The 18th Guards Motor Rifle Division was formed originally as 133rd Rifle Division at Novosibirsk or Biysk in 1939. It was redesignated as the 18th Guards Rifle Division in March 1942 with the 51, 53, 58 Guards Rifle Regiments and 52 Guards Artillery Regiment. The division fought in the East Prussian Offensive. The unit became 30th Guards Mechanised Division in 1945 as part of the 11th Guards Army. In 1965 it was renumbered as 18th Guards MRD. It seems to have been stationed in the Kaliningrad enclave with 11th Guards Army before entering Czechoslovakia in 1968, joining the Central Group of Forces.
In 1991 the Division was withdrawn back to Gusev in the Kaliningrad Oblast. The Division is now at cadre strength, as part of the third-line reserves of the Russian Ground Forces. However there is one Russian chat-forum report that the Division has been reorganised as 79th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade (Russian: 79-я отдельная гвардейская мотострелковая бригада). As the 280th Guards MR Regiment was the last reported unit in the area, in 2002, the 79th Brigade may have inherited its awards and honorific names.
Read more about 18th Guards Motor Rifle Division: Structure (1990s)
Famous quotes containing the words guards, motor, rifle and/or division:
“The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The motor idles.
Over the immense upland
the pulse of their blossoming
thunders through us.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Many times man lives and dies
Betweeen his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For in the division of the nations of the whole earth he set a ruler over every people; but Israel is the Lord’s portion: whom, being his firstborn, he nourisheth with discipline, and giving him the light of his love doth not forsake him. Therefore all their works are as the sun before him, and his eyes are continually upon their ways.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 17:17-9.