Germans, Middleton moved his headquarters another 75 miles to the north, near Liverpool. This made it appear that the corps would move east to the English Channel for a landing near Calais, France. The ruse was effective, keeping the Germans guessing, and compelling them to split their forces among multiple locations along the French coast, instead of concentrating their forces at one probable landing point. The VIII Corps fell under Patton's Third Army, and trained in England from March to late May 1944. Two weeks before the invasion, the corps was pulled out of the Third Army and placed in Omar Bradley's First Army. First Army was responsible for the D-Day landings in Normandy, and once the Allies were established on shore, Middleton was to bring his VIII Corps across. Shortly before the invasion, Middleton took his corps to Southampton where they awaited their channel crossing time. Cotentin Peninsula and Operation Cobra The VIII Corps sat in Southampton from D-Day, 6 June, until 11 June 1944 when it began crossing the English Channel. The corps lost only one of its Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs) to a mine during the crossing, but on it was about half of Middleton's headquarters complement. Other than the members of the sunken LST, who would rejoin the corps ten days later, the entire corps was ashore on 12 June near Carentan, where Joe Collins' VII Corps had cleared the beach on D-Day. At this point the divisions of VIII Corps included the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 79th Infantry and 90th Infantry. The 82nd, under Major General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, performed admirably, but soon left the corps, and once in Brittany the corps would have an entirely different complement of divisions. After VII Corps took the port city of Cherbourg, VIII Corps began moving south against German forces in the middle of the Cotentin Peninsula. The Germans had the high ground, and the fighting was further complicated by the bocage countryside—a series of farmers fields and pastures forming a latticework, with each unit separated by walls of earth up to six feet high supporting dense shrubbery and trees. The German defenders had every advantage over the Americans, whose tanks would tip up and expose their thin bottom armor as they attempted to cross the barriers. By mid July, field expedient devices were developed to equip tanks to penetrate the hedgerows and restore battlefield mobility. Such specially