Tactical symbols
This is a very short synopsis of the German Tactical Symbols used on maps at the very start of the war in 1914. These morphed over time, however the general staff officers used these symbols for operations prior to and at the beginning of World War I. This comes directly from the general staff officer’s handbook which was issued personally to the general staff officer. It is also known as the Red Donkey. There is a copy I understand in the Potsdam archive library and we used a copy in the research and writing of “The Great War Dawning”. While the huge book seems to have everything in it the symbols were left out or did not make the cut. so here is a bonus! I thought this could be of great use to anyone looking at the maps of 1914 and maybe beyond. The general staff found these to be an inadequate subset. So the symbols continued to change but the baseline remained the same. In addition to this, most people who are steeped in the map work of NATO are used to blue being friendly forces and red being the enemy forces. Whenever maps are in color from the German side, the colors are reversed. And that takes some getting used to.
This is totally apparent in the “red books.” That is readily understood as the term used to describe the German official history that comes from the Reichsarchiv. An example of one of these maps is shown above. Actually there are three sets of different “official” German histories with the red books in the great books – or Schlachten-being the most well-known. We will get a chance to explore the pluses and minuses of these different sets later. We have donated most of our German research library to the University of North Texas. So if you want to see complete sets with their maps you need to go there or somewhere else. Easy to find pieces.
We discussed general staff officer “red donkeys” before but it was a long time ago in a blog.
This is really pretty rare. Most academics have not read it and many do not know of its existence. It is not in the bibliography of any of the works that I have looked into. Hope you enjoy.