Percy Hobart

Major-General and commander of the 79th Armoured Division, the specialised-armour formation that opened the way ashore in Normandy. Born on 14 June 1885 in Nainital, India. He passed through the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and served in the Royal Engineers, seeing action in the First World War in India and Mesopotamia, where he was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. In the 1920s he transferred to the newly formed Royal Tank Corps and became one of the leading theorists of mechanised war. His views — independent armoured formations, deep penetration, radio as the basis of control — ran so far ahead of accepted British doctrine that in 1940 he was retired. The dismissed major-general enlisted in the Home Guard as a private. Churchill brought him back after reading about it in a newspaper. In 1943 Hobart was given the 79th Armoured Division and the problem of the landings: how to get tanks through minefields, sea walls, concrete and wet sand under fire. The division produced the machines known as Hobart's Funnies — DD swimming tanks, Crab flail tanks for mine clearance, AVRE engineer vehicles with a mortar for demolishing strongpoints, Crocodile flamethrowers, bridgelayers and fascine carriers. On 6 June 1944 these were the vehicles that went in first on the British and Canadian beaches. Casualties there were markedly lower than at Omaha, where the offered equipment had been almost entirely declined. He died on 19 February 1957.