By David Alan Johnson
“We’ve been slogging our way through hedgerow country, half an acre a day, and we’ve got to find a way to break out.”
In the 1970 film Patton, General Omar Bradley, played by Karl Malden, tells General George S. Patton, played by George C. Scott, that he has a plan called “Cobra.” If Cobra works, Bradley goes on to say, it will allow the American troops to break through the Normandy beachhead perimeter and advance into the open plains of France. Whether or not Bradley ever really said this to Patton is not known, but he was certainly thinking it.
Following the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and the consolidation of the five Allied beachheads, the capture of the port of Cherbourg became the number one priority. Cherbourg surrendered to the U.S. First Army on June 26, and the Americans turned south toward the bocage, or hedgerow, country and the town of St. Lô. Breaking out of Normandy then became the primary goal. The objective was to get beyond the hedgerows and execute “an enormous left wheel,” as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied commander in Europe, put it in his book Crusade in Europe, a maneuver that would bring “the whole area lying between the river [Seine] and the Loire and as far eastward as Paris in our firm possession.”
But in fighting their way south, the Americans found themselves fighting two enemies. The first was the Wehrmacht. The second obstacle, which would prove to be as persistent and as deadly as the German Army, was the land itself. The bocage consisted of a series of hedges and ditches that crisscrossed fields for miles on end, favoring the defending German troops and making any advance by Allied troops very slow and extremely costly. General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, described the bocage as a hellish place “where every small field was a fortress, every hedgerow a German strongpoint.” In 17 days, American forces lost about 40,000 men in the hedgerows. Eisenhower and his generals were becoming desperate to find a way out of them.
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