Wyre Forest Gamers - Tactical Training (2) - Battle Inoculation, Battle Discipline & Fieldcraft

The British & Canadian Infantry in Normandy 1944

Tactical Training (2) - Battle Inoculation, Battle Discipline & Fieldcraft

The bibliography for this series of articles is available here

Battle Inoculation, June 1942 ©IWM020975

Battle Inoculation

The Infantry Training manual defined battle inoculation as “…the process of making men accustomed to the noises and shocks of war as realistically as possible” and set out a number of suggestions on how this could be achieved. They included: -

Live firing against students by trained marksmen during attack drills, provided this could be done safely
Field firing practice in platoon exercises where troops would handle live mortar bombs and lay smoke
Battalion exercises with heavier calibre weapons, e.g. 3” mortars and 25-pounder field artillery
Students having live rounds fired at them and then attempting to discover where the fire was coming from
The use of thunderflashes to represent enemy mortar fire
Placing men in slit trenches and then being overrun by tanks
Simulated dive-bombing and machine gun attacks by aircraft

All the above were carried out at the Battle Schools. Reasonable safety precautions were observed but there were still injuries and even a few fatalities among trainees. It was expected that training of this nature would cause casualties but the important question was what number was acceptable? Some officers pressed for a loosening of the safety regulations and in February 1942 the Home Forces lifted some restrictions on live firing in exercises. However, the politicians and the high command, understanding public sentiment, were unwilling to accept heavy losses during training on British soil.

Attention was also paid to preparing men for the non-kinetic shocks of war. There were lectures on battle psychology in which the physical and mental effects of fear were discussed and how best to cope with them. There was also a short-lived but controversial attempt to introduce so-called “hate training”, which meant that students were encouraged to develop a profound hatred of the enemy. This was vigorously promoted by Wigram who despised Germans in general and Nazis in particular (the fact he was Jewish probably had something to do with this). Students were given lectures on, and shown photographs of, German atrocities. Instructors would shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and “Hate! Hate! Hate!” during platoon attack exercises under live defending fire. Most bizarrely of all, in order to get soldiers acquainted with the gore of the battlefield, they would be splattered with animal blood during bayonet practice and escorted around local abattoirs. Some unfortunate trainees fainted or vomited. All of this caused a lot of unease in the War Office and in May 1942 hate training was brought to an end.

Battle School in Scotland, December 1943 ©IWM H 34907

How effective was battle inoculation training? The instructors at the Battle Schools did the best they could, given the political and moral constraints, to make battle inoculation as realistic as possible. Many soldiers attending the courses recalled that they found the experience to be nerve-wrecking and hectic. And it was not without risk - men did suffer injury or get killed during training. However, there were limits to the level of realism that could be achieved. We have seen in Article 2 that Lionel Wigram was forced to modify his views on battle drill after seeing action in Italy. He did the same with battle inoculation. In his August 1943 report he claimed that the Battle Schools had had not gone far enough into the subject and, in fact, had missed the “big point of it”: -

“Even platoons who have been in quite a number of battles are unable to distinguish between Bren and Spandau fire, between the whistle of our own shells and those of the enemy. They go to ground as soon as there is any noise of firing although it is not directed at them.”

As we will see in a future article, some commanders in Normandy witnessed the very same thing. Wigram’s proposed solution was that students attending Battle Schools should, on a daily basis, experience the sound made by a variety of Allied and German weapons and also that when advancing, men should have fire not directed at them and then directed over them, so they would acquire sufficient skill to know if being fired on or not. These suggestions had not been implemented by the time 21st Army Group departed for France.

Battle Discipline.mp4

Excerpt from Army Training Film - Battle Discipline 1942

Battle Discipline

This aspect of tactical training was concerned with the maintenance of discipline in the field and was chiefly the responsibility of section leaders. The manuals stressed that great care should be taken in the selection of these individuals - leadership was the key quality and the section leader must be the sort of man who others would instinctively follow. Potential NCOs would be put through a series of tests in which their qualities of leadership could be assessed, for example, taking the squad drill, supervising barrack-square battle drill, leading a section in the field and leading men over small and large obstacle courses. Constant practice was then required to develop and strengthen leadership skills.

Once the appropriate leaders had been selected, the focus switched to the maintenance of battle discipline within the section. The aim was to foster a “military conscience” in the men; discipline was essential to generate the team work that would win battles and save lives. Infantry Training was forceful in its directive that “Carelessness in training must be stamped out”. Men who committed “crimes”, such as demonstrating bad fieldcraft, making themselves visible on a skyline or hesitating when crossing an obstacle must be dealt with in exactly the same way as the ordinary transgressions of military life - they should be charged with these offences and brought before the commanding officer to answer them.

The short video on the left is an excerpt from an army training film which portrays a rather idealised version of a battle discipline exercise in the field.

In spite of the Battle Schools’ efforts to eradicate carelessness in training, it is clear that indiscipline persisted in battle conditions. In ATM No.46 (October 1943), an article titled “Suspicious Alertness” recounted how a number of British soldiers in Sicily had been killed while sleeping away from their platoon. The author placed the blame on the poor quality of training, the problem being that “It is difficult to make the soldier realise on exercises the constant risk to which lack of alertness will expose him in war”. In notes prepared for a discussion on battle discipline at the Infantry School Conference in April 1944, the author, complaining that the average soldier was “amazingly lethargic”, listed a number of areas where battle discipline needed improvement, including digging in, degrees of alertness, concealment and dispersion. In previous articles I have discussed the poor intellectual abilities and low educational attainment of much of the army’s personnel so it is hardly surprising that the overall standard of junior NCOs was mediocre at best. Once again, the army was expecting too much from its men. Infantry Training promised that platoon and section leaders would be leaders who “…know all about the enemy methods and have trained themselves to expect them and to deal with them”. How this was to be achieved, when the vast majority of them had never been in battle and German methods were hardly ever discussed, was not explained.

Camouflage and Fieldcraft Prepare for Battle 1943

Army Training Film "Camouflage and Fieldcraft - Prepare for Battle" 1943. Unfortunately, the sound quality is very poor.

Fieldcraft

The importance of fieldcraft as a key element of tactical training had been recognised by the army well before the adoption of battle drill. The manual Infantry Training (Training and War) 1937 contained a section that covered training in fieldcraft and, although short, covered most of the principles which would be enshrined in later pamphlets. The content of the Instructor’s Handbook and Infantry Training in respect of fieldcraft was virtually identical. The latter manual defined fieldcraft as “…the use of natural and artificial cover and conditions to help movement and the employment of weapons” and set down principles that should be followed in its teaching: -

Fieldcraft is universal
Fieldcraft is offensive
Observation is paramount in offence
Concealment is paramount in defence
Cover from view is not cover from fire

Camouflage and Fieldcraft Movement 1943

Army Training Film "Camouflage and Fieldcraft - Movement" 1943

The manual then went on to cover a number of topics including movement by day and night, camouflage, the crossing of obstacles, day and night observation, cover from fire, field signals, selecting lines of advance and memorising a route.

The first two days of the typical two-week course at Battle School was devoted to fieldcraft in all its aspects, suggesting that instructors considered it a fundamental skill that trainees had to grasp before battle drill could be taught effectively. Most of the new recruits in the army were town and city dwellers and the War Office was aware that they would possess few of the hunting and stalking skills that were common in men raised in the countryside. A further concern was that the fieldcraft of German infantry was likely to be superior because a much higher proportion of its men were of peasant or rural origin.

We have now covered the major aspects of tactical training in the British and Canadian armies prior to D-Day. A few elements we have not yet considered, such as consolidation and observation training, will be discussed in future articles.

Return to List of Articles