The 1st Airborne Division, including the 1st Airlanding Brigade, left England for North Africa in June 1943. The brigade now comprised only two battalions, the 1st Border Regiment and the 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment, with Brigadier Philip "Pip" Hicks, in command, Brigadier Hopkinson having been promoted to major-general and given command of the 1st Airborne Division from Major-General Browning. The 1st Ulster Rifles and the 2nd Ox and Bucks remained in England to help create the 6th Airlanding Brigade. Once they arrived in the theatre the brigade was based in the Oran area on the north-western Mediterranean coast of Algeria. Now part of the British Eighth Army, training for the Allied invasion of Sicily, code-named Operation Husky, started in earnest.