"I agree with you," Rommel replied. "The war must be ended immediately. I shall tell the Ftihrer so clearly and unequivocally."

The showdown with Hitler came at a full-dress conference of the top echelon of the high command: Field Marshals Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodi, and Hermann Goring, along with Admiral Karl Donitz and many lesser lights. Rommel spoke first. He said the moment was critical. He told his Ftihrer, "The whole world stands arrayed against Germany, and this disproportion of strength-"

Hitler cut him off. Would the Herr Feldmarschall please concern himself with the military, not the political situation. Rommel then gave a most gloomy report.

Hitler took over. He said the critical task was to halt the enemy offensive. This would be accomplished by the Luftwaffe, he declared. He announced that 1,000 new fighters were coming out of the factories and would be in Normandy shortly. He talked about new secret weapons- the V-2s-that would turn the tide. The Allied communications between Britain and Normandy would be cut by the Kriegsmarine, which would soon be adding a large number of torpedo boats to lay mines in the Channel, and new submarines to operate off the beaches. Large convoys of new trucks' would soon be headed west from the Rhine towards Normandy.

This was pure fantasy. Hitler was clearly crazy. The German high command knew it, without question, and should have called for the men with the straitjacket. But nothing was done.

NUMBERS OF units and qualities and quantities of equipment helped make victory possible for the Americans, but out in the hedgerows those advantages weren't always apparent. Besides, all those American vehicles would be idle until the GIs managed to break out of the hedgerows. And that rested on the wits, endurance, and execution of the tankers, artillery, and infantry at the front.

Hedgerow Fighting: July 1 -24, 1944

WITHIN THREE weeks of the great success of D-Day the ugly word stalemate was beginning to be used. "We were stuck," Corporal Bill Preston remembered. "Something dreadful seemed to have happened in terms of the overall plan. Things had gone awry. The whole theory of mobility that we had been taught, of our racing across the battlefield, seemed to have gone up in smoke." And while the American progress was excruciatingly slow, the British and Canadians remained stuck in place outside Caen. Big attacks followed by heavy losses for small or no gains, reminiscent of 1914-18, weighed on every mind.

So did Hitler's vengeance weapon, the V-l. Used for the first time a few days after D-Day, the radio-controlled aircraft were coming down by the hundreds on London. They were a terror weapon of little military value, except to put an enormous strain on the British public. In June and July the V-ls killed more than 5,000 people, injured 35,000, and destroyed some 30,000 buildings. Worse, Allied intelligence anticipated that the Germans would soon have V-2s-the world's first medium-range ballistic missiles-in operation.

Naturally there was great pressure on the politicians to do something about the V-ls-a pressure that was naturally passed on to the generals. If nothing else, the public had to have a sense that somehow the Allies were hitting back. So big and medium bombers were pulled off other missions to attack the launch sites. Lieutenant James Delong of the Ninth Air Force, flying a B-26 on a strike against the sites in the Pas-de-Calais area, described his experience: "These were very difficult targets to destroy since they consisted mostly of a strong steel launching ramp. They were difficult to hit since the usual hazy visibility and broken cloud cover made them hard to find, leaving seconds to set the bombsight. They were always well defended."

The inability to knock out the sites was disheartening to the bomber pilots, and the terror bombings continued. The sites would have to be overrun on the ground to be put out of action. But the Allied armies were a long way from them.

In early July, according to Eisenhower's chief of staff. General Walter B. Smith, and Deputy Supreme Commander Air Vice Marshal Arthur Tedder, Montgomery was asked to launch an all-out offensive to open the road to Paris. When Monty responded to Eisenhower's plea to get going, he promised a "big show" on July 9 and asked for and got support from four-engine bombers. The attack, however, failed, and on July 10 Monty called it off.

Commander Harry Butcher, Eisenhower's naval aide, reported that the Supreme Commander was "smouldering," as were Tedder and Smith. So was General George S. Patton, Jr, commander of the US Third Army, still in England awaiting its entry into the battle. At Eisenhower's request Churchill put pressure on Monty "to get on his bicycle and start moving." On July 12 Monty told Eisenhower that he was preparing for an offensive in six days, code name Goodwood. "My whole eastern flank will burst into flames," he said as he demanded that the full weight of all the air forces be thrown into the battle. Expectations of a breakthrough ran high.

On July 18 Goodwood began with what Forrest Pogue, the official historian of SHAEF, called "the heaviest and most concentrated air attack in support of ground troops ever attempted." Goodwood got off to a good start, thanks to the bombardment, but ground to a halt after heavy losses, including 401 tanks and 2,600 casualties. Montgomery called it off. The British Second Army had gained a few miles and inflicted heavy casualties, but there had been nothing like a breakthrough.

Montgomery was satisfied with Goodwood's results. Eisenhower was not. He muttered that it had taken more than 7,000 tons of bombs (about half of the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb) to gain seven miles and that the Allies could hardly hope to go through France paying a price of a thousand tons of bombs per mile. Not to mention sixty tanks and 400 casualties per mile.

Tedder was so angry he wanted Monty fired. But this was not an option. Monty was popular with the British press and public and, more important, with the troops. Besides, he had accomplished what he insisted was his objective-to pin down German armour on the eastern flank so as to give the Americans an opportunity to break out on the west. And it was not his fault that no one knew how to use heavy bombers in an artillery role. Those 7,000 tons of bombs caused havoc, misery, and considerable destruction, but after the bombs stopped falling, most German soldiers were able to come up out of their dugouts and man their weapons.

Goodwood showed that there would be no breakthrough on Monty's front. It was too heavily defended, by a too skilful and well-armed and numerous enemy. As that also appeared to be the case on the American front, every Allied leader was depressed and irritable. After seven weeks of fighting, the deepest Allied penetrations were some 45 to 50 kilometres inland, on a front of only 15 kilometres or so, hardly enough room to manoeuvre or to bring in the US Third Army from England.

DURING THE four weeks of hard fighting since D-Day, the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions took heavy casualties, close to 50 per cent overall, higher among junior officers. In the first week of July, when the 30th Division relieved the 82nd, Lieutenant Sidney Eichen reported that he and his men stared in shock and awe at the paratroopers who had inaugurated the battle a month earlier.