The summer of 1940 is the worst moment in British military history since Waterloo and possibly since Agincourt. In June, the British Expeditionary Force has been driven off the continent at Dunkirk. 338,000 men evacuated, but almost all their equipment left on the beach. France has collapsed.
Germany holds the Atlantic coast from Norway to the Spanish border. The Luftwaffe is fighting for control of British airspace. Invasion is considered imminent. Along the southern coast of England, men are digging positions and stringing barbed wire and trying to work out how to defend the country with rifles and a few anti-tank guns against the mechanized army that just rolled through France in 6 weeks.
In the Gloucestershire village of Chipping Campden, a man is drilling his neighbors. He’s 55 years old, compact and energetic with the bearing of someone accustomed to command. He knows exactly why the British Expeditionary Force was driven into the sea. He knows what the German panzer divisions did to the Allied armies and how they did it because the doctrine they used, the massed armored breakthrough, the fast penetrating thrust into the enemy’s rear, the attack against command and supply rather than against the front line, the coordination
of armor and aircraft and infantry at speed, is in large part his doctrine. He wrote it. He trained it. He argued for it in papers and exercises and lectures for the better part of two decades. He was sacked for it. His name is Major General Percy Hobart and he is currently a lance corporal in the Home Guard.
He’s defending Chipping Campden with a rifle and an armband. The same man who created the formation that will become the Desert Rats, who trained more effective armored divisions than any other British officer of the war, who wrote the doctrine the Germans used to beat Britain. That man is here in a village in the Cotswolds doing his duty as a lance corporal because the British Army decided he was too difficult, too abrasive, too radical, and too original to be trusted with a command in the most dangerous war the country has ever fought. It is one of the most
extraordinary institutional failures in British military history. It is also not the end of the story. Because what happens next, how Hobart gets back in, what he builds when he does, what his inventions do to the German defenses on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, is one of the decisive stories of the Second World War.
This is the story of Percy Hobart. It is a story about what happens when an army decides that being right is less important than being agreeable. And about what happens when a prime minister disagrees. He’s born on June 14th, 1885, in the Himalayan hill station of Nainital in British India. His father, Robert, is an official of the Indian Civil Service.
His mother, Jeanetta, is from County Tyrone in Ireland, from a family called Stanley. Hence Percy’s full name, Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart. The India of 1885 is at its fullest imperial extension, a subcontinent administered by a relatively small British elite with complete confidence in its own right to be there.
And Hobart grows up in this world of imperial certainty. What makes the young Hobart unusual is that he is genuinely curious, genuinely cultured. He studies history and literature and church architecture with the same seriousness he brings to mathematics and engineering. He draws and paints. He is, even as a boy, someone whose mind moves faster than his immediate surroundings usually require.
He’s educated first at Temple Grove School, then at Clifton College in Bristol, a public school with a strong tradition of producing military officers. And from there, he goes to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. The shop trains the technical arms, the gunners and engineers, as opposed to the gentleman officers of Sandhurst.
It is a revealing choice. He is commissioned into the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1904 and goes to India, joining the First Bengal Sappers and Miners. The Royal Engineers are the thinking arm of the British Army. For Hobart, they are a formative environment. He is posted to India, takes his duties seriously, and begins to acquire a reputation as a serious professional.
Not an easy colleague, but someone whose technical judgment is sound. Then, the world explodes. On August 4th, 1914, Britain declares war on Germany, and Hobart’s career moves from the peacetime army into the reality that will define his generation. He is 29 years old. He will spend the next 4 years learning what modern industrial war actually looks like.
His Great War is divided between two theaters. In 1915, he is on the Western Front, in the charnel landscape of Belgium and northern France, where a generation of European men are being fed into the grinding machinery of trench warfare. He earns the Military Cross and is mentioned in dispatches.
Then, he is sent to Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, where a British Indian force is fighting the Ottomans in the campaign around the Tigris River. Mesopotamia is where he finds out what he is capable of under extreme pressure. He serves on the staff of an Indian infantry brigade during the operations around Kut al Amara, where a British garrison of roughly 13,000 men is besieged.
The relief attempts fail. On April 29th, 1916, the garrison surrenders, one of the most catastrophic British defeats of the war. For his conduct in these operations, Hobart earns the Distinguished Service Order. He’s also wounded and briefly captured by the Turks. He comes back. He keeps working.
He’s the kind of man who returns from being wounded and captured and immediately looks for the next task. Under General Stanley Maude, he helps in the meticulous staff work behind the successful advance to Baghdad in March 1917. In Maude, he recognizes something. A commander who combines intellectual rigor with the patience to prepare thoroughly.
The contrast with the impulsive, poorly coordinated earlier operations is not lost on him. He takes a lesson that will shape everything he does afterward. He also serves in Palestine in the final phase of the war, where General Allenby uses tanks and cavalry in a combined arms operation at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 that shatters the Ottoman Army.
The tanks are still primitive, slow, unreliable, scorching hot for their crews, but the potential Hobart sees in them stays with him. A war-winning breakthrough. Mass, speed, surprise. The things that trench warfare had destroyed the possibility of, suddenly visible again in a different form. By the time the war ends, he is 33 years old, holding the DSO and the MC, mentioned in dispatches nine times across two theaters.
He attends the Staff College at Camberley in 1920. He is thinking. In 1923, Percy Hobart does something that looks, from the outside, like professional suicide. He volunteers to transfer from the Royal Engineers, a prestigious, established corps with a clear career path, to the Royal Tank Corps.
The RTC is new, controversial, and widely regarded by the cavalry-minded British military establishment as something between a temporary expedient and an unfortunate necessity. Horses are how gentleman officers fight. Tanks are machines, oily and unreliable, crewed by mechanics rather than riders. The cavalry regiments are being pushed to mechanize, and they are doing so with ill-concealed disdain.
Hobart takes one look at this attitude and transfers anyway. He has been reading. The two men who have shaped his thinking most directly are Basil Liddell Hart, a military journalist and theorist, and Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, an eccentric but brilliant tank officer who developed the theory of the armored breakthrough as a war-winning strategy.
Together, they have constructed an argument Hobart finds completely persuasive. The machine gun and barbed wire make frontal infantry assault obsolete. The answer is the tank. Massed, fast-moving, operated independently rather than in support of infantry, thrusting deep into the enemy’s rear to destroy his command, communication, and supply.
Not a 100 yd a day, miles. This is the idea Hobart takes into the Royal Tank Corps and begins to practice. He takes command of the 2nd Battalion Royal Tank Corps in 1931. He becomes Brigadier commanding the 1st Tank Brigade in 1934, the first permanent armored brigade in the British Army, and Inspector of the Royal Tank Corps.
These are the years when Hobart forges his doctrine in the field against the resistance of an establishment that thinks he’s going too far too fast. He insists on radio communication inside and between tanks. The military radio of the early 1930s is bulky, and unreliable, and expensive, and the established view is that signals belong to the dedicated signals corps, not in fighting vehicles. Hobart disagrees.
A tank without radio is a tank that can only receive orders when stationary, which means it fulfills none of the functions of an armored fighting vehicle. He gets the radios. He insists on night training. The cavalry tradition holds that battle happens in daylight when gentlemen can see what they are doing.
Hobart trains his tankers at night because night movement eliminates the enemy’s ability to observe and track you, and a commander who can only operate between sunrise and sunset is handing half the clock to the other side. He develops the concept of the all-arms battle. Tanks, motorized infantry, and artillery working together in a coordinated plan rather than infantry trudging behind the tanks and losing contact when the armor moves at speed.
He envisages armored formations operating as independent strategic instruments, ranging far ahead of the main army, disrupting supply lines and headquarters rather than reducing every enemy position they encounter. His philosophy, as he expressed it in characteristic Hobart style, “Why piddle about making porridge with artillery and then send men to drown themselves in it for 100 yd of no man’s land? Tanks mean advances of miles at a time, not yards.
” He’s also not shy about his view of institutional mediocrity. “No man is any good who has no enemies.” He has many enemies. In Germany, meanwhile, a young armored warfare theorist named Heinz Guderian is reading Hobart’s published papers. He arranges for them to be translated at his own expense so he can follow every development.
After a pre-war German exercise where the parallels between the two men’s thinking became unmistakable, Guderian reportedly offers a champagne toast to Hobart. “The British ideas about armored warfare are becoming German practice while remaining British theory.” Hobart’s personal connection to the war’s other dominant British commander is worth understanding.
In 1927, his sister, Betty, marries Bernard Montgomery. They are a devoted couple, Betty warm and sociable, the human complement to Montgomery’s intensity. In 1937, Betty dies, developing septicemia from an infected insect bite on a Devon beach. It is a death so random and so rapid that it shocks everyone who knew her.
Montgomery never fully recovers. He becomes more rigid, more disciplined, more remote. And Hobart has lost his sister and gained a brother-in-law whose career will become, in the fullness of time, inseparable from his own. In 1938, Hobart is sent to Egypt. The assignment is to create and train a modern armored formation in the desert, the Mobile Force, which will eventually become the 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats.
It is a chance to put 20 years of theory into practice at scale. The reception he receives is a preview of what is coming. The Commander-in-Chief in Egypt, Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Gordon-Finlayson, greets him with a sentence that would be remarkable in almost any professional context. “I don’t know what you’ve come here for, and I don’t want you anyway.
” Working with obsolescent equipment, no cooperation, and constant friction, Hobart forges the formation with the same combination of exactness and intensity he brings to everything. He works the desert like a laboratory, developing techniques of armored navigation, water supply, and maintenance that allow tanks operators a coherent force across hundreds of miles of terrain with no roads, no landmarks, and temperatures that destroy men and machines alike.
General Richard O’Connor, who will lead the Desert Rats in their great victories of 1940 and 1941, calls Hobart’s formation “the best trained division I have ever seen.” Six months after Hobart is removed from command, that division destroys an Italian army 10 times its size at the Battle of Beda Fomm. But by then, Hobart is gone.
Gordon Finlayson’s enmity is persistent. He files a damning fitness report. When General Archibald Wavell takes over as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, he inherits the feud and the file. In November 1939, Jumbo Wilson, Hobart’s contemporary, now commanding in Egypt, writes to Wavell that there is no confidence in his ability to command the armored division and requests a replacement.
The charges include over-centralization and a doctrine that rests on the invincibility of the tank to the exclusion of the employment of other arms. This charge is, by the best available evidence, simply false. Hobart’s written doctrine and practical training consistently emphasize the coordination of tanks, motorized infantry, artillery, and air power.
But the charge serves a purpose. It frames Hobart not as a visionary being misunderstood, but as an extremist being corrected. Wavell, who writes in his own correspondence that he hopes Hobart’s great knowledge and experience can be used somewhere, Nevertheless, acts on the adverse report. There is also a social dimension the official record tends to understate.
In 1928, Hobart married Dorothea Field, a woman he loved who was also the former wife of a fellow officer. In the officer class of the 1920s and 1930s, this was not simply a personal matter, but a social transgression. It contributed to the reservoir of hostility that his professional abrasiveness had already been filling.
When Hobart leaves Egypt, the men of the mobile division line the roads to watch him go. They cheer. He drives through their lines and does not look back. He returns to England in 1940 to find his retirement confirmed and the war underway. Germany invades France and the low countries in May. The British Expeditionary Force is driven to Dunkirk.
The German Panzer divisions, using precisely the doctrine Hobart had spent 20 years developing, applied by generals who studied his papers with the seriousness the British did not apply to them, advance across France in 6 weeks. Hobart joins the local defense volunteers, the organization that becomes the Home Guard, as a lance corporal.
He’s assigned to the defense of Chipping Campden. He drills his neighbors. He places them in defensive positions. He’s driven to his duties by a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service in a small car. The man who wrote the playbook for Blitzkrieg is defending a Cotswold village. One of his colleagues from before the war, encountering him in this period, describes the sight as almost unbearable.
Not because of any self-pity on Hobart’s part, but because the waste of it is so nakedly obvious. Here is a man the German army has studied and used, reduced to drilling civilians with armbands while the country burns. He does his duty. He does not complain. He’s promoted to deputy area organizer. On August 11th, 1940, Basil Liddell Hart publishes an article in the Sunday Pictorial.
The headline is, “We have wasted brains.” The article names names. It identifies specific senior officers whose talents have been squandered by the military establishment’s preference for the agreeable over the able. At its center is Percy Hobart, the man who created the formation now winning desert battles without him, who developed the doctrine the enemy is now using against Britain, who is currently a lance corporal in the Home Guard.
Churchill reads the article. He has known Hobart since the mid-1930s, when Hobart used to come to Chartwell and talk to the then out of office politician about armored warfare during Churchill’s years in the political wilderness. Churchill has followed Hobart’s career with interest and mounting frustration. The article crystallizes something he has been thinking for months.
The War Office produces a dossier of reasons why Hobart cannot be brought back. It lists his abrasiveness, the adverse reports from Egypt, his age, his health. It is a document designed to confirm a decision already made, rather than to genuinely assess the situation. Churchill is unimpressed.
On October 19th, 1940, he writes a minute that is one of the most remarkable defenses of the unconventional officer in the history of the British Army. I was very pleased last week when you told me you proposed to give an armored division to General Hobart. I think very highly of this officer, and I am not at all impressed by the prejudices against him in certain quarters.
Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view. We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their career. This is a time to try men of force and vision, and not to be confined exclusively to those who are judged thoroughly safe by conventional standards.
Men of force and vision, not sound, not well-liked, force and vision. When the military establishment tries again in September 1942 to remove Hobart on grounds of age and health. He’s now 57. Churchill intervenes a second time. “I have been shocked at the persecution to which he has been subjected. The high commands of the army are not a club.
It is my duty to make sure that exceptionally able men, even though not popular with their military contemporaries, are not prevented from giving their services to the crown.” These two minutes are the emotional center of Hobart’s story. They are also statements of principle about the relationship between institutional comfort and institutional effectiveness that go beyond any single career.
Hobart is recalled at his previous rank of major general. He’s given the 11th armored division, a new formation to be raised and trained from scratch in Yorkshire. He chooses its emblem from his own coat of arms, a charging black bull. The 11th becomes the black bull division. And under Hobart’s trained successor, Major General Pip Roberts, it will become arguably the finest British armored division of the entire Northwest Europe campaign.
But before the 11th armored goes to war, something happens on the French coast that changes the entire shape of what is coming. August 19th, 1942, the port of Dieppe on the Normandy coast. Nearly 5,000 Canadians storm the beaches in the largest operation against the Axis conducted from Britain since Dunkirk.
Designed to test German defenses and demonstrate to Stalin that the Western allies are capable of offensive action. In 9 hours, 907 Canadian soldiers are killed. 2,460 are wounded. 1,946 are taken prisoner. Of the nearly 5,000 Canadians who embark, fewer than 2,300 return to Britain. The 27 tanks of the Calgary regiment that make it ashore bog down in the shingle beach.
The Royal Canadian engineers trying to deal with beach obstacles without armored protection are cut down in the open. The lesson is specific and terrible. You cannot send infantry and ordinary tanks onto a defended beach and expect them to survive the first few hundred yards. The beach itself is a killing ground.
To get men ashore and keep them moving, you need vehicles that deal with the beach’s specific problems, mines, obstacles, concrete bunkers, soft ground, anti-tank ditches. You need tanks that can swim, tanks that can clear mines, tanks that can blow up bunkers, tanks that can lay their own roads and bridge their own gaps.
You need, in short, an entirely new category of armored vehicle that does not currently exist. The officer chosen to create it is Percy Hobart. In March 1943, the 79th Armoured Division, forming as a conventional division, about to be disbanded for lack of resources, is redesignated as a specialist formation. General Alan Brooke calls Hobart to his office and proposes the reassignment.
Hobart, characteristically, is suspicious. He wants a guarantee that the 79th will be a fighting formation at the spearhead of operations, not a backwater experimental unit. Brooke gives the assurance. Hobart accepts. He sets up headquarters at Hursley Hall in Suffolk and begins the work that will, in 14 months, produce the most innovative and effective collection of specialist armored vehicles any army has ever assembled.
He calls them his funnies. The name acknowledges that these machines look strange, that they do things tanks are not supposed to do. Hobart wears it with satisfaction. He has spent his career doing things he was told tanks couldn’t do. He has a design philosophy that is relentlessly practical. Every device begins with the same question.
What is going to kill the men who go ashore on this beach, and what machine can prevent it? He studies the RAF reconnaissance photographs of the Norman coastline. He reads the geological surveys. He analyzes Dieppe in exhaustive detail. He works out the problem set systematically and then he engineers the solutions.
Begin with the problem, then work forward to the solution. The first problem is the water itself. The D-Day plan calls for armored support to be present on the beaches from the very first moments of the assault, giving the infantry covering fire while they are most exposed. But landing craft cannot simply drive onto a beach and unload tanks.
The water is too deep close to shore and the craft will be under fire long before they can safely drop their ramps. The tanks need to cross the water under their own power. They need to swim. The solution is the DD tank, Duplex Drive. The DD uses a standard Sherman tank as its base. A collapsible waterproof canvas screen is fitted around the hull.
When raised and locked in position, the screen gives the tank enough buoyancy to float. Twin propellers driven by the tank’s own engine push it through the water at a few knots. When the tank grounds on the beach and the crew drops the screen, it becomes an ordinary fighting tank with its 75 mm gun ready to support the infantry. The design comes from Hungarian-born engineer Nicholas Straussler.
Hobart’s teams develop and refine it. The DD tank looks preposterous, a Sherman in a canvas bathing costume churning through the sea. It also works in calm water up to roughly a foot of wave height. Hobart tests it obsessively at Fritton Lake in Suffolk and in open water off the Norfolk coast, documenting precisely what sea conditions the vehicle can handle and what conditions will sink it.
He documents everything because the difference between the right sea state and the wrong one will, one day, be the difference between men living and men drowning. The second problem is mines. The German army has seeded the approaches to every potential landing beach with anti-tank mines. A tank driving up from the waterline crosses a mine beach at the cost of a track within the first 100 yd.
The infantry funneled behind it walks into lanes pre-registered for fire. The beach becomes a killing ground, not despite the tanks, but because of them. The solution is the Crab, a Sherman fitted with a rotating drum mounted forward of the vehicle, from which heavy metal chains hang. When the drum spins, the chains beat the ground ahead of the tank, detonating mines before the tracks reach them.
The Crab flails its way up the beach at about 1 and 1/2 mph, clearing a lane approximately 9 ft wide, wide enough for following infantry and vehicles. The Crab retains its main gun and can engage targets as an ordinary tank when not flailing. The chains break and wear under the constant hammering, and replacement sets are carried.
In the dust and smoke of a beach assault, the Crabs will cut lanes through minefields that no infantry unit could have navigated without catastrophic losses. The third problem is concrete. The Atlantic Wall is built of it. The bunkers are thick-walled, low-profile, positioned to cover the beaches with interlocking fields of fire.
A Sherman 75-mm gun cannot reliably penetrate reinforced concrete at point-blank range. The men inside the bunkers will keep firing until someone forces them to stop. The solution is the AVRE, the Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers. The AVRE is a Churchill tank, slow but heavily armored, whose main gun has been replaced by a Petard Spigot Mortar.
The Petard fires a 40-lb demolition charge the crews call the flying dustbin on a short, steep trajectory directly against concrete fortifications. It does not need to penetrate the concrete. It needs to collapse the entrance, destroy the gun slit, or detonate the interior. At the short ranges of a beach assault, the Petard can deal with any bunker the Germans have built.
The AVRE is also the base for a family of engineering attachments. It can carry the fascine, a large bundle of wooden poles that drops into an anti-tank ditch to allow vehicles to cross. The small box girder gives it a 30-ft assault bridge that can span a gap in seconds. The bobbin attachment carries a reel of reinforced canvas matting that unrolls ahead of the tank to create a road surface over soft sand or blue clay, essential on sections of the Norman beach where the tidal zone will swallow a wheeled vehicle. The fourth problem is
fire. Some defensive positions cannot be dealt with by direct fire or demolition charges because their occupants are in tunnels, deep in placements, or positions with no clear line of sight for a gun. The only way to force them out is to fill the space with something that follows every contour. The solution is the Crocodile.
Another Churchill tank, this one retaining its main gun but replacing its hull machine gun with a flamethrower connected by armored pipe to a two-wheeled trailer carrying 400 gallons of fuel. The Crocodile projects a stream of burning fuel over 120 yards against a defensive position that can shelter from bullets and resist artillery.
It is the closest thing the Allied arsenal has to an unanswerable weapon. German defenders who see a Crocodile approaching tend to surrender. Those who do not tend not to survive the next few seconds. There are more. The Ark, a turretless tank that drives against a seawall and deploys ramps from its own hull so other tanks can drive up and over it as a mobile bridge.
The Bullshorn plow, which digs mines out of the ground rather than detonating them. The CDL, the Canal Defense Light, a modified tank turret housing an enormously powerful carbon arc searchlight that can illuminate a night battlefield and blind defenders while letting the attackers see. The Buffalo, an amphibious troop carrier that can cross not just the initial beach but rivers, flooded fields, coastal waterways, anywhere the campaign requires movement through water.
Hobart does not just design these vehicles, he designs the formations and tactics that will deploy them. He works out how many crabs per assault lane, how far behind the DD tanks, how the crocodiles should be held in reserve until the initial consolidation is complete. He trains the men who will use them to standards he personally inspects.
Every officer who will land on D-Day knows exactly what his vehicle does and what every other vehicle does and how they are supposed to work together. Then there is the politics of alliance. Montgomery, Hobart’s brother-in-law, now commanding 21st Army Group, is fully converted to the Funnies. He insists that the Americans be offered a share and arranges demonstrations.
Eisenhower attends. He is impressed, particularly by the DD tank and the Crab. He supports adoption of the Funnies by American forces and leaves the detailed decision to the commander of the American First Army. That commander is Lieutenant General Omar Bradley. Bradley watches the demonstrations. He is not unimpressed.
But introducing Churchill-based vehicles into the American logistical system means training new crews and establishing a separate spare parts chain for a British tank type that the American Army uses nowhere else. The production lines are already stretched. Time before the invasion is short. Bradley requests the DD tanks and some armored bulldozers.
He declines the Churchill-based AVREs and crocodiles. It is in the judgment of many historians and of Eisenhower himself one of the most consequential decisions of the Normandy campaign. June 6th, 1944. Five beaches, 156,000 Allied troops. The largest amphibious operation in the history of warfare. At Utah Beach, the westernmost of the five, the American 4th Infantry Division lands south of its intended sector by navigational error.
Against lighter defenses, they lose around 200 men. It is the most successful American landing of the day. At Omaha Beach, 5 mi east, the story is different in every way. The 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions are assaulting a A beach backed by steep bluffs in front of a German defending division that is better than intelligence suggested.
The preliminary bombing has missed almost entirely. The aircraft releasing too far inland for fear of hitting the landing craft. The naval gunfire has been heavy but has not destroyed the concrete positions on the bluffs. The beach at high tide is narrower and more exposed than the models showed. Then the DD tanks fail.
The DD Sherman is designed to operate in seas up to roughly a foot of wave height. Off Omaha Beach in the early morning of June 6th, the waves are considerably higher. The commanders of the 741st Tank Battalion launch their DD tanks from their landing craft roughly 5,000 yd offshore because that is what the doctrine says. The great majority of their tanks sink almost immediately in the rough water.
Their crews drown in the English Channel. Two tanks reach the beach. The 743rd Tank Battalion, whose commanders look at the same sea state and make a different decision, lands its tanks directly onto the beach. Their tanks survive. They provide covering fire but they are too few. By the end of D-Day, American casualties at Omaha number approximately 2,400, by far the highest of any of the five beaches.
The beach is taken but at a cost that echoes through history. On the British beaches, Gold, Juno, and Sword, the funnies go to work. At Sword, 21 of 25 DD tanks in the first wave reach the beach. Behind them come the crabs beating lanes through the minefields and columns of churned earth and detonated explosions.
The AVREs follow. Their petards cracking the bunkers that naval gunfire has not reached. Their fascines dropping into anti-tank ditches. Where a seawall blocks the route inland, an ARK drives against it and deploys its ramps. Where soft ground threatens to swallow vehicles, bobbins unroll their matting carpets. It is not clean or easy.
Men die on these beaches, too. Gold sees around a thousand casualties, Sword around 1,300, Juno over a thousand. The Atlantic Wall is real, and the men who defend it are real, and war is war. But, the comparison with Omaha is telling. The British and Canadian beaches, assaulted by forces of comparable size against defenses of comparable strength, suffered dramatically fewer casualties.
The difference is not primarily the soldiers. The American infantrymen at Omaha are among the finest in the world. The difference is what accompanies them onto the sand. Eisenhower writes in his post-campaign assessment, “Apart from the factor of tactical surprise, the comparatively light casualties which we sustained on all the beaches except Omaha, were in large measure due to the success of the novel mechanical contrivances which we employed, and to the staggering moral and material effect of the mass of armor
landed in the leading waves of the assault. It is doubtful if the assault forces could have firmly established themselves without the assistance of these weapons.” A serious historical channel should say what the record also says. The Omaha disaster cannot be explained solely by the absence of Hobart’s funnies.
The DD tanks the Americans used sank not because of any vehicle design flaw, but because their commanders launched them in sea conditions beyond the vehicle’s limits. The terrain at Omaha, the steep bluffs, the narrow beach at high tide, the particular shape of the German positions, may have reduced the usefulness of the British pattern funnies in ways that are difficult to assess.
Bradley’s decision was driven by genuinely logistical constraints, not simply obtuseness. What is beyond serious dispute is Eisenhower’s own assessment. On the beaches where the funnies were used in strength, they worked. They cleared the minefields, they broke the bunkers, they got men across the sand, they saved lives.
The 79th Armored Division does not rest after D-Day. It is the only British division in northwest Europe that fights as dispersed sub units. Its regiments and squadrons parceled out across the entire 21st Army Group, attached wherever specialist armor is needed. When the port of Le Havre needs to be taken in September 1944, it is the 79th’s Crocodiles and AVREs that crack the fortifications.
When the Scheldt Estuary needs to be cleared to open the port of Antwerp, it is the 79th’s Buffaloes that ferry troops across flooded polder country that ordinary vehicles cannot cross. In March 1945, the 79th does the thing that brings its story to a kind of culmination. Operation Plunder, the crossing of the Rhine.
The Rhine is the last great natural barrier before Germany’s industrial heartland, a broad, fast-moving river defended by what remains of the German army. On the night of March the 23rd to 24th, 1945, the 79th’s Buffalo regiments go into the water. Over the next 72 hours, they make more than 3,800 crossings, carrying the Highland Division, the 3rd Canadian Division, the 43rd Wessex Division, and the 15th Scottish Division across the river under fire.
They lose 38 men and nine Buffaloes. The price is low because the preparation is good and the crews are trained and the vehicles are the right vehicles for the job. On March 26th, a Buffalo crosses the Rhine carrying Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Brooke, General Montgomery, and Major General Percy Hobart. Churchill reaches the far bank, addresses the Buffalo crews, “Splendid job of work.
” And then, in a gesture he later describes in his memoirs with considerable satisfaction, urinates into the Rhine. It is a symbolic act. He has wanted to do it for years. By the end of the war in Europe, the 79th has grown to over 21,000 men and 1,500 tracked vehicles. It has fought from Normandy to the Elbe. It is disbanded on August 20th, 1945.
Hobart retires from the army in 1946 with a KBE. The United States awards him the Legion of Merit. He becomes Lieutenant Governor of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Pensioners. He dies on February 19th, 1957 in Surrey at the age of 71. He has been in the same war a lance corporal and a major general.
He has been sacked twice and recalled twice. He has trained three of the finest armored formations Britain produced, the 7th, the 11th, and the 79th. No other officer of the war can say the same. Percy Hobart’s story is usually told as the story of a difficult man who was vindicated by events. That is true, but it is not the most important thing about it.
The most important thing is what the story tells us about the relationship between institutions and the people who challenge them. Hobart was right. He was right about armored warfare in the 1920s when the cavalry establishment thought he was a nuisance. He was right about deep penetrating radio coordinated tank formations in the 1930s when his superiors in Egypt found him impossible.
The Germans, studying his papers more carefully than the British army read them, used his ideas to defeat Britain in France. The man who was sacked for being too radical had been insufficiently radical. He had merely described what was coming. Then, given a specific and unusual task in the last phase of the war, not to fight in the conventional sense, but to invent, to look at a defended beach and work out what machines were needed to cross it.
He did it with the same combination of systematic analysis and creative engineering he had brought to everything else. The vehicles his division built are not museum pieces. The specialist armored engineering vehicles that modern armies use today, the bridge layers, the combat engineering vehicles, the mine clearing systems as descend directly from the funnies.
The principle that a beach assault requires specifically designed mechanical support is so established in modern military doctrine that it is no longer controversial. It was controversial when Hobart proposed it. It became obvious when the men who had the funnies survived in larger numbers than those who didn’t.
Churchill’s 2 minutes defending Hobart deserve more than their usual status as biographical footnotes. They are statements of principle about what institutions owe to the people who challenge them. About whether the goal is to make the institution comfortable or to make it effective. The army that sacked Hobart twice was not sacking him because he was wrong.
It was sacking him because he made people feel criticized, because he refused to pretend that mediocrity was acceptable, because his impatience with the second-rate was professionally inconvenient in a system that required you to get along. Churchill said, “We are fighting for our lives and we cannot afford this.” Liddell Hart, who had championed Hobart for 20 years, called him the Guderian, in some ways also the Rommel of the British Army.
The comparison is high praise. Guderian and Rommel became famous. Hobart remains for most people a name they have never heard. The men who crossed the beaches of Normandy knew differently. Eisenhower knew differently. The men who drove the Crabs and the AVREs and the Crocodiles and the Buffaloes from Normandy to the Rhine knew differently.
Their machines were designed and built and made to work by one man’s absolute refusal to accept that the tools available were adequate and his willingness to design new ones when they weren’t. He named them the funnies. The name has lasted. The laughter has not. There’s nothing funny about a lane cleared through a minefield by a tank with chains.
There is nothing funny about a concrete bunker demolished by a flying dustbin. There is nothing funny about an assault infantry company arriving on a defended beach and finding, for the first time in the history of warfare, mechanical support specifically designed for the problems of that beach. It is one of the reasons they arrived.
It is one of the reasons they stayed. If you didn’t know Percy Hobart’s name before today, you are in good company. The man who did more to shape D-Day than perhaps any single planner, who spent part of that same war as a lance corporal in the Cotswolds. Tell me in the comments which funny surprised you most.
The DD swimming tank, the crab beating minds with chains, the flying dustbin, the crocodile, the buffalo carrying Churchill across the Rhine. I read every one. Subscribe for more stories like this. One every few weeks. Everyone a name most people haven’t heard. He was told he was too difficult. He built the tanks that got us onto the beaches.
Remember the name, Percy Hobart.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
