The 40th (The King's) Royal Tank Regiment (40 RTR) was an armoured regiment of the British Army from 1938 until 1956. It was part of the Royal Tank Regiment, itself part of the Royal Armoured Corps.
It was originally formed by converting the 7th Battalion of The King's (Liverpool) Regiment, a Territorial Army infantry battalion that recruited mainly in the Bootle area, to a tank unit.
Equipped with Vickers Valentine tanks, the regiment served with the 23rd Armoured Brigade in North Africa. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel J.L. Finigan it fought at El Alamein and acquired the nickname "Monty's Foxhounds" during the long pursuit of the Afrika Korps and the Italian Army across Egypt and Libya and into Tunisia. It later served in the Italian Campaign and then in Greece during the Greek Civil War.
The Regiment was placed in suspended animation in mid-1946, and then reconstituted at Liverpool as an armoured regiment of the Territorial Army in 1947. In recognition of its services in North Africa, Vickers Engineering presented Colonel Finigan with a silver model of the Valentine which still serves as a centrepiece when former officers of the Regiment and its successor dine formally together. In 1956, the Regiment amalgamated with the 41st (Oldham) Royal Tank Regiment to form the 40th/41st Royal Tank Regiment.
Famous quotes containing the words royal and/or regiment:
“An Englishman, methinks,—not to speak of other European nations,—habitually regards himself merely as a constituent part of the English nation; he is a member of the royal regiment of Englishmen, and is proud of his company, as he has reason to be proud of it. But an American—one who has made tolerable use of his opportunities—cares, comparatively, little about such things, and is advantageously nearer to the primitive and the ultimate condition of man in these respects.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We had an inspection today of the brigade. The Twenty-third was pronounced the crack regiment in appearance, ... [but] I could see only six to ten in a company of the old men. They all smiled as I rode by. But as I passed away I couldn’t help dropping a few natural tears. I felt as I did when I saw them mustered in at Camp Chase.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)