SOME 90,000 GIs ENTERED FRANCE on June 6, coming by air or by sea. More than two million would follow. Most of those who landed on D-Day had been in the army for two or even three years. There were some teenagers among them, but the average age was more like twenty-two or twenty-three among the enlisted men, in the mid-twenties or older for the junior officers. The divisions that entered France after D-Day, from June until September, were similar in age and time in the army. But those who came in as replacements, or in new divisions after September, had been overwhelmingly high school or college students when America got into the war. They had been drafted or enlisted voluntarily in late 1942, 1943, and 1944. From June 7 to September they came in over Omaha and Utah Beaches; from September to the spring of 1945 they came in at Cherbourg and Le Havre. Whenever they entered the Continent, they came as liberators, not conquerors. Only a tiny percentage of them wanted to be there, but only a small percentage failed to do their duty.
None of them, not even the D-Day veterans, had been trained for what they were about to encounter. For all its thoroughness, intelligence-gathering capacity, and astonishing achievements in logistics, the army had failed to tell its men about Norman hedgerows. They were going to have to find out for themselves, and then figure out a way to launch a successful attack in hedgerow country.
First light came to Ste.-Mère-Eglise around 0510. Twenty-four hours earlier it had been just another Norman village, with more than a millennium behind it. By nightfall of June 6 it was a name known around the world, the village where the invasion began and now headquarters for the 82nd Airborne Division.
At dawn on June 7, Lt. Waverly Wray, executive officer in Company D, 505th PIR, who had jumped into the night sky over Normandy twenty-eight hours earlier, was on the northwestern outskirts of the village. He peered intently into the lifting gloom. What he couldn’t see, he could sense. From the sounds of the movement of personnel and vehicles to the north of Ste.-Mère-Eglise, he could feel and figure that the major German counterattack, the one the Germans counted on to drive the Americans into the sea and the one the paratroopers had been expecting, was coming at Ste.-Mère-Eglise.
It was indeed. Six thousand German soldiers were on the move, with infantry, artillery, tanks, and self-propelled guns—more than a match for the six hundred or so lightly armed paratroopers in Ste.-Mère-Eglise. A German breakthrough to the beaches seemed imminent. And Lieutenant Wray was at the point of attack.
Wray was a big man, 250 pounds with “legs like tree trunks.” The standard-issue army parachute wasn’t large enough for his weight and he dropped too fast on his jumps, but the men said hell, with his legs he didn’t need a chute. He was from Batesville, Mississippi, and was an avid woodsman, skilled with rifles and shotguns. He claimed he had never missed a shot in his life. A veteran of the Sicily and Italy campaigns, Wray was—in the words of Col. Ben Vandervoort, commanding the 505th—“as experienced and skilled as an infantry soldier can get and still be alive.”
Wray had Deep South religious convictions. A Baptist, each month he sent half his pay home to help build a new church. He never swore. His exclamation when exasperated was, “John Brown!” meaning abolitionist John Brown of Harpers Ferry. He didn’t drink, smoke, or chase girls. Some troopers called him “The Deacon,” but in an admiring rather than critical way. Vandervoort had something of a father-son relationship with Wray, always calling him by his first name, Waverly.
On June 7, shortly after dawn, Wray reported to Vandervoort—whose leg, broken in the jump, was now in a cast—on the movements he had spotted, the things he had sensed, and where he expected the Germans to attack and in what strength.
Vandervoort took all this in, then ordered Wray to return to the company and have it attack the German flank before the Germans could get their attack started.
“He said ‘Yes Sir,’ ” Vandervoort later wrote, “saluted, about-faced, and moved out like a parade ground Sergeant Major.”
Back in the company area, Wray passed on the order. As the company prepared to attack, he took up his M-1, grabbed a half-dozen grenades, and strode out, his Colt .45 on his hip and a silver-plated .38 revolver stuck in his jump boot. He was going to do a one-man reconnaissance to formulate a plan of attack.
• • •
Wray was going out into the unknown. He had spent half a year preparing for this moment but he was not trained for it. In one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time, neither G-2 (intelligence) at U.S. First Army, nor SHAEF G-2, nor any division S-2 had ever thought to tell the men who were going to fight the battle that the dominant physical feature of the battlefield was the maze of hedgerows that covered the western half of Normandy.
One hundred years before Lieutenant Wray came to Normandy, Honorede Balzac had described the hedges: “The peasants from time immemorial, have raised a bank of earth about each field, forming a flat-topped ridge, two meters in height, with beeches, oaks, and chestnut trees growing upon the summit. The ridge or mound, planted in this wise, is called a hedge; and as the long branches of the trees which grow upon it almost always project across the road, they make a great arbor overhead. The roads themselves, shut in by clay banks in this melancholy way, are not unlike the moats of fortresses.”
How could the various G-2s have missed such an obvious feature, especially as aerial reconnaissance clearly revealed the hedges? Because the photo interpreters, looking only straight down at them, thought that they were like English hedges, the kind the fox hunters jump over, and they had missed the sunken nature of the roads entirely. “We had been neither informed of them or trained to overcome them,” was Capt. John Colby’s brief comment. The GIs would have to learn by doing, as Wray was doing on the morning of June 7.
Wray and his fellow paratroopers, like the men from the 1st and 29th Divisions at Omaha and the 4th Division at Utah, and all the support groups, had been magnificently trained to launch an amphibious assault. By nightfall of June 6, they had done the real thing successfully, thanks to their training, courage, and dash. But beginning at dawn, June 7, they were fighting in a terrain completely unexpected and unfamiliar to them.
The Germans, meanwhile, had been going through specialized training for fighting in hedgerows. “Coming within thirty meters of the enemy was what we meant by close combat,” Pvt. Adolf Rogosch of the 353rd Division recalled. “We trained hard, throwing hand grenades, getting to know the ground. The lines of hedges crisscrossing one another played tricks on your eyes. We trained to fight as individuals; we knew when the attack came we’d probably be cut off from one another. We let them come forward and cross the hedge, then we blew them apart. That was our tactic, to wait until they crossed over the hedge and then shoot.”
The Germans also pre-sited mortars and artillery on the single gaps that provided the only entrances into the fields. Behind the hedgerows, they dug rifle pits and tunneled openings for machinegun positions in each corner.
• • •
Wray moved up sunken lanes, crossed an orchard, pushed his way through hedgerows, crawled through a ditch. Along the way he noted concentrations of Germans in fields and lanes. A man without his woodsman’s sense of direction would have gotten lost. He reached a point near the N-13, the main highway coming into Ste.-Mère-Eglise from Cherbourg.
The N-13 was the axis of the German attacks. Wray, “moving like the deer stalker he was” (Vandervoort’s words), got to a place where he could hear guttural voices on the other side of a hedgerow. They sounded like officers talking about map coordinates. Wray rose up, burst through the obstacle, swung his M-1 to a ready position, and barked in his strong command voice, “Hände hoch!” to the eight German officers gathered around a radio.
Seven instinctively raised their hands. The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly between the eyes. Two Germans in a slit trench one hundred meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him. Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear.
Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away. When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.
Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing. “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded. He wanted more grenades.
Then he started leading. He put a 60mm mortar crew on the German flank and directed fire into the lanes and hedgerows most densely packed with the enemy. Next he sent D Company into an attack down one of the lanes. The Germans broke and ran. By mid-morning Ste.-Mère-Eglise was secure, and the potential for a German breakthrough to the beaches was much diminished.
• • •
The next day Vandervoort, Wray, and Sgt. John Rabig went to the spot to examine the German officers Wray had shot. Unforgettably, their bodies were sprinkled with pink and white apple blossom petals from an adjacent orchard. It turned out that they were the commanding officer and his staff of the 1st Battalion, 158th Grenadier Infantry Regiment. The maps showed that it was leading the way for the counterattack. The German confusion and subsequent retreat were in part due to having been rendered leaderless by Wray.
Vandervoort later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray’s jacket and the missing half-ear, he had remarked, “They’ve been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they Waverly?”
With just a trace of a grin, Wray had replied, “Not as close as I’ve been getting to them, sir.”
At the scene of the action Vandervoort noted that every one of the dead Germans, including the two Schmeisser-armed Grenadiers more than a hundred meters away, had been killed with a single shot in the head. Wray insisted on burying the bodies. He said he had killed them, and they deserved a decent burial, and it was his responsibility.
Later that day Sergeant Rabig commented to Vandervoort, “Colonel, aren’t you glad Waverly’s on our side?”
The next day Rabig wasn’t so sure. He and Wray were crouched behind a hedgerow. American artillery was falling into the next field. “I could hear these Germans screaming as they were getting hit. Lieutenant Wray said, ‘John, I wish that artillery would stop so we can go in after them.’
“Jesus! I thought, the artillery is doing good enough.”
• • •
Before the battle was joined, Hitler had been sure his young men would outfight the young Americans. He was certain that the spoiled sons of democracy couldn’t stand up to the solid sons of dictatorship. If he had seen Lieutenant Wray in action in the early morning of D-Day plus one, he might have had some doubts.
Of course, Wray was special. You don’t get more than one Wray to a division, or even to an army. Vandervoort compared Wray to a sergeant in the 82nd Division in World War I, also a Southern boy, named Alvin York. Yet if the qualities Wray possessed were unique, others could aspire to them without hoping or expecting to match his spectacular performance. Indeed, they would have to if the United States was going to win the war. Victory depended on the junior officers and NCOs on the front lines. That is the spine of this book.
• • •
Among other elite German outfits in Normandy, there were paratroopers. They were a different proposition altogether from the Polish or Russian troops. The 3rd Fallschirmjäger Division came into battle in Normandy on June 10, arriving by truck after night drives from Brittany. It was a full-strength division, 15,976 men in its ranks, mostly young German volunteers. It was new to combat but it had been organized and trained by a veteran paratroop battalion from the Italian campaign. Training had been rigorous and emphasized initiative and improvisation. The equipment was outstanding.
Indeed, the Fallschirmjäger were perhaps the best-armed infantrymen in the world in 1944. The 3rd FJ had 930 light machine guns, eleven times as many as its chief opponent, the U.S. 29th Division. Rifle companies in the FJ had twenty MG 42s and forty-three submachine guns; rifle companies in the 29th had two machine guns and nine BARs. At the squad level, the GIs had a single BAR; the German parachute squad had two MG 42s and three submachine guns. The Germans had three times as many mortars as the Americans, and heavier ones. So in any encounter between equal numbers of Americans and Fallschirmjäger, the Germans had from six to twenty times as much firepower.
And these German soldiers were ready to fight. A battalion commander in the 29th remarked to an unbelieving counterpart from another regiment, “Those Germans are the best soldiers I ever saw. They’re smart and they don’t know what the word ‘fear’ means. They come in and they keep coming until they get their job done or you kill ’em.”
• • •
These were the men who had to be rooted out of the hedgerows. One by one. There were, on average, fourteen hedgerows to the kilometer in Normandy. The enervating, costly process of gearing up for an attack, making the attack, carrying the attack home, mopping up after the attack, took half a day or more. And at the end of the action there was the next hedgerow, fifty to a hundred meters or so away. All through the Cotentin Peninsula, from June 7 on, GIs labored at the task. They heaved and pushed and punched and died doing it, for two hedgerows a day.
No terrain in the world was better suited for defensive action with the weapons of the fourth decade of the twentieth century than the Norman hedgerows, and only the lava and coral, caves and tunnels of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were as favorable.
The Norman hedgerows dated back to Roman times. They were mounds of earth to keep cattle in and to mark boundaries. Typically there was only one entry into the small field enclosed by the hedgerows, which were irregular in length as well as height and set at odd angles. On the sunken roads the brush often met overhead, giving the GIs a feeling of being trapped in a leafy tunnel. Wherever they looked the view was blocked by walls of vegetation.
Undertaking an offensive in the hedgerows was risky, costly, time-consuming, fraught with frustration. It was like fighting in a maze. Platoons found themselves completely lost a few minutes after launching an attack. Squads got separated. Just as often, two platoons from the same company could occupy adjacent fields for hours before discovering each other’s presence. The small fields limited deployment possibilities; seldom during the first week of battle did a unit as large as a company go into an attack intact.
Where the Americans got lost, the Germans were at home. The 352nd Division had been in Normandy for months, training for this battle. Further, the Germans were geniuses at utilizing the fortification possibilities of the hedgerows. In the early days of the battle, many GIs were killed or wounded because they dashed through the opening into a field, just the kind of aggressive tactics they had been taught, only to be cut down by pre-sited machinegun fire or mortars (mortars caused three-quarters of American casualties in Normandy).
American army tactical manuals stressed the need for tank-infantry cooperation. But in Normandy, the tankers didn’t want to get down on the sunken roads because of insufficient room to traverse the turret and insufficient visibility to use the long-range firepower of the cannon and machine guns. But staying on the main roads proved impossible; the Germans held the high ground inland and had their 88mm cannon sited to provide long fields of fire along highways. So into the lanes the tanks perforce went. But there they were restricted; they wanted to get out into the fields. But they couldn’t. When they appeared at the gap leading into a field, presited mortar fire, plus panzerfausts (handheld antitank weapons), disabled them. Often, in fact, it caused them to “brew up,” or start burning—the tankers were discovering that their tanks had a distressing propensity for catching fire.
So tankers tried going over or through the embankments, but the hedgerows were proving to be almost impassable obstacles to the American M4 Sherman tank. Countless attempts were made to break through or climb over, but the Sherman wasn’t powerful enough to break through the cement-like base, and when it climbed up the embankment, at the apex it exposed its unarmored belly to German panzerfausts. Further, coordination between tankers and infantry was almost impossible under battle conditions, as they had no easy or reliable way to communicate with one another.
Lt. Sidney Salomon of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, one of the D-Day heroes, found that out on June 7. He was leading the remnants of his battalion, which had come ashore on the right flank at Omaha and been involved in a day-long firefight on D-Day, westward along the coastal road that led to Pointe-du-Hoc. Three companies of the 2nd Rangers had taken the German emplacement there, and destroyed the coastal guns, but they were under severe attack and had taken severe casualties. Salomon was in a hurry to get to them.
But his column, marching in combat formation, began taking well-placed artillery shells. To his right, Salomon could see a Norman church, its steeple the only high point around. He was certain the Germans had an observer spotting for their artillery in that steeple. Behind Salomon a Sherman tank chugged up, the only American tank to be seen. It was buttoned up. Salomon wanted it to elevate its 75mm cannon and blast that steeple, but he couldn’t get the crew’s attention, not even when he knocked on the side of the tank with the butt of his carbine. “So I ultimately stood in the middle of the road directly in front of the tank, waving my arms and pointing in the direction of the church. That produced results. After a couple of shots from the cannon and several bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun, the artillery spotter was no more.”
Salomon’s daring feat notwithstanding, it was obvious that the army was going to have to work out a better system for tank-infantry communication than having junior officers jump up and down in front of American tanks. Until that was done, the tanks would play a minor supporting role to the infantry, following the GIs into the next field as the infantry overran it.
The U.S. First Army had not produced anything approaching a doctrine for offensive action in the hedgerows. It had expended enormous energy to get tanks by the score into Normandy, but it had no doctrine for the role of tanks in the hedgerows. In peacetime, the army would have dealt with the problem by setting up commissions and boards, experimenting in maneuvers, testing ideas, before establishing a doctrine. But in Normandy time was a luxury the army didn’t have. So as the infantry lurched forward in the Cotentin, following frontal assaults straight into the enemy’s kill zones, the tankers began experimenting with ways to utilize their weapons in the hedgerows.
• • •
Beginning at daylight on June 7, each side had begun to rush reinforcements to the front. The Americans came in on a tight schedule, long since worked out, with fresh divisions almost daily. Sgt. Edward “Buddy” Gianelloni, a medic in the 79th Division, came ashore on D-Day plus six on Utah Beach. The men marched inland; when they reached Ste.-Mère-Eglise, a paratrooper called out to Gianelloni, “Hey, what outfit is that?”
“This is the 79th Infantry Division,” Gianelloni replied.
“Well, that’s good,” the paratrooper said. “Now if you guys are around this time tomorrow you can consider yourselves veterans.”
The Germans came in by bits and pieces because they were improvising, having been caught with no plans for reinforcing Normandy. Further, the Allied air forces had badly hampered German movement from the start.
• • •
At dawn, all along the plateau above the bluff at Omaha, GIs shook themselves awake, did their business, ate some rations, smoked a cigarette, got into some kind of formation, and prepared to move out to broaden the beachhead. But in the hedgerows, individuals got lost, squads got lost. German sniper fire came from all directions. The Norman farm homes, made of stone and surrounded by stone walls and a stone barn, made excellent fortresses. Probing attacks brought forth a stream of bullets from the Germans, pretty much discouraging further probes.
Brig. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota, assistant division commander of the 29th, came on a group of infantry pinned down by some Germans in a farmhouse. He asked the captain in command why his men were making no effort to take the building.
“Sir, the Germans are in there, shooting at us,” the captain replied.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, Captain,” said Cota, unbuckling two grenades from his jacket. “You and your men start shooting at them. I’ll take a squad of men and you and your men watch carefully. I’ll show you how to take a house with Germans in it.”
Cota led his squad around a hedge to get as close as possible to the house. Suddenly, he gave a whoop and raced forward, the squad following, yelling like wild men. As they tossed grenades into the windows, Cota and another man kicked in the front door, tossed a couple of grenades inside, waited for the explosions, then dashed into the house. The surviving Germans inside were streaming out the back door, running for their lives.
Cota returned to the captain. “You’ve seen how to take a house,” said the general, still out of breath. “Do you understand? Do you know how to do it now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I won’t be around to do it for you again,” Cota said. “I can’t do it for everybody.”
• • •
That little story speaks to the training of the U.S. Army for the Battle of Normandy. At first glance, Cota’s bravery stands out, along with his sense of the dramatic and his knowledge of tactics. He could be sure the story would get around the division. A lesson would be learned. His own reputation would go even higher, the men would be even more willing to follow him.
But after that first glance, a question emerges. Where had that captain been the last six months? He had been in training to fight the German army. He had been committed to offensive action, trained to it, inspired to it. But no one had thought to show him how to take an occupied house. He knew all about getting ashore from an LCVP, about beach obstacles, about paths up the bluff, about ravines, about amphibious assault techniques. But no one had shown him how to take a house because there were no standing houses on Omaha Beach, so that wasn’t one of his problems.
Not on June 6. But on June 7 it became his number one problem. The same was true for the two hundred or so company commanders already ashore and would be for the hundreds of others waiting to enter the battle. As Cota said, he couldn’t be there to teach all of them how to take a house. They were going to have to figure it out for themselves.
• • •
Normandy was a soldier’s battle. It belonged to the riflemen, machine gunners, mortarmen, tankers, and artillerymen who were on the front lines. There was no room for maneuver. There was no opportunity for subtlety. There was a simplicity to the fighting: for the Germans, to hold; for the Americans, to attack.
Where they would hold or attack required no decision-making: it was always the next village or field. The real decision-making came at the battalion, company, and platoon levels: where to place the mines, the barbed wire, machine-gun pits, where to dig the foxholes—or where and how to attack them.
• • •
Throughout First Army, young men made many discoveries in the first few days of combat, about war, about themselves, about others. They quickly learned such basics as to keep down or die—to dig deep and stay quiet—to distinguish incoming from outgoing artillery—to judge when and where a shell or a mortar barrage was going to hit—to recognize that fear is inevitable but can be managed—and many more things they had been told in training but that can only be truly learned by doing. Putting it another way, after a week in combat, infantrymen agreed that there was no way training could have prepared them for the reality of combat.
Capt. John Colby caught one of the essences of combat, the sense of total immediacy: “At this point we had been in combat six days. It seemed like a year. In combat, one lives in the now and does not think much about yesterday or tomorrow.”
Colby discovered that there was no telling who would break or when. His regimental CO was “grossly incompetent,” his battalion commander had run away from combat in his first day of action, and his company CO was a complete bust. On June 12 the company got caught in a combined mortar-artillery barrage. The men couldn’t move forward, they couldn’t fall back, and they couldn’t stay where they were—or so it appeared to the CO, who therefore had no orders to give, and was speechless.
Colby went up to his CO to ask for orders. The CO shook his head and pointed to his throat. Colby asked him if he could make it back to the aid station on his own, “and he leaped to his feet and took off. I never saw him again.”
Another thing Colby learned in his first week in combat was: “Artillery does not fire forever. It just seems like that when you get caught in it. The guns overheat or the ammunition runs low, and it stops. It stops for a while, anyway.”
He was amazed to discover how small he could make his body. If you get caught in the open in a shelling, he advised, “the best thing to do is drop to the ground and crawl into your steel helmet. One’s body tends to shrink a great deal when shells come in. I am sure I have gotten as much as eighty percent of my body under my helmet when caught under shellfire.”
Colby learned about hedgerows. Once he got into a situation where “I had to push through a hedgerow. A submachine-gun emitted a long burst right in front of my face. The gun was a Schmeisser, which had a very high rate of fire that sounded like a piece of cloth being ripped loudly. The bullets went over my head. I fell backward and passed out cold from fright.”
• • •
About themselves, the most important thing a majority of the GIs discovered was that they were not cowards. They hadn’t thought so, they had fervently hoped it would not be so, but they couldn’t be sure until tested. After a few days in combat, most of them knew they were good soldiers. They had neither run away nor collapsed into a pathetic mass of quivering Jell-O (their worst fear, even greater than the fear of being afraid).
They were learning about others. A common experience: the guy who talked toughest, bragged most, excelled in maneuvers, everyone’s pick to be the top soldier in the company, was the first to break, while the soft-talking kid who was hardly noticed in camp was the standout in combat. These are the cliches of war novels precisely because they are true. They also learned that while combat brought out the best in some men, it unleashed the worst in others—and a further lesson, that the distinction between best and worst wasn’t clear.
On June 9, Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd Airborne was outside Montebourg. That morning he was part of an attack on the town. “I ran by a wounded German soldier lying alongside of a hedgerow. He was obviously in a great deal of pain and crying for help. I stopped running and turned around. A close friend of mine put the muzzle of his rifle between the German’s still crying eyes and pulled the trigger. There was no change in my friend’s facial expression. I don’t believe he even blinked an eye.”
Schultz was simultaneously appalled and awed by what he had seen. “There was a part of me that wanted to be just as ruthless as my friend,” he commented. Later, he came to realize that “there but for the grace of God go I.”
• • •
By June 12, Easy Company, 501st PIR, had been fighting since shortly after midnight, June 6. Mostly its engagements were small firefights in the fields and tiny villages. But on June 12 it was ordered to make an all-out attack in the town of Carentan. It would spearhead the drive to link up the men from Omaha Beach with those from Utah. Street fighting was a new experience for the company, and it showed.
The objective was a T-junction defended by a company of German parachutists—elite troops. The last hundred or so meters of the road leading to the T-junction was straight, with a gentle downward slope. There were shallow ditches on both sides, then sidewalks and behind them houses. Lt. Richard Winters put the 1st platoon, under Lt. Harry Welsh, on the left side of a road, just past where the road curved then straightened out, with 2nd platoon on the right and 3rd platoon in reserve. The men lay down in the ditches by the side of the road, awaiting orders. The German defenders had not revealed their machine-gun position or fired any mortars. Everything was quiet.
At 0600 Winters ordered, “Move out.” Welsh kicked off the advance, running down the road toward the T-junction some fifty meters away, his platoon following. The German machine gun opened fire, straight down the road. It was in a perfect position, at the perfect time, to wipe out the company.
The fire split the platoon. The seventh man behind Welsh stayed in the ditch. So did the rest of the platoon, almost thirty men. They were facedown in the ditches on both sides of the road, trying to snuggle in as close as they could.
Winters jumped into the middle of the road, highly agitated, yelling, “Move out! Move out!” It did no good; the men remained in place, heads down in the ditch.
From his rear, Winters could hear Lt. Col. Robert Strayer, Lts. Clarence Hester and Louis Nixon, and other members of the battalion HQ hollering at him to “get them moving, Winters, get them moving.”
Winters threw away his gear, holding onto his M-1, and ran over to the left side, “hollering like a madman, ‘Get going!’ ” He started kicking the men in the butt. He crossed to the other side and repeated the order, again kicking the men.
“I was possessed,” Winters recalled. “Nobody’d ever seen me like that.” He ran back to the other side, machine-gun bullets zinging down the street. He thought to himself, My God, I’m leading a blessed life. I’m charmed.
He was also desperate. His best friend, Harry Welsh, was up ahead, trying to deal with that machine gun. If I don’t do something, Winters thought to himself, he’s dead. No question about it.
But the men wouldn’t move. They did look up. Winters recalled, “I will never forget the surprise and fear on those faces looking up at me.” The German machine gun seemed to be zeroing in on him, and he was a wide open target. “The bullets kept snapping by and glancing off the road all around me.”
“Everybody had froze,” Pvt. Rod Strohl remembered. “Nobody could move. And Winters got up in the middle of the road and screamed, ‘Come on! Move out! Now!’ ”
That did it. No man in the company had ever before heard Winters shout. “It was so out of character,” Strohl said, “we moved out as one man.”
According to Winters, “Here is where the discipline paid off. The men got the message, and they moved out.”
As Sgt. Floyd Talbert passed Winters, he called out, “Which way when we hit the intersection?”
“Turn right,” Winters ordered.
(In 1981, Talbert wrote Winters: “I’ll never forget seeing you in the middle of that road. You were my total inspiration. All my boys felt the same way.”)
Welsh, meanwhile, was neutralizing the machine gun. “We were all alone,” he remembered, “and I couldn’t understand where the hell everybody was.” Thanks to the distraction caused by Winters running back and forth, the machine gunner had lost track of Welsh and his six men. Welsh tossed some grenades at the gun, followed by bursts from his carbine. The men with him did the same. The machine gun fell silent.1
• • •
The remainder of Easy Company drove into the intersection at a full run and secured it. Winters sent the 1st platoon to the left, the 2nd to the right, clearing out the houses, one man throwing grenades through windows while another waited outside the door. Immediately after the explosion, the second man kicked in the door to look for and shoot any survivors.
Pvts. Ed Tipper and Joe Liebgott cleared out a house. As Tipper was passing out the front door, “A locomotive hit me, driving me far back inside the house. I heard no noise, felt no pain, and was somehow unsteadily standing and in possession of my M-1.” The German rear guard was bringing its pre-positioned mortars into play. Liebgott grabbed Tipper and helped him to a sitting position, called for a medic, and tried to reassure Tipper that he would be OK.
Welsh came up and got some morphine into Tipper, who was insisting that he could walk. That was nonsense; both his legs were broken, and he had a serious head wound. Welsh and Liebgott half dragged him into the street, where “I remember lying at the base of the wall with explosions in the street and shrapnel zinging against the wall above my head.” Welsh got Tipper back to the aid station being set up in a barn about twenty meters to the rear.
Mortars continued coming in, along with sniper fire. Pvt. Carwood Lipton led 3rd platoon to the intersection and peeled off to the right. There were explosions on the street; he huddled against a wall and yelled to his men to follow him. A mortar shell dropped about two meters in front of him, putting shell fragments in his left cheek, right wrist, and right leg at the crotch. His rifle clattered to the street. He dropped to the ground, put his left hand to his cheek and felt a large hole, but his biggest concern was his right hand, as blood was pumping out in spurts. Sergeant Talbert got to him and put a tourniquet on his arm.
Only then did Lipton feel the pain in his crotch. He reached down for a feel, and his left hand came away bloody.
“Talbert, I may be hit bad,” he said. Talbert slit his pants leg with his knife, took a look, and said, “You’re OK.”
“What a relief that was,” Lipton remembered. The two shell fragments had gone into the top of his leg and “missed everything important.”
Talbert threw Lipton over his shoulder and carried him to the aid station. The medics gave Lipton a shot of morphine and bandaged him up.
Sgt. Don Malarkey recalled that during “this tremendous period of fire I could hear someone reciting a Hail Mary. I glanced up and saw Father John Maloney holding his rosary and walking down the center of the road to administer last rites to the dying at the road juncture.” (Maloney was awarded the DSC.)
Winters got hit by a ricochet bullet that went through his boot and into his leg. He stayed in action long enough to check the ammunition supply and consult with Welsh (who tried to remove the bullet with his knife but gave it up) to set up a defensive position in the event of a counterattack.
By this time it was 0700, and the area was secured. F Company, meanwhile, had hooked up with the 327th. Carentan had been captured. Lieutenant Colonel Strayer came into town, where he met the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 327th. They went into a wine shop and opened a bottle to drink to the victory.
Winters went back to the battalion aid station. Ten of his men were there receiving first aid. A doctor poked around Winters’s leg with a tweezers, pulled the bullet, cleaned out the wound, put some sulfa powder on it and a bandage.
Winters circulated among the wounded. One of them was Pvt. Albert Blithe.
“How’re you doing, Blithe? What’s the matter?”
“I can’t see, sir. I can’t see.”
“Take it easy, relax. You’ve got a ticket out of here, we’ll get you out of here in a hurry. You’ll be going back to England. You’ll be OK. Relax,” Winters said, and started to move on.
Blithe began to get up. “Take it easy,” Winters told him. “Stay still.”
“I can see, I can see, sir! I can see you!”
Blithe got up and rejoined the company. “Never saw anything like it,” Winters said. “He was that scared he blacked out. Spooky. This kid just completely could not see, and all he needed was somebody to talk to him for a minute and calm him down.”
• • •
The company went into defensive position south of Carentan. The second day in this static situation, someone came down the hedgerow line asking for Pvts. Don Malarkey and Skip Muck. It was Fritz Niland. He found Muck, talked to him, then found Malarkey, and had only enough time to say good-bye; he was flying home.
A few minutes after Niland left, Muck came to Malarkey, “his impish Irish smile replaced by a frown.” Had Niland explained to Malarkey why he was going home? No. Muck told the story.
The previous day Niland had gone to the 82nd to see his brother Bob, who had told Malarkey in London that if he wanted to be a hero, the Germans would see to it, fast, which had led Malarkey to conclude that Bob Niland had lost his nerve. Fritz Niland had just learned that his brother had been killed on D-Day. Bob’s platoon had been surrounded, and he manned a machine gun, hitting the Germans with harassing fire until the platoon broke through the encirclement. He had used up several boxes of ammunition before getting killed.
Fritz Niland next hitched a ride to the 4th Infantry Division position, to see another brother who was a platoon leader. He too had been killed on D-Day, on Utah Beach. By the time Fritz returned to Easy Company, Father Francis Sampson was looking for him, to tell him that a third brother, a pilot in the China-Burma-India theater, had been killed that same week. Fritz was the sole surviving son, and the army wanted to remove him from the combat zone as soon as possible.
Fritz’s mother had received all three telegrams from the War Department on the same day.
Father Sampson escorted Fritz to Utah Beach, where a plane flew him to London on the first leg of his return to the States.
With Carentan captured, the Americans had linked up and established a continuous line. Attention now shifted to the drive inland, through the hedgerows. It wasn’t going well. Less than two weeks after the exultation over the success of D-Day came the letdown. On the left, Montgomery had promised to take Caen on D-Day, but he still didn’t have it and showed no great urgency in going after it. His reluctance to attack (as the Americans saw it) led to a severe strain on the Alliance, and on the relations between Eisenhower and Montgomery specifically.
That the two men would have difficulty in dealing with each other was almost inevitable, given the contrasts between them. Eisenhower was gregarious, while Montgomery lived in isolation. Eisenhower mixed easily with his staff and discussed all decisions with his subordinates; Montgomery set himself up in a lonely camp, where he slept and ate in a wood-paneled trailer he had captured from Rommel in the desert. Montgomery wrote his directives by hand and handed them down from on high, while Eisenhower waited for general agreement among his staff and usually had his operations officer write the final directive. Montgomery had shunned the company of women after his wife’s death and did not smoke or drink. Eisenhower was modest, Montgomery conceited. “I became completely dedicated to my profession,” Montgomery once said of himself.
He had indeed made an intensive study of how to command. What he had not studied was how to get his ideas across. He always seemed to be talking down to people, and his condescension became more marked the more intensely he felt about a subject. Montgomery’s arrogance offended even British officers, while most Americans found him insufferable. What one American called “his sharp beagle-like nose, the small grey eyes that dart about quickly like rabbits in a Thurber cartoon,” his self-satisfaction, all irritated.
The personality differences were significant factors in the always strained Eisenhower-Montgomery relationship, but what mattered more was fundamental disagreement over strategy and tactics, and their different structural positions. Eisenhower’s military theory was straightforward and aggressive. Like Grant in the Virginia Wilderness in 1864, he favored constant attack, all along the line. He was an advocate of the direct approach and put his faith in the sheer smashing power of great armies. He was once accused of having a mass-production mentality, which was true but beside the point. He came from a mass-production society, and like any good general he wanted to use his nation’s strengths on the battlefield.
To Montgomery, “it was always very clear … that Ike and I were poles apart when it came to the conduct of the war.” Montgomery believed in “unbalancing the enemy while keeping well-balanced myself.” He wanted to attack on a narrow front, cut through the German lines, and dash on to his objective.
Further, Eisenhower was responsible to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and beyond that body to the two governments. Montgomery was in theory responsible to Eisenhower, but in reality he looked to Field Marshal Alan Brooke, not Eisenhower, for guidance. Montgomery was the senior British officer on the Continent, and as such saw himself as responsible for his nation’s interests. The British had neither the manpower nor the material resources to overwhelm the Germans, and they had learned from 1914 to 1918 that it was near suicidal for them to attempt to do so. The British strength was brains, not brawn. Montgomery proposed to defeat the Germans in France by outthinking and outmaneuvering them; Eisenhower wanted to outfight them.
• • •
The initial difficulty centered around the taking of Caen. Montgomery had promised it, did not have it, would not attack it. By mid-June, he was claiming that he had never intended to break out of the beachhead at Caen, on the direct road to Paris; rather, his strategy was to hold on the left while Bradley broke out on the right. His critics charge that he changed his plan because of his failure at Caen; Montgomery himself insisted that he had all along planned to pin the German panzers down in front of Caen while Gen. Omar Bradley outflanked them. There is a fierce, continuing, and unresolvable controversy among military experts on this point.
On July 1, Eisenhower went to Normandy to see what he could do to galvanize his commanders. He told Bradley he was bringing “nothing but a bedroll, one aide and an orderly” and wanted “nothing but a trench with a piece of canvas over it.” He stayed five days visiting with troops, inspecting the battlefield, talking with Bradley and the American corps and division commanders. None of them liked having Eisenhower around because their various headquarters were all subject to sporadic German artillery fire. Eisenhower’s old friend Lt. Gen. Wade Haislip, commanding the XV Corps, told him flatly to get out. “Don’t think I’m worrying about your possible demise,” he added. “I just don’t want it said that I allowed the Supreme Commander to get killed in my corps area. Now if you want to get killed, go into some other area.”
At one point Eisenhower commandeered a jeep and, accompanied by his British aide, Col. James Gault, and an orderly, with no other escort, personally drove around the countryside, and even managed to wander behind the German lines. No startling events occurred, and he did not know he had been in danger until he reached 90th Division headquarters and was told where he had been. The GIs were delighted to see Eisenhower driving the jeep and shouted and whistled as he drove past.
On July 4, Eisenhower went to a fighter airfield; while there, he learned that a mission was about to be flown. Eisenhower said he wanted to go along in order to see the hedgerow country from the air. Bradley, who was with him, demurred, but Eisenhower insisted. His last words, as he climbed into a Mustang, were, “All right, Brad, I am not going to fly to Berlin.”
When he got back to his headquarters, disappointed at the lack of progress in the hedgerows, despairing of ever breaking out in that awful country, British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder and Chief of Staff Walter Smith both told him that it was all Montgomery’s fault. They insisted that Eisenhower had to force him to act. Tedder complained that Montgomery was unjustly blaming the air forces for his own failure and said that “the Army did not seem prepared to fight its own battles.”
Eisenhower wrote a letter to Montgomery, but it was too weak—more a statement of desired objectives than a firm order—to impel action. On July 12, Patton commented in his diary, “Ike is bound hand and foot by the British and does not know it. Poor fool. We actually have no Supreme Commander—no one who can take hold and say that this shall be done and that shall not be done.” There was a general uneasy feeling around SHAEF that Eisenhower would never take hold of Montgomery. Gossips at SHAEF were speculating on “who would succeed Monty if sacked.” To Eisenhower, this simple solution was out of the question because of Montgomery’s popularity with the British troops, Brooke, and the British public. Further, Eisenhower had no right to remove the senior British command. The Supreme Commander seems to have been the only man at SHAEF to recognize these obvious truths, and they provide the answer to the nagging question, Why did Eisenhower put up with Montgomery? He had no choice. He had to cooperate with the difficult and exasperating British general, for Montgomery’s place in the command structure was secure.
The real threat to Montgomery’s position was Tedder’s recommendation that Eisenhower move his headquarters to Normandy and take personal control of the land battle. Montgomery knew that he needed to buy time, not so much to protect his position as to keep Eisenhower in England so that he could run the land battle.
On July 18, Montgomery finally launched an attack, code name Goodwood. In its initial stages, assisted by the tremendous air bombardment, it went well. But after Montgomery lost 401 tanks and suffered 2,600 casualties, he called it off. The British Second Army had taken Caen, gained a few square miles, and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans, but there had been nothing like a breakthrough. Montgomery announced that he was satisfied with the results.
Eisenhower was angry. He thundered that it had taken more than seven thousand tons of bombs to gain seven miles and that the Allies could hardly hope to go through France paying a price of a thousand tons of bombs per mile. Tedder blamed Montgomery for “the Army’s failure,” and SHAEF officers wondered aloud whether Montgomery should be made a peer and sent to the House of Lords or given the governorship of Malta.
This was all wild and irresponsible talk. After the war Eisenhower said he felt the powers of a supreme commander should be greater, that he should have the right to dismiss any subordinate, whatever his nationality. But even had Eisenhower had that power in 1944, he would not have exercised it. Sensitive to the morale factor and keenly aware of Montgomery’s great popularity, he would not consider asking for Montgomery’s removal.
At Smith’s and Tedder’s urging, Eisenhower sent a letter to Montgomery. “Time is vital,” he said, and he urged Montgomery to resume the attack. Many American officers thought that Montgomery hesitated because of the critical British manpower situation. The United Kingdom could no longer make good the losses in the Second Army, so it could not afford the cost in casualties of an all-out attack. Eisenhower argued that an attack now would save lives in the long run.
Everyone was depressed and irritable. After seven weeks of fighting, the deepest Allied penetrations were some twenty-five to thirty miles inland, on a front of only eighty miles, hardly enough room to maneuver or to bring in the American forces waiting in England for deployment. The Americans were still struggling in the hedgerow country, measuring their advance in yards rather than miles. Goodwood had failed and Montgomery refused to mount another attack. The newspapers were full of the ugly word “stalemate.”
There were two bright spots. Ultra radio intercepts revealed that the Germans were stretched to the limit, and Bradley was working on a plan, code name Cobra, to break out on the right. As Eisenhower noted in his letter to Montgomery, “Now we are pinning our hopes on Bradley.”
By July 23, the Americans had landed a total of 770,000 troops in Normandy. First Army had suffered 73,000 casualties. The British and Canadians had landed 591,000 troops and suffered 49,000 casualties. There was a large, immediately available reserve of American divisions in England waiting to enter the battle. The Germans in Normandy, meanwhile, had twenty-six divisions in place, six of them armored, to face the AEF’s thirty-four divisions. As the Allies were on the offensive, their superiority on the ground was only marginal; in addition, the German Fifteenth Army was still intact in the Pas de Calais, which meant that the German ability to reinforce was greater than that of the Allies.
Eisenhower’s great advantage continued to be control of the air. Bradley planned to use it in Operation Cobra to break through the German lines; once he was through, Eisenhower intended to rush divisions over from England, activate Patton’s Third Army, and send it racing for Brittany to open the ports there.
The problem with air power was weather; it was a weapon that could be used only under suitable conditions. Cobra was scheduled to begin on July 21. That day Eisenhower flew over to Normandy to witness the beginning. The sky was overcast and his B-25 was the only plane in the air. By the time he arrived it was raining hard. Bradley told him the attack had been called off and dressed him down for flying in such weather. Eisenhower tossed away his soggy cigarette, smiled, and said his only pleasure in being Supreme Commander was that nobody could ground him.
“When I die,” he added, looking at the steady rain, “they ought to hold my body for a rainy day and then bury me out in the middle of a storm. This damned weather is going to be the death of me yet.”
The next day, as the rains continued, he flew back to London; on the twenty-fourth, still waiting for a clear day, he wired Bradley, urging him to an all-out effort when the weather permitted. “A break through at this juncture will minimize the total cost,” he said, and added that he wanted First Army to “pursue every advantage with an ardor verging on recklessness.” If it broke through, “the results will be incalculable.”
Bradley hardly needed urging, but Montgomery did. Eisenhower wanted Second Army to attack when Cobra began—indeed he had promised Bradley he would see to it—so after sending his message to Bradley, Eisenhower flew to Montgomery’s headquarters. What he wanted, as Smith noted, was “an all-out co-ordinated attack by the entire Allied line, which would at last put our forces in decisive motion. He was up and down the line like a football coach, exhorting everyone to aggressive action.”
All this was highly irritating to Montgomery and Brooke. “It is quite clear that Ike considers that [General Miles] Dempsey [commanding Second Army] should be doing more than he does,” Brooke wrote to Montgomery. “It is equally clear that Ike has the very vaguest conception of war.” The British officers agreed that Eisenhower had no notion of balance. If everybody was to attack, Montgomery argued, nobody would have the strength to make a decisive breakthrough or to exploit it. Eisenhower “evidently … has some conception of attacking on the whole front,” Brooke complained, “which must be an American doctrine.”
Tedder too was unhappy with Eisenhower, but as usual he disagreed with Montgomery and Brooke. Cobra got started on the morning of July 25; that day Tedder called Eisenhower on the telephone, demanding to know why Montgomery was not doing more and what Eisenhower was doing about it. Eisenhower said he had talked with Churchill and that they were satisfied that this time Montgomery’s attack would be in earnest. Tedder “rather uhhuhed, being not at all satisfied, and implying the PM must have sold Ike a bill of goods.” Eisenhower told his aide Capt. Harry Butcher of the conversation and said he thought he could work things out satisfactorily, for “there’s nothing so wrong a good victory won’t cure.”
To get that victory, to get through the hedgerows, junior officers in the tank units had been experimenting with various techniques and methods. One idea that worked was to bring to the front the specially equipped dozer tanks (tanks with a blade mounted on the front similar to those on commercial bulldozers) used on the beaches on D-Day. They could cut through a hedgerow well enough, but there were too few of them—four per division—to have much impact. A rush order back to the States for 278 bulldozer blades was put in, but it would take weeks to fill.
In the 747th Tank Battalion, attached to the 29th Division, someone—name unknown—suggested using demolitions to blow gaps in the hedgerows. After some experimenting the tankers discovered that two fifty-pound explosive charges laid against the bank would blow a hole in a hedgerow big enough for a Sherman tank to drive through. Once on the other side, the tank could fire its cannon into the far corners, using white phosphorous shells, guaranteed to burn out the Germans at the machine-gun pits, and hose down the hedgerow itself with its .50-caliber machine gun. Infantry could follow the tank into the field and mop up what remained when the tanker got done firing.
Good enough, excellent even. But when the planners turned to the logistics of getting the necessary explosives to the tanks, they discovered that each tank company would need seventeen tons of explosives to advance a mile and a half. The explosives were not available in such quantities, and even had they been the transport problems involved in getting them to the front were too great.
An engineer suggested drilling holes in the embankment and placing smaller charges in them. That worked, too—except that it took forever to dig holes large enough and deep enough in the bank because of the vines and roots, and the men doing the digging were exposed to German mortar fire.
A tanker in the 747th suggested welding two pipes of four feet in length and six inches in diameter to the front of a tank, reinforced by angle irons. The tank could ram into the hedgerow and back off leaving two sizable holes for explosives. The engineers learned to pack their explosives into expended 105mm artillery shell casings, which greatly increased the efficiency of the charges and made transport and handling much easier. Some tankers discovered that if the pipes were bigger, sometimes that was enough to allow a Sherman to plow right on through, at least with the smaller hedgerows. Other experiments were going on all across Normandy. The U.S. First Army was starting to get a grip on the problem.
One major part of the problem, as the tankers saw it, was the Sherman tank. It was universally denounced by anyone who had to fight in one against a German Panther or Tiger. The Sherman was a thirty-two-ton tank; the Panther was forty-three tons; the Tiger was fifty-six tons. The Sherman’s 75mm cannon could not penetrate the heavy armor of the German tanks, while the Panther’s 75, and of course the Tiger’s 88, easily penetrated the Sherman. But one thing about the Shermans—there were a lot more of them than there were Panthers or Tigers. In 1944, German industry produced 24,630 tanks, only a handful of them Tigers. The British built 24,843. But the Americans turned out the staggering total of 88,410, mainly Shermans, and then managed to ship most of them to Europe, a few thousand to the Pacific.
For all their shortcomings, the Shermans were a triumph of American mass-production techniques. First of all, they were wonderfully reliable, in sharp contrast to the Panthers and Tigers. In addition, GIs were far more experienced in the workings of the internal combustion engine than were their opposite numbers. The Americans were also infinitely better at recovering damaged tanks and patching them up to go back into action; the Germans had nothing like the American maintenance battalions.
Indeed no army in the world had such a capability. Within two days of being put out of action by German shells, about half the damaged Shermans had been repaired by maintenance battalions and were back on the line. Kids who had been working at gas stations and body shops two years earlier had brought their mechanical skills to Normandy, where they replaced damaged tank tracks, welded patches on the armor, and repaired engines. Even the tanks beyond repair were dragged back to the maintenance depot by the Americans and stripped for parts. The Germans just left theirs where they were.
The Red Army had its own tanks, the T-34s (American-designed, and perhaps the best tank of the war). What it needed was trucks. The American Lend-Lease program supplied thousands of Studebaker trucks (surely a capitalist plot!). When the spark plugs clogged, as they quickly did on the dirt roads, the Russians just walked away from the trucks. The American armored division maintenance crews had men who worked day and night sand-blasting plugs. When they ran out of blasting sand they sent men to the beach to get more. It had to be dried and sifted before it could be used, but it did the job.
Nearly all this work was done as if the crews were back in the States, rebuilding damaged cars and trucks—that is, the men on the shop floor made their own decisions, got out their tools, and got after the job. One of their officers, Capt. Belton Cooper, commented, “I began to realize something about the American Army I had never thought possible before. Although it is highly regimented and bureaucratic under garrison conditions, when the Army gets in the field, it relaxes and the individual initiative comes forward and does what has to be done. This type of flexibility was one of the great strengths of the American Army in World War II.”
Thanks to American productivity and ingenuity, there were many more Shermans in action than Panthers or Tigers (in fact, about half the Wehrmacht’s tanks in Normandy were Mark IVs, twenty-six tons). Besides numbers, the Shermans had other advantages. They used less than half the gasoline of the larger tanks. They were faster and more maneuverable, with double and more the range. A Sherman’s tracks lasted for 2,500 miles; the Panther’s and Tiger’s more like 500. The Sherman’s turret turned much faster than that of the Panther or Tiger. In addition, the narrower track of the Sherman made it a much superior road vehicle. But the wider track of the Panther and Tiger made them more suited to soft terrain.
And so it went. For every advantage of the German heavy tanks, there was a disadvantage, as for the American medium tanks. The trouble in Normandy was that the German tanks were better designed for hedgerow fighting. If and when the battle ever became a mobile one, the situation would reverse. Then the much-despised Sherman could show its stuff.
American transport and utility vehicles were far superior to the German counterpart. For example, the jeep and the deuce-and-a-half (two-and-a-half-ton) truck had four-wheel-drive capability, and they were more reliable than the German vehicles. But again like the Sherman, their advantages did not show in the hedgerows, where squad-size actions predominated and the mass movement of large numbers of troops over long distances was irrelevant.
With any weapon, design differences lead to losses as well as gains. The German potato masher, for example, could be thrown farther in part because it was lighter. It had less than half the explosive power of the American grenade. The GIs said it made more noise than damage.
One other point about weapons. Over four decades of interviewing former GIs, I’ve been struck by how often they tell stories about duds, generally about shells falling near their foxholes and failing to explode. Lt. George Wilson of the 4th Division said that after one shelling near St.-Lô, “I counted eight duds sticking in the ground within thrity yards of my foxhole.” There are no statistics available on this phenomenon, nor is there any evidence on why, but I’ve never heard a German talk about American duds. The shells fired by the GIs were made by free American labor; the shells fired by the Wehrmacht were made by slave labor from Poland, France, and throughout the German empire. And at least some of the slaves must have mastered the art of turning out shells that passed examination but were nevertheless sabotaged effectively.
(In 1998, I received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Jewish slave laborer in a German factory making panzerfaust shells. He said he and his fellow slaves had discovered that if they mixed sand in with the sulfur they could render the explosive inoperable, and that they could do it when the German inspectors’ heads were turned. He said only German soldiers put on the final touch, the trigger mechanism. But those German soldiers liked to take breaks. When they did, the slaves speeded up their output but in the process screwed up the mechanism. The German soldiers were glad to have a higher output and never inspected the shells that had been produced while they were on break. That, he said proudly, was his contribution, and he was glad to see from the story about German duds in Citizen Soldiers that the GIs had noticed and lives had been saved.)
• • •
A major shortcoming of the Sherman for hedgerow fighting was its unarmored underbelly, which made it particularly vulnerable to the panzerfaust when it tried to climb a hedgerow. British tanks without infantry support had been unable to make significant progress at Caen; American infantry without tank support were unable to take St.-Lô, the key crossroads city in lower Normandy. Lt. Col. Fritz Ziegelmann of the 352nd Division attributed the German success in holding St.-Lô to “the surprising lack of tanks. Had tanks supported the American infantry on June 16, St. Lo would not have been in German hands any longer that evening.”
Another reason St.-Lô wasn’t in American hands: Normandy had its wettest July in forty years. One Marauder unit, the 323rd Group, had seventeen straight missions scrubbed during the first two and a half weeks of July. Others fared little better. Perhaps more than any other single factor, this bad weather explains the relative German success in Normandy in the early summer of 1944. Rain and fog made it possible for them to move reinforcements and supplies to the front.
• • •
There was nothing the Americans could do about the weather, but they could go after their problems in getting tanks into the hedgerow fighting. In so doing, they showed their mechanical ability and talents, and their ingenuity and resourcefulness. Rommel was impressed by the effort and results, saying that he thought the Americans “showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces” and that they “profited much more than the British from their experiences.”
Experiments involved welding pipes or steel teeth onto the front of the Sherman tank. Lt. Charles Green, a tanker in the 29th Division, devised a bumper that was made from salvaged railroad tracks that Rommel had used as beach obstacles. It was incredibly strong and permitted the Shermans to bull their way through the thickest hedgerows. In the 2nd Armored Division, Sgt. Curtis Culin designed and supervised the construction of a hedgerow-cutting device made from scrap iron pulled from a German roadblock. The blades gave the tank a resemblance to a rhinoceros, so Shermans equipped with Culin’s invention were known as rhino tanks.
Another big improvement was in communications. After a series of experiments with telephones placed on the back of the tank, the solution that worked best was to have an interphone box on the tank, into which the infantryman could plug a radio handset. The handset’s long cord permitted the GI to lie down behind or underneath the tank while talking to the tank crew, which, when buttoned down, was all but blind. Many, perhaps a majority, of the tank commanders killed in action had been standing in the open turret, so as to see. Now, at least in some situations, the tank could stay buttoned up while the GI on the phone acted as a forward artillery observer.
These improvements, and others, have prompted Michael Doubler to write in his prize-winning Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, “In its search for solutions to the difficulties of hedgerow combat, the American army encouraged the free flow of ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit. Coming from a wide variety of sources, ideas generally flowed upward from the men actually engaged in battle.”
1. Winters wrote in 1990: “Later in the war, in recalling this action with Major [Clarence] Hester, he made a comment that has always left me feeling proud of Company E’s action that day. As S-3, Hester had been in a position to see another company in a similar position caught in M.G. [machine-gun] fire. It froze and then got severely cut up. E Company, on the other hand, had moved out, got the job done, and had not been cut up by that M.G.”
