Help with finding a russian village

[Ebusitanus]

Greetings,
I am currently trying to locate several soviet era villages in the Pskov region in Russia.

My grandfather's brother died on October 16th 1943 as part of the Army Pi. Btl. 662.
He was part of an Pionier battalion mobilitzed to close to gap created by the October 1943 Russian Nevel offensive. Said offensive ripped the second Luftwaffe field division apart and sent everyone looking for suitable bodies to throw into the gap to stop the soviet offensive.

The battlion, trying to close a piece of the breakthrough from the north, was sent to the land mass between both lakes. Here it fought on approachiong soviet troops till the 69th ID could be brought to help along that axis.

https://www.google.es/maps/@56.1162745, ... a=!3m1!1e3

What I do need is to locate near this given map several villages that might well not exist there anymore.

Wlasskowo: Could be Vlaskowo or any close sounding name. Thats the place the man died, surely from wounds received. This place was found on some old map next to the northern shore of the said Ivan lake. I cannot find it anymore.

Gostilowo: Where he was actually buried. I found once a Gostilowo just to the north of Wlasskowo, in between the lake and northerly Nowosokolniki

If anyone would know where I could get a military map of the time of this area to confirm the village locations I would be very thankful.

[Jeff Leach]

Start with the 1:300000 German wartime maps

http://igrek.amzp.pl/mapindex.php?cat=M ... ortoption1

[Ebusitanus]

Thanks for the pointer. Seems that the links are a bit dead:

http://www.mapywig.org/m/German_maps/se ... I.1942.jpg

[naltar]

the link works, it's just that with a direct link to a jpg file, your browser tries to open it, rather than download - and the files are large, or very large. If you clear browser cache but still no joy, try this:

http://igrek.amzp.pl/mapindex.php?cat=M ... ortoption1
(it's a large index, might take a while)
CTRL+F
enter V57 for Newel
You have three map scans available, if you RIGHT-click on a yellow icon with the mouse, you can "save target as..." or "save image as..." and it downloads to your computer (your usual place where downloads go, probably "my documents", or desktop). When you click on the downloaded file, it will be opened by any default graphics software you have installed on your computer, possibly irfanview, or Windows photo viewer, etc.
IF you locate the village you were looking for, you might be lucky to find more detailed map too. Unfortunately the search engine for Russia sucks, so you'd need to check out sheets by their approximate location, via those index sheets, some in Cyrillic) - it's going to take some time. Go to this list of map types:
http://igrek.amzp.pl/index.php
CTRL+F
Rußland IIWŚ 1:100 000
Single, double and quadruple sheets are shown separately,

and then the original Soviet maps (25K, 50K, 100K), again, most single sheets, but some are joined and quadruple, e.g.
Генеральный Штаб Рабоче-Крестьянской Красной Армии 1:50 000

Regards,

n.

[GregSingh]

Gostilowo appears on 1:300000 V 57 Newel German map, but Wlasskowo is not there.
This 1:84000 Soviet map has both, Wlaskowo just near Truschkowa which can be seen on V 57 map.

Wlaskowo-Gostilowo

[Ebusitanus]

Thanks so much everybody!
Both towns are located by Greg and replicated on the original german maps of Nalter and Jeff.

Now...How to get there, get a reliable guide to walk around that area.

[Shesky]

Dear Ebusitanus,
I found this thread and your other thread about your interest in Pionier Battalion 662. This is a interest of mine also, in fact I made an account with this forum purely to reach out in hopes we can pool our findings of the unit together. What is the best way to contact you?