British Forces

Quis Separabit ? Gas men of the Irish Guards ...

H.M.Government/Imperial War Museum (collection).

Soldiers of the Irish Guards Regiment, armed with Thompson submachine guns and wearing gas masks, advance through smoke in the course of an exercise in Surrey, July 1940. The appearance has a curious WW1 flavour about it; hard to imagine that real advances were very often conducted in this way in WW2 (or, in reality, in WW1, either I suppose). Even at this early date, the Irish Guards had already been seriously "in the wars", with 1 Batt. suffering heavy ship-board losses from air attack during an attempted shipping to Norway, and 2 Batt. being heavily engaged against German forces in the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France - like many other regular British Army units - covering the retreat of the general Allied army to the evacuation ports, prior to their own evacuation to England. Like 1 Batt., 2 Batt. suffered heavy losses in this operation. Best regards, JR.