Could the Allies have prepared better for Normandy

[dieseltaylor]

Interesting thread here

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=162240&p=1426555#p1426555

One thing to come out was whether the Allies deliberately did not train on bocage busting tactics to avoid alerting the Germans. Interesting thought which had never occurred to me as I am a SNAFU theorist.

Anyway you can go add to the thread!

[Sergei]

Train bocage busting? Where, in England? I don't think the British government would have approved destroying valuable farmland when food was in short supply.

[dieseltaylor]

Compared to a failed attack? Good point though. Perhaps they could have limited to experimenting to refine the tactics that might work. As the fields are generally very small the amount taken out/damaged need not be huge. And given the other ranges and training going on .....

[Sergei]

I had in mind this paragraph from Roman Jarymowycz's "Tank Tactics from Normandy to Lorraine".

The first step in forming the Canadian Armoured Corps (CAC) was basic training, a task at which General Worthington excelled. The second, doctrinal training, was to prove elusive. By 1943, although the CAC's equipment would be as good as that of any Western ally, its leadership was in dire need of operational experience. The corps was rushed off to Britain, where training was doomed to endless repetition of squadron drills in cramped training areas and solutions to field problems were soon committed to memory by the dullest tactician. Division exercises were not held except as comprehensive movement problems that worked the division and corps staffs but frustrated the regiments and brigades because most areas, especially wheat fields, were strictly off limits to armor.

"We often fail to get the full value from our training because of restrictions that are imposed to prevent damage to crops or to property. So many orders have been issued on this subject that officers and men hesitate at times to leave the road; as a result we often see head-on collisions [tactical battles] with no attempt at quick deployment off the road, rapid manoeuvre, and flanking movements. All this is very bad . . . it leads to unreal situations; it also develops bad habits within units, and reacts adversely on the standards of minor tactics."

The theory that the Allies didn't want to alert the Germans with testing bocage busting in England doesn't seem credible also on the account that, like you said, they could have done so in a small scale and written field manuals and prepared equipment to be given to units just prior to the invasion. No way the German intelligence would have figured it out, compared to all the other potential sources for leaks, like finding out the truth about Patton's FAG.

[Runyan99]

Everything I read always indicated that the failure to prepare for the bocage was simply a gross oversight. Nobody seemed to take it into account in the planning stage, or if they did, the assumed the hedgerows were only a slight obstacle.

[Michael Emrys]

I think for some reason the Allied planners did not expect the Germans to defend Normandy as tenaciously as they did. The assumption seems to have been that once the crust of the Atlantic Wall was penetrated, the Germans would simply fight delaying actions and fall back on the Seine. I'm not certain what reasoning could have led to that conclusion, since fighting close to the beachhead would give the Germans the shortest front to defend in the best defensive terrain short of the Vosges. But then, it seems that the Allies often mis-estimated the Germans and their determination to fight all through the war until the last two or three months.

Michael

[Sergei]

But then, it seems that the Allies often mis-estimated the Germans and their determination to fight all through the war until the last two or three months.

A trait that certainly isn't unique in the history of war. I wonder which case is more common, the campaigns that go without any big surprises for the attacker, like Fall Weiss or Japanese invasion of Philippines, or the campaigns that don't go according to plan (and end in a disaster, a stale mate or a costlier victory than initially calculated) like Winter War or Operation Barbarossa.

One interesting question that I've been pondering is what it would have taken for the Allies to take the shortest route from England to Germany and land at Calais? So instead of making Hitler think the invasion is coming to Calais, they would have made it look like Normandy was the target... I wonder if the Bohemian corporal would have believed that.

No doubt it would have been a bloody suicide, but could any amount of naval and air bombardment have made it successful? The benefits, if successful, would have been obvious: bypassing a lot of territory, being a lot closer to friendly airfields and ports and having none of that damn bocage.

Also, in case it failed, the Brits already knew the route home from Dunkirk.

[Affentitten]

No doubt it would have been a bloody suicide, but could any amount of naval and air bombardment have made it successful?

[Lt Belenko]

Perhaps the destroyers that made runs close to shore at OMAHA later in the morning, could have been part of the plan at H-hour.

[Affentitten]

Perhaps the destroyers that made runs close to shore at OMAHA later in the morning, could have been part of the plan at H-hour.

Except they would have been sitting duck for the shore batteries they thought existed at Pointe du Hoc, for example.

[Michael Emrys]

And mines. At least one and possibly two destroyers struck mines and sank.

Michael

[gunnergoz]

What is it called? Occam's Razor? The idea that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation is usually correct?

Anyway, I vote for SNAFU. No one on the planning staff spent much time talking to people who had spent any time in the area and who was familiar with the military implications of bocage country.

The Brits, practical yet sneaky indirect devils that they are, were happy with their AOR (which did not have as much bocage) and instead spend their time coming up with clever ways to psych out and flummox the Jerries.

The Yanks, know-it-all, confident, hard-charging and doctrinally driven, just figured that firepower and maneuver would win the day...terrain be damned. Besides, whoinhell ever visits Normandy on vacation? Only those weird Limeys... So the American planners actually had more expertise on hand with invading Pacific atolls, than they did with traversing the bocage country.

[dieseltaylor]

Someone maintains in the other thread that pre-war Patton had been in the bocage country. In any event bocage type terrain does exist in the UK but it is concievable that it simply never occurred to anyone that it would be a problem that needed thought, or more likely someone else was sorting this sort of thing out - early "Not my Problem"

[Wicky]

While the upfront initial landing forces received dedicated training to breaching beach defences - I wonder what training the later arriving forces who were timetabled to be in Caen by the end of day one. At that rate of knots of advance it seem that wishful thinking, overoptimism or gamblers luck that the Axis forces in Normandy would simply melt away ruled the day.

Perhaps the overconfidence was a result of the perceived axis weaknesses due to the successful xx deceptions...

[Bigduke6]

Sometimes I wonder whether the bocage was a bit of an excuse.

I mean, here you have these Allied Armies, and overall they are pretty much completely green, maybe here and there a few individuals and small units have been in combat, but by and large you have this massive organization that really has never actually fought a ground war for real. This especially goes for the combat arms small unit leaders, the sergeants through captains. There were tens of thousands of these men in the Allied forces, and at best, my guess, a few hundred had actually commanded soldiers under fire sometime before.

On the other side, you have one of the premier armies in history - the Wehrmacht. The idea of a combat inexperienced small unit leader is not only inconceivable, it is pretty much practically impossible. The German organization has, in contrast to the Allies, not been growing in size since 1941; no, it's been shrinking bit by bit, that tendency almost totally thanks to the Red Army. To have been in a unit that suffered 10 per cent casualties (a situation considered horrific today) was in the 1944 Wehrmacht almost unthinkable: almost EVERY ONE in combat arms, with a campaign under his belt, had seen much worse, and quite possibly experienced it.

Moreover, by this time the German army has been honing defensive tactics and weapons for a good year of constant combat, and again in contrast with modern "wars", this is full on conventional combat lasting days or even weeks, and involving every combat arm possible.

The Wehrmacht in Normandy wasn't an army of supermen, of course they had draftees and foreigners and plenty of war-weary soldiers. But the organization by that time had no other choice but to be competent with their tactics and weapons, as the alternative basically was getting killed or captured on the Eastern Front.

Hindsight makes it pretty clear that, in any kind of balanced engagement of forces, the Wehrmacht was superior to the Allied combat units opposing them. Just the fact that the Germans were not making beginner mistakes, and the Allies had no choice but to do just that, too many green small unit leaders, pretty much guaranteed an Allied bloodbath - until the Allies either got competent themselves, or by just throwing lives and materials at the Germans eventually ran the Germans out of combat power.

At the time, the refrain of the Allied soldiery was along the lines of "No fair, the Krauts have better tanks and no one told us about the bocage."

Which was reasonable - as the alternative to blaming gear or terrain would have been admitting openly that alot of them were going to get maimed or die, before the small unit leaders in the Allied war machine acquired enough combat experience, to fight the Germans on something even generally approximating equal terms.

[dieseltaylor]

BD6 - nicely put.

However I think the bocage should be seen as a force multiplier of considerable value that allowed the Wehrmacht to hang around longer than otherwise. The German weapons were better than the Allied equivalents but then the Allies had more men, more artillery , and more airpower to even things up to the point where there could only be one winner.

I think you might underestimated the number of men in the Allied Armies who had commanded under fire - but I am guessing. Its just that there was the BEF and what might have returned from Africa. But in both cases that was a different war only Italy was "modern" and relevant.

[Sergei]

On the other side, you have one of the premier armies in history - the Wehrmacht. The idea of a combat inexperienced small unit leader is not only inconceivable, it is pretty much practically impossible. The German organization has, in contrast to the Allies, not been growing in size since 1941; no, it's been shrinking bit by bit, that tendency almost totally thanks to the Red Army. To have been in a unit that suffered 10 per cent casualties (a situation considered horrific today) was in the 1944 Wehrmacht almost unthinkable: almost EVERY ONE in combat arms, with a campaign under his belt, had seen much worse, and quite possibly experienced it.

From your words it might be concluded that while the Wehrmacht was decimated year after year, the officer ranks remained untouched. If one army had a terrible, crippling shortage of experienced and properly trained frontline infantry officers and NCO's, it was Wehrmacht. But I'm not sure what is your point with this, overall. That the US Army being ill-prepared for the bocage, or the presence of bocage itself, weren't a factor in June 1944 and the superiorly led Germans could have delayed the advance for two months in the steppe or desert, rather than being washed away as soon as any crack formed in the lines?

[Blackhorse]

Could they have prepared better? Probably. Then again, they did some remarkable preparations despite not covering all potential aspects of the campaign. They made an assumption that turned out to be wrong. They adjusted and overcame it.

Because they assumed that the Germans would withdraw toward the Seine and fight a delay along the river's lines, the invasion's planners had concentrated on the challenge of getting ashore and had paid scant attention to the impediments posed by the bocage.

As a result, Bradley's First Army was unprepared for the difficulties it faced and paid a steep price for each foot of its advance into the region. The experience of the U.S. 90th Division was a case in point. Faced with hostile fire from an invisible enemy, the unit's commanders found the principles of fire and maneuver nearly impossible to apply in the hedgerows, especially the precept that an attacking force should move just behind its artillery in order to confront the enemy while he is still off balance.

The division suffered heavy casualties as a result; 150 officers and 2,315 enlisted men during June and 310 officers and 5,188 enlisted men during July.

More experienced units also suffered terribly in the bocage. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry Divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that rifle companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and over 68 percent of their officers.

The countryside in the British and Canadian sectors, a relatively open, flat, dry expanse stretching from Caen to Paris, was more favorable for offensive warfare. Paradoxically, those conditions made fighting there perhaps more difficult than in the American sector. The nature of the ground and the strategic importance of the area compelled the Germans to mass the bulk of their panzer units and their best troops in the path of Montgomery's forces.

They turned the checkerboard of villages that dotted the region into an interlocking, mortar-and-concrete version of the bocage.

Montgomery's commanders appear to have been little more prepared than the Americans for the sort of resistance the Germans mounted. Poorly versed in combined arms tactics, they allowed their tanks to advance without the protection of accompanying infantry units.

That approach gave German soldiers wielding highly effective Panzerfausts (the enemy version of the American bazooka) and teams firing formidable, high-velocity antitank cannons a relatively free hand in dealing with the advancing forces.

From: http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/normandy/nor-pam.htm (pg 34)

I vote for SNAFU as well.

[Michael Emrys]

Someone maintains in the other thread that pre-war Patton had been in the bocage country.

As I recall, Ladislas Farago in his biography of Patton mentions that he spent his honeymoon in Normandy. I don't know how much of that time was spent in bocage country though. They might have sought more congenial landscapes.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

This especially goes for the combat arms small unit leaders, the sergeants through captains. There were tens of thousands of these men in the Allied forces, and at best, my guess, a few hundred had actually commanded soldiers under fire sometime before.

Although I think the core of your argument has merit, I also believe that you overstate the case here. For instance, in US 1st. Army the 1st. Inf. Division and the 2nd. Arm. Division had both seen action in North Africa and Sicily. It's reasonable to suppose that the bulk of the manpower in both divisions, except for replacements, had seen action. They were early arrivals in Normandy. I think there were also at least two more US divisions who were veteran.So that's several thousand NCOs and company grade officers.

The British had 7th. Arm. Division and one or two infantry divisions that had seen combat.

So, although the majority of both Allied armies was green, there were more than a few hundred experienced men to lead them.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

Sergei,

Fair point, but my response is: the German army was so professional, that killing off lots of its small unit leaders had little effect on its overall professionalism, especially in the early stages of the west European campaign.

This is not only the professional standards of the officer corps. This is a policy of limiting transfers between regiments, maintaining almost no super-elite units, being willing to put the highest-quality people into the combat arms, and systematically using the guys that survived the last disaster, as the core for the rebuilt unit.

I would argue all that makes for extremely competent NCOs. And it was German army officers, with their standards of auftragstaktik - something the other armies only managed to implement in select forces like the paratroopers and commandos.

I would further argue that in the Anglo-Saxon armies, the expansion and willingness to transfer experienced leaders up or laterally, and maintaining big elite formations, plus of course not being obliged to fight the Russians since 1941, left the Allies with very diluted units: sure there were a few combat-experienced leaders in them, but not enough to prevent the unit as a whole from making bonehead mistakes once it went into combat for the first time.

Michael,

A few Allied units with a great deal of combat experience, and command pyramids of relatively long-standing, for instance US First Infantry Division, I would call the exception that proves the rule. I would say that for every unit the allies fielded like 1st Infantry, there were by Normany five or more like 90th Infantry Division: green as grass, for practical purposes completely untried in combat.

Fair point that across the Allied force, the men with useful actual combat experience and in command of small combat arms units were more than a few hundred. But however thousand they were - at a guess ten thousand or so - they were a drop in the ocean when part of an army whatever it was the Allies put together for the Northwestern European campaign.

[dieseltaylor]

Like an idiot I forgot Doubler covered this in his preamble:

1The formidable barriers presented by the hedgerows and the military characteristics of the Bocage seem to have taken First Army by complete surprise. Despite Allied planners' awarenessof the nature of the Bocage, American commanders had done little to prepare their units for fighting among the hedgerows.Preoccupied with the myriad problems of the D-Day landings, American leaders had failed to see the battlefield in depth and had paid little attention to the potential problems of hedgerow combat. As early as 8 June, General Bradley called the Bocagethe "damndest country I've seen." General Collins of VII Corps was equally surprised by the nature of the hedgerow terrainand told General Bradley on 9 June that the Bocage was as bad as anything he had encountered on Guadalcanal. Brigadier General James M. Gavin, the assistant division commander ofthe 82d Airborne, best summarized the surprise of the senior American leadership: "Although there had been some talk inthe U.K. before D-Day about the hedgerows, none of us had really appreciated how difficult they would turn out to be."2

The junior leadership within First Army shared their seniors'surprise. In a survey conducted after the Normandy battles, not 1 out of 100 officers questioned stated that they had prior knowl-edge of the nature of the hedgerows. A summary of these inter-views stated that the officers as a whole were "greatly surprised" by the Bocage. Captain Charles D. Folsom, a company commander in the 329th Infantry of VII Corps' 83d Infantry Division, admitted that the hedgerows presented a problem his unit "had never before encountered" and that pre-invasion training had "not taken the hedgerows into consideration."3

One thing Doubler states which I believe to be wrong is that the average field was 200 metres by 400 metres:

The hedgerows are sturdy embankments, half earth, half hedge.At their base, they resemble dirt parapets and vary in thicknessfrom one to four feet, with heights that range from three to fifteen feet. Growing out of this earthen wall is a hedge thatconsists of small trees and tangles of vines and brush. This vegetation has a thickness of between one to three feet and varies in height from three to fifteen feet. Originally intendedto serve as fences to mark land boundaries, to keep in livestock,and to prevent the erosion of the the land by sea winds, thehedgerows surround each field, breaking the terrain into numer-ous walled enclosures. Because the fields are small, about 200by 400 yards in size, and usually irregular in shape, the hedge-rows are numerous and set in no logical pattern.

I get the feeling Doubler is not familiar with Normandy. The size he quotes is equivalent to a 16 acre field which is larger than the average Welsh field even now. The average field size in Devon about 150 years ago was 3.5 acres when horses did all the work. Devon has good bocage type hedges. This also appear tougher than Doubler makes out:

Americans in Normandy were challenged by fifty miles of hedgerow country, with "an average of 500 small fields per square mile" (Liberation, p. 21). Hedgerow country was "a patchwork of thousands of small fields enclosed by almost impenetrable hedges. . .dense thickets of hawthorn, brambles, vines and trees ranging up to 15 feet in height, growing out of earthen mounds several feet thick and three or four feet high, with a drainage ditch on either side. The wall and hedges together were so formidable that each field took on the character of a small fort. Defenders dug in at the base of a hedgerow and hidden by vegetation were all but impervious to rifle and artillery fire. So dense was the vegetation that infantrymen poking around the hedgerows sometimes found themselves staring eye to eye at startled Germans. A single machine gun concealed in a hedgerow could mow down attacking troops as they attempted to advance from one hedge to another. Snipers, mounted on wooden platforms in the treetops and using flashless gunpowder to avoid giving away their positions, were a constant threat. Most of the roads were wagon trails, worn into sunken lanes by centuries of use and turned into cavern-like mazes by overarching hedges" (Liberation, p. 17). The narrow, sunken roads were nearly useless to tanks.

From

http://www.geocities.com/findinglinc...ensonWWII.html

[Secondbrooks]

I would argue all that makes for extremely competent NCOs. And it was German army officers, with their standards of auftragstaktik - something the other armies only managed to implement in select forces like the paratroopers and commandos.

Jah. On top of that Germans had correct mind set for auftragstaktik while it's opponents didn't have correct mind set. In German army it was much more common to have captain trusting on lowly corporal. While in opposing armies it was more common for captain to think that corporal doesn't know a ****e, so captain has to tell precisely what corporal needs to do with his men. So German army (society?) was able to raise it's officer corps to trusting it's subordinates. Thing which doesn't seem to be very easy task and it's said that many army still to this day fails to gain understandment of it, even when they boast that they do.

As for Germans they have had that idea of leadership atleast from days of ww1. This i've been told.

[Michael Emrys]

One thing Doubler states which I believe to be wrong is that the average field was 200 metres by 400 metres:

I get the feeling Doubler is not familiar with Normandy. The size he quotes is equivalent to a 16 acre field which is larger than the average Welsh field even now. The average field size in Devon about 150 years ago was 3.5 acres when horses did all the work. Devon has good bocage type hedges. This also appear tougher than Doubler makes out:

If the figure of 500 fields/sq. mile you then quote is accurate, that works out to about 1.28 acres per field. That sounds a bit too small. Could it be that the true figure for average falls somewhere in between? The 200 X 400 meters would surely have been the largest encountered. Could Doubler have intended feet instead of meters? That sounds more consistent with the other figures you mention.

Michael

[dieseltaylor]

I agree with feet rather than metres as that would indeed be slightly over an acre. 130 yds times 60yds being slightly under 2 acres. I have found something else and bearing in mind that an American footbal pitch is just over an acre .... but then this author may be repeating previous info.!

http://www.history.army.mil/books/OpArt/us3.htm

Operations inland from the beaches would entail overcoming the defensive advantages accorded the Germans by the geography of the bocage region of Normandy. There had been good reason to choose Normandy as the invasion target. The province offered the major port of Cherbourg to

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logisticians who believed that the early capture of a large seaport would be vital to winning the battle of the logistical buildup against the enemy. Normandy also was within the combat radius from English bases of all the aircraft required for aerial support, including the relatively short-ranging Supermarine Spitfire. Indeed, Allied planners choosing the invasion site had long since concluded that there was no practical alternative to Normandy.8

But going to Normandy meant, especially in the American zone to the west of the British, at the base of the Cotentin or Cherbourg Peninsula and just east of there, the necessity to press from the beaches into the hedgerows of the bocage. The hedgerows divided the Norman countryside into innumerable separate earthen-walled enclosures, some about as large as an American football field, most considerably smaller. The hedgerows were often as much as two meters thick at the base and two to three meters high. Hawthorn bushes and other vegetation springing out from them might reach as much as four meters above the ground. All but the most important roads through the hedgerow country tended to be sunken lanes, worn down by centuries of wagon traffic to make the adjacent hedgerows more commanding still, with foliage overarching the lanes. In this terrain the Allies’ strong suit of mobility could not be appropriately exploited. Truck and even tank movement could be too readily blocked. Tanks could not break through the hedgerows. The enemy could shelter himself against artillery fire. Combat would tend to resolve itself into a series of field-by-field infantry battles, the foot soldiers having to fight for each hedgerow in turn, then having to move across the exposed intervening ground to reach the next hedgerow.9

On the right of the American sector, around the base of the Cotentin or Cherbourg Peninsula, the hedgerows gave way to different but equally difficult obstacles of terrain. Here, low-lying land could be and in the event was readily inundated by the German defenders, so that only occasional causeways afforded dry passage across flooded prairies. An entire division might have to advance on a front not much more than one tank wide.10

The OVERLORD planners gave almost no thought to the terrain obstacles of the bocage, and only slightly more to the inundated prairies. Certainly the obstacles were visible in aerial photographs. There were occasional references to them in preinvasion discussions, especially by British planners who had traveled in Normandy before the war. But there was no effective operational planning to cope with Norman geography. Allied ground commanders were left to improvise responses to the bocage after the invasion began to press inland from the beaches. Indeed, not only operational but also tactical and technological responses were left to be tinkered out under the pressures of costly and nearly stalemated combat. Only after the hedgerows had frustrated attempts to break through with ordinary tanks did the troops in the field improvise

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devices to mount on their prows to undercut and uproot the earthen walls. Then, such devices could not be fashioned and distributed rapidly enough to prevent their absence from contributing to a costly deadlock of seven weeks’ duration disturbingly reminiscent of the Western Front of World War I.

Secondbrooks - the quality of the German fighting man was no doubt superior and that was due to training/mindset. Their has been discussion before here whether a language is important in forming the way in which people think ....... : )