History
In 1938, the 3rd Light Division was formed, consisting of the 67th Panzer Battalion, and the 8th and 9th Mechanized Cavalry Regiments as well as the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment.
The division was sent to participate in the 1939 Invasion of Poland. In the winter of 1939 it was converted to the 8th Panzer Division, losing its two reconnaissance battalions to the 10th Panzer Division, but gained the 10th Panzer Regiment from East Prussian forces. It gained the 8th Rifle Brigade, controlling the 8th Rifle Regiment and the 8th Motorcycle Battalion. The battalion was equipped primarily with Czech tanks.
It was made a part of XLI Motorized Corps for the Battle of France. In the Battles of the Meuse Crossings, the as French forces were initially able to repel German attacks. Eventually, however, the French were forced to retreat in the face of overwhelming attack by German Panzer tanks. The division was involved in the destruction of the French 1st Army and the French 7th Army in May 1940, and remained on the line in France until the country's conquest in June 1940. After a brief service in the Balkans in 1941, it was sent to the Eastern Front in July 1941, where it remained until the end of 1944.
Read more about this topic: 8th Panzer Division (Wehrmacht)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)