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One of the most important operational changes implemented by the German army between the campaigns in Poland in and that in France in , was the concentration of armored units into large forces of their own, led by leaders experienced in weapons and with capabilities of movement and attack not deployed until then. Thus, on May , , the German Panzer divisions that crossed the borders in a western direction did so organized into four army corps: XVI (Hoepner, rd and th), XV (Hoth, th and th), XXXXI (Reinhardt, th and th) and XIX (Guderian, st, nd and th). Only one is missing from the list, the th Panzer Division . th Panzer Division conquest of Holland PzKpfw IV , tank armed with a short mm cannon whose function was to support the infantry. Photographed in Holland at some point during the campaign.
Created on January , – just five months before the campaign – with diverse units, the origin of the th Panzer Division was in the th Leichte (light) Division , which in turn descended from a unit of chivalry. In fact, its two motorized infantry regiments were classified in the cavalry arm until March , , and the division did not have an armored regiment until February of the same year, when the rd was organized with the B2B Email List Plana Major of the Lehr Panzer Regiment (for training), the rd Battalion of the th Panzer Regiment (which became st of the rd) and the rd Panzer Abteilung (for the nd battalion). Instead of joining the others, the th Panzer Division, which as we have seen had been recently formed and which had few tanks compared to its sisters, joined the th Infantry Army to become the point of launches a very particular mission: to conquer Holland . The story of the conquest of Holland has a lot to do with the Limburg, a ledge of land that extends south parallel to the Meuse River, between Germany and Belgium, to the city of Maastricht.
If the Germans intended to invade Belgium to surround the French defenses, their logistics could not be strangled in the German-Belgian border strip between Aachen and Luxembourg, almost all of it in the Ardennes, but they needed more space, part of the Dutch territory had to be crossed. , and they simply refused to allow Hitler to cross their territory to invade another sovereign nation. th Panzer Division conquest of Holland A German motorized column waits, on the Dutch border, for the engineers to finish blowing up the obstacles that prevent passage. Once the decision was made, the German armed forces were aware that the Dutch plan was to concentrate their defenses on the so-called Vesting Holland, the territory west of Utrecht where the country's most important cities were located. , defended to the south by the channels of the Rhine, Meuse and Waal rivers, and to the east by wide flood plains, and to achieve this they decided to implement a plan very similar to Montgomery's controversial Operation Market-Garden of : take Holland from the air through an airborne corridor through which.
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