Professional civilian, remember; I thought perhaps the hedgerows were just some yards or half a mile or something beyond the beaches.
Sorry..I didn’t mean to sound snippy..The hedgerows began more than several miles from the beaches. The Norman farmers, centuries back, made stone berms, from the rocks they cleared from the fields, covered them with dirt, and planted trees and bushes. When a US tank attempeted to go “up and over” the hedgerow, the soft, lightly armored underbelly was exposed, and the German infantry was killing them with the Panzerfaust. A US tanker came up with the idea of taking the steel beams that the Germans had used to create obstacles for the landing craft on the beaches, and welding them to the front of the tanks...sumilar to a cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive. There’s a name for this device, but I can’t recall it..The tank would drive forward, and it would rip a breach into the hedgerow..