The Territorial Battalion, the 4th KSLI, was immediately mobilised on the outbreak of war. It too began with intensive training in Northern Ireland and England as lorry borne infantry of 159 Brigade in the 11th Armoured Division. And it too was destined for campaigning in North West Europe when the attack on “fortress Europe” began.

The Battalion landed in Normandy on “D-Day plus 8”, the 14th June 1944, and was soon thrust into action on the Odon and in Operation Epsom - designed to isolate Caen. It faced severe opposition from elite German SS Divisions in the fighting which followed and then took part in the destruction of the Falaise Pocket.

Crossing the Seine at Vernon, the 4th were part of the rapid allied advance via Amiens into Belgium; they were the first allied troops to enter the vital port of Antwerp, where further heavy fighting was encountered before the city was completely liberated.

From Antwerp the rapid advance continued. In the fighting near Overloon in Holland in October 1944, Sergt George Eardley, who had already won the Military Medal in Normandy in August, was to win the Victoria Cross for his single-handed attack on three German machine-guns positions which were holding up the whole advance.

Like the 2nd Battalion, the 4th spent the winter of 1944 on the Maas and endured its cold and comfortless conditions until the advance was resumed in February 1945. After clearing the Hochwald area, the 4th under their resourceful and popular C.O., Lt. Col. Max Robinson, crossed the Rhine on 28th March, captured Osnabruck and then began a rapid advance into Germany and to the River Elbe - a distance of 125 miles, in which the Battalion was at the forefront of every action.

As they continued their advance through Germany, the end of the war on 9th May found the battalion south of the Kiel canal opposite Lubeck and heading for the Danish frontier.

They were one of the battalions which, under Brigadier 'Jack' Churcher, occupied Flensburg, the seat of the remnant Nazi government under Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. The arrest of Doenitz and his associates was effected by 4-KSLI and the Herefords at the very end of the battalion's war service.