35134 WWII BELGIAN NURSE WITH WOUNDED BEF SOLDIER, BELGIUM 1940

During World War II, the attitude of the Axis countries, especially Germany, to the civilian population living in the conquered areas of Europe was very different. It can be assumed that the farther west, this policy was less genocidal and less brutal. An example is France, which in 1940 was divided into two parts - occupied by German and Italian troops and the so-called The Vichy state, which retained the appearance of independence and which, moreover, closely collaborated with the Third Reich. In occupied France, the Germans commandeered to power, tried to use the industrial base there in their own war effort, forced the supply of contingents of forced laborers and ruthlessly cracked down on the resistance movement, but they did not pursue the murder and annihilation of the French nation. Other examples include the creation of governments to a greater or lesser extent cooperating with Germany in the Netherlands or Norway. On the other hand, the farther east we went, the more German policy turned out to be more genocidal. An example is the German policy in Poland, where the invader sought to Germanise part of the population, and treated the General Government as a reservoir of free labor. With the introduction of the so-called Generalplan Ost from 1941, the Third Reich assumed that a large part of Polish society would either be murdered or forcibly resettled. The Third Reich carried out a similar genocidal policy in the western territories of the USSR, occupied from 1941. The macabre, common denominator of the German occupation policy in Western and Eastern Europe was the desire to murder the Jewish population living in these areas. The crime went down in history as the Holocaust or Shoah (Hebrew, the Holocaust). Safe and probably underestimated estimates show that during the entire Second World War, about 23.7 million civilians died or were murdered.During World War II, the British Army formed a total of 43 infantry divisions. At the start of the war, the division's staff numbered approximately 13,800 officers and soldiers, while in 1944 this number increased to approximately 18,300 people. This significant change in the number of employees resulted primarily from the increase in various types of support units, and not the increase in the number of infantrymen themselves. In 1944, the British infantry division consisted of three infantry brigades, each with its own headquarters, a staff platoon, 3 infantry battalions, and engineering divisions. It is worth adding that a single infantry battalion had approx. 780 officers and soldiers and had numerous support units (e.g. a mortar platoon or a reconnaissance platoon). The division also included a de facto artillery brigade with five artillery regiments (including one anti-tank and one AA), a battalion of machine guns and mortars, as well as reconnaissance, communication and sapper units. An important element increasing the mobility of the British infantry division was its full motorization. The British infantryman's primary rifle was the Lee Enfield No.1 or No.4 rifle. As machine weapons, among others, Sten submachine guns, Bren manual machine guns and Vickers machine guns were used. The most commonly used anti-tank weapons were the 40 and 57 mm 2- and 6-pounder cannons, and later also the 76-mm 17-pounder cannons. In turn, the main armament of the field artillery was a very successful howitzer Ordnance QF 25-pounder.