Microsoft Close Combat manual Allied Improvisation in the Bocage, Lt. Jack Shea, from Yank

78Close Combat

“Give me ten infantrymen in this terrain with the proper combination of small arms, and we will hold up a battalion for 24 hours.”

Lt. Jack Shea, from Yank

“This was about as bad a place to mount an infantry assault as could be imagined, as bad as clearing out a town house-by- house or room-by-room, as bad as attacking a World War I trench system. But it had to be done.”

Stephen Ambrose, in Band of

Brothers

they quickly master the art of unloading directly onto Omaha and Utah beaches, and after a few days are actually moving more supplies than the British. For Montgomery, the storm has the additional consequence of delaying his plan to launch a new offensive against the Germans at Caen.

Allied Improvisation in the Bocage

As the fighting through the Norman hedgerows drags into weeks of close and vicious combat, the immobilized Americans devise new methods and equipment to deal with the bocage. “Dozer tanks”— Sherman tanks with a bulldozer blade in front—can cut through any hedgerow, but too few are available to support large-scale operations. The 29th tries sending engineer squads to place two 24-pound (later 50-pound) explosive charges in the embankment beneath a hedge. Initial results are promising, but experience in the bocage quickly reveals that this method is impractical for large-scale operations. One informal field study shows that a tank company moving 1.5 miles through the bocage will come up against 34 separate hedgerows, requiring 17 tons of explosives to do the job.

A more efficient, and more practical, technique is devised, in which tanks are used to bury smaller charges deeply in an embankment to increase their explosive force. Crews weld a pair of four-foot-long, 6½-inch-diameter steel pipes to the front of a Sherman tank. When they ram the tank into an embankment, then back away, the pipes leave two deep holes for explosive charges. Packing the explosives into empty artillery shell cases before placing them in the holes focuses the explosions even more effectively. However, blowing holes in the hedgerows involves one big drawback: The explosions announce to the Germans when and where an attack is beginning, and provide a handy aiming point for all types of defensive fire. Any tank that appears in the newly opened breach is a perfectly framed target.

The Americans try other methods. Some tankers weld bumpers made of railroad tracks to their Shermans and use them to ram through hedgerows. Even more successful is a hedgerow cutter devised by Sergeant Curtis Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. It consists of scrap iron blades welded to the front of a Sherman tank. Equipped with these tusklike appendages, the retrofitted Shermans come to be called “rhino tanks,” a name that proves appropriate, as the rhinos are nearly unstoppable. At a demonstration of the “Culin Device,” General Bradley is impressed when he sees newly equipped tanks slice through hedgerows “as though they were pasteboard, throwing the bushes and brush into the air.”