643rd Tank Destroyer Battalion (attached 22 to 26 December 1944) 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion 703rd Tank Destroyer Battalion (attached 25 June 1944 to 17 December 1944; 2 January 1945 to 9 May 1945) 803rd Tank Destroyer Battalion (attached 25 June 1944 to 2 July 1944) 413th AAA Gun Battalion (attached 7 July 1944 to 16 July 1944) 486th AAA Auto-Weapons Battalion (attached 25 June 1944 to 9 May 1945) Training timeline The 3rd Armored was activated on 15 April 1941 at Camp Beauregard, LA. In June 1941, it moved to Camp Polk, Louisiana (now Fort Polk). On 9 March 1942, it came under the jurisdiction of the Army Ground Forces and was assigned to the II Armored Corps. In July 1942 it was transferred to Camp Young, CA and from August to October 1942, took part in maneuvers at the Desert Training Center there. It left Camp Young in January 1943 and moved to the Indiantown Gap Military Reservation in Pennsylvania. The division arrived in the European Theatre on 15 September 1943, conducting pre-invasion training near Liverpool and Bristol in Great Britain. It remained in Somerset, England until 24 June 1944, when it departed to partake in the Normandy operations. Combat service The first elements of the 3rd Armored saw combat on 29 June in France, with the division as a whole beginning combat operations on 9 July 1944. During this time, it was under the command of VII Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps First Army, but was later reassigned to the XIX Corps under the Ninth Army and the for the rest of the war. The division was the "spearhead" of the First Army through the Normandy Campaign, taking part in a number of engagements, most notably in the Battle of Saint-Lô, where it suffered significant casualties. After facing heavy fighting in the hedgerows and developing methods to overcome the vast thickets of brush and earth that constrained its mobility, the unit broke out at Marigny alongside the 1st Infantry Division and swung south to Mayenne. 3rd AD engineers and maintenance crews solved the problem of the Norman hedgerows by taking the large I-Beam invasion barriers from the beaches at Normandy and welding them on the fronts of Sherman tanks as large crossing rams. They would then hit the hedgerows at high speed, bursting through them without exposing the vulnerable underbellies of the tanks. The division was next ordered