Talk:Assault Battalion No. 5 (Rohr)

Miscellaneous notes on article draft
@ComradeCheekiBreeki

Hey there! I'm a German wikipedia user and military historian of Germany, and I had a brief look through your page. Some good stuff, but several notes.


 * That flag looks highly suspect. In your article [Note 2], you claim that the name was sometimes rendered in the genitive, as on the flag you added to Wikipedia. I highly doubt that. Yes, a unit might be sometimes referred to in the genitive (where grammatically appropriate), but a unit flag (if that even existed!) would certainly not have the name of the unit in anything except nominative (if it has the unit name at all, which is rare on German unit insignia/flags). I highly doubt that the flag is historically authentic, and it would take a very decent citation to convince me otherwise.
 * You correctly juxtapose the translations "storm" and "assault" for the German "Sturm". I would propose using the more appropriate "assault" as the title of the article and to have "storm" serve as a redirect. Just because English-language literature sometimes gets it wrong, that does not mean Wikipedia has to.
 * I would propose the inclusion of some additional media from the German-language article (Sturm-Bataillon Nr. 5 (Rohr) – Wikipedia). Especially the signum could be of use.
 * Perhaps switch the chapter titles As a "Storm Detachment" and As a "Storm Battalion" to simply Sturmabteilung Calsow and Sturm-Bataillon 5, or appropriate equivalents. That sounds less clunky.
 * You might want to replace "number designation" in the introduction with the somewhat less clunky "ordinal number".
 * The sources used currently weigh a bit too heavily into primary (or very outdated secondary?) sources from the 1920s and 1930s. While not everything you cite has to be from the last ten years, there probably are still some more recent sources out there that are worthy of usage in this article.

All in all, this is a very decent draft, and I'm sure it merits inclusion in Wikipedia. Good stuff!

Best regards

Ted52 (talk) 14:09, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Firstly- thank you very much for the feedback! I’ll get a lot of this fixed as soon as I can.
 * About the flag, there is definitely the possibility that it is in some way fake, but it is at the very least a real flag in a real museum. I traced it myself in Inkscape from a photo I took while I was in the US National World War I Museum in Kansas City; I believe it was in a display case about German stormtrooper tactics identified as “Unit flag of 5th Assault Battalion (Rohr)” or something like that. In fact, it was what led me to starting on this project (you can probably see the file was made just around the time I added the first edit to this page). It’s possible I traced it wrong since there was a lot of glare on the original photo that obscured part of the flag, including where the S was. Looking online, I recall seeing similar designs (the death’s head with crossed grenades) used on the unit flags/insignia of other assault units. It looked quite hasty, so if it was real it was probably temporary. I may visit again at some point and see if I can ask about it.
 * Also insignia related, I did try to add the signum on the media page somewhere but I ran into the issue of it being too long for the length of text and it looked quite clunky. I would still like to add it but I’m not entirely sure how.
 * With regards to “storm” vs. “assault,” I definitely agree. My only issue is that I think it would need a rename with redirect to keep it consistent and I don’t know how that works for drafts.
 * And the sources- I appreciate finally getting some feedback on them. I’ll go looking for more sources here at some point, though I’m not the most experienced source hunter; mostly Google Books and Internet Archive have done me well, though Google Books doesn’t always show you the most important things.
 * Again, thank you very much for the feedback.
 * Thank you, ComradeCheekiBreeki (talk) 14:40, 3 November 2022 (UTC)