The battalion had arrived in Normandy just a week after the initial landings. Although in the end the 8th Rifle Brigade, with the support of tanks, managed to get as far as Bras and Hubert-Folie and to capture the two villages, the 11th Armoured Division lost some 300 to 400 tanks. Armoured half-tracks were still a thing of the future.
Getting through the minefields was just the first of the problems however as the mass of different units still found themselves under attack and the hoped for breakout took longer to materialise than they expected. Movement orders arrived, and on the 4th and 5th road and rail convoys left for their embarkation ports. It was time for ‘the great swan’. By 22 August for the 11th Armoured Division and the 8th Rifle Brigade it was time for rest and refit, at L’Aigle, some 40 miles from the river Seine. My question is that when married both wear the insignia of the rifle brigade. In the end enemy tanks got to within a few miles of Dinant, where some fighting took place between German panzers and infantry and tanks of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and the 8th Rifle Brigade. The first Bren carriers were delivered to the battalion by mid 1940 but still the Mortar Platoon had no mortars and the Anti-Aircraft Platoon did not have the right mountings for using their guns.

The motivation for starting this website comes from a 20 year old friendship with an 8th Rifle Brigade veteran, the subsequent editing and publication of his autobiography (see below) and the large amount of information gathered for this. He spoke very highly of Vic Turner. truck. Dicky Poole, Tom Pearson, & Victor. In September also the first course in waterproofing vehicles took place, an essential preparation for the subsequent seaborne landings in Normandy. Eventually, out of a nominal strength of some 856 officers and men, their total losses during the whole campaign amounted to 163 killed and (at least) 489 wounded. The ‘Snipe’ action was a display of outstanding bravery, and its account forms a glittering page in the history of the immortal Rifle Brigade. Then, on 13 March the battalion moved to the area of Diest and Louvain in Belgium, to rejoin the 29th Armoured brigade, with their brand new Comet tanks. From the second week of August the break-out of the Normandy bridgehead was a fact. A strange assortment of aeroplanes bombed the area and caused casualties. We were not yet dug in, there were no slit trenches and we were set in the middle of the most juicy target since the rising of the curtain on the desert war. We were in the eye of the storm.

8th Rifle Brigade with the 23rd Hussars got a far as Presles and Le Bas Perrier, and a patrol even got to Chenedolle. My wife’s parents John Reed and Bettina May (nee Shepperd) met at Repton camp following John returning from the western desert via Palestine and India. Companies were in scattered and inconvenient billets in the City area, so administration was difficult and training impossible. German losses in tank were smaller, but much more difficult to replace. In November 1941 the division was inspected by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at Duncombe Park and by the end of that year the battalion was stationed at Scarborough. Even then the battalion’s troubles were not yet over.

Then, on 2 April, at Tecklenburg resistance stiffened.


Ron Wise. It seems the 8th Rifle Brigade was quite unique in this respect, as usually such histories were only produced at battalion or divisional level.

They were to remain in this situation for the next few days.