D-DAY’S UNSUNG HERO
In 1943, somewhere near the town of Orford on the southeast coast of England, British major general Percy Hobart stood on a neatly manicured lawn with a croquet mallet in hand. He was about to wrap up a friendly game with British industrialist Miles Thomas, who was advising the government on matters related to tank production for World War II.
Hobart—“Hobo” to his friends at home and in the military—had played croquet with what Thomas would later call “saturnine fierceness,” even though he wasn’t really that much for sports and games. When he’d headed an armored division in Egypt a few years earlier, he’d been irked by his subordinates’ devotion to their late-afternoon polo matches, which typically left them too tired to come back and do more work in the evening, which was precisely what he expected of them. Hobart, they should have known, was all about the work.
A slim 58-year-old with a wispy mustache, Hobart had a piercing gaze and characteristic glower—both of which were magnified by his hornrimmed eyeglasses. Out of uniform, he might easily have been mistaken for a dyspeptic colonial bureaucrat or cranky prep school Latin teacher. In fact, Hobart was a pioneer in the use of tanks in warfare. Many years earlier, he had envisioned a time when armored machines equipped with ingenious gadgetry would race in perpetual motion across a continually shifting battlefield, rendering traditional tactics and strategies obsolete.
The strange vehicles he invented would become known as Hobart’s “Funnies.”
Hobart’s radical views, paired with his haughty, sometimes abrasive manner, had so irritated his superiors in the army that he’d been removed from command of an armored division at the start of World War II and forced into early retirement. At his nadir, in early 1940, the iconoclastic general had been reduced to putting on an armband and serving as a lance corporal in the Home Guard—Britain’s armed civilian militia—of his small village. But just a few months later, British prime minister Winston Churchill—an equally unconventional thinker—abruptly plucked him from the military establishment’s scrap heap. In early 1943, he was given a crucial assignment: devising the technology that would allow the Allies to overcome the Atlantic Wall—the intimidating array of minefields, pillboxes, buried antitank obstacles, and other lethal impediments that the Germans had installed along the Normandy coast to thwart any invading force. This was a daunting, high-stakes mission—one that demanded a creative thinker who saw no idea as too far-fetched. Hobart was just such a man.
As Thomas and Hobart walked off the croquet lawn, Hobart posed a question to his guest: What about a rocket-propelled tank that could simply fly over the traps the Germans had laid? “His idea,” Thomas would recall many years later, “was
