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24 THE COMMAND IS FORWARD
3. Training Films. When I enlisted in France in the First World War as a buck private in the Second Division's field artillery, a sergeant stood over our gun squad and taught us how to operate the French 75's. Today the best artillery instructor in the American Army steps out on the screen and demonstrates visually to a thousand men at a time how a cannon's breechblock is dismounted and re-assembled, how the recoil mechanism works and how the gun is sighted, loaded, fired, and cared for.
This personal story illustrates the important advance which the training film has made possible in this war not only in schooling military and naval personnel but in teaching several million factory workers how to manufacture war equipment with speed and precision. Use of films in military and industrial training has reduced the time required by forty per cent.
More important still, in the early days of our national defense program when enough Garand rifles, anti-aircraft guns, and modern tanks for training purposes simply did not exist, a hundred motion picture prints of one gun or tank enabled a training program to get under way.
This use of the motion picture as a visual aid in military and industrial training unquestionably presages a widespread use of films after the war in high schools and colleges and also in equipping large numbers of maimed veterans to find a socially useful and economically selfsustaining place in our national life. Able leaders of the motion picture industry and farsighted educators are already working cooperatively upon a peacetime program