D-Day Special Tank Variants

Here’s a BBC article – which includes drawing and/or photographs – about Hobart’s Funnies, the modified Churchill and Sherman tanks which were used in specialist roles on D-Day: the AVRE, DD, Crab (a.k.a. Flail), Bobbin, Fascine, Ark and Crocodile.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160603-the-strange-tanks-that-helped-win-d-day

@Midnight_Reaper said in D-Day Special Tank Variants:

@CWO-Marc
I like how the article glosses over the fact that the U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, turned down the use of any of the funnies other than the DD Shermans - most of which sank to the bottom on the American beaches. I suppose you can’t have every decision be the right one…

-Midnight_Reaper

Yes, that was a bad decision, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that the DD Shermans were launched into the water at a greater distance from the beaches than the British did in their own invasion sector. As Barnee notes, the Americans made more good decisions overall than bad ones during the course of the war, but it’s regretable that some of those bad decisions were avoidable because they were partially driven in part by stubborness and pride and (in the case of officers like Admiral Ernest J. King) a certain amount of Anglophobia. The US entered the war two years after Great Britain, which was good in one sense (they were fresh – in contrast with the British, who had taken quite a beating for the past two years) but bad in another sense (they were novices – in contrast with the British, who had a lot of hard-won experience under their belts). Armies and navies, unfortunately, sometimes have to make their own mistakes in order to learn from them, rather than believing what their allies tell them. Human nature, I guess.