Rhino tank

Rhino tank
An M4 Sherman-based United States Rhino tank crashes through a hedgerow.
Service history
In service	1944
Used by	Canada, United Kingdom, United States
Wars	World War II
Production history
Designer	Various, but generally credited to Curtis G. Culin
Designed	1944

The Rhino tank (initially called "Rhinoceros") was the American nickname for Allied tanks fitted with "tusks", or hedgerow cutting devices, during World War II. The British designation for the modifications was Prongs.

In the summer of 1944, during the Battle of Normandy, Allied forces – particularly the Americans – had bogged down fighting the Germans in the Normandy bocage. This landscape of thick banked hedges proved difficult for tanks to breach. In an effort to restore battlefield mobility, various devices were invented to allow tanks to navigate the terrain. Initially the devices were manufactured in Normandy, largely from German steel-beam beach defensive devices on an ad hoc basis. Manufacture was then shifted to the United Kingdom, and vehicles were modified before being shipped to France.

While the devices have been credited with restoring battlefield mobility in the difficult terrain, historians have questioned their overall usefulness and tactical significance.

Following the Normandy landings of June 1944, as Allied forces pushed inland from the French coast, they found themselves operating within an area of Normandy's countryside known as the bocage. The actual bocage landscape extends further than the limited definition of bocage normand, that is to say, from the area directly west of Arromanches-les-Bains, including the entire Cotentin Peninsula, to the south of Brittany, Maine, and Vendée. In some areas, this terrain stretches for 50 miles (80 kilometres). This landscape contained large earth dikes averaging 4 ft (1.2 m) high that were covered with tangled hedges, bushes, and trees that surrounded small raised irregular-sized fields, which were generally no more than 300 ft (91 m) across. The nature of the hedgerows—"sturdy embankments, half earth, half hedge" up to 15 ft (4.6 m) high with interlocking root systems—made excavating them extremely difficult, even with machinery. Narrow sunken tracks were the only pathways between these banks. Tank movement was severely restricted, preventing the Allied forces from bringing their vehicle superiority to bear, and making aerial observation with light aircraft, the Americans using their Piper L-4 Grasshopper and British and Commonwealth forces, likewise using their own Auster AOP aircraft, each type proving important in spotting German tank destroyers and anti-tank cannon emplacements concealed within the enclosed patches of land a distinct priority. The rolling landscape was also dotted with small rivers, woods, and fruit trees, along with scattered stone farmhouses and their outbuildings.