 recipients and only 65 found so far. Until August 1942 the Navy Cross could also be awarded for distinguished non-combat service, which is why the WWI list is so long, and most of those men died before the VA's marker records begin. World War II is where the work is: 827 of 3,580 found.
By service
DoD publishes Navy Cross lists for the Navy and Marine Corps only. The Coast Guard recipients come from the Coast Guard's own Book of Valor and the Home of Heroes WWI list: 10 of 11 are found, including the nine men of USS Seneca lost on 16 September 1918.
The year, day by day
Every recipient who is found, confirmed and has a known date of death is placed on the day he died. That is the roll call: 1,092 names across 341 of 366 days, about 3.0 a day. 25 days have no name yet.
5 June carries 56 names, far more than any other day. Many of the men lost at the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942 were carried as missing and declared dead a year and a day later, so the VA record shows 5 June 1943. The other heavy days are real battles: the naval battle of Guadalcanal (12–13 November 1942), Leyte Gulf (24–26 October 1944) and the Coral Sea (8 May 1942). 394 of the 1,092 names rest in overseas cemeteries or on the Walls of the Missing, where the date of death may be a presumed date.
Today's roll call
If you say their name, they're remembered.
How it's counted
- Start from the official lists. The Department of Defense publishes its Navy Cross recipients at valor.defense.gov, one PDF per service and conflict. All 20 lists were read into one file of 6,748 award lines. The Coast Guard, which DoD does not list, was added from the USCG Book of Valor and Home of Heroes.
- Pull every memorial page that shows the award. The Veterans Legacy Memorial lets you filter by decoration. Searching letter by letter under its three Navy Cross filters produced 1,442 pages.
- Match each page to a list entry. Exact surname; first name exact, a known nickname, or an initial; middle initial; then service, era and age as checks. 1,132 pages matched, 42 are possible, and 268 match nothing on any list. Those 268 are never read until they are verified; most are data-entry errors on the memorial, or Army and Air Force men tagged with the wrong decoration.
- Hold what can't be read yet. A name is held when two records share one memorial page, when the branch disagrees with the list, when the date is a 1 January placeholder, when there is no date of death, and for twelve months after any death. 27 such holds today. Where one man has two pages, an overseas memorial and a stateside grave, the stateside date is used.
- Rebuild and publish. Each rebuild records a dated snapshot, which is what the progress chart and the count log show. The numbers on this page come straight from the files; nothing is typed in by hand.
Why it will never reach 100%
The Veterans Legacy Memorial covers veterans buried in VA national cemeteries, in VA-funded state, tribal and territory cemeteries, in the cemeteries run by the Army, Navy and Air Force (including Arlington), in the overseas cemeteries of the American Battle Monuments Commission, and in private cemeteries where the VA supplied a headstone, marker or medallion since 1996. A recipient buried privately before then with no VA marker, cremated and scattered, or lost at sea with no memorial entry has no page to find. The share that can be found is therefore well under 100%, and the gap is largest for the First World War.
DoD also says plainly that its lists are not complete and should not be used to confirm whether a given person received the award. This page follows the same rule: it is a public count and a remembrance, not a verification service. A count is only as good as the day's data, and corrections are welcome.
Three things that would help
- A date of death for a recipient on the list with no memorial page. These are the 5,215 not yet found.
- A memorial page the search missed, especially under surnames with a space in them (Mc Donald, Le Blanc, Van Horn).
- A correction: a wrong match, a wrong date, a man who should not be on the list.
mike.korman@noveteranalone.comIf one of these men is your family, we would be honored to hear his story.