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The Hell Of Hedgerows

In the battle for France, the Germans suffered 450,000 casualties, killed, wounded or missing. Among them was their commander, Field Marshal Rommel, wounded in an attack by a British fighter-bomber.

By the end of D-Day, the Allies had forced the door into France and were making their invasion stick. Now, the problem was getting it unstuck. Through June and most of July, the Allies were reconquering Europe just an acre at a time. The hedgerow country hung up the Americans, and German tanks held up the British. Casualties rose, morale fell and generals squabbled. The Great Crusade was going nowhere.

But in war, the other fellow suffers too. The Germans were holding, but just barely. Their seemingly solid front was a perilously thin sheet of boilerplate, restraining more and more steam. Finally, it blew, spewing the Allies all across France.

Half a century after the fact, the historians of Normandy still squabble over what really went on. In the middle of the melee stands British Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery, the Allies' man in charge on the ground.

The historians take sides this way: 1) Some, most of them British, say everything went according to Montgomery's original plan, which called for the Americans to break out. 2) Others, most of them Americans, say Monty fell flat on his face and had to change his original plan, which had called far the British to break out. 3) A few have begun to say that past getting ashore, nobody on the Allied side had much of a plan at all.

That third batch may fall closest to the mark. Allied planners were so preoccupied with breaking and entering that they hardly looked beyond the front door. In a vague way, the planners expected the Germans to give way grudgingly as far as the Seine. There, the Allies would put the war on hold while they girded themselves to cross the river.

Half a minute with a map will show that the Americans had the longest way to go. They had to push south before they could swerve east to the Seine; the British could face east as soon as they got past Caen. But if the planners had called this American movement a "breakout," they would have overdramatized what was supposed to be a steady advance.

Still, Monty was an overdramatizer. At briefings in the spring of 1944, he spoke about having his British tanks knocking about south of Caen on D-Day itself. Even so, U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley - no admirer of Montgomery - conceded years later that Monry had planned all along to have the Americans move farthest and fastest, with the British holding the German tanks at bay. And that's pretty much the way things played out, although the timing and the pace surprised everybody.

The Canadians and British banged their heads against Caen for six weeks, and in vain. Monty mounted three big offensives, each with more fanfare - and each time, they fell flat. His fellow generals started to grouse, and not all of the grumblers were American. Britain's air marshals drummed their fingers in frustration, waiting impatiently for Monty to grab the open, rolling plains beyond Caen, perfect for airfields.

There was even some muttering in Britain about cashiering Monty. Eisenhower flew over a few times from England, petitioning Monty in diplomatic terms to shake a leg. People were beginning to use the word "stalemate," dredging up grim memories of World War I. Actually, Monty's men and tanks were doing what they were supposed to do. Like a vast electromagnet, they were drawing German tanks. True, the British were hardly eating up miles, but Montgomery didn't dare try. If the Germans bled his infantry, he - and Great Britain - would end the war without an army. Even so, the British relentlessness forced the German hand. As tanks arrived from afar, Rommel had to feed them into the fire a battalion at a time. Defending Caen kept the Germans from amassing tanks.

But how does a British general inspire his soldiers to draw German fire? Monty could hardly tell his troops that Caen didn't matter; no soldier is willing to risk death for the sake of a diversion. So Monty oversold his final attack on Caen as the one that's going to break this thing wide open. When it petered out in the rain, his American allies were disgusted.

In the weeks following the invasion, Omaha Beach continued to, serve as a main supply point. These LSTs (Landing Ship Tank) are part of the, vast Allied armada: 2,727 ships and, 2,606 landing craft aboard the ships. The "barrage balloons" were meant to snag low flying enemy planes in their cables.

The Americans were hardly setting their own little world afire. The untested GIs had spirit to spare, but they also had a lot to learn. Their classroom - the hedgerow country, the bocage - was a meatgrinder. Tanks had little elbow room there, so the American effort ran heavily to infantry. The GIs were forced to fight their war one farm field at a time, with a German machine gun behind every hedge, or so it seemed.

Some dandy soldiering across the Cotentin peninsula gave the Americans the port of Cherbourg before June's end. But the Germans had left the docks in rubble, and the logistics people faced a lot of sweat in putting things back together. The Allies badly needed docks. When they concluded long before D-Day that they couldn't grab a port early, they decided to take along their own - prefabs called Mulberries.

But a Channel storm late in June sank the American Mulberry (prefabricated harbors that were floated across the English Channel to create sheltered areas for ships supporting the D-Day invasion. They were conceived by Lord Mountbatten and cost $96 million each. It took 20,000 men eight months to build each one from two million tons of concrete and steel. Two were built, one for the British at and one for the Americans intended for Omaha Beach) and crippled the British one. Everybody went back to unloading straight across the beaches - and if they were still at it come September, autumnal storms could wash out the invasion. The Brittany ports beckoned. But to get them, the Americans had to break free of the bocage.

Nothing in the training camps had prepared American soldiers for Normandy's hedgerow country. For centuries, Norman farmers had used hedges - bocage, in French - to separate their fields and meadows, most of which weren't much bigger than a football field. Over the centuries, the roots took hold deep in the soil, while the branches climbed high in the air. Traffic in the narrow country lanes gradually wore down the dirt roads, making them sunken lanes flanked with berms topped by bocage.

To today's tourist, the hedgerows make for marvelous scenery. To the, American infantryman of 1944, they made for misery. The Germans hid machine guns behind,the bocage and waited for the Americans to tiptoe intp the fields through narrow gaps. The Germans made each meadow a botanical fortress, a miniature battlefield - a costly and bloody affair.

At first tanks proved useless. The narrow lanes hemmed in tanks, making them perfect targets for antitank rockets. The roots of the bocage made the berms too solid to smash through. Any tank that tried to go over the berms eposed its unarmored underbelly, an easy kill. Finally, an inventive American sergeant found the answer.

His name was Curtis Cullin, and he soldiered with the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. On July 14, 1944, Gen. Omar Bradley traveled to the 102nd to see Cullin's iinvention - rhinocerous horns. Cullin had salvaged two scrap-metal bars from the German obstacles on Omaha Beach. He welded them onto the front of his Sherman tank so they stuck out in front, like horns.

As Bradley watched, Cullin gunned his "rhino" Sherman into a hedgerow. The horns dug into the berm and kept the tank from climbing. Instead, the tank's engine powered all that weight straight ahead, punching through the berm. Bradley was so impressed that he ordered combat engineers to strip Omaha of all of its scrap metal and rush it forward to tank units. Soon, three out of every five Shermans became a rhino - and not long afterward, the Americans punched their way out of the bocage country.

Bradley's staff concocted a plan they called Operation Cobra - an explosive jab at the German lines, followed by tanks pouring through. With the opening of the Cobra offensive on 25 July, First Army began to leave the Bocage behind and to impose on the German Army a new war of mobility and firepower. Bradley hoped Cobra would take his GIs as far as Brittany. Instead, it flung them across France.

After D-Day After storming the beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of France bogged down in seven weeks of grueling attrition in Normandy. To break out of the Normandy hedgerows and begin a war of movement across occupied France, U.S. General Omar Bradley led Operation Cobra, which this book examines in fascinating detail.

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