THE US FIRST ARMY THE FORGOTTEN HEROES OF WW2 ; THE BATTLE OF THE HEDGE ROWS CHAPTER 4

As the Allied Armies continued to consolidate and expand their footage on the coast of Normandy, the 1^st United States Army was charged with securing the Cotentin Peninsular and the port city of Cherbourg. That meant that the units and men of the First army had to advance eastwards towards the base of the Cotentin peninsular.

The first challenge the First army faced was to advance into and beyond the dense hedgerows that inundated the Normandy country side and was known as the Bocage to the French. The dense hedgerow made the Normandy terrain suitable and ideal for defensive warfare and this, the Germans greatly exploited to the detriment of the Allies.

 In fact the hedgerows and their unsuitability for tactical military maneuvers presented the Allies with such a formidable problem that it took two whole months to advance and break out of the bocage province of France. The Germans had so fortified this terrain and enjoyed such tactical advantages that the whole Allied offensive efforts to break out of Normandy bogged down, and mounting anxiety and despair began to grip the Allied military leadership at SHAEF (Supreme headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe) and doubts began to mount as to the effectiveness of General Montgomery’s plans for a break out into open country beyond the Bocage country.

With the British 21^ST battle Army Group also held back in the hedge row fighting and struggling to take Caen, their D-Day assigned objective, the whole Allied offensive was being threatened with a stalemate, and the Allies desperately needed to fine tune their plans for an eventual breakthrough into open country beyond Caen for the British and into Brittany for the Americans. The Germans feared the effect of a British breakout more as the region beyond Caen led directly to Paris and the Seine River.

For this reason, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concentrated most of his available Panzer divisions within the vicinity of the British positions around Caen. With the British tied down at Caen and the Americans bogged down in the hedgerows, the only viable option for the First Army was to fight its way out of the hedgerow country. With time and some measure of ingenuity the Allies found an effective way to flush the Germans out of the hedgerows.

This involved the principle of combined arms and consisted of close support and tactical co-ordination between infantry, armor and artillery, and involved clearing one hedgerow at a time. With German machine guns, mortars and anti tank guns deployed beyond the perfect cover of the thick hedges, the element of surprise naturally was absent and Allied casualties were heavy as breaching the well-camouflaged German positions was a big challenge.

 The Americans in particular were vulnerable in this fixed positional warfare as their tanks were highly vulnerable to the German hand-held anti-tank guns also known as panzerfaust each time they tried to go over the top of the hedges exposing their vulnerable underbelly to the projectiles of the German anti tank guns.

With each field surrounded by the hedgerows about the size of a football field, each assault had to concentrate on taking one plot at a time in separate costly assaults in terrain that highly favored the defense over the attack. With the fighting bogged down, the First Army had to improvise, and here the ingenuity of the average American soldier came to play.

  A soldier attached to the 2^nd Armored Division’s 102^nd Calvary reconnaissance squadron by name Sergeant Curtis G Collins decided to implement a suggestion he overheard one of the men making during a discussion on how to overcome the hedgerows. He suggested that a metallic tooth could be welded to the front of the Sherman tanks to cut through the hedges in an assault.

 He accordingly designed a heavy steel tooth from abandoned German metal beach obstacles and welded it to a Sherman tank and found out that the tank became quite effective in cutting through the thick hedges in an advance.

Tanks fitted with the metallic teeth became known as Rhinoceros tanks because of the steel cutters that they carried and the idea became so popular and effective that Army commander General Bradley directed that the steel tooth be fitted on as many tanks as possible.  By late July 1944 over 60% of first Army tanks were fitted with the Rhino teeth.

With improvements in the tactical maneuverability of the Allies, the First Army was able to now set its sight on a breakthrough from the hedgerows and make a bid for the capture of St Lo and eventually break out into Brittany and cut off the Germans remaining in the Cotentin Peninsular.

 The fresh impetus in advance took the First Army to within the outskirts of St Lo but to get there Carentan had to be captured and this task was subsequently accomplished by the 101^st airborne in concert with combat command A of the First Army’s 2^nd Division on the 12^th of June 1944. Carentan stood at a strategic point on the important road junction between Omaha Beach and Utah Beach.

The capture of Carentan was thus assigned to the 101^st airborne Division that had landed just close to the city at midnight of 5/6^TH of June on D-Day. Carentan, a small town of four to five thousand stood at the base of the Cotentin Peninsular and dominated a road junction that linked Cherbourg to the Northwest, Bayeux and Caen to the South east and Countenance to the South west.

The Germans flooded much of the Douve River flood plain before the invasion making the resulting marshland impervious to armor and infantry advances. The task of capturing Carentan was thus left to the 101^ST airborne and an armored force detached from the 7^th armored Division whose advance elements had advanced from the beach and linked up with the 101^st close to Carentan.

The only access to the town through the flooded marshlands was through bridges and cause ways that had been largely destroyed by the Germans in the face of the Allied advance. It took a courageous charge face-on against the German defenders, which included units of the elite German paratroop units known as the fallschirmjagers regiment of about two Battalions strength to reach Carentan

The US First Army’s VII Corps and the V Corps had assaulted Utah beach and Omaha Beach respectively. Both units now vigorously pushed forward to integrate their lodgment areas respectively after the visit of the Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D Eisenhower to Omaha Beach on the 7^th of June.

The Germans strongly resisted this move and even committed Panzer forces to if possible split the American-held beaches and drive the Allies to the Sea. The US 101st airborne was thus directed to Capture Carentan and prevent the German breakthrough, because Carentan was the hinge on which both sectors were linked.

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Despite the German flooding of the plains and blowing up of the bridges along the River and causeways leading to Carentan, men of the 101^st division got into a bitter battle where hand to hand fighting had to be resorted to, in order to clear out the German paratroopers who clung tenaciously to the embankments and sought to hold back the advancing airborne soldiers.

On June 12^th the 101^st supported by an armored strike force from the 7^th armored Division which had rapidly advanced inland from Utah Beach seized Carentan and thereafter effected a link-up between Utah Beach and Omaha Beach.

With the lodgment area secure and with the XIX Corps arriving to reinforce the First Army, General Bradley decided to move to the second phase of the campaign which involved seizing the Port City of Cherbourg which sat squarely in his allotted theater of operation. VII Corps led the attack on Cherbourg which though fiercely contested fell after direct American Artillery attack fell on the German garrison commander’s headquarters.

Though captured, the Germans had completely destroyed the Cherbourg Port facilities and thus hindered the Allies from immediately putting the Port to use in landing supplies for more than a month while the Port was being repaired. The Allies still had to depend on direct Beach landing of supplies. By this time First Army’s frontlines stretched from Charmount to the West Coast of the Cotentin Peninsular near La Hayes- Du- Pointes.

On the 1^st of July, the First Army launched an offensive with a view to breaking out of Normandy, into Brittany but the key to this operation lay with the capture of St Lo, the road junction town that stood at the entry point into the plains beyond the Normandy Bocage country.  For this offensive General Bradley organized his thirteen Divisions into four separate Corps.

With the help of the Sherman equipped hedgerow cutters, the First Army launched a powerful attack on July 11 led by the XIX Corps towards St Lo with a view towards evicting the Germans Seventh Army from Normandy. The attack took off as planned after a half-hour artillery bombardment from 11 artillery battalions.

 The initial advance was slow, but the combined engineer, infantry and armored combat teams were able to press on relentlessly, clearing one hedgerow after the other until German resistance thinned out and ultimately collapsed, enabling the 2^nd battalion to advance to within a mile of Martinsville and be in a position to attack St Lo itself.