The General Who Wore Six Stars by Hank H. Cox

Author:Hank H. Cox [Cox, Hank H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO008000 Biography & Autobiography / Military
ISBN: 9781640120105
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2017-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

14

The Great Breakout

Victory is the beautiful, bright-colored flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed. Yet even the military student, in his zeal to master the fascinating combinations of the actual conflict, often forgets the far more intricate complications of supply.

—Winston Churchill

After securing the beachheads and moving inland a few miles, the Allied forces were going nowhere fast. The Germans were unable to push them back into the sea, but they were able to mount stubborn resistance all along the line, despite constant harassment from Allied aircraft. The three towns on the east-west lateral road behind the beach—Carentan, Bayeux, and Caen—remained in German hands. Montgomery was supposed to take Caen, a key crossroads, but there too the Germans were digging in and putting up a fight, and Montgomery seemed reluctant to force the issue.

The Germans also were aided by the nature of the landscape, in particular the notorious Normandy hedgerows in the so-called bocage country. This was an area of cultivated fields divided by tall, thick hedgerows that restricted movement and observation. It provided a natural defensive bulwark that the Germans were not slow to utilize. Sherman tanks could not move through the hedgerows, making them sitting ducks for the German Panzerfausts. The American troops were under constant fire but could not see where it was coming from. An enemy emplacement might be only a few feet away in a hedgerow and be invisible until too late. The hedgerows, Bradley said, “formed a natural line of defense more formidable than any even Rommel could have contrived.”1

For weeks the First Army was bogged down as green troops got accustomed to the rigors of combat and the by now infamous hedgerows took their inexorable toll. They were not only delaying Bradley’s infantry but also the planned breakout to be led by Patton and his yet to be formed Third Army. In this crisis American ingenuity once again came to the rescue. “Previous attempts to force the Normandy hedgerows had failed when our Shermans bellied up over the tops of those mounds instead of crashing through them,” Bradley recalled. “There they exposed their soft undersides to the enemy while their own guns pointed helplessly toward the sky.”2

The solution, conceived by a twenty-nine-year-old sergeant named Curtis G. Culin Jr. from New York City, was a few pieces of sharp scrap steel welded to the front of a Sherman tank. “Four tusk-like prongs protruded from it,” Bradley said. “The tank backed off and ran head-on toward a hedgerow at 10 miles per hour. Its tusks bored into the wall, pinned down the belly, and the tank broke through under a canopy of dirt.”3 Almost overnight the ingenious devices were being attached to the Shermans and the hedgerow impediment began to crumble.

The high command also had a plan to circumvent the tough German defenses along the invasion line: Operation Cobra, which also became known as the Normandy Breakout. It was clear a dramatic move was necessary. “By the middle of July we

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