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OFFICER CADET TRAINING
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ELEVEN
XVII. INFANTRY CO-OPERATION WITH SUPPORTING ARMS
AND OTHER SERVICES
Those who conducted these lessons were surely eternal optimists, but in 1966/67, the fact
that they were included in the syllabus for officer cadet training demonstrated the confidence
that pervaded the corridors of MID. Apart from the 25-pounder gun-howitzer battery that
was inherited from the Singapore Volunteer Artillery (20 PDF Artillery) and the squadron
of Volunteer Field Engineers (30 PDF Engineers), supporting arms and services were a
very scarce commodity in the Singapore Military Forces.
7
But, the objective of the lessons
was for the cadets to note that the Infantry did not and could not fight alone in the modern
battlefield, and active duty during the Confrontation had provided the personnel of the
Volunteer and regular battalions with some practical experiences of co-operation in a hot-
war of sorts. Most of the instruction was by way of lectures at the company level, but for
lessons involving Artillery support which occupied the bulk of the programme, there was a
demonstration of the guns and a sand-table exercise, followed by a lecture on the siting and
deployment of Artillery and the battle procedure of a battery. Based as these lessons were on
towed guns, they were obsolete at the time. The Artillery support of choice for the SAF was
to be for a very long time man-portable mortars because they were seen as simple, effective
and compatible with Infantry mobility in closed terrain. The idea was that mortars would
move with the Infantry and go into crash action to support Infantry manoeuvres with the
flexibility accorded by high trajectory in jungle terrain and against targets on reverse slopes
of hill features.
There was also a self-conscious attempt by the then senior-most officer in the Engineers,
CPT George Mitchell, who migrated to Australia after leaving the service as Lieutenant-
Colonel, to cover co-operation with Field Engineers but it was a theoretical lecture on the
‘importance of engineering in warfare’ and a rather wishful attempt at defining the structure
of engineering units. As it turned out, Officer Cadet Gurcharan Singh, who had a degree in
civil engineering, was promptly hauled off into the Engineers on being commissioned and
within some 36 months, took over as Chief Engineer Officer. In fact, he was sent on a Field
Engineer course to Fort Belvoir in the US together with Officer Cadet Chng Teow Hua and
both missed the Commissioning Parade and the Commissioning Ceremony. Teow Hua in
turn became Chief Engineer Officer after Gurucharan. The Engineers received high priority
and soon developed beyond all recognition with a wide range of capabilities of which the
most visible for some time to come was bridging.