Naval, Marine and Air Force Uniforms of World War 2 [antikvár]

PREFACE This volume is the first postwar publication to describe and illustrate the naval and air force uniforms of the main combatant nations of World War 2. During the war, military and naval intelligence departments prepared manuals and posters to help their servicemen identify friend and foe alike, and since the war these rare publications have been the main source of information on the subject, and are now valuable collectors' items. The great difficulty has been to strike a fair balance between regulation uniform, and what was actually worn by sailors and airmen in action. Many thousands of photographs - on which the present drawings are based - confirm that officers and men often wore precisely what they pleased, or found most practical for the tasks they had to perform. It has obviously not been possible to illustrate every item of uniform of every nation, nor describe every rank and trade badge; one could easily write a book of this length on each nation. Certain limits have had to be imposed. Firstly it has not been possible to include female auxiliaries, nor all the many uniformed, civil and para-military organisations which took an active part in the war. These organisations wiU probably be covered in a future volume. Illustrations and text have been designed to compliment each other and not overlap, so extensive references to illustrations in both this volume and in my previous work Army Uniforms of World War 2 (hereafter referred to as A.U. followed by the page number and figure number) will be found in the text. The description of cap badges, badges of rank, and rate, and trade and specialists' badges is not satisfactory, and so I have relied on the illustrations to show typical examples of some of these badges being worn. Rank and rating badges have been broken down into groups for ease of description, but it must be remembered that a comparison between say a French maître and a British petty officer can only be approximate, since their responsibilities and authority were often very different, A.M.