I'm currently going through the War Diary of 14 Field Dressing Station and trying to plot their progress across O.E. Can anybody shed light on the M.R.s I'm seeing? For example: "Unit reached its locations S.W. of STE CROIX GRANDE TONNE on the BAYEUX – CAEN road Ref. 872742 and was open and ready to receive patients by 0600 hours." How do I locate 872742? Other references have a letter before the numbers: "Location. TURNHOUT (M.R. E056067). Located in excellent school premises, good floors and corridors, central heating. Accommodation for 110 beds inclusive of an Officer Ward of 9 beds for Div Sick." Any help greatly appreciated
Hi You need to use the Coordinate Translator at this location The "Coordinate Translator" This need a little bit of patience to use and sometimes you will need to cross reference with other clues and some common sense. In your case, you know that the location is in France between Caen and Bayeux and while you have the 6 figure grid reference you don't know which grid square it fits in. If you go to the site you will see that Europe was split up by the allies into a number of 'grids' of which French Lambert Zone 1 is the most likely. You then go to the Coordinate translator section of the web site, select which Grid system to use and put in the coordinates (4 or 6 figures) but preface it with the letter code of the grid square most likely to cover it unless, as you say with other grid references, the square 'letter' has been included inwhich you can input it with some confidence. The site will then do the conversion and give you a small window from which you can zoom into the location. The site is generally regarded as giving a pretty good approximation. For instance here in the UK, it will get you within a few yards of a still visible feature such as an anti aircraft site and in Italy, in at least one example I have, the location given matches well with a description in a war diary.
As luck would have it there is an air view of this exact area in April 1944 online. It seems the pilot 'accidentally' shot an oblique when he banked to changed position. Loucelles; Lower Normandy; France | NCAP - National Collection of Aerial Photography Loucelles is ringed and the square is (more or less) the map reference North is to the bottom. Current view
I found the maps in the British Library. The map references refer to the Eastings followed by the Northings, Eastings being grid lines from left to right and Northings being bottom to top. So for the reference 872 look for the horizontal gridline 87 and 88 and once located estimate 2 parts of the line hence 872. Repeat the same going from bottom towards the top of the map and locate the 74th to 75th lines and again estimate two portions, hence 742 where the two points intersect is the exact point you are looking for. There are web tools to convert a map reference to a sat nav reference but these can be up to two kilometres difference. The British Library were very helpful.