BBC on Hobart’s Funnies

The BBC recently posted an article on ‘Hobart’s Funnies”, the specialized engineering tanks that assisted Allied troops during the D-Day landings.  This is probably a story already familiar to most readers, but it’s a nicely done article so we thought it worth pointing out.

Excerpt:

David Willey, the curator at Britain’s Tank Museum at Bovington, says Hobart quickly became a leading light in this kind of warfare. In 1934, Hobart became the inspector of the Royal Tank Corps, and in charge of tank tactics. He was such an influential figure that Heinz Guderian, one of the leading commanders in Germany’s early victories of World War Two, had his reports translated and studied them intently, Willey says.

Hobart based his vision of fast-moving columns of tanks to the highly mobile Mongol hordes of the Middle Ages, and was one of the first commanders to predict that aircraft could help resupply these columns far behind enemy lines.

Full article here.