2e DB's motorised infantry regiment. Free French armoured units serving with the Eighth Army became the 501e Régiment de chars de combat (501e RCC). The artillery and the other two armoured regiments of 2e DB, the 12e Régiment de Cuirassiers (12e RC) and the (12e RCA), were drawn from the Vichy Armée d'Afrique. Perhaps the most unusual unit in the division was the Régiment Blindé de Fusiliers-Marins (RBFM), sailors who served as a tank destroyer regiment. Leclerc had to weld the various units, some of whom had recently been fighting against the Allies, into a team. This was no easy task. When two men from the 501e RCC upset a former Vichy officer by singing a disrespectful song about Général d'armée Henri Giraud, resulting in a fight, he told the officer concerned that respect had to be earned. In April 1944, 2e DB was shipped to Britain to participate in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northern France. Leclerc and his staff travelled by air in a converted B-24 Liberator bomber. The division moved to training areas in Yorkshire, where Leclerc established his headquarters on the estate of Henry Frederick Hotham, 7th Baron Hotham, at Dalton Hall, Beverley. Training was conducted in concert with Maczek's 1st Polish Armoured Division. On 1 August 1944, 2e DB landed at Utah Beach in Normandy as part of Major General Wade Haislip's United States XV Corps of Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.'s United States Third Army. Both of these American generals spoke French fluently. Later that month, 2e DB participated in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, which inflicted a major defeat on the German Army. Like most new division commanders, Leclerc also made errors, in his case by allowing 2e DB to use roads that had been earmarked for American units, thereby causing traffic jams and holding up the American advance. The next assignment for 2e DB, and the one that it had been brought from Africa for, was the liberation of Paris. Allied troops initially avoided the historic city, moving around it to minimise the danger of destruction if the Germans sought to defend it. When Parisians rose against the Germans, de Gaulle and Leclerc persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower to help. Leclerc's men had to fight their way into Paris, and when they got there they found German infantry and tanks still holding parts of the city. The German commander,