Instructors

[wainfleet]

I'm curious to know whether instructors took their turn at the front with everyone else, or lived a privileged life at the base. You'd think that PTIs, for example, would have been particularly valuable at the sharp end. Or were they deemed less expendable than the ordinary infantryman, on account of the time and money invested in training them?

[stevem49]

My wife's Grandfather served at the front and won a DCM, he was then moved to Wales as a signal instructor - so yes!

[centurion]

Most instructors originally learnt their business at the sharp end. At least initially there doesn't seem to have been a great deal of training in how to train. Where the weapon was new and original then the manufacturer might provide instruction for the initial users but having someone who had 'done it for real' was deemed important.

[wainfleet]

Yes, but once trained, would they have gone back into the line or stayed at the base instructing? Or were there, as I suspect, both permanent base instructors and instructors serving with infantry battalions?

[Ron Clifton]

Hello wainwright

As far as I know, the purpose of training establishments at the bases was to train soldiers, mainly officers and NCOs, to act as instructors within their units, by what might be called cascade training. This was the practice in most of the pre-war schools such as Hythe.

There were certainly specialist officers for Lewis guns, gas measures and the like at the HQs of battalions. These would serve at the front but would not normally be included when the battalion "went over the top" as their skills would be particularly needed to train replacements for casualties.

A lot of the instructors at Etaples and other camps would have been PB men, no longer physically fit for front-line service. This was one of the reasons that they were so unpopular.

Ron

[roel22]

From the German perspective: my great-grandfather was a gefreiter (private) in the Kaiser Alexander Garde Grenadier Regiment no. 1. When the regiment went to the front in 1914 he stayed behind in Berlin and became an instructor. He must have had a reasonably good life there, until he was sent to Ypres in the spring of 1918. Within a few weeks he was KIA.

Roel

[centurion]

Hello wainwright

As far as I know, the purpose of training establishments at the bases was to train soldiers, mainly officers and NCOs, to act as instructors within their units, by what might be called cascade training. This was the practice in most of the pre-war schools such as Hythe.

There were certainly specialist officers for Lewis guns

But the dedicated OR Lewis gunners were sent to Lewis Gun school rather than be trained within battalion. They might then provide basic training (clearing jams etc) to other soldiers who could act as ad hoc gunners in emergency but they could not produce fully trained Lewis gunners - that was what the school and instructors did. The School provided training in matters such as tactical positioning, indirect fire, fire on the move etc - this could certainly not be done on a cascade down process as special facilities were needed. The same applied to bombing schools and mortar schools.

[jon_armstrong]

Two of the men of the war memorial I'm researching spent time serving as instructors back in the UK. One was an officer and the other an NCO. Both had been wounded in 1st Ypres with the 1st Cheshires - so had very much been at the sharp end - and after recovery got training positions.

The officer later joined the RFC and was KIA in 1917, but the NCO stayed in training roles and seems to have become some sort of examiner. He was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after the war ended.

[tipperary]

You will read of RFC pilots going home quite often to be rested but doing a stint as an instructor before again returning to the front.As others have said those who done it for real new what they were doing.john

[bill24chev]

A next door neighbour of mine ad a eldest brother who was a Serjeant in the 1/5th Loyals. He returned to the UK as an instructor at some time between Autumn 1916 and November 1917. He volunteered to returne to the Battalion in France in time to be KIA/Missing in the German countger attack at Cambrai. So some instructers had experience both before they became instructers and could return to operational units later.