ASSAULT TRAINING CENTER
In 1943, an Assault Training Center was established at Braunton, Devonshire, England to prepare American units for the coming invasion. The first division to go through was the 29th Infantry.
In 2008, the 29th Infantry Division Living History organization opened its Assault Training Center at a site near Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia - an expanse of woods, fields, and hedgerows bordering the North Anna River and easily accessible from I-95.
Members of the 29th surveyed the farm and built a challenging program of instruction including basic infantry skills, weapons qualification, communications, tactical movement and patrolling, and special training in ranger/commando skills that the 29th Ranger Battalion endured in 1943. Trainees also learn to drive a jeep.
The ATC course spans five weekends. The first four weekends are for basic and advanced skills training, the last is a final exam: a challenging night combat patrol.
Each weekend begins with warm up exercises and a run through the obstacle course, plus special challenges like two hours of basic unarmed combat training.
The instructors and tactical NCOs are experienced reenactors and active duty and retired Army veterans with years of training time, as well as combat experience from Viet Nam to Afghanistan. Training topics and methods are drawn directly from period field manuals and other historical sources.
The class is organized as a provisional platoon with squads composed of two four-man teams. The teams stay together throughout training, and trainees rotate as team and squad leaders to get hard leader experience.
Each training day is composed of "evolutions" - training topics through which the class rotates by team or squad. A one-hour training evolution might be basic knots and rope work, pre-inspection of the jeep, individual camouflage, or tactical movement.
Evolutions are interconnected. The basic ropes class is soon applied to practice in knotted rope climb, hasty rappelling, and various ways of crossing obstacles with ropes (using the North Anna River as the obstacle). Intense land navigation classes in map and compass will soon be applied to patrol skills. When the class spends two hours on planning and briefing a patrol order, it's because the class will soon be patrolling.
Every trainee will familiarize by live fire with the basic weapons of the rifle company - M1 rifle, Thompson sub-machinegun, BAR, and Browning light machine gun; later, teams will learn to call for and adjust supporting fires using M3 binoculars, map, and pyrotechnics down range.
Teams carry extra equipment, often as much as 20 pounds over basic pack load per man - demo charges, extra ammunition, Hawkins mines, radios, smoke and simulated fragmentation grenades, and other baggage that has to be distributed for an even load and easy access. This and other challenges are designed to test leader skills, endurance, and ingenuity.
At the end of the ATC course there is a new kind of living historian, one with a keener first-person understanding of the challenges of training and soldiering for real.
