Shoulder flash Bedfs / Herts

The regiment was expanded for the duration of the Second World War:

The 5th Battalion, a 1st Line Territorial Army unit, formed a 2nd Line duplicate, the 6th Battalion, in 1939 as another European conflict seemed inevitable and, as a result, the Territorial Army was doubled in size and each unit formed a duplicate.
The 7th, 2/7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Battalions were all raised during the war, during the huge expansion of the British Army, and were used mainly to supply the other battalions of the regiment with trained infantrymen or for home defence.
Only the 1st, 2nd and 5th Battalions saw active service:

The 1st Battalion was stationed in the Middle East with 14th Infantry Brigade, part of the 6th Division which later renumbered to the 70th Division. They moved to British India in 1942, after the Japanese entered the war, and subsequently served as Chindits in the Burma Campaign of 1944 where they, like many other Chindit units, suffered heavy casualties mainly from disease. The 1st Battalion saw no further part in the war.
The 2nd Battalion formed part of the 10th Infantry Brigade, 4th Infantry Division. They were part of the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to France in September 1939, and evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. They spent two years on home defence in the UK expecting a German invasion of England which never arrived. It took part later in the North African Campaign in 1941–42, the Tunisia Campaign in 1942–1943, the Italian Campaign in 1944 and the liberation of Greece in 1944–1945.
The 5th Battalion was attached to the 55th Infantry Brigade, part of the 18th (East Anglian) Infantry Division formed part of the reinforcements dispatched to Malaya in early 1942. It surrendered to the Imperial Japanese Army with the Fall of Singapore and the men spent the rest of the war as POWs.[4]
At the end of the war in 1945, the 1st Battalion was in British India and the 2nd in Greece. The 1st Battalion moved to Libya in 1947 and then to Greece, where civil war had broken out. The 2nd Battalion moved from Greece to Egypt in 1946, returning to the United Kingdom in 1947