After D-Day: Letters From 'the Bocage'

Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe along the Normandy beaches of Western France, was planned meticulously for more than two years by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff, especially British Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan. The plan included training and equipping hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen; sending a vast armada of thousands of ships across the English Channel; bombing and sabotaging bridges, railways, and other means of transportation inland of the invasion beaches; and using deception operations to convince the German High Command that the invasion would occur elsewhere.

Remarkably, however, the Overlord planners overlooked a terrain feature of the Normandy countryside that enabled the defending German forces to significantly delay and disrupt the Allied breakout from the beachheads and inflict heavy casualties on Allied forces. Just a few miles inland from Omaha Beach is the bocage country of Western France. There, every 50 to 100 yards, are fields bounded by hedgerows — earthen banks topped with bushes and trees that inhibited the vision and movement of U.S. and allied troops.

On June 7, 1944, my father, Frank Sempa, a sergeant with the 29th division’s 175th infantry regiment, landed on Omaha Beach near the Les Moulins draw under sporadic rifle and mortar fire. His regiment quickly crossed the beach to the Vierville draw and received the order to seize the French town of Isigny. By June 9, after liberating the small town of La Cambe, the 175th captured Isigny. Historian Michael Reynolds notes that the 175th accomplished the capture of Isigny “with little or no sleep and food.” The seizure of Isigny, he further notes, “eliminated the German corridor between the OMAHA and UTAH bridgeheads,” which meant that the German “defensive system north of the Aure valley ... collapsed.”

The 29th Division’s next objective was St.-Lo, a transportation hub that had to be taken before the American army could launch Operation Cobra, a massive mechanized attack toward Paris and Germany’s Siegfried Line. St.-Lo was less than 20 miles from Isigny but to get there the 29th Division had to fight in the bocage.

For the next 40 days my father’s division fought in what Leo Daugherty has called “the Battle of the Hedgerows.” Daugherty describes the battlefield as “a maze of broken and uneven terrain features surrounded by small plots of land enclosed by thick hedgerows ...”  He quotes one historian on the military characteristics of the terrain:

The hedgerows in each field provide excellent cover and concealment to the defender and present a formidable obstacle to the attacker. Numerous adjoining fields can be organized to form a natural defensive position echeloned in depth. The thick vegetation provides excellent camouflage and limits the deployment of combat units. The hedgerows also restrict observation, making the use of heavy caliber direct fire weapons almost impossible and hampering the adjustment of indirect artillery fire. Consequently, anyone occupying a high place that afforded good fields of observation and a clear view of the surrounding countryside would have a distinct advantage ...

The German defenders, explains Daugherty, turned each hedgerow into a potential fortress. 

Joseph Ewing, a member of my father’s regiment who wrote the War Department’s history of the 29th Division in World War II, described the bocage as “a vast maze of natural fortifications miles in depth.” According to Ewing, “every hedgerow was a possible enemy position.” Joseph Balkoski, the author of four volumes on the 29th Division’s campaigns in northwest Europe, noted that the American soldiers in the bocage “were paying a demoralizing price for every foot of ground they gained.”

Fighting hedgerow to hedgerow, one officer noted, produced among the troops feelings of “deadly unrelenting fatigue and danger.” “Each patch of farmland,” writes James Jay Carafano, “became its own universe of battle.” For the attacking Allied armies, explains Eisenhower biographer Michael Korda, “it was a nightmare battle of doggedly crawling toward these obstacles, assaulting them, and then within a hundred yards beginning the whole process all over again.” General Omar Bradley called it “the damndest country I’ve seen.”

Glover Johns, a battalion commander with the 29th Division’s 115th regiment, in his book "The Clay Pigeons of St.-Lo," described what it was like to fight among the hedgerows:

Thus goes the battle, a rush, a pause, some creeping, a few isolated shots, some artillery fire, some mortars, some smoke, more creeping, another pause, dead silence, more firing, a great concentration of fire followed by a concerted rush. Then the whole process starts over again.

Beginning on June 13, 1944, my father wrote letters home to his parents and brother John from the bocage. Those letters were discovered by my sister in the basement of the home in Avoca, Pa., where my father lived prior to being drafted into the army in 1941. Now housed at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., they give us a glimpse of what it was like for an infantryman fighting in the Battle of the Hedgerows.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” he wrote from Somewhere in France on June 13, 1944, “Everything with me is fine. ... Plenty of excitement but will have to write about that later. ... Needless to say I’m busy ... My home over here is a foxhole but rather comfortable. ... Don’t worry about me. Love Frankie.” That same day he wrote to his brother John: “Bet you’re not surprised to hear that I’m now inside the Fortress of Europe. ...  Am writing you this from my foxhole ... [H]ad plenty of experiences ...”

From June 13 to July 18, the 29th Division inched its way to St.-Lo against the German Army’s tough 352nd infantry division that was armed with mortars, grenades, deadly 88mm guns, Mk V Panther tanks, and StuG assault guns. My father was in the front lines virtually every day of the battle, moving from hedgerow to hedgerow, never knowing how many Germans were on the other side of the hedgerows and what weapons they had. The division’s After Action Reports note that my father’s regiment fought near the villages of St. Germain-du-Pert and Amy, seized La Meauffe and La Creterie, captured St. Claire-sur-Elle, battled for Hill 108 (“Purple Heart Hill”) near Villiers-Fossard, engaged in a vicious fight on the Martinville Ridge along the St.-Lo-Bayeaux road, and fought at la Boulaye.

Casualties were terrible. In one day’s action on the Martinville Ridge on July 12, my father’s regiment suffered 60 casualties and the 29th Division as a whole suffered nearly 500 casualties.