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:
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Come Vitus, are we men, or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
—Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff)