Hedge Rows

...and there's also the problem referred to earlier in the thread, of how close the opponents were.

Would you REALLY want to be on one side of a hedgerow/stone wall, and expecting a napalm drop on the other???

 

Weren't they often dug into The Bocage.?

I was thinking more like Naplaming squares that were planned for attack.....not Palming fields that were actively involved in close battle.
Would it hurt something.?

 

I can believe it. It was probably the last priority on the list of, what they thought at the time, strategic importance during the operation.

 

I haven't been fortunate enough to visit like some of you fellows and I have no doubt at all that many of the hedgerows have been removed. Many small farms here in the states have been consolidated into huge open fields too (bad news for tractor fans like me) but Google Earth seems to show that there are still a lot of very small fields on the Carentan peninsula

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kyriad/@49.4535931,-1.5131476,4170m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x480b9cc8bda4afe3:0x51608626b8d64499

I think another Calvados is in order.

 

I never knew that so much of France looked like that. It sure made for a beautiful place.

So many "Americans" were isolated from the realities of war.
Their house was not bombed by The French, their daughter was not killed by a British Tank, their son were not maimed and blinded by a Canadian grenade.....their husband was not killed by an Australian rifle company.
The French really took a beating in a way that most in The USA can never relate to. Like all, awful events in life I suppose.
Until it happens to you.......

 

I read some of the pre-invasion intelligence assessments given to 50th Division. These concentrated heavily on the beach zone and the defenses thereof. Some reports on the Norman countryside inland were included, but they read to me more like tourist brochures than serious military evaluations of the topography. They certainly did not give any indications of the tactical advantages such country would give to the defense, but then as has been noted here the whole plan was to seize Caen and get out into more open country as soon as possible.

And as far as white phosphorous goes, the 50th did use WP grenades in the bocage. They were very effective but they tended to leak, with consequent danger to the user.

 

This is somewhat off the topic, but by 1944 our knowledge of what war was like was much greater than it had been in 1941. Our armed forces had suffered thousands of casualties and every town and neighborhood had lost somebody. We had been in the war for over two years and it was clear to all that the war would last a good while yet and that the worst and most costly fighting still lay ahead. Certainly many of our troops had no illusions. The D-Day force included four divisions that had seen heavy action in Africa and Italy (1st, 9th, 82nd Airborne, 2nd Armored), and those guys knew what they were in for. The new divisions had received instruction from veterans who spared no pains to tell the men what combat was like and to make their training as real as possible.

 

One thing not mentioned so far was the isolation of each field from the next. Very often the soldiers had no idea what was going on to their left or right. Sight and sound were concentrated and amplified in your field but almost completely reduced in the next field. This put a great psychological stress on the soldiers and commanders who felt they were alone and isolated all the time.

 

That's a good point...almost like fighting in a bunch of small amphitheaters.
Sounds would spiral all over the place...easy to mistake noises, and if they were being made by "friend or foe".
As mentioned already...like fighting in a jungle...very unnerving.!

 

I agree. I mentioned this earlier in the thread (I apologize for quoting myself, I thought it was relevant :unsure

 

The British and Canadians found the Churchill Crocodile and the Universal mounted Wasp useful in the hedgerows as well as around the bunkers.