Another big improvement was in communications. After a series of experiments with telephones placed on the tank, the solution was to have an interphone box on the tank, into which the infantryman could plug a radio handset. The handset’s long cord permitted the GI to lie down behind the tank while talking to the tank crew, which, when buttoned down, was all but blind. Many of the tank commanders killed in action had been standing in the open turret to be able to see. Now, at least, the tank could stay buttoned up while the GI on the phone acted as an FO.
These improvements and others have prompted historian Michael Doubler to write, “In its search for solutions to the difficulties of hedgerow combat, the American army encouraged the free flow of ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit. Ideas generally flowed upwards from the men actually engaged in battle.” They were learning by doing.
First Army worked on developing a doctrine as well as new weapons for offensive warfare in the hedgerows. In late June the 29th Division held a full rehearsal of the technique it proposed. Attack teams consisted of one tank, an engineer team, a squad of riflemen, plus a light machine gun and a 60-mm mortar. The Sherman opened the action. It ploughed its pipe devices into the hedgerow, stuck the cannon through, and opened fire with a white phosphorus round into the corners of the opposite hedgerow, intended to knock out German dug-in machine gun pits.
White phosphorus was horror. Lieutenant Robert Weiss got caught in a German barrage of white phosphorus shells. He recalled the bursting of the shell, followed by “a snowstorm of small, white particles that floated down upon us. We looked in amazement, and eyes filled with instant terror. Where the particles landed on shirts and trousers they sizzled and burned. We brushed our clothing frantically, pushed shirt collars up. If any of the stuff touched the skin, it could inflict a horrible burn, increasing in intensity as it burrowed into a man’s flesh. There was nowhere to hide, no place that was safe.”
After firing the white phosphorus shells, the tank put systematic .50-calibre machine-gun fire along the entire base of the enemy hedgerow. The mortar team lobbed shells into the field behind the German position. The infantry squad moved forward across the open field, using standard methods of fire and movement-throwing themselves to the ground, getting up and dashing forward, firing, moving. As they got close to the enemy’s hedgerow, they tossed grenades over the side. The tank, meanwhile, came on through the hedgerow either on its own power or after backing out and placing explosives in the holes. Infantrymen could plug into the phone and spot for the tank crew as it fired at resistance points. The tactics worked, were far less costly in casualties, and were soon adopted, with variations, throughout the European Theatre of Operations (ETO).
THE ENEMY was fighting with the desperation of a cornered, wounded animal. The German infantry was stretched thin. The frontline divisions were getting one replacement for every eleven casualties. By mid-July the Wehrmacht in Normandy had lost 117,000 men and received 10,000 replacements. For the Germans, rations and ammunition flows were adequate, if barely, but medical supplies were gone and artillery shells were severely limited.
Knowing that if the Americans broke through, there was nothing between them and the German border, so the Germans fought even harder. Rommel continued to direct the battle even as he went over and over in his mind a search for some way to convince Hitler to step aside so that the war could be concluded while Germany still had some conquered territory to bargain with (as in 1918) and before Germany herself was destroyed.
On July 16 Rommel sent Field Marshal Giinter von Kluge an ultimatum for Kluge to pass on to Hitler. It was a two-and-a-half-page document. Rommel opened by observing that the ultimate crisis was coming soon in Normandy. The American strength in tanks and artillery grew each day. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht replacements who were arriving were inexperienced and poorly trained, which made them particularly likely to panic when the Jabos appeared. Rommel concluded: “It is necessary to draw the political conclusions from this situation.” His aides argued that he should cross out the word political. He did, and signed.