These were the men who had to be rooted out of the hedgerows. One by one. There were, on average, fourteen hedgerows to the kilometre in Normandy. The enervating, costly process of making the attack, carrying the attack home, mopping up afterwards, took half a day or more. And at the end of the action there was the next hedgerow, 50 metres away. All through the Cotentin Peninsula, from June 7 on, GIs heaved and pushed and punched and died doing it-for two hedgerows a day. It was like fighting in a maze. Platoons found themselves completely lost a few minutes after launching an attack. Squads got separated. Just as often, two platoons from the same company could occupy adjacent fields for hours before discovering each other's presence.

Where the Americans got lost, the Germans were at home. The German 352nd Division had been training in Normandy for months. Further, they were geniuses at utilizing the fortification possibilities of the hedgerows. In the early days of battle many GIs were killed or wounded because they dashed through the opening into a field, just the kind of aggressive tactics they had been taught, only to be cut down by pre-sited machine-gun fire or mortars (mortars caused three quarters of American casualties in Normandy).

American army tactical manuals stressed the need for tank-infantry cooperation. But in Normandy the tankers didn't want to get down on the sunken roads, because of insufficient room to traverse the turret and insufficient visibility. But staying on the main roads proved impossible: the Germans held the high ground inland and had their 88-mm cannon sited to provide long fields of fire along highways. So into the lanes the tanks went. There they were restricted. They wanted to get out into the fields, but they couldn't. When they appeared at the gap leading into a field, mortar fire, plus panzerfausts (handheld antitank weapons), disabled them-often, in fact, caused them to "brew up," or start burning. The tanks had a distressing propensity for catching fire.