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Famed Tac Mountain Training Center Closes (article) |
Mountain
Training Center
(Source: "The USFA Sentinel, February 13, 1953")
This article appeared in the USFA command newspaper and describes the first training class at the MTC.
The importance of the training center lies in teaching Tac Cmd troops not merely the procedures for survival under winter hazards but the techniques involved in defending themselves and the areas entrusted to their care under these adverse conditions of heavy snow and ice. Confirmation of the significance accorded this mountain training is the personal imetus given the MTC by Lt Gen George P. Hays, USFA CG and a veteran Alpine fighter himself.
To furnish a site for this training, Tac Cmd ordered the construction of a semi-permanent installation near Saalfelen, 2,240 feet up in the Austrian Alps. The building of the Mountain Training Center, a large-scale project in itself, was described in a photo feature in the SENTINEL of Jan. 23.
To this mountain tent-city there came at the beginning of January representatives of every tactical unit in USFA, men selected by their companies to receive the winter warfare training and then pass it on to others in their own outfits.
No sooner had the students arrived than they embarked on a rigorous program of instruction. The first step was to learn to move on skis - to climb, to turn, to move cross-country and downhill. In the first week, they also began their study of cold weather care of equipmenmt, of prevention and treatment of cold weather injuries.
Instructors in these specialized skills are 16 Austrian outdoorsmen, selected by the Army as the best-qualified teachers available. To work the soldier-students into condition to take this instruction the MTC gives a steady schedule of physical training.
From the second week, the trainees wore a rucksack on their backs at all times. From the second to the sixth week, the weight of the pack was built up from five to 45 pounds. During the second week, the curriculum also took up such subjects as cold weather cooking, woodcraft and avalanche training.
During the final four weeks of the school, emphasis shifted gradually from basic to advanced ski instruction to the tactical application of the new mountaineer skills. After the trainees had been taught how to build cold weather shelters, they were sent out on a series of overnight ski marches and bivouacs. This phase of the training climaxed with a three-day field problem held last week.
During these three days the trainees were called upon to employ all the skills learned in the previous five weeks: cross-country skiing under tactical conditions, traversing of steep and bumpy slopes, moving through deep snow on skis or snowshoes, and always, always keeping body and weapon ready for action.
To head of the Mountain Training Center, USFA imported Lt Col John H. Hay, an officer whose ski history goes back to his boyhood years in Billings, Montana. Col Hay was a platoon leader in the first mountain brigade in the U.S. Army, organized at Mt. Rainier Washington in 1941. Later he became a battalion commander in the 10th Division, which Gen Hays commanded in the last war.
Famed
Tac Mountain Training Center Closes
(Source: USFA Sentinel, June 24, 1955)
(Source: USFA Sentinel, June 24, 1955)
Included in the summer program during the three and a half years the center operated were rock climbing, mountain marches, forestry, woodcraft, cooking, evacuation and weather forecasting.