On June 6, 1944, multi-ton tanks swam toward the Normandy shore wrapped in canvas skirts while others drove onto the sand unrolling giant reinforced carpets in front of themselves. These were Hobart’s Funnies, the specialized armor of Major General Percy Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division, born from the August 1942 Dieppe raid where standard Churchill tanks spun helplessly on shingle beaches, were stopped by concrete walls, and were picked off from the cliffs.

This episode is a masterclass in extreme problem solving: how Hobart, forced into retirement and serving as a corporal in the Home Guard until Churchill personally demanded his return, mutated the durable Churchill and mass-produced Sherman platforms into flamethrowers, bunker busters, carpet layers, bridge layers, mine flails, and strobing searchlights, and why General Omar Bradley’s decision to accept only DD tanks and bulldozers while rejecting the rest for logistical reasons remains one of the most debated choices of the Omaha Beach landing.

• The Churchill Crocodile: 400 imperial gallons of thickened fuel in a six-and-a-half-ton armored trailer, driven by compressed nitrogen to throw flame over 120 yards, often prompting surrender on sight
• The AVRE’s Petard spigot mortar and its 40-pound ‘flying dustbin’, reloaded through a hatch under fire by Royal Engineers who also dismounted to place demolition charges against seawalls
• The bobbin carpet fed under the tank’s own tracks to cross soft blue clay, and the small box girder bridge deployed across a 30-foot gap in about 30 seconds without leaving the hull
• Duplex Drive Shermans: pneumatic rubber pillars, twin propellers, and why so many swamped when launched too far out in rough seas at Omaha but provided vital fire on British and Canadian beaches
• The Sherman Crab flail spinning at over 140 rpm, the Canal Defence Light flickering six times a second to dazzle defenders, and the lineage running to Centurion AVREs in the 1991 Gulf War