What was the battle of the hedgerows in Normandy?
The battle of the hedgerows was the fighting of the US First Army in the bocage of Normandy in June and July 1944. The bocage is a country of small fields, each enclosed by an earth bank topped with a thick hedge, and it gave every advantage to the German defenders. The Americans learned to attack field by field with teams of infantry, tanks and engineers and fitted their tanks with hedgerow cutters such as Sergeant Curtis Culin's Rhino. They took Saint-Lô on 18 July, and Operation Cobra, launched on 25 July, broke through the German front and carried them out of the bocage.5
On 6 June 1944 the Americans got ashore in Normandy. Then, as they pushed inland, they ran into the hedges. For seven weeks the US First Army fought from one small field to the next, and the price of a mile was counted in thousands of men. The landings themselves are told in our account of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, and the end of the campaign in the Battle of Falaise.6
A country of hedges
For centuries Norman farmers had enclosed every plot of land, field, pasture and orchard alike, with a hedgerow. Each hedgerow was half earth and half hedge: a bank of earth one to four feet thick at the base, with bushes, vines and small trees growing out of it to a height of three to fifteen feet. The hedges marked property lines, kept in cattle and sheltered the land from the sea winds.7
The fields they enclosed were small, about 200 by 400 yards, and irregular in shape, so the hedgerows ran in no logical pattern. Each field had a gap for people, cattle and carts, and wagon trails sunk between the banks wound from field to field.8
This was the bocage, and it covered almost all the ground in front of the Americans, from the Cotentin Peninsula to Caumont. Around Carentan wide marshes left only a few roads and strips of dry, hedged land to advance on. On the British and Canadian front the ground south and southeast of Caen was different: more open, rolling country of fields and pastures, suited to tanks and wanted by the air forces for airfields.9
Why the hedgerows favored the defender
Every field was a small fortress. Several adjoining fields formed a defensive position in depth, the thick growth hid the defenders, and the banks gave them cover from fire. The hedges also blocked the view, which made it hard to aim heavy weapons and to adjust artillery fire. The British official history notes that in this close country "advantage would be with the defence", and the Canadian one calls it "very unsuitable for armour and favourable to the defence".10
The Germans used it well. Michael Doubler's study for the US Army's Combat Studies Institute describes their forward line as a chain of hedged fields, each held by a small detachment, with reserves, tanks and assault guns behind ready to counterattack. Machine guns dug into the corners of each field caught the attackers in a crossfire, and mortars ranged in beforehand on the fields caused, by his count, as much as 75 percent of American casualties in Normandy.11
Tanks were no answer at first. Kept on the roads, they met antitank guns sited to cover them. Driven at a hedgerow, a tank reared up, showed its thin belly and pointed its gun at the sky. The weather helped the Germans too: June and July 1944 brought more cloud, wind and rain than any summer since 1900, and on many days kept Allied aircraft on the ground.12
June: the shock of the bocage
The invasion plans had been so taken up with getting ashore that little thought went into the hedgerows inland. No tactics had been worked out for them and no special equipment devised, and the divisions had not trained for them.13
The first attacks showed the cost. In the account of the US Army's histories, the 2nd Infantry Division threw itself at Hill 192 on 12 to 16 June. From that height northeast of Saint-Lô the Germans watched the American rear as far as the beaches, and the division lost more than 1,200 men without taking it. Attacks by the 29th Division toward Saint-Lô in mid-June also stalled, and by the end of the month the line had settled about five miles short of the town.14
The British met the same problem west of Caen. The British official history describes how the 7th Armoured Division, the "Desert Rats", advanced into the bocage near Tilly-sur-Seulles in June: German infantry hidden in the hedges tried to lob grenades into the turrets, and it became clear that "our tanks must have infantry to work with them".15
In the American sector the First Army under Omar Bradley first took the port of Cherbourg, which fell on 26 June. On 3 July Bradley opened a general offensive to the south through the bocage, toward Coutances and Saint-Lô.16
Infantry, tanks and engineers, field by field
The answer came from the units themselves. Divisions worked out their own methods, rehearsed them behind the line and passed on what worked. According to the US Army's histories of the campaign, the 29th Infantry Division of Major General Charles Gerhardt formed small teams that gave each hedged field an infantry squad and one tank, with engineers to blow gaps in the banks.17
In Doubler's description the tank fired its gun and machine guns into the far hedgerow while the infantry crossed the field, keeping to its center and away from the hedges on the flanks. The division's ordnance company welded iron prongs to the tanks so that they could ram holes in the banks for the engineers' demolition charges, and the gap let the tank follow the infantry into the next field.18
Talking was a problem in itself, because tank and infantry radios worked on different channels. Units fixed telephones to the outside of the tanks, wired to the crew's intercom, so that an infantryman behind a tank could point out a target.19
On 11 July the new methods were tested, in an attack that both US Army accounts describe in detail. The 2nd Division went back to Hill 192 with teams trained in hedgerow tactics. German panzerfausts knocked out or turned back all six tanks in the first wave of one battalion, but behind 20,000 rounds from the division's own artillery the 38th Infantry reached the top of the hill by noon, and the Germans fell back.20
Sergeant Culin's Rhino
Many hedgerow devices were invented that July: prongs, a "salad fork", brush cutters and dozer blades. The best known came from Sergeant Curtis G. Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. He welded steel scrap from a German roadblock onto a tank to make a cutter with tusklike teeth that held the nose of the tank down while it tore through the bank.21
Bradley watched a demonstration, on 14 July by the date in the US Army's histories. Impressed, he ordered the cutters made in mass, and ordnance units welded them from the steel of German beach obstacles. The soldiers called the device a "rhinoceros", and the tanks that carried it "Rhinos". By the count of the same histories, three out of every five tanks in the First Army had one by the start of Operation Cobra.22
Bradley forbade their use until Cobra, so that the Germans would not see them in advance. Doubler counts more than 500 cutters built between 14 and 25 July.23
Saint-Lô, 11 to 18 July
Saint-Lô was the hub of the roads in the American sector. The 29th Division made the main effort against it from the northeast and the east, along the Martinville ridge, with the 35th Division attacking alongside. Bombed from the air and shelled from the ground, the town lay in ruins.24
In the early hours of 17 July Major Thomas D. Howie led the 3rd Battalion of the 116th Infantry to relieve another battalion cut off on the ridge. He reached it, and minutes after agreeing to push on toward the town he was killed by a German shell.25
On 18 July a task force of the 29th Division under Brigadier General Norman Cota drove into Saint-Lô. It carried Howie's flag-draped body on a jeep, so that he would enter the town with the first troops, and laid it on the rubble before the church of Sainte-Croix. War correspondents called him "the Major of St. Lô".26
The town was taken on 18 July and cleared the next day, when the First Army's July offensive came to an end. By the count of the US official history, the 29th Division had lost more than 3,000 men in the battle for Saint-Lô and the 35th more than 2,000, and in seventeen days of attack the army had gained only about seven miles west of the Vire. The American and the British official histories both put the First Army's losses from 3 July to the fall of Saint-Lô at about 40,000, and the American one adds that nine in ten were infantrymen.27
Operation Cobra: out of the hedgerows
Bradley now planned to break through on a narrow front west of Saint-Lô, behind a carpet of bombs. The British and Canadians kept attacking around Caen, among them Operation Goodwood from 18 July, and drew most of the German armor to their front. On the eve of Cobra the Canadian official history counts seven German armored divisions facing the British and only two, Panzer Lehr and the 2nd SS Panzer, facing the Americans.28
Cobra was delayed by bad weather. On 24 July the bombing began and was called off, and on 25 July it went in. That morning nearly 3,000 aircraft, more than 1,500 of them heavy bombers, bombed a strip of ground south of the road from Saint-Lô to Périers.29
Some bombs fell short, onto American lines. The US official history counts 111 killed and 490 wounded, the British one more than a hundred killed and six hundred wounded. Among the dead was Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of the Army Ground Forces.30
The German front fared far worse. The bombing turned the positions of Panzer Lehr into what its commander, Fritz Bayerlein, later described as a landscape on the moon. The VII Corps of General J. Lawton Collins broke through, and on 27 July the Americans were nearing Coutances. On 30 July they entered Avranches, at the base of the Cotentin, and the way out of the bocage lay open.31
Through that gap the armored divisions of George Patton broke out to the south and into Brittany. The war in Normandy became a war of movement, which ended in August with the German armies trapped at Falaise.32
The cost and the lesson
Doubler ranks the hedgerow fighting among the hardest the US Army fought in Europe, matched only later in the Hürtgen Forest and the Ardennes. By his count the First Army lost about 100,000 men between D-Day and 31 July, 85 percent of them in the infantry, and rifle companies often fell to about a hundred men. The Germans suffered too: by mid-July their casualties in Normandy had passed 100,000, and by the US official history's count only about 12 percent of the losses were to be replaced.33
Doubler sees the battle as a lesson in adaptation. Ideas came up from the men in the fields, he writes, and Culin's cutter was the best example of a single soldier's idea that changed a whole army. By the end of July teams of infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery observers worked together in a way that nobody had trained for before the landings.34
