Unusual Symbols

Depict a Tank Destroyer Platoon

Recently, while looking for something else, I ran into a poster that used unusual symbols to describe the structure of a tank destroyer company. Published, in March of 1944, by the Tank Destroyer School at Fort Hood, Texas, this organizational chart used boxes to depict vehicles, circles to show the people riding in each vehicle, and glyphs to indicate the presence of weapons and radios.

Boxes that sported a stylized cannon symbolized M-18 ‘Hellcat’ self-propelled 76mm guns. Those without such embellishment depicted M-29 ‘Weasel’ tracked utility vehicles. Rectangles that took up half of the space of a full-sized symbol represented jeeps.

The circles that stood for non-commissioned officers bore the chevrons of the rank in question. Likewise, a circle with a line through it showed the location of a lieutenant. A plain circle, however, portrayed the presence of a private.

An arrow represented a machine gun. A symbol that might be described as a ‘twig growing out of a branch’ denoted a 2.36-inch rocket launcher. An abstraction of an aerial that made me think of a tree in winter indicated that the vehicle in question carried a radio set.

The diagram at the top of this page uses the aforementioned symbols to portray the tank destroyers, weasels, trailer, and jeep of one of the three numbered platoons of the unit represented in the poster. The infographic that follows uses silhouettes to show the same eight vehicles.

Source: Employment of Four Tank Destroyer Battalions in the ETO (Fort Knox: Armored School, 1950)