How a British General Won D-Day With a Move No One Believed Possible
British Historical Archive
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In the early summer of 1943, a man in his fifties cycled to his Home Guard duties in a Cotswold village — a corporal in a borrowed uniform, drilling with broomsticks in case the Germans came. To his neighbours he was an elderly gentleman doing his bit. Almost none of them knew that this corporal had, a few years earlier, been one of the most important soldiers in the British Army — a major-general who built Britain's tank forces from nothing, and was then thrown out, humiliated, and left to rot.
His name was Percy Hobart, and this is the story of how a general the army had sacked came back to build the strangest tanks of the war — machines that swam through the sea, beat paths through minefields, and threw fire into concrete bunkers — and saved thousands of lives on the beaches of Normandy. It takes in the newspaper article and the personal intervention of Churchill that rescued him from obscurity, the secret 79th Armoured Division and its "Funnies," and the hard, still-argued truth about the American beaches — why General Bradley turned most of Hobart's machines down, and what it may have cost at Omaha.
Sources:
Liddell Hart, B.H. — The Tanks: The History of the Royal Tank Regiment
Fletcher, David — Hobart's Funnies (Bovington Tank Museum)
Bradley, Omar — A Soldier's Story
Imperial War Museum Archive — iwm.org.uk
#WW2 #DDay #Tanks #MilitaryHistory #Normandy
20 Comments
I had never heard of him.
Thank you for posting.
My father, Commander HV Wheeler landed on Sword Beach with the first wave.
He landed his DD Tank on the beach. He disobeyed stupid orders from HQ in England
to launch the DDs at sea. Most of those launched at sea sank with their crews . . .
He was too scared to get in close and become a target himself.
The Home Guard was enthusiastic and very patriotic and not to be sneezed at... The Leeds Gas Works Home Guard was commanded by George Sanders VC MC contained Wilfrid Edwards VC & William Boynton Butler VC as members.
Hobart was taken from 11th Armoured Division to age and ill health. 79th Armoured Division was not really a fighting command (suited his health) and his Royal Engineers background. It deployed as individual units in support of others.
One day's training would have made 'rookies' capable of driving across a beach - The crews did not need to know how to replace the brake linings !
How a British General Won D-Day With a Move No One Believed Possible
British Historical Archive
53,036 views
In the early summer of 1943, a man in his fifties cycled to his Home Guard duties in a Cotswold village — a corporal in a borrowed uniform, drilling with broomsticks in case the Germans came. To his neighbours he was an elderly gentleman doing his bit. Almost none of them knew that this corporal had, a few years earlier, been one of the most important soldiers in the British Army — a major-general who built Britain's tank forces from nothing, and was then thrown out, humiliated, and left to rot.
His name was Percy Hobart, and this is the story of how a general the army had sacked came back to build the strangest tanks of the war — machines that swam through the sea, beat paths through minefields, and threw fire into concrete bunkers — and saved thousands of lives on the beaches of Normandy. It takes in the newspaper article and the personal intervention of Churchill that rescued him from obscurity, the secret 79th Armoured Division and its "Funnies," and the hard, still-argued truth about the American beaches — why General Bradley turned most of Hobart's machines down, and what it may have cost at Omaha.
Sources:
Liddell Hart, B.H. — The Tanks: The History of the Royal Tank Regiment
Fletcher, David — Hobart's Funnies (Bovington Tank Museum)
Bradley, Omar — A Soldier's Story
Imperial War Museum Archive — iwm.org.uk
#WW2 #DDay #Tanks #MilitaryHistory #Normandy