History - War at a Glance

"The Damndest Country I’ve Seen" The objective of the 29th Infantry Division is to secure Isigny, cross the River Aure, and proceed south to take Saint-Lô, a strategic road and rail hub. But between the beach and Saint-Lô lies 20 miles of what General Bradley calls “the damndest country I’ve seen” - the bocage. The best defensive positions the Germans have in Normandy weren’t put there by Rommel but by Celtic farmers more than a thousand years before the battle. The “hedgerow country” is almost impossible to picture without actually seeing it, a painful lesson the Allies soon learn. The bocage consists of small, irregularly shaped fields, only about 200 by 400 meters, enclosed by ancient, overgrown hedges that grow from earthen mounds flanked by drainage ditches. The hedgerows grow up to 15 feet high, limiting visibility to one field at a time, and they are impenetrably dense - even for tanks. They form a thousand square miles of tough patchwork terrain, connected by a network of dirt roads sunken far below field level by centuries of use. The towering hedges shade these lanes, further decreasing visibility. Using the ideal camouflage and concealment of the bocage to best advantage, the Germans disperse small, heavily armed antipersonnel and antitank units through it, dug in at the bases of the hedgerows and nearly invisible to the oncoming Americans. Out of the silence a sudden, tearing burst of fire from an MG 42 machine gun, the chatter of a machine pistol, the detonation of a Panzerfaust antitank round, incoming mortar fire, or a single sniper shot is usually the first sign of the enemy’s presence. In these ideal defensive positions, small German units can sometimes repulse attacking forces five times as large. Most of the vicious small-unit fighting in this campaign takes place at distances of less than 300 yards; sometimes it feels like a firefight in a dimly lighted house. Any tank that takes to the sunken roads between fields is in serious danger; often it can’t turn around or traverse its gun in such a tight space. Attempting to climb over the embankment between fields exposes the tank’s underbelly to antitank weapons. Up on the main roads there can be, and probably is, an 88-millimeter gun around the next bend, and the Germans fortify the stoutly built stone houses of the villages along those roads, so it is dangerous to move at all. Tanks and troops remain equally vulnerable in the bocage until the Allies develop tactics to enhance mobility and improve tank-infantry cooperation. When the 29th finds itself stymied in the bocage, Gen. Charles Gerhardt orders Brig. Gen. Norman Cota, a veteran of the landings in North Africa, to devise new tactics to break the impasse. The resulting approach uses small teams composed of a tank equipped with pipe devices in front to aid in the placement of explosive charges and a telephone on its rear deck for communication with infantrymen, an engineer team, an infantry squad, a Browning automatic rifle, and a 60-millimeter mortar. To begin the attack, the tank pushes into a hedgerow and then fires white phosphorus rounds from its main gun into the corners of the opposite hedgerow to suppress the enemy’s heavy machine guns. The tank then lays down machine gun fire along the base of the hedgerow. Meanwhile, the mortar team drops high explosive rounds into the fields behind the enemy positions and smoke rounds to block the enemy’s view. When the tank opens fire with its machine gun, the infantry attacks, moving across the field well away from the hedgerows on either side, and throws grenades over the hedgerow to disrupt defenders on the other side. When the infantry has advanced far enough to block the tank’s field of fire, the tank backs away, and the engineers emplace and detonate explosives in the holes the pipes leave in the embankment. The tank then rolls through the resulting hole and provides close support for the infantry, while the infantry suppresses antitank fire. Using this approach the 2nd Battalion of the 116th Infantry makes better progress than ever before in its push toward Saint-Lô. The 3rd Armored Division comes up with an approach for larger-scale hedgerow operations, coordinating the efforts of a tank company and an infantry company to attack across a front three fields wide. The attack begins by penetrating the hedgerows of the two outer fields. When they are taken, the team moves to breach the hedgerows that border the center field and attack the flanks of the German positions there. This allows the attackers to take more territory while facing less direct enemy fire. The increasing savvy of the now-veteran American units, combined with an increasingly massive flow of Allied men and materiel into France, propel them toward their goal. On July 18, 1944, six weeks after the D-Day invasion, the Americans take Saint-Lô. In those six weeks the 29th Division alone loses more than 3,000 men; for the month of July up to that point 12 American divisions advance 7 miles at a cost of 40,000 casualties. By the time Saint-Lô falls, the German army in Normandy has suffered 100,000 casualties, and the American First Army matches that awful figure by the end of July; about 10 percent of the American casualties are battle-fatigue cases brought on by the terror and exhaustion of the grinding hedgerow battle. See Next Operation Cobra: Breaking out of the Bocage Patton Unleashed Trapped in the Pocket Racing Toward the Rhine