HOME GUARD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 229, 26 September 1940, Page 20

HOME GUARD.

ENGLISH TRAINING.

"NOT A GENTLEMANLY WAR." "I've learnt more here in two days than in twenty years in the Army." '•'They taught me more here in two days than they did in fifteen years in tlie Arniv." These two comments were made independently within an hour of finishing the two-day Home Guard training course ; t Osterley Park, Middlesex, wrote a London "Sunday Express" representative on August 4. One speaker was a captain. The other was a foreman engineer. Fifteen hundred members of the Home Guard have already taken the course. A thousand more application forms have been sent out. In addition, six more courses, lasting till August 15, and taking 110 men each, are fully hooked.

The spirit of Osterley is: "If you fight at all, it won't be a gentlemanly, orthodox war. It will be a war of quick movement, hasty improvisation and initiative." There are six instructors, the most picturesque of whom is W. F. Crisp, sft hisdi in his socks, whose permission" I have to describe him as a "bloodthirsty little man." Crisp's hobby in life is fighting Germans. He fought them in France in the last war (Croix de Guerre and M.M.), and he fought them for two years in Spain. Sugar Trick. Here is some of the advice he gave his audience: — To immobilise petrol-driven engines the recipe is one lump of sugar in the tank of a motor-bicycle, three lumps in a lorry. If you have no sugar, try vinegar, or paper torn to the size of confetti, or small lengths of thread. Or stuff up the exhaust pipe with clay. To stop motor bicyclists, stretch a taut wire across the road, four feet from the ground. To stop cars cut a leaning tree halfway through the trunk. Attach a wire fairly high up and pull it from the other side of the road as the car conies. Or Ret up the tree and bomb the car. If you find a motor car unattended slit the tyres—'but cut 4he wall of the tyre, not the tread. Wet the blade of your knife and it will cut rubber more easilv.

Sand in Engine. To wreck a railway siding put a handful of sand in the lubricating box of any engine you see. A popular course, especially for Home Guards in country areas, covered the art of stalking. It was given 'by an assistant camp chief of the Boy Scouts. Stockbrokers, 'business men, mechanics, labourers, men from every walk of life, played games which in peace time they would have laughed at. The instructor posted eight men on the outskirts of the wood, less than two hundred yards distant. How many could we see? I could see two. The man beside me could see six. When the hidden men revealed themselves only two were in the place in which my companion had seen six. The rest were at the other end of the wood.

Back.to Nature. Mr. R. Penrose, architect and industrial camouflage expert, talked about camouflage. "Go back to nature," he said. "It's better than anything we can devise." He showed types of shading, how to break up shadows, and how to blend things into the landscape, what paint to use and how to use it. An Indian army captain home on sick leave showed us how to knife a sentry in silence. Then Crisp talked again, this time on street fighting. He showed* how, by blockading exits, to make the enemy fight on our own ground, how to build blockhouses out of the corner walls of ruined houses. Crisp also told how to recognise all types of German tanks, what were their vulnerable points.