GUERRILLA TROOPS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21992, 18 June 1941, Page 7

GUERRILLA TROOPS

Special Training Tough and Self-reliant Their Place in War “For all the sway of mechanisation there is still a corner in British regiments for small bodies of ranging guerrillas who would find their places in the pages of Conrad or Dumas, men who are masters of close combat and. the tommy-gun, who can cpver 6Q miles on their feet and live where they halt,” states “The Times" special correspondent with the Army. “They are experts in explosives and the arts of stalking and fleldcraft. There- is the hard, clean-cut look about them, the physical and mental alertness, that you see ip Rugby internationals. I have spent a few eventful days on one of their courses, and had not far to look for a d'Artagnan or a Porthps“An astonishing amount of detail and sheer hard work has to be mastered before these men are ready for any special service which the occasion might produce. The time is not yet when tanks and motors, the robots of war as it were, shall have entirely suppressed the individual spirit of adventure. I found much in common between them and the French groupes francs which this time last Sear were still skirmishing on the order of Lorraine, recking little of the imminent blitzkrieg; it was a form of warfare at which our new guerrillas would have excelled and, by their ability to live on the country, they would probably have struck deeper blows.

“But they are far more versatile than that. They are the skirmishing troops of their units. With all the advantages of automatic arms and, ta certain conditions, field wireless for communications, much of their activity is still full of the lore than BadenPowell passed on to the Scout movement.

Tuition from Shanghai “The short history of the British guerrillas goes back to the Norwegian campaign when so-called independent companies were raised from within their formations with the Idea of getting ta behind the advancing Germans and harassing them. It did not quite happen that way, but many of the men I have met fought in Norway with telling effect. Normally the units would have no transport, and an extremely high standard of physique and intelligence is required for travelling long distances across country. Besides passing all the elementary tests of military training the new recruit has immediately to march 27 miles, with one halt, carrying full equipment. Our superman, ta short, must first and foremost be a trained soldier, whatever his athletic prowess “We were far removed from the bartack square in a little grey town where I watched a good deal of the guerrillas’ everyday training. Some of the officers and men had put up a record march of more than 66 miles ta 24 hours in full kit, a remarkable performance, though the object of their training is not so much the achievements of outstanding feats of endurance as the maintenance of a steady average' that will allow the troops to onerate well within themselves. Their training strongly resembles any athletic training, which alms at progressing in a series of curves rather than along a constant line liable to end in staleness. The men on this course received expert tuition in unarmed combat from former members of the Shanghai police force. They can make the silencing of a sentry an art in itself, and with the Colt automatic they practise the ‘instinctive’ method of firing from the hip with bent knees and elbow and a central stance, a method that may soon be universal. Up the Mountainside “I watched squad strive against squad ta Khud races up and down a towering hillside, and the team record for the course—it was the time of the last man home that mattered—was lowered in something under 10 minutes, an astonishing figure for a climb like that, since, in addition to weapons and equipment, one man on each side carried a Bren tripod on his back. One’s memory went back to just such a day in the French Alps and the remark of a blue-clad Alrrine chasseur that none of the forbidding mountainsides around was unassailable to well-trained troops. “Later on we saw more of the purpose of all this intensive climbing which clearly has its importance in defence or attack. High above country fragrant with spring we watched the swift approach of two packets of men. The stillness was broken by a rattle of automatic fire directed against figure targets, and the echoes had hardly reverberated round the hills before the men were racing up the mountainside with an extraordinary sureness of foot. The little scheme involved further firing with rifles, Brens, and tommy-guns, the last levelled from the hip in much the same way as a boxer stands on guard. The whole movement was so rapid arid neat that It was hard to realise that anyone had been there at all until one examined the riddled targets—and they did not completely satisfy the commanding officer. Training in Fleldcraft To be out with a unit on a night exercise, the sky red with the glow of distant fires and the twinkle of bursting A.A. shells, was not the least of our adventures. For the rest I went out to the moors to join a detachment engaged on a cadre course of fleldcraft. All through the winter men sent from different regiments to these course have been going ta turn into the wilds for several days, taking only what food they could carry on toot and learning afresh a self-sufficiency that has passed from the ken of most people In a mossy glade, a stream hard by such as Puck might have known, they had set up their little bivouacs, simply fashioned out of ground-sheets and dry bracken or a half-felled fir tree Fires smouldered with hardly a whi.se of smoke to betray their presence, and a baronet who has lived a life of risk in several parts of the world showed how a sheep can be killed and cut up with nothing but a bowle knife. Stalking, map-reading, finding objectives in the dark, and experiments ta camouflage that will not be found in the text-books are among the subjects taught, and even in this remote place you never see a soldier who does not carry his rifle wherever he goes. Proud and tough as they are, perhaps the most impressive thing about the guerrillas is their eagerness to learn something new.