Page 48 - Wish Stream 2023 CREST

Exercise
NORMANDY
SCHOLAR
OCdt Warner
After five days of digging trenches in prepara- tion to face the Donovian 3rd Shock Army in a nuclear war (some things never change), Gaza Company was rewarded with our much anticipated trip to France on Ex Normandy Scholar in early July. The purpose of the trip was to enable OCdts to apply the Combat Estimate to real world scenarios, putting ourselves in the shoes of our forebears of the Normandy Campaign (1944). Cru- cially, it was also a pleasant escape from the con- fines of the Military Academy and an escape to life outside of the wire.
It was Gaza Company’s good luck that a battalion of French OCdts from Saint-Cyr, with a German platoon in tow, were also in Normandy conducting a battlefield study tour that week. A call for linguists was made, and a motley crew of varying ability - from French law degrees down to GCSE Spanish
- was dispatched unsupervised to spend the day with the French Army.
The day was a great opportunity to learn from our sometime NATO allies, exchanging vocabulary (‘rouillé/rusty was quickly learnt) and noting simi- larities and differences. We were surprised to learn that the French Ocdts learnt the same ‘7 Questions’ format for their Combat Estimate, and startled that they had no concept of a ‘reserve’ during a pla- toon attack. The French OCdts were also naturally wary of their German attachments (“they’re always eating”), and, luckily for us, few on the exchange
46 SANDHURST