Egypt
Training began in the desert at Khataba, north west of Cairo and was focused on tank operations and integrating the Rhodesian elements into the division. In addition, the lack of manpower had forced the merging of numerous units and much of the training time was spent on marrying up drills between the new composite units. The period of training was finally concluded by a series of training exercises, Exercise Cape Town being the first from 1 to 3 December for the 11th Armoured Brigade (11th Armd Bde) and Exercise Durban from 5 to 7 December for the 12th Motorised Brigade (12th Mot Bde). Training was concluded with Exercise Tussle as a British III Corps operation finishing on 21 January 1944 and on 23 January the division moved to Helwan. By now, the Division had been in Egypt for months due to indecision related to its role.
On 3 March 1944, the Division was instructed to move to Palestine and the advance parties left on 7 March. On 12 March however, this movement order was countermanded and the Division was instructed to move to Italy. One year after arriving in the Middle East, the Division embarked from Alexandria between 14 and 16 April to arrive in Taranto, Italy on 20 and 21 April 1944.
Read more about this topic: 6th Armoured Division (South Africa)
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—Salvador Dali (1904–1989)
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