Second World War
The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 saw 9th Field Company RE in France once again, still as part of the 4th Division. It took part in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. In May 1942, it was reorganised as 9 Field Company RE (Airborne). 9 Field Company RE (Airborne) became the engineer support for the newly formed 1st Air Landing Brigade, with about one third of the company being trained in the use of parachutes while the rest were trained as gliderborne troops. The unit's first airborne operation was in Norway in 1942 when they were sent to destroy a heavy water plant. However, both gliders crash landed, and the few survivors were executed by the Gestapo. In 1943 9 Field Company RE (Airborne) also took part in further airborne operations in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
Read more about this topic: 9 Parachute Squadron RE
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“Oh, one world at a time!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)