late 1937 and throughout 1938, German demands for the annexation of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia led to an international crisis. To avoid war, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in September and brokered the Munich Agreement. The agreement averted a war and allowed Germany to annexe the Sudetenland. Although Chamberlain had intended the agreement to lead to further peaceful resolution of issues, relations between both countries soon deteriorated. On 15 March 1939, Germany breached the terms of the agreement by invading and occupying the remnants of the Czech state. On 29 March, British Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha announced plans to increase the part-time Territorial Army (TA) from 130,000 to 340,000 men and double the number of TA divisions. The plan was for existing TA divisions, referred to as the first-line, to recruit over their allowed complements (aided by an increase in pay for Territorials, the removal of restrictions on promotion which had hindered recruiting, construction of better-quality barracks and an increase in supper rations) and then form a new division, known as the second-line, from cadres around which the divisions could be expanded. This process was dubbed "duplicating". The 45th Division was to be a second-line unit, a duplicate of the first-line 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division. It was envisioned that the duplicating process and recruiting the required numbers of men would take no more than six months. Some TA divisions had made little progress by the time the Second World War began; others were able to complete this work within a matter of weeks. In April, limited conscription was introduced. This resulted in 34,500 twenty-year-old men being conscripted into the regular army, initially to be trained for six months before deployment to the forming second-line units. History Formation and home defence On 28 August 1939, the embryo of the division was formed. Major-General Frederick Witts, formally a staff officer in the British Indian Army's Western Command with experience commanding an infantry brigade, was assigned as the General Officer Commanding (GOC). It was not until 7 September that the 45th Infantry Division became active. At that point, it took control of the 134th, 135th, and 136th Infantry Brigades, in addition to supporting divisional units, which had previously been administered by the 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division. Due to the lack of official guidance, the newly formed units were at liberty to choose numbers, styles,