Photo By Lori Stewart | BG Charles Y. Banfill in 1951 while deputy chief of staff for intelligence at Far East...... read more read more
by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
19 JUNE 1942
On 19 June 1942, Col. Charles Y. Banfill presided over a small ceremony officially activating the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Banfill would lead the Army’s first centralized military intelligence school until January 1945, putting his personal stamp on World War II intelligence training.
By the time Colonel Banfill was tapped as commandant of the new training center, he had been in the U.S. Army for twenty-five of his forty-five years. Born in Florida in 1897, he enlisted in the Louisiana National Guard in 1916 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps Reserves in 1918. He then began his career in military aeronautics, spending most of the next eighteen years as a flight instructor for the Army Air Corps. By 1935, he was leading photo-mapping efforts in the Operations Section of the office of the Chief of the Air Corps.
Colonel Banfill started 1941 as chief of the Geographic Section of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, but when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December that year, he was leading the Plans and Training Branch. Within months, Banfill was dual hatted as chief of the Military Intelligence Service’s Training Group and commandant of the soon to be activated MITC.
In April 1942, Colonel Banfill arrived at Camp Ritchie. The 638-acre post was nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Cascade, Maryland, just south of the Pennsylvania border. The former property of the Buena Vista Ice Company had been in use by the military since 1926, when the Maryland National Guard began using it as a summer camp. Once it was chosen as the site of the MITC, new construction turned tent slabs into barracks, officer quarters, mess halls, offices, and classrooms for 6,000 staff and students. Meanwhile, Banfill prepared the school for operations.
At noon on 19 June 1942, Colonel Banfill and his initial complement of five staff officers conducted a short activation ceremony outside the commandant’s headquarters. After the flag was raised, Banfill provided some opening remarks and the camp adjutant read the activation order. Thus, the MITC was open for business, although the first class did not begin until 27 July.
Throughout his thirty-one months as commandant, Banfill was a stickler for realism in training. Before the school opened, he negotiated a lease with the National Park Service to use the northern portion of the Catoctin recreational area for field exercises. There, the intelligence students practiced cross-country day and night patrols, armor and artillery movements using plywood mockups, construction of gun emplacements and slit trenches, and camouflage and booby trap installations. He created a Composite Troop Unit, whose personnel acted as role players for myriad exercises, dramatized playlets, and demonstrations. Additionally, whenever possible, instructors incorporated actual captured documents, maps, German prisoners of war, and G-2 reports from the theaters and brought in guest instructors from Allied countries.
The school commandant had several notable idiosyncrasies, but his concern was to ready his students for their overseas duties. He monitored every student’s progress and personally shifted them to intelligence specialties according to their abilities or sent them to officer candidate school. He urged his many foreign-born students to apply for U.S. citizenship and to Anglicize their names before deploying. Upon his orders, a mock cemetery was built to remind students of the importance of vigilance. He also flew random “bombing runs” over the school in his personal Piper Cub airplane, dropping bags of flour on unsuspecting students who did not take cover quickly enough.
Banfill, who pinned on his first star in February 1944, remained commandant of the MITC until January 1945. At that time, he departed for Europe to become director of intelligence for the Eighth Air Force through the end of the war. In 1947, Banfill transferred to the newly established U.S. Air Force and completed his thirty-two years of military service as the service’s director of intelligence on 31 July 1953.
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| Date Taken: | 06.19.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 06.20.2023 10:49 |
| Story ID: | 447524 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 85 |
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