The Battle of the Hedgerows

At 5.30 a.m. on 3 July 1944, in torrential rain that had begun during the night, three divisions of the American VIII Corps under Major General Troy Middleton attacked on the western edge of the Cotentin peninsula towards the small town of La Haye-du-Puits. It was the first act of a great offensive that General Omar Bradley’s First Army was conducting southwards, towards the road running from Coutances through Saint-Lô to Caumont. Over the following days VII Corps was to join the attack astride the Carentan–Périers road, and XIX Corps along the river Vire. The first hours raised hopes of rapid progress, but at around 7.30 a.m. German resistance stiffened markedly, and by evening it was clear that the strongest of the attacking divisions, the 90th Infantry Division, had advanced less than a mile and a half, losing more than 600 men.

So began what the Americans later called the “battle of the hedgerows”: several weeks of fighting for every field in the Norman bocage, which ended only with the breakthrough near Saint-Lô at the end of July. It is often said that Allied intelligence “overlooked” the hedgerows, and that the problem was solved by blades cut from German beach obstacles. This needs qualifying: the hedgerows were no secret to the planners, but their tactical significance was underestimated, and the famous hedgerow cutters were developed in the course of July and went into action in large numbers only on 25 July, in Operation Cobra – on 3 July nobody yet knew how to deal with the bocage.

A country of small fields

The bocage is a landscape typical of western Normandy and neighbouring Brittany, shaped by centuries of cattle-raising and orchard-growing. Fields and meadows, often no larger than a football pitch, were enclosed by earth banks a metre high and sometimes more, overgrown with dense shrubs and trees reaching several metres. The roots bound the earth of the banks so tightly that they resembled low walls rather than fences. Between the fields ran narrow sunken lanes, so deep that – as one American observer noted, quoted by the US Army historian Martin Blumenson – they “might have been made for ambushes”. South of Carentan the picture was completed by extensive marshes along the Douve, the Taute and the Vire, crossed only by narrow causeways.

For a defender it was ideal ground. Every hedgerow running across the line of attack became a ready-made trench line, which the Germans strengthened with machine-gun positions in the corners of the fields and anti-tank guns hidden in the greenery. The gaps for carts and cattle were registered in advance. Mortars and artillery, directed by observers on low rises, struck every field in which the Americans appeared. The attacker could usually see only the next hedgerow, a hundred or two hundred metres away, and did not know what lay behind it.

The hedgerows did not take the Allies by surprise in the sense that nobody knew about them – they were visible in thousands of aerial photographs of the coast and its hinterland. The Overlord planners, however, had concentrated above all on the landing itself and on holding the beachhead; far less attention had been paid to fighting inland. American military historians – among them Blumenson in the US Army official history and Michael Doubler in his study of American infantry tactics in Europe – point out that the divisions trained in England had not practised fighting in such terrain, and that the staffs had underestimated how much the bocage would slow the advance and restrict the use of tanks. To this was added a mistaken assessment of the enemy: at the beginning of July VIII Corps intelligence concluded that, after their June defeats, the German divisions on its sector had practically ceased to exist as such. The first day of the offensive showed how wrong it was.

In June, after the Normandy landings, during the fighting for the beachhead and the advance on Cherbourg, the Americans had already worked out their first methods of hedgerow fighting. A tank platoon would fire on the hedgerow from which the attack started and on the field in front of it, while the infantry moved along the lateral hedgerows and cleared the next bank at close quarters. The trouble was that a tank climbing a bank exposed its thinly armoured belly, and its gun then pointed at the sky. Engineers therefore had to blow gaps in the banks, which immediately told the Germans where a tank would appear. Infantry and tank crews also lacked common communications – their radios worked on different frequencies, and infantrymen trying to attract a crew’s attention hammered on the armour with their fists. Signal companies therefore began installing infantry radios in tanks and mounting telephones on the outside of the vehicles, connected to the tank’s intercom.

The plan for the southward offensive

After the liberation of Cherbourg on 26 June Bradley could turn the whole of the First Army southwards. Since mid-June, while the main forces were fighting in the north of the Cotentin, the units near Saint-Lô and Caumont had stood still, and the Germans had gained two weeks to dig in on the hills and in the hedgerows. In line with the overall concept of General Bernard Montgomery, who at that time commanded all the ground forces in the beachhead, the British and Canadians were to tie down the main German armoured forces around Caen, while the Americans were to break out of the marshy Carentan plain onto the dry, firm ground beyond the Coutances–Saint-Lô–Caumont line, from where a thrust towards Brittany and its ports could be launched. The start was delayed by the Channel storm, which on 19–22 June destroyed the American Mulberry artificial harbour off Omaha Beach and halted deliveries, and by the resulting shortage of artillery ammunition.

Bradley planned a staggered attack, corps by corps, from west to east. The first to move, on 3 July, was Middleton’s VIII Corps – three divisions that were veterans of the June fighting: the 79th Infantry Division under Major General Ira Wyche by the sea, the 82nd Airborne Division under Major General Matthew Ridgway in the centre, and the 90th Infantry Division under Major General Eugene Landrum on the left wing. They were to take the horseshoe of hills around La Haye-du-Puits – the Montgardon ridge, Hills 121 and 131, the Poterie ridge and the wooded massif of Mont Castre – and then push on towards Lessay and Coutances. A day later VII Corps under Major General Joseph Lawton Collins was to strike along the road from Carentan to Périers, and on 7 July XIX Corps under Major General Charles Corlett across the Vire towards Saint-Lô.

On the other side stood the German Seventh Army, which after the sudden death of General Friedrich Dollmann on 28 June had been taken over by SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser. The western part of the front was held by LXXXIV Corps under General Dietrich von Choltitz, the eastern part, near Saint-Lô, by II Parachute Corps under General Eugen Meindl, with the elite 3rd Parachute Division. On the isthmus between Carentan and Périers fought the 6th Parachute Regiment under Colonel Friedrich von der Heydte and the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, later supported by a battle group of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The whole German force in Normandy was commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as commander of Army Group B, and from the beginning of July his superior was the new Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, who had replaced Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, dismissed by Hitler. They were short of men, tanks and fuel, but in the bocage a few machine guns, some mortars and a well-hidden gun were enough to stop a battalion.

The first day

Choltitz did not intend to defend the marshes in front of La Haye-du-Puits, where the weak remnants of the 91st and 243rd Infantry Divisions stood together with battalions of Osttruppen – volunteers and prisoners from the Soviet Union in German service, on whom, by his own assessment, he could not rely. He placed the fresh 353rd Infantry Division, which had arrived from Brittany, and the remnants of the 77th Division higher up, on the Montgardon ridge and on Mont Castre, hastily forming the so-called Mahlmann Line, named after the commander of the 353rd Division. He regarded this line as his main defensive position.

On 3 July Ridgway’s paratroopers fared best. A company of the 505th Regiment, having slipped along the edge of the marshes during the night, found itself at dawn in the middle of a German outpost on Hill 131, held by Osttruppen, who withdrew. By noon the regiment had taken the northern and eastern slopes of the hill, and the 508th Regiment its south-eastern slope, with losses counted in dozens rather than hundreds. By 5 July the 82nd Division had taken the Poterie ridge, advancing more than six kilometres in three days; then, worn out by more than a month of fighting since the night of 6 June, it was relieved and sent back to England.

The day looked entirely different for the 90th Division, which was making the main attack on Mont Castre. It was a troubled formation – after a poor debut in June its commander and two regimental commanders had been removed, and since 12 June Landrum had been trying to rebuild it. His men had to squeeze through a corridor less than two kilometres wide between Mont Castre and the marshes, under the eyes of observers on the hills. German artillery and mortar fire broke up companies before they could reach the first hedgerows: according to Blumenson, by the afternoon 125 wounded from a single battalion had passed through the aid station of just one regiment, 90 per cent of them hit by shell fragments. By evening the division had advanced less than a mile and a half, merely denting the forward line of the defence, and had lost more than 600 men. On the right wing the 79th Division, advancing along the road to La Haye-du-Puits, was stopped after less than a kilometre by machine-gun and mortar fire from a railway embankment. Rain and low cloud grounded the aircraft and limited observation for the artillery, depriving the Americans of their chief advantage.

Field after field

The following days brought no breakthrough. On 4 July Collins’s VII Corps sent the inexperienced 83rd Infantry Division under Major General Robert Macon into an attack on Sainteny, halfway between Carentan and Périers. On the narrow isthmus between the marshes there was no room for manoeuvre, and facing them stood von der Heydte’s paratroopers and the SS panzergrenadiers. On the first day the division lost nearly 1,400 men. Blumenson cites a telling episode: von der Heydte sent captured medical orderlies back to the Americans with a note saying that General Macon would probably need them. In twelve days the 83rd Division lost some 5,000 men and still did not reach Périers.

On 7 July XIX Corps went over to the attack. The 30th Infantry Division crossed the Vire and the canal linking it with the Taute, and when the Americans tried to widen the bridgehead with an armoured division, Kluge and Rommel brought the elite Panzer Lehr Division across from the Caen sector. Its counter-attack at Le Dézert on 11 July broke against American infantry, tank destroyers, artillery and aircraft, which that day were able to fly again. Meanwhile, in the west, the 79th Division took the ruins of La Haye-du-Puits after several days of fighting, and the 90th Division finally captured Mont Castre in bloody fighting. After twelve days, on 14 July, VIII Corps reached the rivers Ay and Sèves. According to Blumenson, it had advanced some eleven kilometres through the hedgerows in that time and lost more than 10,000 men.

The hardest struggle proved to be for Saint-Lô itself, a road junction on the Vire defended by Meindl’s paratroopers. On 11 July the 29th and 35th Infantry Divisions began their attack, and the neighbouring V Corps took Hill 192. Every ridge – Hill 122, the Martinville ridge – had to be fought for over several days under artillery fire, which in the first two days alone cost the 29th Division nearly a thousand men. On 17 July Major Thomas Howie, commander of a battalion of the 116th Infantry Regiment, who had promised to meet his comrades in Saint-Lô, was killed. When an American task force finally drove into the ruined town on 18 July, his body, wrapped in a flag, was laid on the rubble in front of the church of Sainte-Croix. The capture of Saint-Lô cost the 29th Division more than 3,000 and the 35th Division more than 2,000 killed, wounded and missing. The town, destroyed by Allied bombing as early as the night of 6/7 June and then by the artillery of both sides, lay in ruins – after the war Samuel Beckett, who worked there in an Irish Red Cross hospital, called it “the capital of the ruins”.

Over the whole of July, up to the start of Operation Cobra, the First Army lost – according to the US official history – some 40,000 killed, wounded and missing, the overwhelming majority of them infantrymen. Divisions were being used up faster than replacements arrived, and replacements thrown straight into the front line were often killed in their first days.

Blades from German obstacles

The most famous answer to the bocage was the devices that allowed tanks to burst through the earth banks instead of climbing over them. This was not a single invention but the product of the ingenuity of many units. According to American accounts, a hedgerow cutter built in the 79th Division was already working on 5 July, and a few days later XIX Corps demonstrated a set of steel prongs originally designed to punch holes in the banks for explosive charges. It turned out that a tank fitted with such prongs and driven at speed could tear a whole section out of a bank, bushes and all.

The best-known solution is credited to Sergeant Curtis Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, attached to the 2nd Armored Division. The British historian Max Hastings writes that the inspiration was a half-joking remark by another soldier, named Roberts, that “saw teeth” should be welded onto a tank. A prototype with steel tusks welded to the front of a Sherman was demonstrated to Bradley, who according to American accounts inspected it on 14 July and ordered as many tanks as possible to be fitted with such devices. The steel came from the German beach obstacles, the so-called Czech hedgehogs, which Rommel had ordered to be set up in their thousands on the beaches as part of the Atlantic Wall, and which now, cut up, were returning to the front as blades. The First Army’s workshops, supported by welding equipment and welders flown in, produced some 500 sets by the end of July, known after Culin or, from their appearance, as “rhinos”.

Bradley, however, forbade the use of the new tanks before the great attack, so that the Germans would not have time to devise a counter-measure. By the start of Operation Cobra on 25 July, according to various sources, some 60 per cent of the First Army’s tanks had been fitted with the devices, and in the 2nd Armored Division almost three-quarters of its vehicles. Only then could armoured columns go through the hedgerows cross-country, avoiding the registered gaps and lanes. To say that the bocage problem was “solved” by the cutters is therefore a simplification: the blades proved useful above all in the pursuit after the breakthrough, while the breakthrough itself was made possible by a massed heavy-bomber raid and the concentration of forces on a narrow sector. Culin received the Legion of Merit; a few months later, in the Hürtgen Forest, he lost a leg to a mine. In 1961, in one of his last speeches as president, Dwight Eisenhower recalled him as an example of soldierly ingenuity.

Bradley’s frustration

For Bradley the first days of July were one of the most difficult periods of the war. The offensive that was to have taken the First Army onto dry ground near Coutances within a few days had stalled after a few kilometres, and the losses exceeded all expectations. The American and British press began to write of the threat of a war of position like the Western Front of 1914–1918, and impatience was growing at Eisenhower’s headquarters, also with Montgomery, whose troops were still held up before Caen. The weaker divisions, such as the 90th and 83rd, raised doubts about the quality of their commanders; Landrum lost command of the 90th Division at the end of July.

Bradley – as he later recalled in his memoirs – came to the conclusion that spreading his forces across the whole width of the front and pushing the Germans back from hedgerow to hedgerow would not produce a breakthrough. Around 10 July he and his staff began preparing a different plan: a concentrated blow on a narrow sector a few kilometres wide west of Saint-Lô, along the road to Périers, preceded by a heavy-bomber raid, after which armoured divisions would be sent into the gap. The precondition, however, was to take the starting positions – the Saint-Lô–Périers road and Saint-Lô itself – which cost another week and a half of fighting in the hedgerows.

The Germans paid an equally high price for their defence. Their infantry divisions were melting away, there were almost no replacements, and the armoured units, drawn into the fighting in the front line, could not form reserves. Rommel and Kluge reported to Hitler that the front in Normandy could not hold for long. The July fighting in the bocage, although from the American soldiers’ point of view it looked like a bloody stalemate, exhausted the Seventh Army to such an extent that by the end of the month it no longer had anything with which to stop a breakthrough.

Place in the war

The Battle of the Hedgerows, begun on 3 July, lasted into the last ten days of the month. Operation Cobra, repeatedly postponed because of the weather, began on 25 July after an air raid in which some of the bombs fell on American troops. After two days of heavy fighting the German front cracked, American armoured columns – including tanks fitted with Culin’s blades – drove on Coutances and Avranches, and on 1 August General George Patton’s Third Army entered the battle. In August the Battle of Normandy turned into a war of manoeuvre, which ended with the encirclement of a large part of the German forces at Falaise and the liberation of Paris on 25 August.

For the US Army July in the bocage was a school of war, paid for with the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. It taught the army to coordinate infantry with tanks, engineers, artillery and aircraft. The word “hedgerows” entered American memory of the war for good. For the people of Normandy the same weeks meant ruined towns and villages, from Saint-Lô to La Haye-du-Puits, and thousands of civilian dead.