Army Ranger Combat Training School at Fort Shafter in Honolulu circa 1943

Sequences from a school run by Milton Francois D'Eliscu (November 10, 1895 – October 15, 1972). After World War II broke out, d’Eliscu, by then in his late 40s, rejoined the military. In early 1942 he was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland, to train elite Army Rangers. U.S. Army leaders were sufficiently impressed with d’Eliscu’s fighting and fitness program that in early 1943 they sent him back to Hawaii to set up another school to prepare Rangers for jungle warfare in the brutal island campaign in the Pacific.

D’Eliscu set up a secret training site in the mountains that became known as the Mayhem Bowl, replete with ravines and dense brush. According to a United Press account that concealed the school’s exact location, a three-mile course there had trainees running up and down hillsides, navigating water hazards, scaling a wall, and running up a metal slide that was greased to make the going more difficult. For a section of the course, trainees had to crawl a half mile with no part of their bodies more than 24 inches off the ground, an effort that typically took an hour.

A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser described the training course as “sort of a mountain goat’s nightmare, covered with the three feet of mud and water.” To make the battlefield frighteningly realistic, d’Eliscu used actual flamethrowers and tear gas as hazards. “Fire and gas are a little unorthodox,” he explained. “But then, so is war.”

“My job was to make worms and turtles out of the men,” he later told a newspaper interviewer.

The training in Hawaii was even more grueling than that at Fort Meade. Among other ordeals, d’Eliscu put trainees through a particularly brutal exercise that required teams of men to lift and carry a 1,000-pound log up a steep hill multiple times—and then proceed to hand-to-hand fighting drills. He also subjected them to life-threatening dangers, planting fields with explosives and using live ammunition, flamethrowers, and bare bayonets in training, to instill in them what he called “sane appreciation of a knife and a bullet.”

The regimen was so hazardous that by March 1943 trainees in the program had already suffered 1,600 injuries. But d’Eliscu didn’t seem concerned. “Better to have a few men hurt now,” he said, “than to have them killed needlessly later.”

D’Eliscu even went through the workouts alongside his trainees. “I went through every test with the men,” he said, “never asking them to do a thing I wouldn’t or couldn’t do.”

1:36 #shredded #goals