I am putting together a new set of pages for my site on the artillery present at the Cassino battles and am missing a few Arm of Service numbers. I need the following, all 8 Army and subordinate units, for May 1944 or a little earlier. 8 Army - 2 RHA, 165 Field Regt and 11 Regt R Canadian Arty 2 Polish Corps - 1 Polish Survey Regt, 7 A-Tk Regt Polish Arty, 2 Polish LAA Regt and 8 Polish HAA Regt 2 New Zealand Div - 36 NZ Survey Bty 6 AGRA - 2 Med Regt and 76 Med Regt 2 Polish Army Group Polish Arty - Army Group HQ, 11 Med Regt Polish Arty, 7 Regt Polish Horse Arty and 9 Field Regt Polish Arty 2 AA Brigade - 117 LAA Regt 12 AA Brigade - 1 HAA Regt If any one has any of these numbers I will be eternally grateful. Derek
Hi Derek, There are some pictures of Archers of 7 Polish Anti-Tank Regiment of 2 Polish Corps in Valentine (Part 2) by Dick Taylor (2010). Those photos are from the end of the war, but show an AoS of 47.
I thought I'd seen charts of Canadian artillery serials in the HQ RCA 1st Canadian Corps records. This shows all the artillery in the corps with their serials in September 1944. You would need to go to an earlier reel and search through to find 11 Field Regiment RCA if you wanted to make sure the serial was the same at the time of Cassino. War diaries : T-15440 - Héritage
Thanks for the info Chris, the link is very interesting. The AoS of 47 for the Polish A-Tk Rgt is odd as I would expect that number to be a LAA Rgt. A Divisional A-Tk Rgt should have 46. I was hoping to find AoS for 2 Polish Corps level units as 10 & 13 Corps use different numbers for some of their units. There doesn't seem to be a standard numbering system for Corps units at this time. 11 Canadian Field Rgt is even more interesting. I have a Canadian Army list for Jan 44 and there is no mention of 11 Field anywhere in the list. However, while 4 Armoured Division has 2 Field Rgts with AoS 74 & 76 with their LAD's, 5 Armoured has 17 Field Rgt & LAD as 74 but just an LAD with 76. I would guess that 11 Field was "on loan" to 8 Army as an Army Field Regt from 5 Armoured Div. Your link alerted me to the fact that 11 Field was probably in 5 Armoured at the time which led to finding the missing regiment in my earlier list. Thanks for that. If my reasoning is right, it is quite possible that it still used its AoS of 76 while detached (unless anyone can prove differently ). Ah! the joys of research. Derek
Hi Derek, I didn't know there was variation between 10 and 13 Corps! 7 Polish anti-tank regiment was a corps unit so far as I know. (And the Archers do show the "Maiden of Warsaw" emblem for 2 Corps.) It would be interesting to dig into other Polish units to see whether they were using an entirely different numbering scheme or not. I will post of photos of the relevant images in the Valentine book showing the 47. An interesting detail is that in one of the photos is what might be a Roman numeral II. In a Polish history of the regiment - admittedly a bit of a hodge-podge put together by talking to veterans - rather than batteries the sub-units seem to been numbered squadrons. I don't see any sign of the four-quadrant blue and red Royal Artillery marking to indicate battery, so it might be that this regiment simply denoted its sub units with Roman numerals. But since there is only the one photo showing that, I am not sure.
Chris, I found this on line, the artillery numbers at least seem to match British practice for an armoured division.The Polish system needs some more research by me as there are obviously some differences. As to the differences between 10 & 13 Corps, this is probably a legacy of 8 Army changing from their own system to the UK version. Some numbers seem to be the UK ones and some the old 8 Army ones. I have decided to load the pages on my site and then fill in the gaps later if and when I find the missing info. I anyone is interested you can find it here - Cassino May 1944
