Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-104.51.53.50-20150415225527/@comment-4125495-20150425004700

Manuk51a wrote: probably Australian Navy was back then legally British. i mean, if they still have the UK flag on their national flag, it's saying something. but i dunno. probably devs just don't want to touch allied navies at all for now? The Royal Australian Navy in WW2 was owned and operated by Australia. The Union Jack on the flag signifies that the country is a member of the British Commonwealth but it'd been a sovereign nation for nearly 40 years by the time WW2 broke out. The RAN ships were initially under the command of (but not owned by) the British Admiralty but after the war in the Pacific broke out and Japan basically destroyed the British presence in the area, the RAN were basically under independent command or collaborated with the USN.

You might have been getting confused with New Zealand - up until 1941 New Zealand's navy was a branch of the British Navy and early in WW2 the bulk of their personnel were assigned to British ships.