International Encyclopedia of Uniform Insignia
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Luke2
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Rank Structures, Selected World War II Belligerents

Searching for 19th Century RN warrant officer uniforms for Dorward, I happened to find this site.

http://www.historyandtheheadlines.abc-clio.com/ContentPages/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1145956&currentSection=1130224&productid=3

Very interesting, but I cannot agree with a number of statements:

(1) "The British and the Americans had the best NCO corps of World War II; the Soviets had the weakest."

What about the Wehrmacht?

(2) "Consequently, rather than simply accepting rank titles at face value, a reasonably approximate rank equivalency can only be established by considering what the holder of that rank actually did."

That sounds fair enought, but its never done consistently. If you equate a German Generalmajor with a Brigadier General, you also shold equate a German Hauptmann with a British Major, and a German Oberst with a British Brigadier.

/Luke
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Caim_Dubh
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Re: Rank Structures, Selected World War II Belligerents

This brings up some interesting implications Luke. I currently work in a NATO organization, where we have 18 NATO member nations providing personnel. The organization is somewhat ad hoc, though, in that the nations provide whatever numbers and ranks they see fit. So, in some cases we have a US Army captain in charge of a team that might have a Slovakian Army lieutenant colonel, a Romanian Army major, and a RAF sergeant. At one point we had an office that had four personnel, one of whom was an OR-7 while the others were junior OF-grades. The OR-7 was placed in charge of the office.

Different countries might give different levels of responsibility to comparable ranks, where an American OR-6 might be doing the same job as a Danish OF-2.
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Luke2
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Re: Rank Structures, Selected World War II Belligerents

Excuse my ignorance, having no experience working with Nato, but I thought thats why you had the STANAG-2116 agreement. /Luke

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