Mysterious Markings
Found on Canadian military trucks of the First World War
In his splendid series about Canadian motor machine gun brigades of the First World War, Per Finsted mentions a curious symbol that he found in a pair of period photographs. In one picture, the symbol, made up of a triangle and three C’s, was painted on the front of an unarmored cargo truck. In the other, it appears on the back of several armored machine gun carriers.
In the first photo (shown above), the symbol keeps company with a four-digit number and an arrowhead. (While the latter looks a lot like the ‘crow’s foot’ that has long been used by British military and naval authorities to mark property of the Crown, it also resembles the abstracted arrow incorporated into the unit badges of the Canadian motor machine gun brigades.)
In the second photo (shown below), each instance of the mysterious marking consorts with another four-digit number. (Marvelous to say, all of the four-digit numbers that I have been able read begin with ‘57’. None, moreover, falls outside a range that begins with ‘5786’ and ends with ‘5797’.
Mr. Finsted speculates that the first two of the C’s in the triangle might have stood for ‘Canadian Corps’. He could not, however, think of a suitable match for the third C. (‘Currie’s Canadian Corps’ comes to mind. However, while the first of the photos has been dated to September of 1916, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie did not take command of the Canadian Corps until June of the following year.)
A poster depicting organizational insignia worn by soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force shows a dozen unit patches shaped like the ‘almost equilateral’ triangles featured in the vehicle marking.1 Of these, ten belonged to units - such as motor transport companies and the corps siege park - that used trucks to move things behind the lines. The eleventh, in the form of a triangle made up of three smaller triangles, indicated membership in the Canadian Cyclist Battalion. The last pertained to a unit entirely new to me: ‘HQ Canadian Corps Clerks’.
Of the 132 patches on the poster that were worn by men serving with the Canadian Corps, only two - those of the aforementioned ‘H.Q. Canadian Corps Clerks’ and the Canadian Corps Siege Park - sported the three C’s seen on the vehicle markings. As neither of these units formed part of a division, and both bore names that included the phrase ‘Canadian Corps’, the third C may well have referred to ‘corps troops’.2
This hypothesis, however, falls afoul of the fact that none of the patches for the 22 other units that fell into the category of ‘corps troops’ featured three Cs. (Indeed, only one of these patches, that of the Canadian Engineers Motor Transport Company, bore any C at all.)
With this in mind, I pass the question to the readers of The Tactical Notebook.
Secondary Sources
Per Finsted The Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, Part 1, Part 2, and Supplement, Chakoten: Dansk Militaerhistorisk Selskab [The Shako: The Danish Military History Society]
G.W. L. Nicholson Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 (Ottawa: Roger Duhamel, 1962)
Michael O'Leary Researching Canadian Soldiers of the First World War, Part 17: Battalions and Brigades, Companies and Corps
War Diaries
2nd Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade
Canadian Corps: Administrative Branches of the Staff
General Officer Commanding Canadian Machine Gun Corps
A high-quality reproduction of the poster can be found in G.W. L. Nicholson Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918 .
The Canadian Expeditionary Force consisted of the Canadian Corps and a number of smaller elements. The latter included units attached directly to British field armies and those that served in Siberia and North Russia.
Canadian Corps Canadien. Remember, Canada is bi-lingual.
Did they refer to early motorized units as “cavalry”?