"Seventy years ago the fate of Europe was decided in a few bloody hours on the beaches of Normandy. On June 6, 1944, the greatest amphibious force ever assembled began to fight its way ashore. In Normandy on Friday President Obama, along with other world leaders, celebrates the salvation of Western civilization from the Nazi scourge. That mission had a messianic quality; General Dwight Eisenhower, its architect, called it a crusade—a language echoed this week in Poland when the president used "sacrosanct" to reaffirm the American commitment to the defense of Europe.
Extraordinary heroism was demonstrated on the beaches named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword—Hitler spent four years building what he thought was the impregnable Atlantic Wall and it was breached in one day. But what lay beyond the beaches turned out to be far more formidable and entangling than Hitler's shoreline bunkers. It was called bocage—the English equivalent word, hedgerows, doesn't convey what it really is: a deep earthen berm reinforced by a web of the roots of shrubs, bushes and trees. It was really a Norman delineation of turf, creating the earliest pattern of European feudalism, setting the boundaries of field and meadow as permanently as stone walls.
The Allied infantry—long, thin lines of lightly armed men—depended on tanks to give them a shield against formidable Nazi gun emplacements. But the bocage was a tank trap. The military historian John Keegan wrote: "Bocage came to mean the sudden, unheralded burst of machine-pistol fire at close quarters, the crash of flame of a panzerfaust strike on the hull of a blind and pinioned tank."…"
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