Already after the first experiences of fighting in North Africa at the turn of 1942-1943, the US Army changed the position of the American armored division. From 1943, the full-time armored division consisted of three armored battalions, three mechanized infantry battalions, three artillery battalions and many support units. The exception was the 2nd and 3rd Panzer Divisions, which retained the structure with two armored regiments, three armored battalions each. For this reason, they were often called heavy armored divisions. The armored battalion of other divisions than the 2nd and 3rd consisted of three armored companies - three of medium tanks (M4 Sherman) and one of light tanks (M3 / M5 Stuart). In turn, the mechanized infantry battalion consisted of three infantry companies, a service company and a staff sub-unit. The American armored division also had, like the infantry division, a very strong artillery component, consisting of self-propelled artillery - most often M7 Priest howitzers, of which there were 54 full-time units in the division. In total, the American armored division consisted of, among others: approx. 11,000 men, approx. 250 tanks and approx. 500 M2 / M3 armored personnel carriers.
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….