The MoD has a great write up on Major General Sir Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart KBE, CB, DSO, MC– best known as “Hobo” — one of the most unsung generals of WWII.
In the dark days of late summer 1940, the recently elected Prime Minister, Winston Churchill directed the Army to reinstate one of its most effective, innovative and outspoken former senior officers. This man had led the British development of armoured tactics in the 1930s, but in 1939 he was sacked and found himself employed as a Corporal in the Chipping Campden Home Guard (armed with a piece of drainpipe with a bayonet welded to its end!).
But in October, Churchill summoned this 55-year-old corporal for lunch…and reinstated him as a General. He would go on to raise and train the largest Division to fight in Europe. He was Major General Sir Percy Hobart; possibly the most overlooked British General of the Second World War, whose legacy in military thought, innovation and leadership remains alive and well in today’s British Army.
