![]() ![]() “At the museum we’ve got the ‘pike’ he was given – much of Britain’s military equipment had been left in France, so instead of a rifle he had a piece of scaffolding pole with a bayonet attached at the end. As Britain faced the threat of invasion, its leading expert on armoured warfare found himself demoted to corporal, and serving in the Home Guard in the Cotswolds village where he lived. Hobart based his vision of fast-moving columns of tanks on 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.īut after training a new armoured unit in the North African desert, Hobart was given early retirement – partly, it is thought, down to official hostility to his ‘unconventional’ views on armoured warfare. 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. In 1934, Hobart became the inspector of the Royal Tank Corps, and in charge of tank tactics. Troops would have to land on sandy beaches, and their tanks would have to be able to make their way across these beaches and punch holes through the seawalls or other concrete obstacles the Germans had built up.ĭavid Willey, the curator at Britain’s Tank Museum at Bovington, says Hobart quickly became a leading light in this kind of warfare. Trying to capture a heavily defended port was likely to fail, commanders realised. The failure of the Dieppe landings provided many lessons. Many were stranded, unable to move on the loose shingle, and picked off by anti-tank guns. ![]() All of of the 28 tanks which came ashore alongside them – essential if the troops were going to be able to break through the German strongpoints – were knocked out. In less than 10 hours, more than 60% of the 6,000 British, Canadian and American troops who landed on the beach were either killed, wounded or captured. The landings at Dieppe would be a practical test to see if the Allied armies could land enough men and tanks to break the strong German defences. On 19 August 1942, Allied armies put their plan for an invasion of Occupied Europe to the ultimate test – by landing troops on the beaches and trying to capture a French port.įrance had, by this time, been under German control for more than two years. ![]()
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