JSP tricks to make templating easier?

At work I’ve been tasked with turning a bunch of HTML files into a simple JSP project. It’s really all static, no serverside logic to program. I should mention I’m completely new to Java. JSP files seem to make it easy to work with common includes and variables, much like PHP, but I’d like to know a simple way to get something like template inheritance (Django style) or at least be able to have a base.jsp file containing the header and the footer, so I can insert content later.

Ben Lings seems to offer some hope in his answer here:
JSP template inheritance
Can someone explain how to achieve this?

Given that I don’t have much time I think dynamic routing is a little much, so I’m happy to just to have URLs map directly onto .jsp files, but I’m open to suggestion.

Thanks.

edit: I don’t want to use any external libraries, because it would increase the learning curve for myself and others who work on the project, and the company I work for has been contracted to do this.

Another edit: I’m not sure if JSP tags will be useful because my content doesn’t really have any template variables. What I need is a way to be able to do this:

base.html:

<html><body>
{ content.body }
</body></html>

somepage.html

<wrapper:base.html>
<h1>Welcome</h1>
</wrapper>

with the output being:

<html><body>
<h1>Welcome</h1>
</body></html>

I think this would give me enough versatility to do everything I need. It could be achieved with includes but then I would need a top and a bottom include for each wrapper, which is kind of messy.

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