D-Day has its 80th anniversary today. Its success was in part due to the efforts of Lance-Corporal Percy Hobart from Chipping Campden. This sleepy town was not high on Hitler’s list of priority targets, yet in 1940 its defences were second to none, described as “a hedgehog of bristling defiance.”
The reason was simple. Their architect was a man whose name has since passed into military legend and, while his battle dress bore the single stripe of a lance corporal in the ‘Dad’s Army’ Cotswold’s Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), he was, in fact, Major-General (temporarily retired) Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart. ‘Hobo,’ as he became known, was the man behind Hobart’s Funnies – the ingenious armoured inventions that would help swing the D-Day beach landings in favour of the Allied armies.
D-Day Funnies: bizarre but ingenious
The Funnies included a range of inventive modifications to existing armour, such as the Churchill Crocodile tank modified as a flame thrower, or another Churchill with its gun replaced by a spigot mortar that would hurl 40 lbs of high explosive 150 yards to decimate defensive concrete bunkers.
Other modifications included flails fitted to the front of American Sherman tanks to ignite land mines and clear a path for infantry, and the extraordinary Duplex Drive Sherman tanks fitted with a watertight canvas housing that allowed them to float in to shore from a landing craft well away from beach hazards. Tanks fitted with bridge-laying capability, or a bobbin, that deployed a wide canvas cloth to save following vehicles from sinking into soft ground, and armoured bulldozers to clear battlefield debris, were all utilised to great effect by units of the invading armies.
A father of invention
Born in India, Hobart graduated from the Military Academy in Woolwich in 1904 and joined the Royal Engineers. During World War I he survived the battles of Neuve Chapelle and Loos and served in Mesopotamia, now Iraq. After the war, he transferred to the Royal Tank Corps and began studying the writings of Captain Basil Liddell Hart, an exponent of fast-moving assault by armoured columns carrying infantry. Hart’s theories were also finding favour with a more malign influence, as Nazi Panzer tank commander Heinz Guderian adapted similar tactics to achieve notable successes for German forces in the early Blitzkrieg phases of World War II.
Winston steps in
Playing an important role in the formation of the 7th Armoured Division (which later gained notoriety as the Desert Rats) the onset of the war saw Hobo cast out of the army after the War Office received information concerning his unconventional ideas about armoured warfare. While he languished in Chipping Camden’s redoubtable LDV force, where his talents had led to him being promoted to the dizzy heights of Deputy Area Organiser, it fell to his old friend Liddell Hart to spring to his defence.
After reading a piece in the Sunday Pictorial in which Liddell Hart criticised the decision to sideline Hobart, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ignored the protestations of Chief of the General Staff Alan Brooke, and reinstated Hobart, who was immediately assigned the task of training the 11th Armoured Division – a task he undertook both enthusiastically and with success.
Having completed his honing of the 11th Armoured, Hobo’s next job was to raise and train a new unit – the 79th Armoured Division.
Overcoming obstacles
The ill-fated Dieppe raid in August 1942 had shown the inability of armoured vehicles to overcome fortified obstacles during an amphibious landing. Having established that specialised vehicles would be needed and, at the ripe old age of 57 years, resisting a further attempt to have him removed on medical grounds and the 79th Division disbanded, Hobo found himself tasked with developing solutions to the problem. Soon the unit was renamed the 79th (Experimental) Armoured Division Royal Engineers and the genesis of Hobart’s Funnies began.
With his brother-in-law Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery emphasising the need for specialised vehicles and backing him, Hobo also found himself supported in his task by Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower and the generals planning Operation Overlord, the great D-Day crusade to liberate Europe. Given the green light, production went into overdrive and, although the vehicles of the 79th did not deploy as a single unit, the vehicles were all attached to other units. By the end of the war the 79th Armoured Division numbered almost 7,000 vehicles spread across the Allied forces.
It’s remarkable to think that this enormous input into the war effort was all the brainchild of one extraordinary man who, but for the faith shown in him by his mentor Liddell Hart and Winston Churchill, may have found that his contribution amounted to little more than fortifying the barricades of a bucolic Cotswold town.
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