Funnies: The D-Day Tanks | The Tank Museum 

Me too man, me too.

LMG, MOUNTED & LOADED

Lol was about to comment that

"Dam it honey, these are not toys! They are serious historical teaching aids!"

That’s the dream right there

...Sherman Starts Flailing ...Sherman Starts Flaming ...Sherman Starts Shooting

@@alwayscurious3357 Er most of the Funnies were based on the Churchill tank.

@@markfryer9880 There also flail and flame Hobart Shermans though

@@markfryer9880 yeah but the Churchills weren't amphibious unlike the Sherman DDs were.

Comm ___ everybody gangsta till the Germans capture the Shermanns

Must have been a surprise to them! You really can't tell what they are from afar with screens up in the water.

Well, technically it would've been a 75mm. 76mm Shermans were only deployed after the invasion, if I'm not mistaken. ;-)

Well if he was a mg42 gunner he could have opened up at it and with a couple of sweeping bursts sunk it

@@TheRpf1977 didn't they have to save ammunition though?

@@TheRpf1977 By the time the tanks were coming in, beach clearing parties and the first Infantry should be ashore and more likely targets.

The Churchill “suspension in pain”

Absolutely right! The little battleground even had a place cut out for it to be placed in, right next to where the facine dropped. I want an update on this video where he plays with it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Are you for real or are you pulling our collective legs? I suspect that you are as I have never heard of such a vehicle in all my reading about D-Day.

misolgit 69 Wait, what?

@@apropercuppa8612 it's the plot of a Goon show circa very late 50s/early 60s

@@apropercuppa8612 P.S. the actual title of the show may very well be the Jet Propelled Guided NAAFI but its been a long time since I heard that one so.... bit of a brain fade there old chap

You had me going in the first half, not gonna lie.

Yes, Percy Hobart, whose Funnies inspired laughs of glad tidings of victory when they were most needed!

that mine sweeper invention was classic. why dont britian invent things anymore.

this man is amazing. this is why creative minds need to be embraced. why dont britain produce and invent things anymore.

A bunch of people would ask why the UK named a tank after a little town in Tasmania.

Well now you know it was because of Hobarts "Funnies".

@@0Zolrender0 I think the op was thinking more fundamentally. Why not Hobarts: modified, purposed, dedicated, weird or any other alternative.

Cheese Grate because we are British!

I love the Sherman Crab, the flail is incredibly effective at mowing down infantry.

Hi Kerrin, interesting stuff! Our Archive and Library would probably be interested in this. You may wish to get in touch; library@tankmuseum.org Thanks

The Tank Museum i have two copies of The Story of the 79th armoured division. One was my dad’s he was in 502 company RASC

Yeah, it was learning about the funnies, particularly the Churchill versions that started my fascination with WW2 and WW1 armoured vehicles as well. :-)

Also, don't set your military structure up as a popularity contest or you're left with a bunch of popular yes-men.

@@cavscout888 What interesting about that is that it was an inevitable result of the Nazi ideology. If you a) are convinced that a superpowerful enemy is always out to get you and b) somehow also convinced that your people are the beast and their superiority is innate and c) shape your ideology around projecting personal strength.... Well if you do those things then it's hard *not* to end up with a high command based on personal prowess rather than the ability to assess military situations.

A prime example of why it was invented, to quickly clear minefields placed to limit movement and channel soldiers into killing zones.

@@markfryer9880 .......... Thanks! I never thought about it in that way (soldiers being channelled into a dangerous situation)👍

@@chrisneedham5803 A sad but true part of military defences planning I am sorry to say.

@@markfryer9880 .......... Something you will find interesting about the bravest men he saw in the whole war. His landing craft was hit on the way in and started to take on water so there was mass panic to get out of it even though bullets were hitting the closed ramp. When the ramp went down he was shocked to see someone chest deep in water shouting where they must run to. He was stuck on the beach for 20 or 30 mins. He saw quite a few of those men in the water get blown up, machine gunned or run over by landing craft. He said everyone that took their place lasted about 3 mins but one after another someone took their turn knowing that was the last thing they would ever do.

Very true. Their operation was a very thrown together improvised affair at best and could have been very costly in men and materiel. Barges designed for use on rivers and with bow ramps rapidly cut in are not designed for Channel crossing let alone repeated crossings in support of any bridgehead build up.

But nevertheless a very British story; how an insufferable little twerp became a national hero.

Hi Mark, in the first wave on Omaha beach, 112 Funnies were included. However, the reason a lot of them didn't make it onto the beach was due to them being launched too far out and in rough seas. Consequently, a large amount of them sank.

@@thetankmuseum They were the DD tanks, but the Americans failed to utilise any of the other available Funnies.

@@markfryer9880 I think that may be due to them not needing them at Omaha? I'm not too familiar with the exact defenses of Omaha Beach but I don't recall anything there that required flail tanks, road layers, or bridge layers. There's also the matter of logistics. For the British/Commonwealth forces it was no big deal using Sherman based funnies because they were already operating normal Shermans so they were familiar with how to use, maintain, and repair and had the spare parts for them as well. In the US, on the other, we didn't operate any Churchills (or any other foreign tanks) so we'd have to train crews on how to operate & maintain them, get mechanics trained on repairing them, and we'd have to stock up spare parts and putting those parts into the logistics and supply system.

Riceball01 Could they not have been crewed by British soldiers? And serviced by them too?

@@MaxJNorman That's definitely possible, although I don't know if the British would have been able spare any vehicles with crew, maintainers, and parts. But that definitely would have been the easy part, integrating the parts into the supply chain would probably be trickier.

Thanks! Great to hear that you enjoyed this one.

Thanks Neil!

We look forward to welcoming you!

Brilliant day... absolutely loved it. Thanks to the team at the museum.

See the Gloster Meteor. Or Stanley Hooker and Rolls Royce’s auto controlled twin-speed twin-charger supercharging engine technology. Or Barnes Wallis’ work. Or the M.52 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52 Or any number of British planes. Göring on the Mosquito: _In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked._ From the war came innumerable British inventions: the cavity magnetron, anti-submarine electronics, electronic computer, the world’s most advanced jet engines, developing the A-bomb (MAUD Committee) as well as the Liberty ship (a Sunderland shipyard design), to name but a few. Huge developments in engineering and manufacturing, with a staggering 132,500 aircraft and over a million military vehicles from Britain alone. The Tizard Mission: _The information provided by the British delegation was subject to carefully vetted security procedures, and contained some of the greatest scientific advances made during the war. The shared technology included radar (in particular the greatly improved cavity magnetron which the American historian James Phinney Baxter III later called "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores"),[2] the design for the proximity VT fuse, details of Frank Whittle's jet engine and the Frisch-Peierls memorandum describing the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Though these may be considered the most significant, many other items were also transported, including designs for rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives._ See the Gloster Meteor. Or Barnes Wallis’ work. Or the M.52 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52 Or any number of British planes. Göring on the Mosquito: _In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set - then at least I'll own something that has always worked._ Or the Tizard Mission: _The information provided by the British delegation was subject to carefully vetted security procedures, and contained some of the greatest scientific advances made during the war. The shared technology included radar (in particular the greatly improved cavity magnetron which the American historian James Phinney Baxter III later called "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores"),[2] the design for the proximity VT fuse, details of Frank Whittle's jet engine and the Frisch-Peierls memorandum describing the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Though these may be considered the most significant, many other items were also transported, including designs for rockets, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self-sealing fuel tanks and plastic explosives._

Hobart actually commanded the EMF for a while. Many ideas like amphibious tanks, bridge layers, armoured engineering vehicles were thought up and developed to trials stage at the end of WW1 or within a few years of the end.

Who says we don't have? The legacy of the 79th still lives on - even though much of the ideas utilised on the funnies existed prior to WW2.

Kevin Hurley it helped that he was Monty’s brother in law

Yay the tank museum is like a theme park for me

stump182 PDED.

Western civilization as we know it today only exists because of some boffins who worked on solving the impossible in their garden-shed, garage, or basement!

@@Grubnar or garden.

@@connorkilpatrick6283 Of course ... as long as it is not raining!

Not just British ideas though, Canadian's and South African's also developed equipment and ideas used on the funnies, the DD idea came from an Hungarian

Not all of them

Thanks for the great feedback!

Hi there, its an early attempt at raising the exhausts to stop water ingress. The improved versions combining air intake used on D-Day were the upright box like structures seen on the rear of Shermans and Churchills. I don`t know if its true but apparently they were removed by rotating the turret and using the gun to knock them off!!!

@@growlers90 I've been looking for this answer both on reddit and here for months. Your the first person to have a answer that makes sense. Thank you sir.