ID two disc

**Boski Roman** · 09-09-2013, 05:07 PM

I calmed down

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 09-09-2013 05:07 PM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**Matt L** · 09-10-2013, 12:59 AM

by Eike41

Matt,

I just thought the "a" was the blood group I cannot think of any other reason for it.

So how does a replacement disk relate to the roll number Matt? If I am roll number 63 and I lose my disk do I change roll number to #2 if that is the second replacement disk issued for the company? Or is there some sort of lookup table in between? I just want to clarify my understanding of the relationship.

Nope- the marking is clearly Infanterie-Regiment 188a, which doesn't make sense to me at all. I can't see a faker doing something like that and otherwise it looks okay, it's just strange and I don't know what to make of it. There are a very few replacement Bataillone that had multiple 'incarnations' that had the same Arabic number, but were differentiated with Roman numerals. But this sub letter isn't anything I've ever even heard of.

And no too (LOL)- if a soldier needs a new disc, apparently the practice wasn't, or wasn't always, to just mark a new one using what his old one is listed to be in his Soldbuch; it was for the field unit to mark a disc themselves and then presumably change the document entry (which is a weird way of doing it I think). Now it's just occurred to me that I and others have just expected it'd be sequential- the first replacement disc would be 1, the second 2, etc., but now I wonder if it actually went by the Kompanie roll- they'd have kept their own and may just have gone to that when making a new disc. That makes a lot more sense. Then again, the Germans seem to have had a special place for paperwork- you see it in the sheer mountains of reports there were, and the continual commentary by officers about 'fighting the paper war'- so it wouldn't really surprise me if they had a separate roll for replacement discs LOL But no, I suspect it was just the Kompanie's own roll and thus 63 is a perfectly reasonable number.

That Grenadier disc is magnetic I'll bet- the rust at the break line suggests it's a steel disc; that'd make it a rather late war type I think- not the Nirosta stainless steel type but another ferrous type that is seen from time to time.