Army Group ARMORED DIVISION See United States Army ARMORED INFANTRY American mechanized infantry incorporated into armored divisions In weapons they varied little from regular rifle divisions The key difference was that they kept up with tanks by riding in half-tracks or other mechanized vehicles that formed part of their division’s organic transport The Wehrmacht term for comparable troops was Panzergrenadiers ARMY In most militaries, a large ground combat formation comprising a single HQ that controlled two or more corps, dedicated artillery, plus attached nondivisional combat and support troops Soviet armies replaced the corps echelon for the first two years of the war on the Eastern Front They were thus smaller and far more numerous than Wehrmacht armies German armies shrank in actual size and combat power due to protracted attrition, but the Wehrmacht did not expand beyond 16 Army HQs designated in the east, including Panzerarmee HQs Japanese armies comprised two or more reinforced divisions and thus were corps-sized in the wartime parlance of the Western Allies ARMY AIR FORCES (AAF) See United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) ARMY DETACHMENT See Armeeabteilung; operational group ARMY GROUND FORCES (AGF) See United States Army ARMY GROUP A massive command comprising several subordinate armies and anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million men An army group was the largest formation of ground forces under one commander used by any military in the war, or indeed in the history of war The Red Army used Direction to designate army groups from 1941 to 1942, but thereafter shifted nomenclature to Front During the last campaign of the war, the Manchurian offensive operation against Japan in August 1945, the Red Army reverted to use of “Direction.” There were 11 Wehrmacht army groups, or Heeresgruppen, by 1944, commanding 26 armies: 18 of infantry, so-called Panzerarmee, airborne army, and mountain army After three years of fighting on the Eastern Front, every Heeresgruppe and German army was but a shadow of its former size and combat power by 1944 Meanwhile, opposing Soviet Fronts and whole groups of Fronts were larger and vastly more powerful than in 1941 The Western Allies also deployed some of the most powerful army groups seen in the history of war from 1944 to 1945 The 77