Quote:
Originally Posted by Adrian Roberts  He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. [The Wikipedia entry, which is not my sole reference, says that he was posthumously promoted to pilot officer, but I had not heard that this was done in the British armed forces, and I would prefer confirmation of this] |
It was indeed done a fair bit. When Spidge was doing his death by rank comparisons, I posted them on rafcommands, and was told that the rank as held on the CWGC was not always indicative of the rank that they held at the time of their death.
There were a number of reasons:
1) For officer ranks, the CWGC makes no differentiation between given ranks, temporary ranks and acting ranks. So if an individual is listed as Squadron Leader, one would need to go through the London Gazette to check promotions, and what type they were. However, temporary ranks were not usually gazetted, causing a fair bit of confusion for anyone researching an individual. For ORs, it was either because the paperwork hadn't caught up or as a reward.
2) Commonwealth and Allied personnel who were not serving in British units were not usually LGed, so to find out their promotions etc one would need to go to their country of origin. Australia is the best served for government databases, and so one could find a fair bit of info. Unfortunately, the other countries are more difficult to check
3) In some cases a posthumous promotion was the only way of recognising an individual because, as you state, Adrian, most medals could not be awarded.
4) We also don't know whether, in this case, the promotion was a direct award for his bravery or that the paperwork had already been completed and was being processed. His service file has not been digitised yet and so I cannot check.
However, he was definately promoted as evidenced by the fact that his citation states Sergeant and his CWGC/Australian Nominal Roll state Pilot Officer.