Camp Ritchie: Eight Week Class Content

Camp Ritchie Eight Week Class Content*

Each of the thirty-one basic Camp Ritchie classes ran over an eight-week period, with the first five weeks focused on "General Instruction" and the last three including specialized training. "General Instruction" covered the following areas:

Terrain Intelligence: 50 Hours

Signal Intelligence: 25 Hours

Staff Duties: 51 Hours

Counterintelligence in Theater of Operation: 21 Hours

Enemy Armies: 42 Hours

Aerial Photo Interpretation: 28 Hours

Military Intelligence Interpreters and Foreign Maps: 28 Hours

Combat and Operations: 27 Hours

Visual Demonstration: Included above.

Order of Battle: Included above.

TOTAL HOURS: 272 Hours

During the final three weeks, while continuing to take "General Instruction," students were enrolled in eighty-two hours of "Specialized Instruction." All students in the first class specialized in the interrogation of German prisoners of war (IPW). Students in the later classes were enrolled in a variety of languages and areas of specialization. The number of students in these specialized fields fluctuated according to the exigencies of the war. 

Instruction concentrated, as a rule, on the following areas, although counterintelligence increasingly became an important focus of the Camp Ritchie curriculum:

Interrogation of Enemy Prisoners of War and Identification and Translation of Documents

Aerial Photo Interpretation

Military Intelligence Interpreters (Allied and neutral)

Terrain Intelligence

Signal Intelligence

Appendix 6 shows the emphases and shifts in specialized instruction for the thirty-one classes.

Finally, the students participated in an eight-day "terrain exercise," which involved the completion of twenty intelligence-related problems. They were also sent on a forty-eight-hour patrol and on night azimuth training.

* As outlined in Charles Y. Banfill, "Brief of Pertinent Facts and Data Concerning the Military Intelligence Training Center, Camp Ritchie, Maryland," June 3, 1944, and reprinted in Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Interrogation World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq, 39-40.

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