Paul Boyle in World War II

            Working as a procurement agent for the United States War Department, Bill Boyle had a lot of friends in high places.  Seldom, he said, did he call on them for favors.  But on the evening of 30 March 1944, Bill Boyle called the general at Camp Breckenridge, an Army training camp in northern Kentucky, and asked for one favor, to see his brother Paul before the 83rd Infantry Division left Kentucky for New York, where they would board a transport ship to England.  And after England, Bill knew from the above-average orders for munitions over the past few months, his brother would likely be involved in the impending assault on German leader Adolph Hitler's "Fortress Europa” at that time called the Mobilization Training Program.  The basic training consisted mostly of running, swimming, jumping, hiking, marching and drilling -- exercises designed to make the men learn how to follow orders and bring them into a fit physical condition.  By the second week of basic training, the men began learning about their areas of specialty, specialties which were assigned to the men based on a 20-question form they were given with their induction notice.  Based on these questions, Paul was assigned to become a machine gunner, even though he wanted to learn how to be a ground crew member of the United States Army Air Force.  Specialized individual training continued until February, when the troops were assigned to combined training, where they learned to fight at the squad, platoon and company level in combined arms operations.  Among the group training activities was a 25-mile hike every other day, a trip that "makes your feet plenty sore," according to Paul.

            Throughout the training period, Paul developed a fondness for his comrades-in-arms, but a hatred of military life.  Before his induction, Paul was a mechanic at White Motors in Cleveland, and a member of the United Auto Workers union.  As a union man, he enjoyed fairly regular hours and steady pay, enabling him to enjoy the company of women and join several social and fraternal organizations.  In many of his notes to his brothers, Paul asked them to tell his many girlfriends not to forget him and that he would be back soon -- especially “the little blonde” Paul’s lifestyle after joining the Army was a vastly different experience. Used to a steady paycheck, Paul found himself hitting up relatives for money in nearly every letter, asking his brother George for “$5 or $10 because I owe a little to some guys,” asking his mother for ten dollars (but promising to pay it back) and asking his oldest brother, Tom, for “about $20 or what you can afford”.  In addition, Paul was training under a drill sergeant he described as “the meanest of the bunch.”  For as much as Paul complained about military life, he enjoyed an incredible amount of freedom until their camps were locked down before they were shipped to Europe.  From the time they completed their basic training until the beginning of December 1943, men of the 83d Infantry were treated to a weekend pass every other weekend.  But even with reprieves every 14 days, Paul hoped for more liberty, explaining to his brother George that biweekly passes proved that "someone doesn't like us too well.” Paul professed to his mother that he was with "a nice bunch of fellows", but when it became clear his younger brother John would be drafted, Paul quickly replied to his mother that he hoped "they give Johnny a deferment because I would hate to see him get in an outfit like I am in.”  Such was the dichotomy of war. 

            At the end of August 1943, the 83d was put on alert.  Their unit would leave for Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky on 9 September to begin advanced training.  According to unit historian Ernie Hayhow, the division was subjected to a number of new rigors once they arrived in Kentucky.  Instead of sleeping in relatively comfortable barracks, the men would be camped out in the field through the winter, through weather that was "cold as hell.”  Instead of firing at cut-out soldiers, the men would be firing blanks at each other.  And when explosives ripped apart a bridge, it was for real.  By the end of maneuvers, the men began to realize they were getting very close to departing for combat.  The only question was whether it would be in the European or Pacific theater.  Paul wrote to his mother that he would probably not get home until the war was over.

   I told Bill if I didn't get home before Christmas, I wouldn't get home. Well today I found out there wasn't going to be any furloughs, so I won't get home. 

     For the remainder of 1943, and the beginning of 1944, the men of the 83d Infantry were not allowed to correspond with home.  In preparation for the unit’s assignment to overseas service, a new commanding general, Robert Montague, had taken command of the division.  Montague, under orders from the War Department, was to keep the location of his division secret until they were blatantly involved in the war.  But even though the division was preparing for overseas service, the most popular “latrine rumor” of the time was that the 83d would never leave the United States.  The rumors were wishful thinking, though.  The division’s training became far more realistic and lifelike after December.  Using captured German aircraft, U.S. pilots would swoop down over troop movements, and the men were ordered to identify the aircraft by their silhouettes.  Infantry units began to train with field artillery units in an attempt to teach infantrymen how to advance behind a cover of artillery fire.  The “German” planes demonstrated dive-bombing, skip-bombing and strafing to the troops in the Kentucky hills.  As unit historian Ernie Hayhow wrote, payoff for the 83rd was near.

            On 10 March 1944, the men of the 83rd Infantry received orders to prepare for overseas duty.  The men were issued new clothes, new field gear and new guns[1].  On 30 March 1944 in an Evansville, Indiana hotel, Bill Boyle saw his brother Paul, still waiting for his new uniform.  The two men talked about family gossip, and a little about what came next for Paul.  As a procurement agent, Bill knew that Paul’s orders to ship out meant he would be going directly to war.  And because of training with German planes, Paul told Bill he was sure they were going to Europe.  Paul left his brother around 10 p.m. and headed back to Camp Breckenridge.  The next morning, at 6 a.m., the entire 83rd Infantry Division boarded eastbound trains for Camp Shanks, New York.  Their stay at Camp Shanks would only be for seven days -- just long enough to get all of the men and all of their equipment loaded onto the transport ships to depart for England. 

            After two weeks at sea, the convoy docked at Liverpool, where the men were once again put on trains and transported to a staging area in the Midlands of England.  Once in England, the troops were surprised to see how many people had flooded into the island nation.  The 83rd Infantry was quartered in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, where they were not only responsible for getting themselves in shape for the inevitable assault, but also for policing the local population.    Huge fences were erected around the communities of south central England, and U.S. military policemen kept the soldiers and civilians inside their kennels, lest anyone try to alert the enemy of the incredible amount of military activity in England. 

            Civilians, though, were not foremost on the minds of the American soldiers.  Every day brought a lot of drilling, and training that was more specialized to French terrain.  In Wales, the men of the 83rd Infantry spent two weeks attacking empty villages and charging the surrounding hills.  A mock French beach was constructed to detail north of London for troops who would be involved in the D-Day landings.  At these beaches, British and American troops practiced scaling cliffs, taking out gun emplacements and attacking the beaches with specialized British tanks called "funnies".  These tanks were equipped with, among other things, anti-personnel flame-throwers, large plows, and land mine-detonating flails.  The 83rd Infantry practiced these maneuvers to attack the French beaches, but never put the training to the test.  In fact, while Paul Boyle and the men of the 83rd Infantry were practicing for the invasion, the invasion force was boarding ships in Liverpool, only a day away from taking part in the largest military engagement in human history. 

       The Allied generals started planning the D-Day invasion on 12 February 1944, under orders from the combined U.S., British and Soviet chiefs of staff.  The Allied leaders named General Dwight Eisenhower Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces, and ordered him to formulate a plan for the invasion of Hitler's "Festung Europa”.  Many considerations had to be taken into account while planning the invasion.  Military planners wanted to attack the beaches about an hour after low tide in order to have the most undefended area to cross, yet have a rising tide so small troop and tank transports could easily be brought in and out of the invasion beaches.  But even more important than the generals in the planning of the operation, which now bore the name "OVERLORD", were the meteorologists.  Sending more than 175,000 troops and 21,651 vehicles into France, the weather had to be absolutely perfect.  On 4 June 1944, with weather reports in hand, Eisenhower finally gave the go order with a simple "OK, let's go" to his chief of staff.  The invasion force boarded the ships that morning, and the ships assembled off of the southeast coast of England in a seaborne staging area called "Piccadilly Square".  The invasion plan called for American Airborne Infantry troops to be dropped behind enemy lines several hours before the main invasion force would land on the Normandy beaches, in order to knock out enemy machine gun positions.  The initial strike forces attacked four separate beaches. 

        The British landed on Gold and Sword beaches and the Canadians on Juno beach, while Americans assaulted Utah and Omaha beaches, which were closer to the base of the Cotentin Peninsula.  Troops at Sword and Juno ran into little resistance, attacking flatlands that were lightly defended.  Those invading Utah Beach were shelled and ran into some German opposition.  But the fiercest resistance came at Omaha Beach.  The beach was only about 7,000 yards wide, flanked by easily defendable high cliffs on either side and a wide open expanse of gravel on the beach, devoid of cover for invading troops. 

            After the beaches were secured, the Allies had to supply and reinforce the soldiers on the beach, who were quickly becoming tired.  In order to get troops and supplies into Normandy, though, the Allies needed useable ports.  However, one of the reasons the beaches of Normandy were picked was because they were not highly visible targets that Hitler's troops would be defending.  The U.S. Navy found an answer to the shortage of ports in barges called Mulberries.  Enormous rectangular barges with decking on the top, the Mulberries were designed to be towed into place, and then scuttled.  Once filled with water, the Mulberries would sink to a certain level, and then could be used as docks several hundred feet out in the ocean.  The Mulberrys were put end-to-end to form large breakwaters.  Troops and equipment could then be transferred from large ocean-going ships to smaller landing craft.  These portable docks, Eisenhower said, were "critically important" to invading France.  Without the Mulberries, the initial effort would have been doomed.  And, at the time, it was hard for the Supreme Commander to imagine any of the invasion's first month succeeding without the portable docks.  But by 10 days after D-Day, the Mulberries would be ripped apart, and the Allies would find a new way to land troops.

      Eight days after the D-Day invasion, the 83rd Infantry was transported to Liverpool to depart for France.  On June 16, the unit was midway between France and England when a massive Spring storm brewed up south of the English Channel.  The transport ships were withdrawn close to the English shore. The storm passed the Cotentin Peninsula, and struck the Normandy coast of France.  Within 24 hours, all of the Mulberry Harbors off the coast of Omaha Beach were destroyed.  On 22 June 1944, the 83rd Infantry made their second attempt to land at Omaha.  This time, though, the troops did not have the advantage of a dock.  Instead of docking, small, shallow-draught landing craft docked alongside the ocean-going transports and the troops crawled down the sides of the ships to board the smaller boats.  It was a system that worked relatively well, and was used until the Allies secured port cities.  As soon as they were ashore, the men were sent inland because of incredible fatigue front line troops were experiencing.  The 101st Airborne Infantry, which the 83rd relieved, had been in non-stop heavy combat for 10 days before the 83rd Infantry landed.  The bulk of the fighting had moved inland toward the base of the Cotentin Peninsula.  The beachhead had been established well, but greater and bloodier fights lay ahead in France’s Bocage Country.

            General Omar Bradley, who commanded the American First Army, which included the 83rd Infantry, wanted to push the American troops directly inland as soon as the 83rd and several other infantries were landed, but the fighting near the peninsula kept the new divisions tied up for about a week. After the Germans were pushed south, into the path of the 3rd Armored Division, Bradley was able to maneuver his army toward its first strategic objective, the communications hub of St. Lo.  But what neither he nor anyone else on his staff counted on was the hellish terrain known as the hedgerow which lay between the 83rd Infantry and St. Lo.  While the might of the German Army could not stop the American onslaught, the geography of France’s Norman Bocage bogged down the American army for a decisive -- and costly -- month.

            The Norman farmers of southern France cultivated an marsh-like environment much like that of pre-Civil War northwest Ohio. Rather than draining the land with a system of ditches, French farmers built earthworks called hedgerows around their fields.  The hedgerows were about four feet high, three feet thick and roughly 200 by 400 yards in dimension.  Despite all of the hedgerows surrounding areas that were roughly the same in surface area, they were laid out in a very haphazard fashion.  Some hedgerows were rectangular, other triangular, some round and some defying description.  Since the only things that ever had to be moved between the hedgerows in peacetime were men and carts, no dedicated roads traversed the Bocage country. 

            The first American soldiers to find the Bocage were paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Infantry, who were sent into France hours before the D-Day invasion to cut German communication lines.  In the paratrooper training, like the regular infantry training, no mention had been given to the hedgerow country.  The primary result of this incredible oversight in training was that when the paratroopers landed, the hills and ridges of the hedgerows prevented easy communication with each other. Rather than being able to use their system of clicking command and locations to other troops, they could not even determine in which direction they were supposed to travel. In addition to slowing down troop movement, the paratroopers learned that the hedgerows were great defensive positions.  Hedgerows served to divide the countryside into small compartments.  These small compartments, covered as they were with brush and brambles, provided great cover and concealment to the defending German troops.  Not only did they have a small area to defend, which meant they could get greater results from fewer troops, but the ground cover made them virtually immune to U.S. infantry small arms fire. Eventually, the paratroopers fought their way out of the hedgerows, and fell back toward Cotentin.  But the lessons they learned about the terrain were not passed onto the combined infantry and armor units that would follow in several weeks. 

            Infantrymen were not the only ones hampered by the close-quarters fighting.  Combined arms units, those made up of infantrymen and light armor, could not fight on a unified front line.  Instead, the hedgerows had to be taken one at a time.  Mechanized units could not maneuver between the hedgerows because of the lack of wide enough roads, and they could not scale the hedgerows to fire cannon at the Germans, because they would expose the soft armor of the underbelly of the U.S. tanks.  Artillery was impractical, because there was no way to observe enemy positions and plot targets.  Air support would not even be possible, since the German and American troops were generally fighting less than one football field away from each other.  Taking the hedgerows, no matter what the cost, was the job of the infantrymen, alone at first, and combined with technological advances later.

     Predictably, German troops took full advantage of the natural defensive positions in the hedgerows.  While the hedgerows had different shapes, most of them had a definite back and a definite front.  German troops would gather at the back of a hedgerow when U.S. forces neared.  Machine gunners would set up in the middle of the rear wall, and snipers would occupy the two rear corners[1].  Other troops attached to the small units defending the hedgerows would serve as runners between different units, thus establishing a very effective German communication network behind the lines.  When U.S. infantry units would try to break into the enclosed middle of the hedgerows, German machine gunners would open fire on the troops, who had no cover to duck behind.  Snipers, on the other hand, worked in more devious ways.  The main job of the German snipers was to take out officers.  The snipers would look for the stripes or bars on the uniforms of officers and non-commissioned officers, and try to take out the U.S. command structure, hoping that confusion would reign.  In some cases, the German plan worked.  Troops coming into battle for the first time were prepared to react while under machine gun fire.  All of the men from one platoon were killed by a single sniper when they came under fire in the low part of hedgerow, because all they instinctively hit the ground when the machine guns started firing.  This predatory behavior of the enemy snipers made them the most hated men on the battlefields.  So hated were the snipers, that they routinely were not even taken prisoner.  General Huebner, of the U.S. 1st Infantry wrote in his diary that he could have easily taken four snipers prisoner in one day, but "preferred to kill them.”  U.S. infantry was getting the job done, but at a bloody price. 

            After several days of fighting with infantry alone, the U.S. commanders realized they would need to find a way get armor into the hedgerows to support the infantry.  At first, engineering units would advance behind the infantry units and place dynamite charges in the front wall of the hedgerow.  But with some walls standing six feet tall and four feet wide, it quickly became impractical to blow up the embankments.  Charged with finding a way to penetrate the hedgerows, a maintenance officer from a rear-echelon armored unit fashioned a large, fork-shaped plow out of iron from the German beach barricades  at Omaha.  The plow broke right through the earthworks of the hedgerows, and fighting became a little easier for infantrymen on the front lines once the new plows were issued to their units.  It took time for these advancements to make it to the front line, though, and it took several weeks for the new equipment to reach the front lines.

            In the last week of June 1944, the 83rd Infantry Division was trained behind Allied lines for hedgerow warfare.  Instead of training with armor and artillery units, though, the 83rd Infantry trained alone, practicing gunning techniques and mortar shelling, not learning how to coordinate their efforts with armor.  On the night of 27 June 1944, the 83rd Infantry moved into the hedgerow country. Unit historian Ernie Hayhow described the feelings of fighting in the hedgerows as "treacherous, rugged, nerve wracking, murderous". A soldier in Paul Boyle’s weapons platoon wrote of these feelings in a poem about Paul.

               It’s hard to make out what beyond your row-
               I’ve pushed the leaves aside myself to see-
               Most often there’s nothing but the fields that flow
               Like highways through the hedges-tho some might hide the enemy,
               And death might lurk unseen.

           The hedgerows would bring the heaviest fighting the young infantry unit had seen yet.

            It was after the 83rd Infantry entered the hedgerow country that Paul Boyle began writing letters again.  The two letters he wrote between arriving at the front line and his death on 26 July reflect the strain the battle had on his nerves.  Earlier letters from Paul indicated that he expected to get home, go out with girls again, and buy a new car.  But after entering the hedgerow, the letters were much more ominous.  Paul was frustrated with the lack of information troops at the front received.

I guess you know by now that I'm in France.  There isn't a lot of news in fact I think people at home get the news faster than we do.

I'm sending some money home. It isn't very much but I don't think I'm going to get a chance to spend it.

Paul wrote this letter on 2 July 1944.  Three nights later, on 5 July 1944, the 83rd Infantry had its bloodiest night of the war.  While trying to take a hedgerow next to the Carentan-St. Lo Road, the 83rd Infantry advanced 1,600 yards at a cost of 2,100 men seriously injured or dead.  The night was described by Hayhow as "slow, costly and hellish.”  As the 83rd Infantry had not been trained in combined arms operations, they tried to take the heavily defended roadside hedgerows by pouring troops into the hedgerows, trying to defeat the well defended Germans by strength in numbers.  But as the machine guns mowed down the U.S. soldiers, it became clear force in numbers would not work.  The loss of 2,100 men from a division of about 17,000 was devastating.  But with 2,100 less soldiers, some of whom were officers, career advancements that take a decade in peacetime took a matter of days.  When Paul Boyle landed in Normandy, he was a private.  By 29 June 1944, he was made a Private First Class, and on 19 July 1944 he was promoted to Sergeant.  The promotion was to be short-lived, though, as the next week would bring about the bloody push to St. Lo.

            General Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. First Army, wanted to take St. Lo as quickly as possible.  The city was a major communications and logistics hub for the German Army, and if the city was captured, all of southern France would be the Allies for the taking.  On 13 July, Bradley had the 83rd Infantry move to a line from Lessay to St. Lo.  This line would be in the middle of the hedgerows, and would be a blocking line along the Allied right flank to prevent German forces from coming up behind the U.S. forces that would push toward St. Lo[1].  Although the 83rd would not be aggressively rushing through the hedgerow any longer, they would have to slowly push through, making sure no Germans slipped behind U.S. lines.  Hedgerow combat, as always, would take its toll on the American soldiers.  In his last letter home, dated 20 July 1944, Paul sounded more dispirited than ever.  Paul told his mother he thought the days of getting furloughs were over for him, and that things had been getting very dangerous near him.   

I just hope your prayers and mine are answered because I have really been lucky...There isn't much I can say, but I hope this war ends soon. 

Good luck was at a premium.  From 13 July to 26 July, 11,000 casualties would be suffered on the American side.  One of these would be Sgt. Paul Boyle. 

            Mary Boyle received the telegram that her son had died in August, 1944.  Soon after getting the message, she asked her son Bill to find out if Paul, a devout Catholic, had gotten confession before he died.  Bill wrote a letter to Jean Cossette, a French priest who served as chaplain to the 331st regiment of the 83rd Infantry, asking if Paul had gotten confession.  The priest had been on furlough while Paul was killed, but knew of a young man by the last name of Smith, from Evansville, Indiana who had been in Paul's machine gunning platoon.  Bill left for Evansville the next day.  In Evansville, a man at the American Legion post told him there was a young man named Smith who lived north of town who had been sent back with injuries.  Bill drove to their house, and found a kind, elderly couple.  He explained that his brother had been killed, and he wanted to talk to their son about his experience in the war.  The mother's face sank, Bill said.  She told Bill that their son had not told them anything about the war, and wanted to forget everything relating to the war.  They told him if he wanted to find the young man, that he was building a new house on their property, about a mile away.  Bill found the young man working on the roof of his house, and asked about Paul.       

          The kid said "I want you to follow me to the orchard.  I'll sit on a stump and face the other way.  I'll tell you what happened to your brother, and then I want you to leave.  Don't thank me, don't ask any questions.  Just leave. 

The young man told Bill that he was a private in Paul's platoon.  On the afternoon of 26 July 1944, the platoon was setting up machine guns around a hedgerow.  The men of the weapons platoon did not know that across the hedgerow from them were German soldiers from the 17th SS Panzer Guards Division, a special forces unit assigned to protecting the German armored forces.  As the platoon's sergeant, Paul was in charge of the set up.  As the men were setting up the machine guns, a sniper fired, striking Paul in the shoulder.  Paul fell to the ground, but got on his hands and knees and tried to crawl back to the brush line.  As he crawled, the young soldier said, Paul shouted to the other soldiers "Don't retreat!" Seconds later, Paul Boyle was shot again, this time in the head, the first of 17 men in the weapons platoon killed. Within 12 hours of his death, the Allies broke free of the Bocage country, and headed south toward St. Malo.

        Paul was buried in the Allied cemetery, near Omaha Beach in France, along with 9,385 other Americans killed in the Normandy campaign.  Paul didn't die heroically storming a German position, or throwing his body over a grenade to protect his comrades in arms.  Instead, he died at the hands of an assassin.  There is nothing about Paul's death that, in the global scope of war, is particularly noteworthy or history-changing.  His death did not turn the tide of the war.  However, his life and death provide a telling micro-history of the American experience during the invasion of Europe.  His training, at Camp Atterbury, Camp Breckenridge, the Highlands of England and even in France, had been extensive.  Historian Charles Whiting said that no military force had ever trained as hard as the American invasion force.  Yet despite the amount of training, American overconfidence led the forces to discount the hedgerows, said Capt. Charles Folsom, a company commander in the 83rd Infantry.  These oversights cost the lives of countless thousands of soldiers, including Paul.  The bloody night of 5 July 1944, Michael Doubler said, proved beyond all doubt that the 83rd Infantry's debut in combat was a failure, and accurately shows what happened when U.S. divisions did not combine their armor and infantry forces.