There is no official world ranking, because every country has its own awards and "most decorated" depends on what you count. Audie Murphy is usually called the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War; Daniel Daly and Smedley Butler each won two Medals of Honor; and only three men, Arthur Martin-Leake, Noel Chavasse and Charles Upham, have won the Victoria Cross twice.
"The most decorated soldier" is one of the most searched phrases in military history, and one of the slipperiest. It sounds like a fact; in reality it is a judgement, and the answer changes with the country, the war and the method of counting.
This guide starts with that counting problem, then tells the stories of nine men whose records are verified from official citations and museum archives. One of them, a German pilot, was a committed Nazi, and we say so plainly: a record is not a recommendation.
The counting problem
Nations do not keep a common scoreboard. The American Medal of Honor and the British Victoria Cross sit at the top of separate systems, each with its own ladder of lesser awards. Some lists count every ribbon a man wore, including campaign and service medals; others count only awards for gallantry; others look for the highest award won more than once. Foreign decorations can double a total without a single extra act of courage. Poland's Cross of Valour could be awarded up to four times to the same person, Soviet heroes could hold the Hero title several times, and Germany's Knight's Cross came in ascending grades.
Medals also depend on witnesses, on officers who write recommendations, and on politics. In 1997 and 2000, after reviews ordered in the 1990s into whether prejudice had kept them from the highest award, the United States gave the Medal of Honor to seven Black and 22 Asian American veterans of the Second World War. So read every "most decorated" claim as: most decorated by this measure, in this army.
1. Audie Murphy (United States, Second World War)
Audie Murphy was a sharecropper's son from Texas, turned away by the services as too young and too slight before the Army accepted him in 1942. He fought from Sicily to Germany. On 26 January 1945, near Holtzwihr in eastern France, six German tanks and waves of infantry hit his company. He sent his men back, climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and fired its machine gun alone for about an hour; his Medal of Honor citation says he killed or wounded about 50 of the enemy1. With a long list of other American and foreign awards for valour, he is usually described as the most decorated American soldier2 of the Second World War.
2. Alvin York (United States, First World War)
Alvin York, a devout Tennessee farmer, first tried to avoid service as a conscientious objector. On 8 October 1918, near Châtel-Chéhéry in the Argonne, his platoon was cut down by machine-gun fire and Corporal York took command of the survivors. His Medal of Honor citation records that the machine-gun nest was taken together with four officers and 128 men. France added the Croix de Guerre, and York came home the most famous American soldier of the war.
3. Daniel Daly (United States, 1900 to 1918)
Daniel Daly is one of the very few Americans to win the Medal of Honor twice for separate actions. The first came as a private at Peking on 14 August 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion, when he held a bastion of the Tartar Wall alone3 under sniper fire until reinforcements arrived. The second came in Haiti on 24 October 1915, when his small detachment was ambushed at night by about 400 Caco fighters3, held out until daybreak and then scattered them. At Belleau Wood in June 1918, aged 44, he put out a fire in an ammunition dump and took a machine-gun post alone, earning the Navy Cross and the Army's Distinguished Service Cross. A famous battle cry about living forever is attributed to him there, but the words may owe more to a war correspondent than to Daly.
4. Smedley Butler (United States, 1914 to 1915)
Smedley Butler, a Pennsylvania Quaker's son, is the other famous Marine with two Medals of Honor for separate actions. The first was for Veracruz, Mexico, in April 1914; the second for the assault on 17 November 1915 at Fort Rivière in Haiti4, an old French bastion that his Marines stormed through a single breach in the wall. The official account of that fight names Gunnery Sergeant Daly as the most conspicuous figure among the enlisted personnel4. Butler himself thought the first award undeserved and tried to return it5. In 1935 he published War Is a Racket, a blistering attack on profiteering from war.
5. Arthur Martin-Leake (United Kingdom, Boer War and First World War)
The Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry, has been awarded 1,358 times since 18566, and only three men have received it twice6. The first was a doctor, Arthur Martin-Leake. He won the cross for tending the wounded under fire at Vlakfontein in the Boer War on 8 February 1902, and a bar for rescuing wounded men near Zonnebeke in the autumn of 1914, twelve years later.
6. Noel Chavasse (United Kingdom, First World War)
Noel Chavasse, son of the Bishop of Liverpool, was the medical officer of the Liverpool Scottish and had already won the Military Cross in 1915. On 9 August 1916 at Guillemont6 on the Somme he searched no man's land for wounded men through the night, close to the German lines, and was hit by a shell splinter: his first VC. Between 31 July and 2 August 1917 at Wieltje, during the battle of Passchendaele, he was badly wounded early but kept working for two days, going out again and again under fire. He died on 4 August 1917, and the bar was awarded after his death, the only man to win both of his crosses in the First World War.
7. Charles Upham (New Zealand, Second World War)
Charles Upham, a farmer from Canterbury in New Zealand, disliked fuss and insisted that his medals belonged to his men. He won his first VC on Crete between 22 and 30 May 19416, leading his platoon against German paratroopers while wounded. His second came on 14 to 15 July 1942 at Ruweisat Ridge in Egypt, during the first battle of El Alamein, where he was wounded again and captured. A persistent escaper as a prisoner, he ended the war in Colditz. Of the three double VCs, he is the only one who earned both crosses as a fighting soldier rather than as a doctor.
8. Adrian Carton de Wiart (United Kingdom, Boer War to 1945)
Adrian Carton de Wiart, born in Brussels in 1880, holds a different kind of record. He was wounded 11 times by the count of his regimental museum7: twice in the Boer War, once in Somaliland, where he lost his left eye, and eight times on the Western Front, where he lost his left hand. He won the VC commanding the 8th Gloucesters at La Boisselle on 2 to 3 July 1916. Between the wars he lived in eastern Poland, and in 1939 he headed the British Military Mission there; among his decorations are the silver cross of the Virtuti Militari7 and the Polish Cross of Valour. In 1941 his plane came down in the sea on the way to Yugoslavia, and he swam ashore into Italian captivity.
9. Hans-Ulrich Rudel (Germany, Second World War)
Hans-Ulrich Rudel belongs on this list, and must be described honestly. A Stuka pilot on the Eastern Front, he was the only man to receive the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds, presented to him by Hitler on 1 January 19458. German records credit him with 2,530 ground-attack missions and 519 Soviet tanks; these are wartime claims, not verified counts. He was also an unrepentant Nazi. After the war he settled in Argentina, helped Nazi fugitives escape justice, and in 1953 led the list of a far-right party in the West German election. His medals measure what the Nazi state chose to reward, not a cause to admire.
What the medals do not tell you
Most of the men on this list said, in one way or another, that the medals belonged to others: to the men who died beside them, or to the many acts of courage no officer saw. Murphy struggled for years with what we would now call post-traumatic stress. Chavasse's headstone in Belgium is carved with two Victoria Crosses. Upham refused to be treated as a celebrity. Behind every "most decorated" headline the real record is a citation, a date and a place.
For more stories of individual courage, see America's greatest military heroes.