War and Game

One of the major problems that had hampered the First Army-how to use tanks effectively in the hedgerow country- appeared to have been solved just before COBRA. The most effective weapon for opening gaps in hedgerows was the tank dozer, a comparatively new development in armored warfare. So recently had its worth been demonstrated that a shortage of the dozers existed in Normandy. Ordnance units converted ordinary Sherman tanks into dozers by mounting a blade on the front. Some hedgerows, however, were so thick that engineers using satchel charges had first to open a hole, which the dozers later cleared and widened.

Because the use of demolitions and tank dozers was time consuming, the tanks in offensive activity had often remained on the roads, and when cross-country movement became necessary, progress was inevitably slow. In order to speed up the movement of armor, Ordnance units and tankers throughout the army had devoted a great deal of thought and experimentation to find a device that would get tanks through the hedges quickly without tilting the tanks upward, thereby exposing their underbellies and pointing their guns helplessly toward the sky. The gadgets invented in July 1944 were innumerable.
As early as 5 July the 79th Division had developed a "hedgecutter," which Ordnance personnel began attaching to the front of tanks. Five days later the XIX Corps was demonstrating a "salad fork" arrangement, heavy frontal prongs originally intended to bore holes in hedgerow walls to facilitate placing engineer demolition charges but accidentally found able to lift a portion of the hedgerow like a fork and allow the tank to crash through the remaining part of the wall. Men in the V Corps invented a "brush cutter" and a "greendozer" as anti-hedgerow devices.

The climax of the inventive efforts was achieved by a sergeant in the 102d Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Curtis G. Culin, Jr., who welded steel scrap from a destroyed enemy roadblock to a tank to perfect a hedgecutter with several tusklike prongs, teeth that pinned down the tank belly while the tank knocked a hole in the hedgerow wall by force. General Bradley and members of his staff who inspected this hedgecutter on 14 July were so impressed that Ordnance units on the Continent were ordered to produce the device in mass, using scrap metal salvaged from German underwater obstacles on the invasion beaches. General Bradley also sent Col. John B. Medaris, the army Ordnance officer, to England by plane to get depots there to produce the tusks and equip tanks with them and to arrange for transporting to France by air additional arc-welding equipment and special welding crews.
Every effort was made to equip all tanks with this latest "secret weapon," for it enabled a tank to plough through a hedgerow as though the hedgerow were pasteboard. The hedgecutter sliced through the earth and growth, throwing bushes and brush into the air and keeping the nose of the tank down. The device was important in giving tankers a morale lift, for the hedgerows had become a greater psychological hazard than their defensive worth merited.

Named Rhinoceros attachments, later called Rhinos, the teeth were so effective in breaching the hedgerows that tank destroyer and self-propelled gun units also requested them, but the First Army Ordnance Section carefully supervised the program to make certain that as many tanks as possible were equipped first. By the time COBRA was launched three out of every five tanks in the First Army mounted the hedgecutter. In order to secure tactical surprise for the Rhinos, General Bradley forbade their use until COBRA.

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