Market Garden To Germany
The Brigade had a minor role in Operation Market Garden and went on to participate in the Ardennes.
Soon thereafter, the 11th Armoured Division pushed forward into the German-occupied Netherlands. In March 1945, it crossed the Rhine River and by the end of the war had advanced to the northeast and captured the German city of Lübeck on 2 May 1945.
As it drove into Germany, the Brigade occupied the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945, pursuant to an 12 April agreement with the retreating Germans to surrender the camp peacefully. When the Brigade entered the camp, they found more than 60,000 emaciated and ill prisoners in desperate need of medical attention. More than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition lay littered around the camp. Units of the Division and its higher formations were detached to oversee the work needed in the camp.
From the end of the war in Europe (8 May 1945) the Division was involved in the occupation of Germany until its disbandment in January 1946.
Read more about this topic: 159th Infantry Brigade (United Kingdom)
Famous quotes containing the words market, garden and/or germany:
“At market and fair, all folks do declare,
There is none like the Boy that sold Broom, green Broom.”
—Unknown. Broom, Green Broom (l. 23–24)
“He had the oaks for heating and for light.
He had a hen, he had a pig in sight.
He had a well, he had the rain to catch.
He had a ten-by-twenty garden patch.
Nor did he lack for common entertainment.
That I assume was what our passing train meant.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny. Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)