hist2004
06-07-2004, 04:57 PM
The Wehrmacht in Normandy in June of 1944 was an international army. It had troops from every corner of the vast Soviet empire -- Mongolians, Cossacks, Georgians, Muslims, Chinese -- plus men from the Soviet Union's neighboring countries, men who had been conscripted into the Red Army, then captured by the Germans in 1941 or 1942. There were some Koreans, captured by the Red Army in the 1939 war with Japan. In Normandy in June 1944, the 29th Division captured enemy troops of so many different nationalities that one GI blurted to his company commander, "Captain, just who the hell are we fighting, anyway?"
Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, "In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, 'Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent.'"
By no means were all the enlisted German personnel in Normandy reluctant warriors. Many fought effectively; some fought magnificently. At St.-Marcouf, about ten kilometers north of Utah Beach, the Germans had four enormous casements, each housing a 205mm cannon. On D-Day, these guns had gotten into a duel with American battleships. On D-Day Plus One, GIs from the 4th Infantry Division surrounded the casements. To hold them off, the German commander called down fire from another battery of 205 cannon some fifteen kilometers to the north, right on top of his own position. That kept the Americans at bay for more than a week while the German cannon continued to fire sporadically on Utah Beach.
The casements took innumerable direct hits, all from big shells. The shells made little more than dents in the concrete. The casements are still there today -- they will be there for decades if not centuries, so well built were they -- and they bear mute testimony to the steadfastness of the Germans. For eight days the gun crews were confined in their casements -- nothing to eat but stale bread, only bad water, no separate place to relieve themselves, the ear-shattering noise, the vibrations, the concussions, the dust shaking loose -- through it all they continued to fire. They gave up only when they ran out of ammunition.
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 the 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 43 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 machine-gun fire or mortars (mortars caused three quarters of American casualties in Normandy).
The region west and southwest of Omaha Beach figured prominently in D-day, for early junctions with VII Corps depended on progress in that direction. The flooding of the lower Aure Valley was 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, comprising the low tableland stretching from Formingny-Trevieres west to the Vire Estuary. In it lay some of the strongest German fortifications, controlling the approaches to Carentan, and through it from east to west ran the main highway from Paris to Cherbourg and the Contentin. North-south roads in the region are winding, and usually narrow; they were expected to present difficulties in the form of steep shoulders and narrow bridges. Local communications are served by many small lanes and track, designed for the needs of farmers, but regarded as unsuitable for military use except by infantry. Any advance inland would require, for the supporting vehicular traffic, a great deal of engineering work to develop small roads into suitable north-south axials.
The American troops who fought in Normandy will remember fighting in the hedgerows or bocage. Stock raising and fruit growing are the main rural activities in this part of Normandy, and the field system is characterized by a patchwork layout of irregular fields varying from narrow ribbon-like strips to squared-shapes. These range in size from 10 or 15 to a 100 acres or more. The majority however, ranged from 50 to 75 acres. Some contained orchards of apple trees, more are used for pasture, and there are occasional patches of grain.
Boundaries between the fields follow north-northeast to south-southwest and west-northwest to east-southeast axes in the Omaha region, and they could not be counted to provide a safe direction-line for keeping an axis of advance. The hedgerows form a natural fence and vary in shapes. Some are low bushes, five to six feet high, growing from the ground level of the field and not hard to break through. Others are thick, densely matted walls of tough and briery hedge, running up to 10 feet in height and interspersed with large and small trees. Many hedge embankments are not passable for tanks. Communication between fields is usually limited to small openings at the corners. Narrow trails or sunken roads, running between parallel hedgerows give access to fields far off the regular road net.
It was a disadvantage to the attacking forces to fight in the bocage. Each hedgerow across the axis of advance might conceal a nest of enemy resistance, in which good positions for flat-trajectory weapons could be quickly organized, with short but excellent fields of fire across the nearest fields. Axial hedgerows could be utilized by defenders for delivering flanking fire. On the other hand, the defending force could use prearranged fires of mortars and automatic weapons sited to cover the hedgerows leading toward any prepared positions. Due to hedgerow walls the attacking forces found difficulty maintaining communications on their flanks and in coordinating the attack if units larger than a company.
The church towers were regarded as observation points in this terrain lacking hills. The isolated farms consisted of buildings grouped around a courtyard; many of these farms became the strong points in the battles through the hedgerow country.
The Enemy Defenses
Within days after the Allied invasion, Americans found themselves facing a stubborn opponent on terrain that favored the defender. Planners within Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) thought that by the 20th of June, the First Army would be far inland occupying the line Lessay-St. Lo-Caumont. However, it was not until another month would Bradley occupy the sector. Commanders identified the three factors most responsible for their slow progress: the inhospitable bocage country, the tenacity and organization of the German defense, and various problems within their unit. Immediately after the American attackers reached the hedgerows, it became clear to the troops that in this terrain their advantage of tanks and aircraft was virtually lost. Also, it was clear it would be an infantryman’s war, with the advantage of the German defender’s side .
The terrain allowed the Germans infantry to use all the skills they had learnt in three years of combat with Russia. Their machine guns and mortars were sited so that all the gaps in the hedgerows were covered and ranged. They even placed ranging sticks out of sight of the attackers, so that even the rawest German recruit would know the exact distance to his target and employ his weapon accordingly. Using the system of fortified hedgehogs that the Wehrmacht had employed in Russia, the defenders would cover a couple of rectangles, usually not adjacent ones, with an easy and covered escape route already worked out, so that when they finally had to yield to the weight of the American attack, they could fall back to the next field and begin the lethal process all over again.
Machine guns were the primary weapons of the German defense. At the corners of each field in positions dug into the embankments of the bocage, the Germans placed heavy machine guns whose purpose was to pin down attacking infantrymen in the open, making them easy targets for small arms and preplanned indirect fires. Light machine guns and machine pistols supplemented the heavy machine-gun fire and were placed in positions to the front and flanks of the attackers. The purpose of the grazing fires was to inflict casualties on American infantrymen seeking cover and concealment during their advance. Indirect fire was a key defensive component. Once pinned down in the open, preplanned artillery and mortar fire punished American units. German mortar fire was particularly effective, causing as much as 75% of all U.S. casualties during the Normandy campaign.
Other measures enhanced the bocage defenses. German commanders linked together defensive positions with wire communications that allowed them to coordinate the defense of their sector. Snipers guarded forward positions against infiltration and delivered harassing fire during lulls. Booby traps and mines abounded within the thick vegetation as well as tripwire explosives. German infantry used the panzerfaust, a highly effective, hand-held antitank weapon in order to combat American armor at close range. At longer ranges Germans engaged American armor with tank main guns and self-propelled guns, and used the legendary 88-mm antiaircraft gun in ground defense mode.
The Americans initially attempted to use normal fire and maneuver tactics with two rifle platoons abreast followed in turn by the third riffle platoon and the weapons platoon. However, as the point men leading platoons emerged from the hedgerows, they found themselves exposed to almost point-blank German machine-gun fire. Pinned down in the open in the middle of a well-prepared kill zone. American commanders found out that four or five German defenders positions could pin down an entire infantry battalion and hold up an attack for long periods of time. As a German officer wrote after the war: “There was really no forward thrust, no attacking movement in these chessboard tactics; all they amounted to was the constant occupation of one small square, previously softened up by the gunfire. Even more than the First World War, everything depended on the mechanics of ground fighting, on sledgehammer tactics”.
With any weapon design, it either led to losses or gains. A major shortcoming of the Sherman for hedgerow fighting was its unarmored underbelly, which made it vulnerable to the panzerfaust when it tried to climb a hedgerow. The German potato masher could be thrown at a greater distance because it was lighter. However, it had less explosive power than the American grenade and caused more noise than damage according to the GIs . According to Stephen Ambrose, over four decades of interviewing GIs, they often tell stories about duds, generally about shells falling near their foxholes and failing to explode.
Sniping in the Bocage
German snipers were a particular source of fear. The experience of a platoon leader in the 9th Division illustrates how green troops can react under fire: “One of the fatal mistakes made by the infantry replacements is to hit the ground and freeze when fired upon. Once I ordered a squad to advance from one hedgerow to another. During the movement one man was shot by a sniper firing one round. The entire squad hit the ground and froze. They were picked off, one by one, by the same sniper”. Ernie Pyle, with the 9th Division writes about the snipers hidden in the high hedgerows that line every roadside and lane. “A man can hide himself in the thick fenced-row shrubbery with several days’ rations, and it’s like hunting a needle in a haystack to find him. Every mile we advance there are dozens of snipers left behind us. They pick off our soldiers one by one as they walk down the roads or across the fields. It isn’t safe to move into a new bivouac area until the snipers have been cleaned out. The first bivouac I moved into had shots ringing through it for a full day before all the hidden round men were rounded up. It gives you the same spooky feeling that you get on moving into a place you suspect of being sown with mines”.
Regards,
Hist2004
Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, "In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, 'Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent.'"
By no means were all the enlisted German personnel in Normandy reluctant warriors. Many fought effectively; some fought magnificently. At St.-Marcouf, about ten kilometers north of Utah Beach, the Germans had four enormous casements, each housing a 205mm cannon. On D-Day, these guns had gotten into a duel with American battleships. On D-Day Plus One, GIs from the 4th Infantry Division surrounded the casements. To hold them off, the German commander called down fire from another battery of 205 cannon some fifteen kilometers to the north, right on top of his own position. That kept the Americans at bay for more than a week while the German cannon continued to fire sporadically on Utah Beach.
The casements took innumerable direct hits, all from big shells. The shells made little more than dents in the concrete. The casements are still there today -- they will be there for decades if not centuries, so well built were they -- and they bear mute testimony to the steadfastness of the Germans. For eight days the gun crews were confined in their casements -- nothing to eat but stale bread, only bad water, no separate place to relieve themselves, the ear-shattering noise, the vibrations, the concussions, the dust shaking loose -- through it all they continued to fire. They gave up only when they ran out of ammunition.
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 the 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 43 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 machine-gun fire or mortars (mortars caused three quarters of American casualties in Normandy).
The region west and southwest of Omaha Beach figured prominently in D-day, for early junctions with VII Corps depended on progress in that direction. The flooding of the lower Aure Valley was 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, comprising the low tableland stretching from Formingny-Trevieres west to the Vire Estuary. In it lay some of the strongest German fortifications, controlling the approaches to Carentan, and through it from east to west ran the main highway from Paris to Cherbourg and the Contentin. North-south roads in the region are winding, and usually narrow; they were expected to present difficulties in the form of steep shoulders and narrow bridges. Local communications are served by many small lanes and track, designed for the needs of farmers, but regarded as unsuitable for military use except by infantry. Any advance inland would require, for the supporting vehicular traffic, a great deal of engineering work to develop small roads into suitable north-south axials.
The American troops who fought in Normandy will remember fighting in the hedgerows or bocage. Stock raising and fruit growing are the main rural activities in this part of Normandy, and the field system is characterized by a patchwork layout of irregular fields varying from narrow ribbon-like strips to squared-shapes. These range in size from 10 or 15 to a 100 acres or more. The majority however, ranged from 50 to 75 acres. Some contained orchards of apple trees, more are used for pasture, and there are occasional patches of grain.
Boundaries between the fields follow north-northeast to south-southwest and west-northwest to east-southeast axes in the Omaha region, and they could not be counted to provide a safe direction-line for keeping an axis of advance. The hedgerows form a natural fence and vary in shapes. Some are low bushes, five to six feet high, growing from the ground level of the field and not hard to break through. Others are thick, densely matted walls of tough and briery hedge, running up to 10 feet in height and interspersed with large and small trees. Many hedge embankments are not passable for tanks. Communication between fields is usually limited to small openings at the corners. Narrow trails or sunken roads, running between parallel hedgerows give access to fields far off the regular road net.
It was a disadvantage to the attacking forces to fight in the bocage. Each hedgerow across the axis of advance might conceal a nest of enemy resistance, in which good positions for flat-trajectory weapons could be quickly organized, with short but excellent fields of fire across the nearest fields. Axial hedgerows could be utilized by defenders for delivering flanking fire. On the other hand, the defending force could use prearranged fires of mortars and automatic weapons sited to cover the hedgerows leading toward any prepared positions. Due to hedgerow walls the attacking forces found difficulty maintaining communications on their flanks and in coordinating the attack if units larger than a company.
The church towers were regarded as observation points in this terrain lacking hills. The isolated farms consisted of buildings grouped around a courtyard; many of these farms became the strong points in the battles through the hedgerow country.
The Enemy Defenses
Within days after the Allied invasion, Americans found themselves facing a stubborn opponent on terrain that favored the defender. Planners within Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) thought that by the 20th of June, the First Army would be far inland occupying the line Lessay-St. Lo-Caumont. However, it was not until another month would Bradley occupy the sector. Commanders identified the three factors most responsible for their slow progress: the inhospitable bocage country, the tenacity and organization of the German defense, and various problems within their unit. Immediately after the American attackers reached the hedgerows, it became clear to the troops that in this terrain their advantage of tanks and aircraft was virtually lost. Also, it was clear it would be an infantryman’s war, with the advantage of the German defender’s side .
The terrain allowed the Germans infantry to use all the skills they had learnt in three years of combat with Russia. Their machine guns and mortars were sited so that all the gaps in the hedgerows were covered and ranged. They even placed ranging sticks out of sight of the attackers, so that even the rawest German recruit would know the exact distance to his target and employ his weapon accordingly. Using the system of fortified hedgehogs that the Wehrmacht had employed in Russia, the defenders would cover a couple of rectangles, usually not adjacent ones, with an easy and covered escape route already worked out, so that when they finally had to yield to the weight of the American attack, they could fall back to the next field and begin the lethal process all over again.
Machine guns were the primary weapons of the German defense. At the corners of each field in positions dug into the embankments of the bocage, the Germans placed heavy machine guns whose purpose was to pin down attacking infantrymen in the open, making them easy targets for small arms and preplanned indirect fires. Light machine guns and machine pistols supplemented the heavy machine-gun fire and were placed in positions to the front and flanks of the attackers. The purpose of the grazing fires was to inflict casualties on American infantrymen seeking cover and concealment during their advance. Indirect fire was a key defensive component. Once pinned down in the open, preplanned artillery and mortar fire punished American units. German mortar fire was particularly effective, causing as much as 75% of all U.S. casualties during the Normandy campaign.
Other measures enhanced the bocage defenses. German commanders linked together defensive positions with wire communications that allowed them to coordinate the defense of their sector. Snipers guarded forward positions against infiltration and delivered harassing fire during lulls. Booby traps and mines abounded within the thick vegetation as well as tripwire explosives. German infantry used the panzerfaust, a highly effective, hand-held antitank weapon in order to combat American armor at close range. At longer ranges Germans engaged American armor with tank main guns and self-propelled guns, and used the legendary 88-mm antiaircraft gun in ground defense mode.
The Americans initially attempted to use normal fire and maneuver tactics with two rifle platoons abreast followed in turn by the third riffle platoon and the weapons platoon. However, as the point men leading platoons emerged from the hedgerows, they found themselves exposed to almost point-blank German machine-gun fire. Pinned down in the open in the middle of a well-prepared kill zone. American commanders found out that four or five German defenders positions could pin down an entire infantry battalion and hold up an attack for long periods of time. As a German officer wrote after the war: “There was really no forward thrust, no attacking movement in these chessboard tactics; all they amounted to was the constant occupation of one small square, previously softened up by the gunfire. Even more than the First World War, everything depended on the mechanics of ground fighting, on sledgehammer tactics”.
With any weapon design, it either led to losses or gains. A major shortcoming of the Sherman for hedgerow fighting was its unarmored underbelly, which made it vulnerable to the panzerfaust when it tried to climb a hedgerow. The German potato masher could be thrown at a greater distance because it was lighter. However, it had less explosive power than the American grenade and caused more noise than damage according to the GIs . According to Stephen Ambrose, over four decades of interviewing GIs, they often tell stories about duds, generally about shells falling near their foxholes and failing to explode.
Sniping in the Bocage
German snipers were a particular source of fear. The experience of a platoon leader in the 9th Division illustrates how green troops can react under fire: “One of the fatal mistakes made by the infantry replacements is to hit the ground and freeze when fired upon. Once I ordered a squad to advance from one hedgerow to another. During the movement one man was shot by a sniper firing one round. The entire squad hit the ground and froze. They were picked off, one by one, by the same sniper”. Ernie Pyle, with the 9th Division writes about the snipers hidden in the high hedgerows that line every roadside and lane. “A man can hide himself in the thick fenced-row shrubbery with several days’ rations, and it’s like hunting a needle in a haystack to find him. Every mile we advance there are dozens of snipers left behind us. They pick off our soldiers one by one as they walk down the roads or across the fields. It isn’t safe to move into a new bivouac area until the snipers have been cleaned out. The first bivouac I moved into had shots ringing through it for a full day before all the hidden round men were rounded up. It gives you the same spooky feeling that you get on moving into a place you suspect of being sown with mines”.
Regards,
Hist2004