On Tuesday and Wednesday, I shared with the readers of this blog descriptions of a training exercise that was conducted in 1942. Today I am going to share the infomation on the conclusion of that exercise. Soon after completing that exercise, the men in the Reserve Officers’ Class attended the ceremony that made them commissioned officers.
Here is the description about one part of their training session:
“All morning men tramp and fight against zooming planes and hostile scout cars spitting blanks and raking the roads with imaginary bullets. The sand bag grenades soon are expended as baseball pitches land them in open scout cars for direct hits. Some student officers even let fly with oranges and dirt clods. A grinning machine gunner is hit with a wet sandwich. A road barricade almost tips one of the scout cars as the driver skids and plunges to one side to avoid a heap of logs and tree stumps placed on the road.
” Then the dusty and tiring hike back to the boats in a rear guard action, fighting all the way against aviation and scout cars that have been blown off the road a hundred times. Wading into the water and out to the boats, the men return to the barracks and the knowledge that their ten weeks as student officers is over and that in weeks, months and years to come they will have an opportunity to work further “problems…”
The descriptions of that past training exerise are meant to add to the recruits’ familarity with Marine history. During their first four weeks in training, the recruits must study that history, along with their study of Marine customs and courtesies. Tomorrow I will write a bit more about the study of military history.
