At the end of June 1944, Lance Corporal Ken Tout was still waiting to be allocated a new Sherman tank. Part of the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry, he had arrived in Normandy in a ‘Honey’ – a small, four-man US-built tank – but was now waiting to be put into a Sherman crew. Fortunately for Tout, this meant he’d missed the last few days of heavy fighting around Caen – a crucial Allied objective that the Germans were holding fast to.
The survivors had been pulled back out of the line and, on June 29, Tout chatted to one of his mates, a Sherman driver in 4 Troop called Michael Hunt. “We got clobbered,” Hunt told him. “It’s the bocage, you see. The fields are so small. You go through one great hedge into a field and within 50 yards you have to cross through another hedge even thicker. And the orchards. And farm buildings. Ideal places for Jerry tanks to hide.”
Hunt then reeled off a long list of those who had been killed or wounded. “And three of Frank’s crew,” he continued. “Brewed up. Didn’t stand a chance. And Len Wright with a wound in his skull, and tanks going up on mines, and Jerry tanks with their guns waiting behind hedges.” So it went on. Tout, a gunner and later tank commander, was appalled, although the losses meant he was almost immediately assigned a crew in 3 Troop, part of C Squadron and soon facing exactly the same challenges.
Normandy was a brutal place in which to fight. There was no getting away from it. On the other hand, advancing was always dangerous and difficult, no matter where one found oneself fighting. There is a persistent myth that, because of the immense casualties on the Eastern Front – scales that dwarfed those in Western Europe, somehow the fighting there was a lot harder.
This was most certainly not the case. On the Eastern Front, both the Soviet Union and German troops were exceptionally brutal with regard to the civilians caught up in the fighting, while the Red Army, especially, was woefully poor to begin with after the Germans invaded in June 1941. Even when they began winning, the Russians did so with a reckless and cruel disregard for the lives of their own men.
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Every major offensive they fought involved substantially greater losses than those of the Germans. And as has been shown by the war in Ukraine, their approach has barely changed since. The Allies, on the other hand, took casualties extremely seriously and did all they could to limit these as far as possible. Their approach was one of ‘steel not our flesh’ – in other words, they used modern technology, mechanisation, their immense global reach and advanced industrialisation to ensure that machines, not men, did as much as the hard yards as possible.
Of course, a large number of Allied troops were killed and wounded but the scales were substantially lower than those of the Red Army or less efficient other Axis forces. It meant that by 1944, the Allies had worked out how to win. A very long materiel tail was key – what I call ‘big war’ – and enormous fire power.
They realised, for example, that the Germans would always counter-attack when assaulted. It was almost Pavlovian. At that moment, when the Germans finally emerged from their foxholes and places of hiding, the Allies would bring down the full weight of artillery, of air support, and, for much of the fighting in Normandy, off-shore naval guns that could hurl enormous shells 16 miles and more.
Broadly speaking, this was very effective, but the rub was this: to get the Germans to counter-attack, the hornet’s nest needed poking a bit. And this poking was the task of the infantry and armour – especially tanks. This was the bit that was so particularly dangerous and casualties in these front-line infantry and tank units were as high as anywhere.
In the telling of the war, we naturally focus on the infantry and men in tanks, but actually, in the British, Canadian and American armies now fighting in Normandy, only 14% were infantry and 8% were in armoured units, of which only 48% were actually operating tanks. Some 43% in the British Second Army, for example, were in the Royal Army Service Corps. Indeed, most British soldiers in Normandy weren’t in the infantry – they were driving trucks. It was much the same in the US Army too – but, those unfortunate enough to be in the infantry or in tanks were having a terrible time.
Casualties were horrendous. The US 4th Infantry Division suffered just 197 casualties on D-Day, for example, but in the next two weeks fighting through the bocage of the Cotentin peninsula, suffered more than 100% casualties of their rifle platoons. This was because the terrain favoured the defender, not the attacker.
The Normandy landscape was far from uniform – in fact, in the eastern half of the battlefront, around Caen, much of the land was more open and rolling, but the network of villages, almost all surrounded by orchards, posed plenty of hazards, as did numerous woods, lanes and winding, narrow lanes.
As the terrain swept westwards from the British sector to the American, so the bocage became denser. ‘Bocage’ referred to a particular type of hedgeline. Originally, small fields and lanes had been marked out by low earth-covered mounds, or walls, but over time, hedges and trees had been grown on top.
These made it very difficult indeed to see very far ahead. A German anti-tank gun might be lurking around the corner of a lane or road but if the infantry tried to move across fields they were finding themselves being pinned down from the far hedgerow. The enemy could position machine-guns at each far corner behind the mound of a hedge. Riflemen would be dug in between these two corners. Further back, behind the next field or two, would be teams of mortars.
No matter how the Americans tried to break through the hedge, they would be exposed and mowed down. And even if the infantry did make their way successfully across one set of fields, the Germans could easily pull back to the next line. Around Saint Lô, for instance, on a ridgeline to the north-east of the town, the Americans simply could not find a way through and so for several weeks found themselves pinned down in what rapidly turned into trench warfare.
Bob Slaughter was a 19-year-old sergeant in the 29th Infantry Division when he found himself sharing a foxhole with a replacement immediately named ‘Junior’. Branches and bits of wood covered the top of their hole in the ground. “Junior and I were a pitiful sight,” Slaughter recalled. “Fine yellow dust sifted through the cracks of the roof and stuck to our sweaty skin and eyes.”
Their eyes were swollen and bloodshot and when nature called, they simply lay down and did their business into a receptacle of some kind in their trench. Slaughter reckoned anyone who survived a week there could consider themselves an old-timer. Shelling, snipers, limited food and water and lack of sleep all took their toll. Casualties continued to mount. Yet, the Germans were also being ground down.
However bad it was for Allied frontline troops, it was doubly awful for the enemy, largely because they had fewer supplies, the Allies had mastery of the skies making it very hard for the Germans to move at all by day, and because the Allies had far greater fire-power. So, the attritional grind in Normandy was slowly but surely wearing the Germans down, and it was this, combined with new tactics, that finally prompted the breakthrough.
It was men of the US 102nd Cavalry, for example, who hit upon the idea of making a ‘hedge-cutter’ for their Sherman tanks. Cutting up German steel beach obstacles, they fashioned a series of fork-like prongs that could be bolted to the front of a tank. Without, the Sherman simply couldn’t force a way through the thick base wall of the hedgerows, but with the hedgecutter attached, it easily sliced through, breaking up the mound and slicing roots.
This in turn meant tanks could burst into a field, blast the enemy machine-gunners with both their main gun and machine-guns, spraying the opposite hedge too, while the infantry followed behind. Infantry operating on their own had no chance, but working in tandem with the tanks, they were able to unlock the German defences.
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At the same time, new techniques of ever-closer coordination and communication between ground-attack aircraft and troops below were also evolving. With the bulk of German armour being ground down by the British and Canadians near Caen, when the Americans launched a major offensive, Operation COBRA, to the north-west of Saint Lô, on July 25, 1944, the floodgates opened. Suddenly, a huge hole had been blasted in the German line – a hole from which they could not recover. All along the front, the Germans were soon in full retreat.
There was still plenty of bitter fighting to come but the long weeks of attrition in the bocage were over. Nonetheless, by the time the 77-day Battle for Normandy was finally over in the third week of August, the losses had been enormous. In fact, the average daily casualty rate across both sides in Normandy was 6,870 – and that figure was higher than the Somme, Passchendaele and Verdun in the First World War, normally benchmarks for wanton slaughter.
Normandy was to prove an incredible victory for the Allies – but it had come at a terrible cost.
