Hedgerows

In talking about Bradley and D-Day, it occurs to me that the two battles where Bradley's armies had their worst problems came in terrain he probably didn't fully understand before his men fought there: the "boccage" or hedgerow country of Normandy, France, and the Hurtgen forest.

I realize it's way too simplistic to say that the Americans got bogged down in both places because their overall commander had never hunted in their fields. And Bradley did have intelligence and photos demonstrating what the terrain was like. (And ignorance is never a defense.) Still, neither he nor his army had fought in that kind of terrain before, his overall tactics and battle doctrine were ill-adapted to it, he didn't really have the right equipment for it (though who did), and the analogies an American would make upon hearing the area described are very misleading. Taken together with equipment shortages and everything else plaguing the allies, it shouldn't be surprising that it took the Americans a few weeks to figure it out.

I've often thought that the biggest problem of fighting in the hedgerow country began with semantics: when an American hears the word "hedges," he thinks of those cute little things in front of suburban houses. Everyone who's studied World War II and the aftermath of D-Day realizes that the boccage was difficult country to fight in, but I think it's hard to imagine exactly how hard it was unless you walk through it. Even the photos of long mounds of dirt with trees tangled in them don't really do the place justice. It's easy to get lost even on the roads; throw German machine guns (arguably the best ground weapon in the war) and mortars in there, and even an army that knew the ground it was fighting on would have trouble.

Americans would take one small Norman field, only to come under fire from the next and then the next. Rather than the rapid movement Bradley (and everyone else) had envisioned, the Germans threatened to tie them down in Normandy for months.

It didn't work out that way, mostly because of Cobra - but that's another story. (And another documentary - this one will end with the capture of St. Lo.)