AS FIGHTING tanks roll off the assembly lines in increasing numbers in England, trained crews must be ready to operate them. So a training camp has been set up in a remote region. After the tank crew recruits have passed rigid medical tests, they are admitted to the camp where their further training is conducted by specialists experienced in the handling of tanks of every description. The pupils are instructed in long buildings divided into small classrooms. Each instructor teaches from four to sixteen tank students. In some classrooms staff sergeants explain the mechanism and use of the 7.92 mm. Besa gun and the two-pound Vickers gun which are the principal weapons of attack in modern tank warfare. In other classrooms, gunnery specialists train advanced pupils to become instructors themselves. A short distance from the main building are large sheds divided into sections where tank men are trained to find targets while being subjected to pitching and lurching experienced by crewmen as a tank travels over rough country. Here the pupil sits in a strange steel cage which turns and tosses him, so he experiences all the difficulties of firing from a tank in action. They call this machine “Rypa,” a word derived from the initial letters for rolling, yawing, pitching, and action. In the Rypas, of which there are three types, the recruit learns to make and alter his range quickly with each movement of the tank. The Rypa to which the gunner is first introduced is comparatively harmless. It goes through its gyrations slowly, and slowly the recruit learns to use his gun. During practice, this gun is an air gun which fires pellets at a rotating target. Only after the recruit has reached a satisfactory degree of marksmanship is he passed on to the next Rypa-machine which subjects him to more violent shaking. After some weeks of training, when the potential gunner is good at sharpshooting even from a Rypa Model 2, he enters a Rypa which behaves like a real tank at a cruising speed of between forty and fifty miles per hour. Rypa practice comprises less than half of the recruit’s training. In a building which looks like a film studio, a wide- spread panorama of rolling countryside is painted on tall canvas screens - including hills, swamps, plains, and suburban streets. In the center of the building stands a large cruising tank, with a pupil at its gun. The pupil is expected to identify the targets and then fire quickly. First he finds the range upon the target selected by his instructor. Then in actual firing, he presses the switch of an electric torch mounted on the gun so that the beam of light reveals the quality of his marksmanship. He usually operates his gun while blindfolded, because he often will be unable to see the mechanism in the darkness of a tank in action. After a short time, he learns to do everything by touch. The steering of the tank, too, has to be done in almost complete darkness. Steering a tank is different from steering an automobile. In a tank, there is no steering wheel, only left and right-hand levers and a four-speed gear box with reverse. It requires about six weeks' hard training to pass the test as a perfect tank driver. The tank driver has, instead of a windshield, a small hole about six inches long and two inches deep, either covered with bullet-proof glass or obscured by rotating shutters. But the man at the levers is not wholly dependent on the peephole. Generally his course is determined by what the other members of the crew tell him. The instruction is by no means complete after the courses in gunning and driving have been finished. In a tank every man’s life depends on the collaboration of every other man. Usually there are four men to a tank crew, and every one of them is trained to take over any other man’s job in an emergency. Only after a thorough training of all its members is the tank crew ready for action. Then they leave their Rypas and squeeze themselves through the narrow opening of a real tank which will fire at a target that is not a lighted spot on a painted canvas. In action there is even less of a tank to be seen than during practice. The tank is there all right, but cruising at a speed of fifty miles per hour, it hides behind a screen of smoke from chemical containers thrown from a small, double-barreled mortar.