“Manic Mechanic” – The U.S. Soldier Who Turned A Sherman into a Hedge Shredding Monster

They started calling him crazy long before anybody knew his name would be written into the unofficial legends of Normandy. Even before the hedgerows, before the beaches, before the taste of cordite and fear became part of his daily diet, the guys in the motor pool said there was something off about Corporal Curtis G. Cullen.

Not “nuts” like dangerous. Not the kind of crazy that got you shipped home. It was more the way he looked at things.

Where other men saw a busted track or a leaky transmission, Cullen saw a puzzle, a problem that could be solved with enough sweat, scrap, and swear words. He wasn’t an engineer. Never claimed to be. He was a mechanic. A Jersey kid who’d grown up in a garage, hands in grease by twelve, driving trucks by fourteen, fixing whatever came through the door because if you didn’t fix it, it didn’t run, and if it didn’t run, nobody got paid.

In peacetime that made you useful.

In Normandy, it made you dangerous—at least to the enemy.

June 1944, a few weeks after D-Day. The beaches were behind them now, the worst of the surf and the shingle and the machine-gun fire fading into grim stories and letter fragments and names scratched on the inside of helmets. American armored divisions had finally wrestled their way off the sand and out of the marshes. Men like Cullen had nursed Shermans through salt water, mud, and shrapnel, praying the engines would keep turning.

The briefings before the invasion had been simple, almost optimistic. France, the officers said, would open up inland. Rolling farmland. Broad fields. Good tank country. Once off the beach, the armor would be the hammer, the infantry the anvil, and the Germans would be caught in between.

Nobody had put “hedgerows” on the slides.

The first time Cullen really saw one up close, he mistook it for a small ridge. Just a rise at the edge of a field, covered in brush. Nothing a thirty-ton tank couldn’t flatten.

Then he walked over to it.

He ran his gloved hand along the side. The “ridge” wasn’t just dirt. It was centuries of earth, piled and packed and held together by roots that had dug down and sideways and through, weaving themselves into a living wall. Six feet high in some places. Ten in others. The top a tangle of shrubs and trees. The side a dense layer of soil that felt like cured cement under his fingers.

You couldn’t walk through it.

You couldn’t see over it without climbing.

And beyond it—beyond every one of those green, quiet walls—were fields boxed in like rooms. Each field a separate killing ground, with only a couple of narrow gaps for roads or farm tracks.

The bocage, the French called it. To the Americans, it was something else.

“Hell,” one infantryman muttered, staring at the same wall Cullen was leaning on. “Green hell.”

The name stuck.

The tankers tried the obvious thing first. Tanks were supposed to go over obstacles. That’s what thirty tons of steel and torque were for. You saw a ditch, you bridged it. You saw a wall, you climbed it. You saw a hedge, you crushed it.

Shermans rolled forward and lifted their noses up against the bank. Tracks churned, clawing at the earth. The front end rose, inch by inch, like some big, clumsy animal trying to haul itself up onto a ledge.

For a horrifying moment, they hung there—nose up, tail down, bellies exposed.

Cullen saw it happen from thirty yards away. The Sherman’s front lifted, the hull tilting up just enough to show the smooth underside of the tank: the belly plate, the thinnest armor on the whole machine, angled toward the German lines like a target painted in neon.

He knew what was coming before the first flash.

A Panzerfaust rocket lanced out from the thick brush on the far side of the hedge. In training, they’d seen pictures: a man with a tube on his shoulder, a little bulbous warhead at the end, nothing to be too scared of if you kept your distance.

In reality, the thing moved like a bolt of angry light. It hit the Sherman’s exposed belly with a meaty, sickening thump, followed by a punching roar that Cullen felt in his teeth.

The tank shuddered. Flames burst out from the driver’s hatch. The engine screamed once, a high, tortured whine, then cut off abruptly. The turret rocked as if something inside had slammed against it.

Cullen started running before he even realized his legs had moved. You always ran when a tank took a hit. Maybe somebody would make it out. Maybe you’d drag them clear before the ammunition cooked off.

The first man out was the loader. He came through the turret hatch like he’d been shot out of a cannon, jacket smoldering, one pant leg on fire. Cullen grabbed him and tackled him into the grass, smothering the flames with his own body.

The smell of burning wool and hair hit him an instant later. He gagged, swallowed it down, and rolled, dragging the loader with him.

“Crew?” he shouted. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

The loader coughed, eyes wild. Smoke poured out of the turret behind him. There was a muffled pop inside, then another. The main gun shell stowage turning into a row of little bombs.

“Driver…” the loader rasped. “Bow gunner… they—”

The tank went up.

Cullen felt the heat like a slap. The turret lid flew open, a tongue of fire licking out. Black smoke boiled, thick and oily, carrying with it a spray of molten metal and things he didn’t want to identify.

The loader sobbed once, a sound that didn’t belong on any battlefield Cullen knew.

All along that hedgerow line, it was the same story.

Sherman after Sherman tried to crest walls built by French farmers eight hundred years before any of them were born. Sherman after Sherman lifted its nose, exposed its belly, and died screaming.

Panzerfaust rockets. Panzerschrecks. Anti-tank guns tucked in behind the bushes. Machine-gun nests zeroed in on the only places infantry could move: the gaps between fields, the mouths of the lanes.

Tank after tank was pinned or destroyed in a landscape that, on the maps, had looked like easy country.

In the first weeks after D-Day, American armor losses skyrocketed. Not to Panthers sweeping in glorious charges. Not to Panzers dueling at a thousand yards. To hedges.

Natural fortresses, the officers called them. A “fortress system,” someone said in a briefing, like they had stumbled into a defensive network designed by God and French peasants.

The infantry called it something simpler each time they stepped into another boxed field and heard the first clatter of German machine guns: “Green hell.”

Cullen heard all of it.

He heard tank commanders swearing and slamming helmets into dirt. He heard infantrymen cursing the “tin cans” that couldn’t do anything but die on hedges. He heard officers muttering about going back to the drawing board and asking for engineers to clear lanes.

And in the motor pool, he heard the most dangerous, stupid, throwaway joke of the summer of ‘44.

It came one afternoon when a group of tankers and mechanics were gathered around a disabled Sherman, arguing.

“I’m telling you, Curt,” one of the tank commanders said, kicking the track in frustration. “These stupid hedges make us useless. We’re like big iron coffins. Can’t go over, can’t go through, can’t go around without getting a Panzerfaust up the ass. Might as well turn us back into tractors.”

Another man snorted. “Why don’t we just put cat claws on the tank or something,” he muttered, half under his breath. “Cut through the damn things.”

Most of the guys laughed. It was the kind of bitter humor that kept you from screaming.

Cullen didn’t laugh.

He looked up from the gear housing he’d been elbow-deep in, wiped a streak of grease across his sleeve, and stared past the men to the hedgerow at the edge of the field. He watched a breeze move the leaves. He imagined roots, soil, mass.

Cat claws.

Not a joke, his brain said. An idea.

“We could do that,” he said.

The others turned, expecting a punchline.

He didn’t smile.

“We could do that,” Cullen repeated. “We don’t have to go over. We could… bite into it. Push through. Like a plow going into hard ground. You don’t ride the plow over the dirt, you cut it.”

“Yeah?” the tank commander said, skeptical but intrigued despite himself. “And what do you propose, Corporal? We just magically whip up some claws out of thin air?”

Cullen’s eyes had that look again, the one that made the other mechanics shake their heads and call him manic when he wasn’t listening. A stare that meant his brain had already left the conversation and was out there in the field, measuring, cutting, welding something that didn’t exist yet.

“Not out of thin air,” he said. “Out of scrap.”

That night, while the sky over Normandy flickered with sporadic artillery flashes and the distant glow of burning villages, Corporal Curtis Cullen went hunting for steel.

Officially, there were procedures for this sort of thing. Requisitions. Forms. Approvals. Permission to modify government property.

Unofficially, there was war.

Which meant you took what you could find and prayed nobody asked where you’d gotten it until after it worked.

Cullen found his miracle in the skeletal remains of a German roadblock.

They called them dragon’s teeth—pyramidal concrete blocks designed to stop tanks cold. But the ones near his sector had been blown, leaving behind not just shattered concrete but the heavy steel beams and shapes used to anchor them.

Half buried in rubble, one of those beams caught Cullen’s eye. He scrambled up the broken mound, boots skidding, hands biting into rough edges, and knelt beside it.

He ran his fingers along it, feeling the weight, the thickness. Heavy, but not too heavy for a Sherman to carry on its nose. Solid enough to punch into packed earth and roots without warping too quickly.

He grinned in the dark.

“Gotcha,” he whispered.

Back at the maintenance area, he dragged the scavenged metal into the circle of yellow light around the welding torch. Sleep was a luxury. Time was something infantrymen out in the fields didn’t have.

He chalked rough lines on the steel, no drafting table, no protractor. Just measurements taken with a tape pulled off a tank’s front plate and the feel of what “about right” looked like.

Four prongs, he thought. Four teeth, like the front of a farm plow, spaced to match the width of a Sherman’s tracks, forming a crude, triangular rake that would catch the base of the hedgerow instead of riding up it.

Two vertical beams to carry the load up into the hull. Crossbraces. Angled cuts.

He was not thinking in terms of stress charts or finite element analysis. He was thinking like a man who had watched tank after tank lift and die.

Composition: combat proven German steel, he thought dryly, as he began to cut.

The torch hissed to life, a jet of bright blue-white flame spilling sparks as it bit into the beam. Metal glowed, ran, separated. The smell of hot iron and flux filled the air, mixing with the ever-present perfume of oil and sweat and cigarettes.

Other mechanics glanced over from their own work, curious.

“What are you doing, Curt?” one of them asked.

“Making cat claws,” he said without looking up.

They laughed. He didn’t.

By midnight, the four main teeth lay on the ground, smoking gently. He took a break to drink black coffee so thick it felt like it might strip paint. His hands shook—not from fear, but from fatigue and adrenaline.

“Help me get these bastards up there,” he told one of the younger mechanics, jerking a thumb toward a Sherman that had seen better days.

The tank sat on the edge of the work area, its crew off somewhere trying to sleep. Its front hull plate—the glacis—gleamed dully in the half-light. Cullen had picked it because its engine still ran and its crew was desperate enough to let a crazy mechanic weld God-knew-what onto their girl.

With a grunt and a lot of cursing, they dragged the first tooth into position, braced against the lower hull. The angle had to be just right—low enough to catch the base of the hedge, high enough not to dig into every bump in the road.

“You really think the brass is gonna let you do this?” the younger mechanic asked as he helped hold it in place.

Cullen struck an arc, welding bead forming like a line of molten toothpaste along the junction.

“I think they’ll let me if it works,” he said over the sizzle. “And if it doesn’t, they’ll yell at me while everybody keeps dying on the hedges. I know which one I’d rather bet on.”

The welds were ugly—thick, aggressive cords of metal, overdone on purpose. Pretty would have to wait for peacetime. This had to hold against six hundred tons of resistance every time the tank pushed into a new field.

He worked through the night, one bead at a time, sweat running down his back despite the cool air. The welding mask made the world a small, bright furnace. When he flipped it up, the stars looked dim by comparison.

By dawn, the Sherman had a new face.

Four thick steel tusks jutted out from its front hull, spaced across the width like the teeth of some mechanical beast. They projected forward and slightly down, sharp-edged and brutal in their simplicity.

It looked… wrong.

Like something from a fever dream.

Like a farm plow and a battleship had a child.

Guys from neighboring units drifted over, mugs of coffee in hand, drawn as much by the smell of cooked steel as by the rumors that had been circling all night.

“What in God’s green hell is that?” one tanker asked, pointing.

“My next bad idea,” Cullen said, wiping his hands on a rag. His eyes were red-rimmed, his stubble black against his jaw, but he was grinning.

The motor pool sergeant stood a little distance away, arms folded, expression halfway between irritation and reluctant interest.

“You know there are regulations about modifying equipment without authorization,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Cullen replied.

“You reading them?” the sergeant asked.

“No, Sergeant,” Cullen said.

The sergeant snorted. “Fine. You want to get yourself court-martialed, you can do it after you see whether this thing works. Better break it in before the officers see it.”

“They’ve already seen it.”

The voice came from behind them. Cullen turned, heart suddenly thumping harder than it had under any shellfire.

A captain stood there, helmet pushed back, hands on his hips. Behind him, a colonel. And behind them, because the universe had a sense of humor, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley himself, spectacles glinting in the new sunlight.

Somewhere, someone muttered, “Oh, hell.”

Cullen snapped to attention, welding gloves still in his hands.

“Sir,” he said, feeling suddenly very much like a corporal who had just welded an unauthorized monstrosity to a perfectly good Sherman in front of half the chain of command.

Bradley’s gaze went past him, studying the tusks.

“What do you call this, Corporal?” the general asked.

Cullen swallowed.

“Sir, we keep trying to go over the hedgerows,” he said. “And every time we do, we expose the belly plate and get nailed. I figured if we could bite into the base of the hedge instead, we could cut through instead of climbing over. So I, uh, welded on some… prongs.”

“Prongs,” Bradley repeated, deadpan.

“Yes, sir,” Cullen said. “Four prongs, made from captured German steel. I can adjust the angle if necessary. Figured it was worth a try.”

The colonel beside Bradley shook his head.

“This is not a factory-approved modification,” he said. “Tanks are designed with specific weight distributions. You can’t just hang half a ton of scrap on the front and expect—”

Bradley raised a hand.

“Let the man speak,” he said.

He turned back to Cullen.

“You think this will work?” the general asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Cullen said honestly. “But everything we’ve tried so far isn’t working. Worst case, we tear the thing off and I get yelled at. Best case, we get a tank through a hedge without blowing it up.”

There was a murmur from the gathered tankers. “Let him try,” someone said. “Can’t be worse than what we got.”

Bradley considered the ugly steel teeth for another long moment.

“All right, Corporal,” he said. “You built it. You test it. Get that tank’s crew and let’s see what happens.”

The crew of the Sherman—the same one that had sat, sullen and useless, at the edge of the field while others tried and failed to climb the bocage—needed no encouragement. Their lives depended on the ability to move. Right now, they might as well have been in a pillbox with tracks.

They clambered up and into their steel home, still giving the welded prongs dubious glances but trusting, at least, that Cullen knew his trade. He’d kept their engine running through salt water, their tracks in one piece through rubble. Maybe he could keep them alive through this.

The tank’s engine coughed awake, then settled into a deep, rumbling idle. The big vehicle rolled forward, treads clanking on the packed dirt.

A crowd formed along the edge of the field, infantrymen and tankers and officers in a loose arc, watching.

The hedgerow loomed ahead, a wall of green and earth six feet high, crowned with brush and small trees. Behind it, somewhere, German eyes and German guns waited.

Inside the Sherman, the driver wiped his palms on his trousers and held the controls a little tighter.

“You sure about this, Curt?” he muttered into the intercom.

On the hull, sitting with his legs dangling over the front, Cullen thumped the welded tusks affectionately.

“Sure as hell am not,” he said. “But I’d rather try this than go up and over again. Aim for the base. Don’t climb it. Shove those teeth right into it and keep going.”

He scrambled back, dropped off the side, and moved to stand beside Bradley and the colonel. He felt suddenly more naked than he ever had under enemy fire.

The tank picked up speed. Not much—this wasn’t a charge, it was a shove. Ten miles per hour, maybe. Enough momentum to make the impact count without risking the driver’s teeth rattling out.

The prongs hit first.

There was a momentary shudder, a grinding howl as steel met centuries of earth. The tusks bit into the base of the hedge, slicing into the packed soil, shearing roots that had never imagined their day would end like this.

Instead of climbing, the tank’s nose stayed low.

Instead of lifting its belly, the Sherman drove forward, the added weight on its front helping it dig. The hedge resisted, fought back, then started to give.

The thick wall split.

Earth crumbled. Roots snapped with sharp, wet cracks. Brush toppled. The prongs cut a path, the Sherman’s bulk forcing a doorway where none had existed.

On the far side, sunlight burst through in a ragged, dusty beam.

The tank rolled into the next field.

For a heartbeat, there was complete silence around the watching crowd, as if every man present were waiting to see if the universe would correct itself and the hedgerow would somehow reassemble.

Then someone shouted, voice half laughter, half disbelief.

“Do it again!”

The driver swung the tank around in the far field, clanking along the inside edge. He lined up on another section of hedge, a fresh wall of green that had never felt tracks or steel.

Again, the Sherman accelerated.

Again, the prongs bit.

Again, the hedge split raggedly, centuries of farmer’s earthwork undone in seconds by a Jersey mechanic’s midnight welding job.

The third time, someone started clapping.

By the fifth, the field was full of noise—cheers, whoops, the kind of wild, relieved laughter that comes when the impossible suddenly looks negotiable.

Bradley’s face had changed.

The caution had not gone away—no general worth his stars let it—but there was something else now: a sharp, hungry interest.

He turned to the colonel.

“How many tanks do we have in this sector?” he asked.

“Enough, sir,” the colonel said cautiously.

“We don’t have enough,” Bradley replied. “Not until they all have this thing on their noses. Get me the engineers. Get me the ordnance people. Get me anyone with a welding torch and a steady hand. I want every Sherman in Normandy to look like that in a week.”

The colonel hesitated.

“Sir, there are regulations—”

“Regulations can catch up,” Bradley snapped. “The Germans aren’t waiting for our paperwork.”

He looked at Cullen.

“What’s your name, Corporal?” he asked.

“Curtis G. Cullen, sir,” Cullen said, suddenly feeling every year and every rank in his life.

“Well, Corporal Cullen,” Bradley said, “you may have just given us the key to getting out of this damned bocage. Good work.”

He meant it. Years later, he would say publicly that Cullen’s crude, midnight-built contraption was one of the most important tactical inventions of the war.

In the moment, all Cullen could do was nod and mumble, “Yes, sir,” as his brain adjusted to the idea that something he’d thought up over bad coffee and worse odds was about to become official doctrine.

The next days were a blur.

Word spread faster than any official memo. “You seen the hedgerow tank?” guys asked each other. “The one with the teeth? They say it goes through the walls like butter.”

They weren’t that easy to build. The steel had to be scavenged, cut, welded. Every prong had to be angled just so. But they were easier to build than new tanks. And much, much cheaper than dead crews.

Workshops across Normandy turned into improvisational factories.

American engineers, some with degrees and some with nothing but experience, crowded around hastily drawn diagrams based on Cullen’s prototype. They measured, argued about optimal angles, then decided there was no time for perfection.

They welded.

Some units used railroad rails, cut and sharpened. Others used sections of I-beam salvaged from wrecked bridges or German obstacles. The designs varied slightly, but the principle remained: four to six heavy tines, braced back into the hull, forming a toothy rake that could tear into the base of a hedge.

Cullen watched with something like bemusement.

“I couldn’t build them this fast if I built them myself,” he joked to one of the motor pool guys as a convoy of newly tusked Shermans rolled past, their front ends bristling.

“What do you think, Curt?” the man asked. “Gonna hold?”

Cullen shrugged.

“We’re about to find out,” he said.

The troops christened the modified tanks with a dozen names.

Rhino tanks, because of the horned fronts.

Cullen cutters, because soldiers had a way of rewarding the man who improved their chances.

Hedgerow tanks, hedge-busters, hedgerow tusk tanks.

Whatever they called them, they changed the look—and the sound—of Normandy.

Where before, the approach of armor had been announced by the clatter of tracks and the grinding whine of engines as tanks struggled and failed to climb, now it came with a new sound: the tearing rumble of steel teeth ripping into old earth, the snap of roots breaking.

German machine-gun crews, dug in behind hedgerows with carefully calculated fire lanes that intersected at the mouths of lanes and gaps, suddenly found those lanes meaningless.

One German lieutenant, writing in his diary in a rare quiet moment in July, put it bluntly: “The Americans have found a way to make their tanks come through the hedges themselves. We can no longer guess where they will appear. They emerge from the green walls like ghosts. Our ambushes are useless. We are the ones being surprised.”

Before the Cullens and Rhinos, a German anti-tank team could point at a map and say, “The tanks must come here, or here. We mine these points. We prepare Panzerfaust here. We make this field a death box.”

After?

The map became a suggestion.

A Sherman could now punch through almost any hedgerow face in front of it. That turned each field from a box with one or two predictable exits into a place where armor could break through wherever the commander chose.

Infantry advancing behind those tanks felt the difference.

PFC Joe Ramirez, an infantryman from Texas, remembered the first time he followed a Rhino tank through a hedgerow.

“Before that,” he said later, sitting at a kitchen table years after the war, “we’d go up to the hedge and just sort of… stare at it. You knew there were Germans on the other side. You knew they knew exactly where you’d pop out—through the gate or the hole or whatever. It was like walking into the front door of a house where the owner’s standing there with a shotgun.”

He shook his head.

“Then these tanks show up with… horns on their face. I thought they’d gone nuts. But that thing hit the hedge and it just opened. Dirt flying. Roots snapping. We went through in a place where there wasn’t any gate, and when we came out on the other side, the Krauts were pointing their guns at where we should have been, not where we were. We got them from the side. First time I felt like, ‘Okay. Tables turned.’”

Captured German officers were baffled.

Some of them genuinely believed the Americans had shipped purpose-built hedgerow tanks from the States—special models designed in secret, produced in factories, then ferried across the Channel.

They could not imagine that the devices tearing their centuries-old earthworks apart had been conceived by a grease-covered corporal and welded on in farmyards with nothing more than scrap and nerve.

General Bradley, once he had decided, did not do things halfway. Orders went out: replicate Cullen’s design. Iterate if necessary, but copy the essentials.

By the end of July, roughly sixty percent of the Shermans in Normandy carried some form of hedgerow cutter.

That statistic was just a number on a report to some people.

To the men in the fields, it was the difference between approaching the next wall wondering which of them would burn, and approaching it knowing they had a bulldozer with teeth on their side.

Curtis Cullen didn’t get a promotion for his idea. He didn’t get rich. There were no patents filed in his name, no royalties on future designs.

He got what most soldiers got: more work.

More transmissions to fix. More tracks to patch. More nights under a sky that never seemed entirely dark, because somewhere, someone was always firing something.

He rarely talked about what he’d done. When pressed, he’d shrug and say, “Someone was gonna think of it eventually.” Maybe. Maybe not.

What he knew—what the men whose lives were saved by his midnight welding knew—was that he’d thought of it when it mattered.

Years later, in one of the many after-action interviews that historians and armies conducted, a German officer who’d faced the Americans in the bocage was asked what had changed the battle.

He didn’t mention the big strategies, the sweeping plans.

He said, “They found a way to bring their tanks through the hedges. After that, it was never the same.”

One man.

One idea.

One welding torch, hissing blue in the Normandy night.

A broken tank and a bad joke that turned into four steel teeth on a Sherman’s nose.

And suddenly, the walls of green hell had doors.

The manic mechanic had, in his own stubborn, unapproved, grease-stained way, helped turn the tide.