How to Read a World War II Map: Grids, Scales and Unit Symbols

Sheet 4618 Adorf, prepared by the Army Map Service from German 1:25,000 originals, 1944

The Maps of World War II · Chapter 1 of 9 · Reading the map

How to read a WWII map

Every World War II map spoke the same few languages: a grid for position, a scale for distance, contour lines for ground, and a small set of symbols that told a commander who was where. Learn them here, then try them on the trainers below.

The grid: a shared language for the whole battle

A military map is first of all a grid. Every sheet carried numbered lines, usually one kilometre apart, running north–south (eastings) and east–west (northings). A forward observer who radioed “enemy tanks at 345 768” put every gun, every headquarters and every pilot on the same spot without a word of description. The rule soldiers learned was simple: read right first, then up, “along the corridor and up the stairs.” Four figures name a one-kilometre square; six figures pin a point to within a hundred metres.

Allied maps of France and the Low Countries used the Nord de Guerre grid, a French Army system from the First World War that British and American mapmakers carried into 1944. In the Pacific and on many U.S. sheets the grid was a simple rectangular overlay printed on whatever base map existed. The principle never changed.

Scale: how far is it, really?

Scale is the ratio between the map and the ground. At 1:50,000, the standard battle map of the war, two centimetres on the sheet equal one kilometre on the ground and a one-kilometre grid square is two centimetres across. Platoon and company leaders wanted 1:25,000 sheets that showed every hedge and farm track; corps and army staffs worked at 1:100,000 and 1:250,000; strategic planners at 1:1,000,000, where a whole campaign fits on a table.

Contours, spot heights and the hills named by maps

Brown contour lines join points of equal height. Close together, they mean a steep slope; far apart, gentle ground. Spot heights mark summits and road junctions. Soldiers often had no other name for a hill than the number printed on it, which is why the war’s histories are full of them: Hill 112 in Normandy, fought over for weeks in the summer of 1944, takes its name from its 112-metre spot height; Hill 609 in Tunisia and Hill 192 near Saint-Lô did the same. The map gave the battle its name.

Unit symbols: who is where

On top of the printed base, staffs drew the war itself. The U.S. War Department’s field manual FM 21-30, Conventional Signs, Military Symbols and Abbreviations, set out the system American officers used. A rectangle meant a unit. A mark inside gave the branch: crossed diagonals for infantry, an oval for tanks, a single diagonal for cavalry and reconnaissance, a dot for artillery. Marks on top gave the size, from a single bar for a company to XX for a division and XXXXX for an army group. A number beside the box named the unit.

Color told friend from foe. On U.S. and British maps, friendly forces were drawn in blue or black and the enemy in red. Soviet maps, and many German ones, reversed the colors, showing their own troops in red and the enemy in blue, which is worth remembering before you read a captured map.

Reading a situation map

A situation map combined all of these layers. Staff officers laid clear acetate over the printed sheet and drew the front line, unit symbols, boundaries between formations, phase lines and objectives in grease pencil. Each morning the overlay was wiped and redrawn. The practice map below puts every one of those marks on a single sheet.

The fine print

Before trusting any wartime map, read its margins. They give the sheet number and series, the scale, the grid, the date the information was compiled, the edition, the magnetic declination and, often, a security classification. A 1944 American sheet of Germany might note that it was “prepared by the Army Map Service” from German originals of the 1930s: the roads and villages were a decade old, and the bridges might be gone. Good map readers checked the date first.

Map sheets and mapmakers

Original 1940s map sheets, German Messtischblätter, American copies of them, artillery fire plans and photographs of draftsmen at work. 17 maps in 2 groups: Topographic sheets, More maps.

Topographic sheets 9 maps

More maps 8 maps