BATTLE TRAINING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 April 1942, Page 4

BATTLE TRAINING

SEVERE SCHOOL METHODS IN BRITAIN TESTS AND TOUGHENING EXERCISES. VISIT BY CORRESPONDENTS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, . Noon.) LONDON, April 26. Instructors plastering troops with animal blood, loud-speakers roaring out hate slogans and n picture gallery of German atrocities are features of General Paget's battle training schools, in which infantry officers and n.c.o.’s are taught to think and act like Commandos. Correspondents visited a typical school in South-East England, where a 21-year-old .. Lieutenant-Colonel—the youngest in the British Army—is headmaster. Attack and speed is the school’s motto. Every evercise is carried out with live ammunition, every movement at the double. A leader is chosen for each section in the school, regardless of rank. He may be a major or a sergeant. The only test is leadership under battle conditions. Tin-hatted correspondents were taken in so close to the exercises that they were sprayed with chunks of earth from exploding bombs. The commanding officer, cutting red tape, asked the local R.A.F. station commander for co-operation and Spitfires power-dived within twenty feet of the correspondents’ heads, while electrically-controlled bombs exploded a few yards away. They watched one section cover milelong assault courses in twenty minutes. The troops, with rifles loaded, crawled under barbed wire, through which machine-gun bullets were whizzing within inches of their heads. The troops plunged and charged through a stream of blazing tar and bullets from enemy cross-fire. Then a section went on to the attack and wiped out a hidden enemy. A “haunted house,” with hidden traps and figures springing out of the walls, is used in part of the course. Instructors yell through loud-speakers, “On your toes!” “Remember Hong Kong!” “Remember Dunkirk!” “There’s a Hun —kill the swine!”

Loud-speakers also broadcast a sound track of a German war horror film. The course lasts for a fortnight and on the last day, during a 24-hour exercise, the trainees live on a slice of bread and a little water.