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Tank Hack Ensured Farmland Didn't Thwart the Invasion of Europe
szczys writes: Ingenuity reigns supreme when trying to overcome obstacles standing in your way. So was the case during the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII. Land features in the Normandy bocage region were especially difficult for tanks to navigate. The obstacles were earthen dikes topped with mature trees originally put in place to contain livestock. The solution was to reuse materials from the Axis' own anti-tank measures to build a tank attachment to cut through the obstacles. The Allies were able to take the Axis by surprise as it was assumed the armored divisions wouldn't be able to break through this area.
Stuff that mattered 70 years ago, and is mildly interesting today :)
William George
" The Allies were able to take the Axis by surprise as it was assumed the armored divisions wouldn't be able to break through this area.: ...which is funny because the French didn't expect the tanks of the Germans to be able to pass through the Ardennes. The moment they realized what the plan was, it was too late and France had no option but to surrender, even if possessing a superior force.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
One of the best ones I have heard about is the hacking of the Dutch telephone system by the insiders. They had special "area codes" that bypassed main trunk exchanges but allowed the resistance fighters to communicate using the regular telephone system. If Gen Montgomery knew about it or had used it, his Operation Market Garden (movie: A Bridge Too Far) might have gone differently, they last bridge group might have learned the the German General Model and his panzer divisions were being held in that area as reserve and for refitting and they were in a position to cut off the lines of communication. Need to look it up.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yep, it's an awesome improvised hack. I'm a WW2 history aficionado, so of course I'd heard about this before.
For all the unbelievably thorough preparations made for the allied invasion, historians and laypersons alike have always found it fascinating or puzzling that apparently no thought was given to the potential tactical disadvantages the bocage (hedgerows) would have on the allied advance, or how the allies might try to cope with it. It took a lone Sergeant in the Army tank corps to come up with a reasonable solution to the problem. I suppose nothing tends to motivate you like facing a potentially lethal situation.
I'd rank it up there with the CO2 scrubber hack on the Apollo 13 mission.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Picture the hedge covered with heavy growth 15 to 30 feet high. Difficult to penetrate on foot- easy to hide in and defend.
Picture a german bazookaman behind the hedge ready to blow a hole in your soft underbelly.
Picture the teeth cutting 12" deep into the hedge before the tank starts to lift upwards.
Picture the heavy growth toppling onto the defenses, the top of the hedge being shaved off to become a wide dirt road.
Much harder to defend against the infantry following the tank through the new gap.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Picture terrain like this. The hedges make it hard to travel through, and give cover to defending machine gunners.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The D-Day plan included the capture of Caen on D-Day itself. If you ever visit Normandy, it is obvious that the river valley around Caen is the only good way out. The German's realized this too, and sent every possible unit there to keep the British from seizing the exit from the beaches. Battle after battle erupted in front of Caen to keep the Allies in. The Allied plan took the bocage hedgerows into account. They were protection from German counter-attack while the American Army took the port of Cherbourg and the Cotentin peninsula to serve as the staging area for incoming units to prepare for the breakout. With the main German force facing the British at Caen, the only other way to break out from the beachhead was through the bocage. This had never been part of the Allied plan, so it took some improvisation to develop tactics to break out.
Lets look at how a hedgerow is created. In medieval Europe fields were sectioned off into small areas with hedges between them. Every year due to frost action rocks are driven to the surface by frost action. Every year farmers go through their fields and throw these rocks into the hedges. Over the decades and centuries these hedgerows become very solid. In effect they were stone walls with hedges on top and there were a lot of them on Normandy. here is a better explanation of why hedgerows were a problem.
From the article:
When demonstrated for General Omar Bradley, he was impressed enough to order them built in quantity for the tanks. Eventually the prototype became an engineered product (dubbed the “Culin Rhino Device”) that was fitted to many tanks before being shipped over from England.
I wonder how long it took, from the demo for Gen. Bradley, until the device was fitted on tanks sent over from England. Hopefully not too long. Imagine the tanks being made in the US today. How long would it take before they were outfitted with the "tusks"? Senator #1: "I demand that the tusks be made in my state." Senator #2: "No - make them in my state, or I'll vote against them being made at all!"
In related news, U.S. Air Force instructs airmen on exactly how to praise the F-35. The Air Force should reject the F-35 for its many flaws, and demand their money back. Sigh. Some things really were better back in the past.