Rhino tank

"Rhino tank" (initially called "Rhinoceros") was the American nickname for Allied tanks fitted with "tusks", or bocage 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 become bogged down fighting the Germans in the Normandy bocage. This landscape of thick, banked dirt and rock walls covered with trees and 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. The devices have been credited with restoring battlefield mobility in the difficult terrain, a claim which some historians question. 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 . This landscape contained large earth dikes averaging high that were covered with tangled hedges, bushes, and trees that surrounded small raised irregular-sized fields, which were generally no more than across on a side. The nature of the hedgerows—"sturdy embankments, half earth, half hedge" up to high with sturdy, interlocking root systems—made excavating them extremely difficult, even with machinery. Narrow sunken roads were the only pathways between these banks. Tank movement was severely restricted, preventing the Allied forces from bringing their vehicular superiority to bear.