Platoon Infographics
The Volksgrenadier Division of 1944
During the last two years of the Second World War, the German Army converted many of its infantry divisions into Volksgrenadier formations. To this end, the Army High Command issued tables of organization that made extensive use of infographics. Some of these used existing map symbols to lay out the number and types of crew-served weapons rated by various battalions, regiments, and divisions. Others employed glyphs of a different type to show the number of soldiers, horses, and vehicles authorized to particular types of platoons.
In the second set of pictographs, circles indicated individuals; lines, crosses, and fill reflected rank; and abstractions of overhead views pointed to the presence of horses, horse-drawn wagons, and motor vehicles. Some circles, such as those that depicted men who rode bicycles, sported special symbols. Many, however, did not. Thus, the reader who wished to distinguish between soldiers who laid telephone wire and those who dropped shells into the mouths of mortars was obliged to rely on a combination of context and labels.
The symbols for horse-drawn wagons, limbers, and carts indicated the number of quadrupeds that pulled each vehicle, the number of wheels involved, and whether the teamster served as a seated driver or a walking leader.
The symbols for motor vehicles replaced the horse icons with an abstraction of the front end of a truck. They also made it easy to distinguish between wheeled vehicles and those that moved with the aid of caterpillar tracks.
The Gulashkanone [rolling kitchen] that played such a central role in the daily life of the German soldier received, in the form of a hatched oval, a special symbol of its own. On the whole, however, when depicting the special features of vehicles, such as the carrying capacity (in tons) of trucks or the nomenclature of a tracked carrier, the draftsman used abbreviations. Thus, for example, a Raupenschlepper Ost [‘tracked puller east’] that carried ammunition [Munition] bore the label ‘RSO MUN’.
