Military forces all over the world use abbreviations to speed things up, reduce writing, and theoretically at least, to reduce confusion by standardizing abbreviations, unlike people who create their own abbreviations ad hoc on Facebook, Twitter etc.
Military personnel using these everyday soon get used to them, but often the abbreviations are a complete mystery to researchers such as genealogists.
Here are scans of original World War II Canadian manuals. These were in turn reprints of the British manuals.
Abbreviations keep changing and so to understand them, one wants to look for manuals of the period.
Field Service Pocket Book Part I – Pamphlet No. 3 ABBREVIATIONS 1943 (Canadian Army reprint of British manual approved 9 January 1943.)
This copy had Amendment No. 1 changes of 5 June 1943 entered by the soldier. He missed some of the changes and I will note these in future. I compared it with another unmodified one and explanatory note are shown below of the changes.
