“Hobart’s Funnies” Sound Comic Until You Watch What They Were Built to Solve

Specialized armored vehicles for Normandy handled mines, seawalls, soft sand, and other problems ordinary tanks met too late.

Major-General Percy Hobart backed a family of modified armored vehicles designed for ugly, specific tasks: flail tanks to beat paths through mines, bridge layers, fascine carriers, AVREs with petard mortars for concrete obstacles, and more. The nickname makes them sound whimsical. They were anything but. They represented a ruthless acceptance that standard equipment often failed at the shoreline. On some beaches and in some sectors, access to these specialist vehicles mattered dearly. They remind us that invasion planning was less about heroically overcoming the impossible than about identifying each obstacle in advance and designing a machine for it.