"Finding your way around the battlefield – German style" Topic

Old, but still an interesting article here.

"Michael Dorosh kindly provided (for my old website on counterbattery) the following information from the Canadian Army Training Memorandum No. 24, March 1943, which came as a welcome piece of information to me, since I understood the theatre grid system of the Commonwealth armies, but had never even thought about how the Germans did it. Turns out they used a Stosslinie, thrust line (or point), drawn on a map. This is a variant of the offset method, in which a location is expressed by giving the distance to two edges of the map – except that the distance is given in relation to a randomly chosen line on the map.

The differences in locating units on the map were quite astounding to me, and I originally wondered why the Germans ever came up with such an unwieldy system. But I guess that in application it is not actually unwieldy, and it has the advantage to add to secrecy. While David Irving claims that Rommel invented this system to help his tanks advance in France, I simply doubt that this is true (David Irving making things up?), since it appears to be a universally used system in the Wehrmacht.

In North Africa, the thrust line was determined by Panzergruppe HQ during CRUSADER, and my guess is that this did not change when the HQ was upgraded to army status. I believe that in other theatres thrust lines were determined by Corps HQs (a Panzergruppe was equal in status to a Corps HQ), but I am not certain about this. During CRUSADER I have come across two changes of Panzergruppe's thrust line, but there may have been more…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

It is an interesting article. I think the discussion confuses two separate things, i.e.

Were the stosslinie used to provide a (relatively) secure way of providing exact locations on a common map? Yes.

Were the stosslinie used to substitute for grid squares on German Army maps? No (or, they could be used as a temporary substitute, but only that).

Glad to see the info is still of use.

Tuscaloosa

In North Africa during CRUSADER no grid squares were used in communications by Panzergruppe. Everything I can see was working off the Stosslinie. This contrasts with Commonwealth forces that used the grid system throughout for location recording.

I presume that German artillery used a grid system, but that wasn't the point I was getting at in the Blog entry.

All the best

Andreas