Thanks Ron. I'm trying to find if the Royal Marines Infantry 6 weeks initial training followed by a period at the RM Infantry Battle School, was the same in duration and content as an infantry Bn in the Army.
Kellard The PTWs performed two roles. Firstly they taught basic military skills such as how use weapons and how to march in unison. Secondly and just as importantly they used various tests to assess what skills you possessed in order to decide which branch of the services you should be sent to. In my case it resulted in my becoming a Wireless Operator, initially in the RA and later in the RAC Ron
Thanks Ron, If anyone has info on the infantry course (what they now call the Combat Infantry Course) I'd appreciate it.
In the second half of the war, all recruits - like Ron - underwent 6 weeks of primary training and selection. If selected for the infantry, the recruits would go to an Infantry Training Centre to do their 'proper' infantry arm training for 10 weeks, though this would increase a bit if they became specialists, e.g. anti-tank gunners, signallers, etc. I'm afraid I haven't got anything on the syllabus of the basic infantry course. The 6 weeks primary plus 10 weeks infantry is a total of 16 weeks which tallies with another snippet I've seen that says that the 'old' infantry regimental depots ran a 4 month course for recruits. You'd expect the RM would need a similar sort of timescale to train their recruits to a similar level, but they may not have been carrying out the sorting/selection exercise that the Army did, though I suppose they had other niches to fill with gunners, landing craft crews etc.
Kellard Found this (Revolution and Reform: Problems with British Infantry Training in the Second World War) whilst looking for something else, it has some useful, perhaps, references at the bottom of the page that you might be able to use/have copied TD Edited to add If you browse down the right hand side there are several references to various types of infantyr training and lessons learnt - Browse records of other archives | The National Archives