D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

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with colored crayons on a set of maps in the seclusion of his tent, who figured out the solution that was to become known as Operation Cobra. "I said I didn't want to stand up and slug, but ... at one time we were going to have to," Bradley told an aide. "Afterward we can make the breakthrough and run deep."

The point Bradley chose for slugging was a road that ran westward from the gutted city of St.-Lô toward a town called Périers. He picked "Lightning Joe" Collins to seize that road. At a cost of 5,000 casualties, the 29th and 35th Divisions finally captured the heights just west of St.-Lô.

Collins had discovered a secret weapon to get his tanks by Normandy's dense hedgerows. A sergeant in the 2nd Armored Division devised a way to attach to the front of a tank a pair of saw-toothed tusks, made from the steel barricades that once obstructed the landing beaches. These tusks could hack through a hedgerow in a few minutes.

Once the breakthrough came, it came quickly. Within a week after Collins' men had seized the St.-Lô-Périers road, General Patton's newly organized Third Army started to push south and in one day advanced 40 miles into Brittany. "Whether the enemy can still be stopped at this point is questionable," German headquarters near Paris warned Hitler. "The enemy air superiority is terrific and smothers almost every one of our movements . . . Losses in men and equipment are extraordinary."

Hitler launched his "retaliation" against Britain scarcely a week after Dday: some 2,300 V-1s hit London that summer, killing 5,400 civilians more or less at random. But this new terror weapon failed to achieve Hitler's hope of somehow reversing Germany's military fortunes. On June 23, the Soviets launched a gigantic midsummer offensive across a 300-mile front east of Minsk and demolished 28 German divisions within a month. On July 20, Hitler's own Wehrmacht officers turned against him. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg planted under Hitler's conference table a bomb that was supposed to kill the Führer. A shaken and partly deafened Hitler survived to wreak vengeance on the conspirators (even Rommel, who was not directly involved, was forced to take poison) and to add a manic streak to his own supervision of the war.

Hitler's top generals urged him to pull back from Normandy and establish a new defensive line on the Seine. Hitler refused. He ordered Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, his commander in the west, to launch an immediate counterattack against the American breakthrough force. Into this he flung not only the battered remnants of the Seventh Army but also the Fifteenth Army, which had been at the Pas de Calais awaiting the invasion that never came. Their mission: to cut through American lines to the port of Avranches and isolate the twelve American divisions that Patton had led south into Brittany.

Bradley was delighted at the prospect: "This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century," he gloated to a visitor from Washington. "We are about to destroy an entire hostile army." As the Germans plunged westward, Bradley began creating an enormous pincer to encircle them. Patton's tanks raced eastward toward Argentan while the British moved south from Caen toward