The Weeks Following D-Day

Since the 65th anniversary of D-Day was just a few days ago, I just wanted to write a little bit about the weeks that followed D-Day.

In the weeks following D-Day, the Allies faced a challenge that they did not expect - the Norman hedgerows. In Normandy, hedgerows divided fields, were centuries old, generally taller than a man, were a tangled mess of roots and soil, had full size trees growing on top of them, and the fields they protected needed to be cleared of German resistance. The Allies assumed that the Norman hedgerows were similar to the English hedgerows, but they weren't. English hedgerows were much shorter in size. Aerial surveillance photographs of Normandy and western France didn't show the height of these hedgerows, since the photographs were typically taken at high noon, so there were very few shadows to utilize to estimate height.

Once the Allies broke out from the beachheads, they were confused as to how to root the Germans out of these formidable defensive positions. Tanks tried to climb over the hedgerows, but that left their belly exposed, and Germans were there waiting with their panzerfausts (translated "iron fist") and panzershrek bazookas. The Allied front lines were very disorganized, many times soldiers found themselves hurling grenades over the hedgerows at Germans just on the other side - and vice versa. The Allies couldn't just bypass the German forces, as it would leave their flank exposed. There was typically an "entrance" to a field in the middle of the hedgerow, and the Germans would set up their machine guns in order to meet anybody coming into the field with a vicious cross-fire. The Germans were experts at static defensive positions, and placed their weapons in extremely effective positions. So the Allies needed to find a different way to get into the fields without giving the Germans the benefit of the angles of fire. Enter American ingenuity. American combat engineers took the German-made tetrahedron defensive obstacles from the beaches (see picture), cut them apart, and welded them into a sort of crude plow to attach to the front of Allied tanks (see picture). This way, tanks could break through the hedgerow without exposing its vulnerable underside, infantry could follow behind under the cover of the tank, and clear the field of resistance. This worked with great success, but the time line that the Allied generals had for getting to Paris got pushed back for weeks.

For more information - just type "Normandy hedgerows" into a google image search - the results show many pictures from 1944 as well as present-day photos. Also, for more reading about the fighting in hedgerow country - read Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers.

tetrahedron beach defenses

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hedgerow tank plow