The morning reports and the battalion journals place a battery with a grid reference: V-044572, RN 25, Q9435. Between Sicily in 1943 and Bavaria in 1945, the family's Army units used six different grids. Their square letters overlap, so a reference only means a place once you know which grid it is on.
Battery D, 26 September 1944: "1 9/10 mi No of Epinal, France (V-044572)". V is a 100 km square. 044 is the easting: 04.4 km east of the square's west edge. 572 is the northing: 57.2 km north of its south edge. Six digits give a 100 m square, four give 1 km (Q-8623), two give 10 km (RN 25). The easting always comes first.
A grid is a flat map's own coordinate system, in metres, drawn over the sheet. All six used here are Lambert conformal conic projections, each centred on its own region. Each is cut into 100 km squares lettered A to Z without I, five to a row from the north-west, so the same letters come round again in every grid and in every 500 km block. Battery D's J in August 1944 is near Grenoble. Its J in November is 300 km north, in the Haute-Saône. N is Naples, Montélimar or the Spessart, depending on the grid. The map sheet named its grid in the margin. The typist didn't, so the grid has to be worked out from the date and the towns.
| Grid | Where and when, in these records | As typed |
|---|---|---|
| South Italy Zone | Sicily, July 1943 (Battery C, 62nd CA). Italy south of Rome, 1944 (Battery D, 106th AAA, and the 894th AAA's medical detachment). A British wartime grid. Its 500 km squares are lettered too, normally written in lower case: rN is 100 km square N of 500 km square r. | 591564 Sheet 271-IV F-2684 RN 25 |
| North Italy Zone | Its companion to the north, on the sheets from Tuscany up. Only the medical detachment's two references at Frontignano and Siena, July 1944, use it here. Same lettering style; its block is lettered w. | WQ 71 WQ 81 |
| Lambert Zone III (Sud) | Southern France, August 1944: the Dragoon landings, Provence, up the Rhône to Grenoble and Lyon. France's own pre-war grids, one for each band of latitude. | 518247 U 41 J-546416 |
| Lambert Zone II (Centre) | Ain, Doubs, Saône valley and Haute-Saône, September to November 1944. | P-074766 Y 27 J-762365 |
| Lambert Zone I (Nord) | Normandy, June–July 1944: Company B, 313th Infantry, in the Cotentin, from Cherbourg south to La Haye-du-Puits. The company typed the 500 km block letter, V, before the square. HQ Battery, 128th AAA wrote the square alone, from Cherbourg to Romazy, Rennes and Le Mans (June–August 1944). | VO 1819 VT 1099 Z-374373 |
| Nord de Guerre | From the Vosges (Battery D at Xertigny, 20 September 1944) through Alsace, the Saar, across the Rhine and into Bavaria, May 1945. A French grid of the First World War covering the northern front and the Rhineland, which the Allies used for the 1944–45 campaign. HQ Battery, 128th AAA was on it from Étampes (24 August 1944) to Nancy. | V-044572 VZ-6457 Y-888629 |
The grids changed with the map sheets, not on any one date. In mid-September 1944 Battery D was writing Lambert II references in the Doubs (P-074873, 14 Sep). Six days later, in the Vosges, it wrote Nord de Guerre (V-032425, 20 Sep). In November it was back on a Lambert II sheet for one move (J-762365, Passavant-la-Rochère), then on Nord de Guerre again in Alsace. The 894th's medical detachment wrote the 500 km block letter as well (VZ-6457, Contrexéville). Battery D never did.
A reference without a 500 km letter is read in the block these records use: South Italy's r, the Lambert zones' only block, Nord de Guerre's eastern block (type VZ… for the western one).
None of the entries says which grid it uses, except the 62nd's Sicilian ones ("1:25,000 South Italy Grid"). Each reference was decoded on every grid and checked against the town the same entry names. The right grid puts it within a few kilometres of the town. A wrong one puts it hundreds of kilometres away. The tables below give every reference and how far it falls from the named town, worked out as the page loads. The towns are taken at their centres, so a kilometre or two is as close as the check can get. The grid each reference was found to be on is recorded in the data, in the grid_on column of records/army/stations.csv and actions.csv.
A map of these stations should use whichever position is more exact. A reference to 1 km or better that falls within 8 km of its named town belongs at the grid point: it is the record's own position, finer than a town centre. A two-digit reference, good only to 10 km, leaves the station at the town. So does a reference that misses its town, which is a typing slip.
Two-digit references are only good to 10 km, so they miss their towns by up to about 8 km. Of the finer ones, ten miss by 10 km or more. Five are in the 1945 journal, and the notes in records/army/stations.csv explain them: a slipped digit (Eisenberg, Osthofen, Ober-Sailauf, Weißenburg), or a typist who kept the old square letter after the battalion crossed into the next square (Gersfeld, N-550079 for H-550079). The sixth, Battery D's N823076 of July 1944, falls 13 km from "10 Mi. SE Battipaglia" and is unexplained. The other three are Co. B, 313th Infantry's in Normandy, 5–11 July 1944: its clerk kept typing square O, the Cherbourg square, after the company moved south into T. Read as VT, all three fall beside the hamlets they name. The tenth is the same slip a month later: the 128th AAA's HQ Battery typed Romazy's square Y for "near Rennes" (Y-977547); in X, the square to the west, it falls 3.4 km from the city. Hover a dot to read its note.
The journals time their entries the way the Navy did, with a zone letter: 1600A is GMT+1, 1200B GMT+2. The 106th's records change from B to A in mid-September 1944 and back to B in April 1945. See the Pacific page on zone letters for the system.