The Americans at Normandy by John C. McManus

Author:John C. McManus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER TEN

COBRA

By the time the St-Lô battle finally came to an end, Bradley’s 1st Army had suffered 40,000 battle casualties in only seventeen days of combat. Combat fatigue accounted for the loss of another 10,000 men. Infantrymen suffered 90 percent of the 1st Army’s casualties. “Over a stretch [of combat] you became so dulled by fatigue that the names of the killed and wounded … might have come out of a telephone book for all you knew,” one dogface later wrote. “All the old values were gone, and if there was a world beyond this tangle of hedgerows … you never expected to live to see it.”

The killed and wounded were not just names out of a telephone book. They were Americans, most of them quite young, with families, hometowns, strengths, weaknesses, talents, vices, hopes, dreams, and plans for the future. For every dead soldier there was a life of unfulfilled potential, perhaps even unfulfilled achievements or generations of unborn children and grandchildren. Every wounded man suffered pain, in varying degrees. Some recovered from their wounds; some did not. Some were grazed; some were crippled. The victims of combat fatigue battled demons that, for some, would never go away. In short, the extensive casualty list of July represented a monumental amount of tragedy.

In exchange for these staggering losses, the Americans had captured St-Lô and had moved the front line some twelve to fifteen miles farther south. At this rate, the bloodletting in Normandy would soon be comparable to that of the Argonne Forest in World War I or Grant’s offensive in the summer of 1864, two of the bloodiest campaigns in the history of the U.S. Army.1

The horrible losses haunted General Bradley as July unfolded. He knew that this carnage had to stop, but how to do it? From the first, he had wanted to fight a fast-moving battle of maneuver, but to this point he had been unable to make that happen in the confining hedgerows that dominated Normandy. The general was a pensive man. He liked to sit in isolated silence in his trailer and study maps of the battle area. The only problem was that the maps were starting to overrun one wall in the trailer. To oblige him, his staff pilfered a mess tent, complete with floorboards (so that Bradley would not have to walk in mud), and crammed a huge eight-foot-high acetate map board of Normandy into the tent.

As the bloody July days unfolded, Bradley spent more and more time in the tent, studying his maps, trying to figure some way for a breakthrough. “I paced the dry planking of that floor, scribbling boundaries, penciling roads, coloring the river lines” with an assortment of crayons. As he worked, he consulted with members of his staff, picking their brains for insight or for flaws in his own thinking. The first task was to find the right terrain, the kind of place where a breakthrough could be exploited. “You had to look for a place where you would not be hung up by swamps or river crossings.

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