D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

those present laughed, but Culin went away and developed the idea by welding a pair of short steel girders to the front of a Sherman. General Bradley saw a demonstration. He immediately gave orders that the steel from German beach obstacles should be cut up for use. The ‘rhino’ tank was born. With a good driver, it took less than two and a half minutes to clear a hole through the bank and hedgerow.
    One of the most important but least favourite pastimes in the bocage was patrolling at night. A sergeant usually led the patrol, whose task was either to try to capture a prisoner for interrogation, or simply to establish a presence out in front in case of surprise attacks. German paratroopers on the Saint-Lô front used to sneak up at night to lob grenades. Many stories were elaborated around night patrols. ‘I talked to enough men,’ wrote the combat historian Forrest Pogue, ‘to believe the tale of a German and an American patrol which spent several days under a gentleman’s agreement visiting a wine cellar in no-man’s land at discreet intervals.’ He also heard from one patrol leader that his group had ‘reported itself cut off by the enemy for three days while they enjoyed the favors of two buxom French girls in a farmhouse’. But even if true, these were exceptions. Very few men, especially those from the city, liked leaving the reassuring company of their platoon. American units also used patrolling to give newly arrived ‘replacements’ a taste of the front line. But for a sergeant in command of some terrified recruits ready to shoot at anything in the dark, a night patrol was the worst task of all.
     
    American military bureaucracy handled the whole ‘replacement’ system with a brutal lack of imagination. The word itself, which suggested the filling of dead men’s shoes, was ill-chosen. It took several months before the term was changed to ‘reinforcement’. But the basic problem remained. These new arrivals were poorly trained and totally unprepared for what lay ahead. ‘Our younger men, especially there placements who came up when I did,’ reported a lieutenant in the 35th Division, ‘were not real soldiers. They were too young to be killers and too soft to endure the hardships of battle.’
    ‘Practically all of the replacements,’ stated a report from the 4th Infantry Division, ‘had come direct from replacement training centers.’ They had received no unit or field training and, unlike those prepared in England for the invasion, they had never been put under overhead artillery fire. ‘A great many of those furnished as specialists had never been trained in their official speciality. A good many of the infantry replacements had not been trained as combat infantry . . . I have found men trained as mail orderlies, cooks, officers’ orderlies, truck drivers etc., for periods ranging from six months to a year, who had been sent over, assigned to a combat unit, and thrust into combat within 24 hours . . . These men were definitely inadequately prepared, both psychologically and militarily, for combat duty.’ The only chance that the division had to train them was during the much needed periods of rest: less than six days out of the forty since it had landed on Utah. It was an impossible task. Having suffered 7,876 casualties since landing, the 4th had received 6,663 replacements. 35 The majority of suicides were committed by replacements. ‘Just before they went across to France,’ an American Red Cross woman recorded, ‘belts and ties were removed from some of these young men. They were very, very young.’
    Replacements joined their platoon usually at night, having no idea where they were. The old hands shunned them, partly because their arrival came just after they had lost buddies and they would not open up to newcomers. Also everyone knew that they would be the first to be killed and doomed men were seen as somehow contagious. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because replacements were often given the most dangerous tasks. A platoon did not want to waste experienced men.
    Many replacements went into shock as soon as they came under fire. Aid men found themselves having to act as counsellors to replacements curled in terror at the bottom of their foxholes. These boys were convinced that they were under direct fire because of the intense vibrations in the earth from shells landing some distance away. The aid men had to try to persuade them to stick their heads out of the