1st Light Mechanized Division
Open-knowledge reference entry
The 1st Light Mechanized Division (French: 1ère division légère mécanique, 1ère DLM) was a French Army formation during World War II. It was the first of the armoured divisions of the French Cavalry.
Formation
Preparations to create such a unit began in 1931. Slowly the 4th Cavalry Division was mechanised.
Name
In July 1935, the mechanised components, though still not fully equipped, were given a separate identity, while confusingly 4th Cavalry continued to exist, giving the false impression the armoured division was a completely new force. The name of the unit is most often translated as "Light Mechanized Division", but a better translation, both from a linguistic as military point of view, would be "Mechanized Light Division". In French the adjective mécanique qualifies légère, not the other way around. In French military parlance, light troops were those that engaged in scouting and skirmishing, and the distinction traditionally applied to both cavalry and infantry arms. A mechanized light division was therefore one designed for this role but using modern motorized and armored equipment to perform it. Some motorised infantry divisions without tracked vehicles would also be called "light divisions".
Organisation
Another confusion often caused by the category indication is the mistake to assume that such units were "lightly" equipped: in fact most heavy equipment was concentrated into the motorised units which represented the most powerful in the French Army.
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This entry incorporates text from “1st Light Mechanized Division” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.