I Was Poorly Trained!

You know there wasn’t much training in peace time. We went to Jamaica, there was very little training, none of it very realistic. I would say that my own training was poor, very little of it was hands on, ya I spent a good part of my time telling people how to do things even though I didn’t know how to do them myself. I can remember being posted out to Fort Osborne Barracks during the summer of 1940 and I was teaching recruits how to disassemble and assemble a Bren gun. Well, I learned how to do that and I taught them. We never fired any Bren guns, we just assembled and disassembled them. No, I’m no expert, I led a completely civilian life until the war and never paid much attention to things like that although some of my brother officers were active militia officers. I can only speak for myself, I was badly trained and my impression of many of the troops, not all, was that they weren’t trained at all.