Second World War
The Division served during the Second World War and was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), together with the 3rd Infantry Division forming the British II Corps. After the 1940 Battle of France and the evacuation at Dunkirk, it spent the next two years in the United Kingdom on Invasion duties and training for its next deployment which would be as part of the British First Army and Operation Torch, the landings on the North West African coast.
During the Tunisia Campaign it was involved in Operation Vulcan the final ground attack against Axis forces in North Africa.
After the Axis defeat in Africa it was next involved in the Italian Campaign, and fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino.
In November 1944 it was dispatched to Greece to provide assistance during the Greek Civil War.
Read more about this topic: 4th Infantry Division (United Kingdom)
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)