destroyed the German weapon from only three hundred yards distance. The next day, a second destroyer from the platoon boldly drove around a blind corner and from a distance of one hundred fifty yards engaged a concealed 88 that was pounding the infantry. The TD lost a track, but the 88 lost its crew.14
While the towed guns of the 801st Tank Destroyer Battalion placed direct fire on three of Cherbourg’s fortifications, the doughs, M10s from the 899th, and tanks entered the city on 25 June. 2d Platoon of Company C helped knock out five 20mm and one 47mm guns during heavy street fighting. Twice, the only tactic available to the crews was to dash around a corner while under fire—shooting while moving—and to engage the target.15
Cherbourg fell, but the Germans sabotaged the port facilities so thoroughly that the engineers needed three weeks to repair them sufficiently to handle minimal shipping.16
With the capture of Cherbourg, LtGen Omar Bradley on 3 July turned First Army south to drive inland through the heart of the bocage, as Normandy’s hedgerow country is known in French. The troops encountered stiff resistance at every turn. Casualties mounted alarmingly for little gain in territory. Indeed, the next three weeks would cause senior Allied commanders to worry that they were falling into a stalemate similar to that of trench warfare during World War I.17
Throwing Away the Manual
Allied planners had selected the invasion area in part because it offered superb natural inland defenses for the beachhead. The hedgerow-covered terrain in most of the zone was unsuitable for German armored counterattacks.18
The terrain also was not particularly suitable for Allied combined-arms attacks, either. The U.S. Army described the conditions in its lessons learned report on the fighting in Normandy:
The terrain in the area selected for the initial penetration of French soil was generally level or gently sloping. However, it was broken up into a “crazy quilt” pattern of small fields separated by hedgerows. These consisted of an earthen mound or wall eight to ten feet in width and four to six feet in height, covered with a scrub undergrowth.
Along the top of this wall grew rows of trees. Forming an important part of the obstacle thus created was the ditch that ran along one or both sides of the mound. The roads, narrow and winding, ran between these hedgerows, and offered the defenders many advantageous positions for ambuscades or surprise attacks on advancing foot-troops and armor. Observation was normally limited [to] from one hedgerow to the next….19
The Germans exploited the conditions to establish an extraordinarily effective defense in depth. The bocage became a seemingly infinite series of strongpoints, each concealing infantry with “bazookas” (TD crews applied this catch-all phrase to one-man panzerfausts and larger crew-served antitank rockets), machine guns, AT guns, sometimes armor, and nearly always mortar and artillery support.
Incredibly, American forces had conducted virtually no training to operate in the hedgerows, and units on the line were left to work out the best approach through trial and error. The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History attributes this lack of preparation to an assumption among invasion planners that the Germans would withdraw to the Seine River. Whatever the cause, the riflemen paid with a river of blood. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that infantry companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and more than 68 percent of their officers.20 These casualties, naturally, were concentrated in the combat elements.
The key to the solution lay in creating effective tactics for the infantry, their supporting separate tank battalions, and, less problematic, the artillery. The fate of the tank destroyers revolved around this dynamic because—with a single exception—they were not called upon to fight large German armor attacks during the fighting in the Normandy beachhead.21 The Germans faced the same difficulties as the Americans in the bocage and found that they could rarely employ more than a platoon or company of tanks at once.22 On the VIII Corps front in June and July, for example, German tanks were rare, but the enemy had many SP and assault guns that he employed in close support of the infantry. On the XIX Corps front, the TDs encountered some Mark IVs and Mark V Panthers, which were typically employed during frequent counterattacks in groups of between two and seven in support of the infantry.23
The Sherman tank could crawl across about half of the hedgerows, but in doing so it risked getting stuck, or exposing its thin belly to enemy fire, and having knocked loose everything inside the vehicle that was not tied down. The tankers first resolved the problem by using tank-dozers to knock holes in the hedges. Within two weeks of D-Day, the infantry-tank team began to develop through trial and error the technique that—with local variations—would see the men through Normandy. Engineers blew one or more holes through a hedgerow with explosives, and the armor raced through to support the riflemen on the far side. (Interestingly, the German Panzer Lehr Division also settled on using a mix of tank, infantry, and engineer companies amidst the hedgerows.24) The Germans naturally figured this out and quickly aimed their AT weapons at any gap that suddenly appeared in the far hedgerow.
This was as dangerous as it sounds. But there was nothing else to do.
The M10 Plays Tank
The U.S. Army concluded after the war that two factors determined the role self-propelled TDs wound up playing in the bocage.25
The first was the power of the terrain to force tactical decisions. Tank destroyers deployed even a few hundred yards behind the front line were unable to provide support and could not respond to the shallow, harassing German tank-infantry actions that characterized counterattacks. TDs, therefore, had to deploy more or less even with the infantry, no matter what doctrine said.
The second was the high attrition rate suffered by the separate tank battalions. Of those that landed on D- Day, for example, the 741st Tank Battalion lost most of its Shermans during the landing. From D-Day to 10 July, half the tanks in the 746th fell victim to enemy fire.26 By 31 July, the 70th Tank Battalion was down forty Shermans and six M5s.27 The 743rd Tank Battalion in June and July lost at least twenty-five officers and men killed in action and another one hundred sixteen wounded, or nearly one man in five.28 The infantry divisions had little choice but to turn to the tank destroyers to augment the tanks in offensive operations.
803d Tank Destroyer Battalion CO LtCol Charles Goodwin described a typical SP outfit’s experience during the hedgerow fighting in June and early July (in the course of which his men supported the doughs of the 2d, 29th, and 30th Infantry divisions and the 82d Airborne Division’s paratroopers):
This battalion has been utilized almost continuously as close support antitank defense immediately behind the front-line infantry and as actual tanks…. No previous theories or training directives contemplated the terrain or type of combat encountered in this zone. The hedgerows and heavily covered areas preclude observation and afford extremely limited fields of fire. Front-line infantry, with the exception of the 82d Airborne infantry, could not or would not point out targets of opportunity such as machine gun nests, pillboxes, etc. When such targets were located, however, excellent results were obtained from the 3-inch fire. OPs such as church steeples, tall trees, hilltops, etc., can be effectively eliminated.
In the earliest combat, there was a tendency on the part of the infantry commanders to order the destroyers out in front of the infantry. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is fatal. The destroyer cannot substitute for the tank inasmuch as it is lightly armored and has no machine gun to keep hostile infantry down. The .50-caliber antiaircraft mount is useless for ground work. [We] suffered eight tank destroyer casualties during this early period, seven of which were caused by the German rocket launcher or rifle AT grenade. It is believed that these weapons possess a range not in excess of seventy-five yards. These weapons can penetrate any part of the tank destroyer, including the front and final drive. Had the destroyers remained behind the advancing infantry, these losses could have been avoided. This is evidenced by the fact that no tank destroyer casualties have been
