The Distinguished Service Order (DSO) is a military decoration of the United Kingdom, and formerly of other parts of the Commonwealth, awarded for meritorious or distinguished service by officers of the armed forces during wartime, typically in actual combat .
Way back in 2001, Hugh Halliday had published a list of RAF and Commonwealth DSO Awardee list http://www.rafcommands.com/archive/00013.php . Taking that as a basis, with contributions from Malcolm Barrass and Jagan Pillarisetti, the list has been revised, cross-checked against the gazettes and enriched with Citations and links.
It is available in a Database Query tool at http://www.rafcommands.com/database/awards/index.php?qaward=DSO
Hugh’s list has been increased by an additional four awards, and citations and links to the original gazette notifications provided.
There are 1223 DSO Awards in the Database. 22 are pre WW2, and 18 Post WW2. Of the remaining 1182 awards, 504 have been gazetted without citations (they appear with “Notification Only” in the citation box). The rest have some form of a citation available. Only about a dozen or so awardee names, bulk of them Army Aviation Corps related do not have the linked information .
This is the first step in the Awards Database. Subsequent awards will be added for VC, GC and the DFC to start with.