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Posted on 04/29/2003 5:34:59 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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"It was a disaster which lay hidden from the World for 40 years . . . an official American Army cover-up."  What was that terrible event so heinous as to prompt those accusations of perfidy 43 years later from the British news media from some American newspapers and in a particularly antagonistic three-part report from the local news of the ABC affiliate in Washington D. C. WJLA-TV? It was two hours after midnight on 28 April, 1944. Since the moon had just gone down, visibility was fair. The sea was calm. A few hours earlier, in daylight, assault forces of the U S 4th Infantry Division had gone ashore on Slapton Sands, a stretch of beach along the south coast of England that closely resembled a beach on the French coast of Normandy, code-named Utah, where a few weeks later U.S. troops were to storm ashore as part of history's largest and most portentous amphibious assault: D-Day The assault at Slapton Sands was known as Exercise Tiger, one of several rehearsals conducted in preparation for the momentous invasion to come. So vital was the exercise of accustoming the troops to the combat conditions they were soon to face that commanders had ordered use of live naval and artillery fire, which could be employed because British civilians had long ago been relocated from the region around Slapton Sands. Individual soldiers also had live ammunition for their rifles and machine guns.  In those early hours of 28 April off the south coast in Lyme Bay, a flotilla of eight LSTs (landing ship, tank) was plowing toward Slapton Sands, transporting a follow-up force of engineers and chemical and quartermaster troops not scheduled for assault but to be unloaded in orderly fashion along with trucks, amphibious trucks, jeeps and heavy engineering equipment. Out of the darkness, nine swift German torpedo boats suddenly appeared. On routine patrol out of the French port of Cherbourg, the commanders had learned of heavy radio traffic in Lyme Bay. Ordered to investigate, they were amazed to see what they took to be a flotilla of eight destroyers. They hastened to attack. German torpedoes hit three of the LSTs. One lost its stern but eventually limped into port. Another burst into flames, the fire fed by gasoline in the vehicles aboard. A third keeled over and sank within six minutes. There was little time for launching lifeboats. Trapped below decks, hundreds of soldiers and sailors went down with the ships. Others leapt into the sea, but many soon drowned, weighted down by water-logged overcoats and in some cases pitched forward into the water because they were wearing life belts around their waists rather than under their armpits. Others succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water.  When the waters of the English Channel at last ceased to wash bloated bodies ashore, the toll of the dead and missing stood at 198 sailors and 551 soldiers, a total of 749, the most costly training incident involving U.S. forces during World War II. Allied commanders were not only concerned about the loss of life and two LSTs -- which left not a single LST as a reserve for D-Day -- but also about the possibility that the Germans had taken prisoners who might be forced to reveal secrets about the upcoming invasion. Ten officers aboard the LSTs had been closely involved in the invasion planning and knew the assigned beaches in France; there was no rest until those 10 could be accounted for: all of them drowned. A subsequent official investigation revealed two factors that may have contributed to the tragedy -- a lack of escort vessels and an error in radio frequencies. Although there were a number of British picket ships stationed off the south coast, including some facing Cherbourg, only two vessels were assigned to accompany the convoy -- a corvette and a World War I-era destroyer. Damaged in a collision, the destroyer put into port, and a replacement vessel came to the scene too late.  Because of a typographical error in orders, the U.S. LSTs were on a radio frequency different from the corvette and the British naval headquarters ashore. When one of the picket ships spotted German torpedo boats soon after midnight, a report quickly reached the British corvette but not the LSTs. Assuming the U.S. vessels had received the same report, the commander of the corvette made no effort to raise them. Whether an absence of either or both of those factors would have had any effect on the tragic events that followed would be impossible to say -- but probably not. The tragedy off Slapton Sands was simply one of those cruel happenstances of war. Meanwhile, orders went out imposing the strictest secrecy on all who knew or might learn of the tragedy, including doctors and nurses who treated the survivors. There was no point in letting the enemy know what he had accomplished, least of all in affording any clue that might link Slapton Sands to Utah Beach. Nobody ever lifted that order of secrecy, for by the time D-Day had passed, the units subject to the order had scattered. Quite obviously, in any case, the order no longer had any legitimacy particularly after Gen. Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, in July 1944 issued a press release telling of the tragedy. Notice of it was printed, among other places, in the soldier newspaper, Stars & Stripes.  The long beach at Slapton and its evacuated hinterland was the great practice ground for the invasion of Europe. During many months U.S. forces attacked with heavy bombardment and live ammunition in large-scale maneuvers. With the end of the war, the tragedy off Slapton Sands -- like many another wartime events involving high loss of life, such as the sinking of a Belgian ship off Cherbourg on Christmas Eve, 1944, in which more than 800 American soldiers died--received little attention. There were nevertheless references to the tragedy in at least three books published soon after the war, including a fairly detailed account by Capt. Harry C. Butcher (Gen. Eisenhower's former naval aide) in My Three Years With Eisenhower (1946). The story was also covered in two of the U.S. Army's unclassified official histories: Cross-Channel Attack (1951) by Gordon A. Harrison and Logistical Support of the Armies Volume I (1953) by Roland G. Ruppenthal. It was also related in one of the official U.S. Navy histories, The Invasion of France and Germany (1957) by Samuel Eliot Morrison. In 1954, 10 years after D-Day, U.S. Army authorities unveiled a monument at Slapton Sands honoring the people of the farms, villages and towns of the region "who generously left their homes and their lands to provide a battle practice area for the successful assault in Normandy in June 1944." During the course of the ceremony, the U.S. commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Gen. Alfred M. Guenther, told of the tragedy that befell Exercise Tiger.  All the while, a detailed and unclassified account of the tragedy rested in the National Archives. It had been prepared soon after the end of the war by the European Theater Historical Section. For anybody who took even a short time to investigate, there clearly had been no cover-up other than the brief veil of secrecy raised to avoid compromise of D-Day. Yet, in at least one case -- WJLA-TV in Washington -- the news staff pursued its accusations of cover-up even after being informed by the Army's Public Affairs Office well before the first program aired about the various publications including the official histories that had told of the tragedy.
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©2000, Aaron Elson
Lou Putnoky: Just before the Southern French invasion, Admiral Moon committed suicide aboard our ship. He was the highest-ranking serviceman to commit suicide during World War II. But it was kept very quiet, because they didn’t want the enemy to know. He shot himself with a .45. In fact that’s documented in a book. There’s an incident that happened in April of 1944, just before the Normandy invasion. It was the final training exercise. The name of it was Exercise Tiger, and a book was written about it by a British author. His name is Nigel Lewis. It’s very enlightening. And it was kept quiet for many, many years.
Aaron Elson: Were you participating in it?
Lou Putnoky: Yes. Our admiral, and our task force was involved. The reason why this was hushed up was because the British fouled up. See, the British, it’s a hard thing to say – they’re good sailors, but the one thing that trips up the British is tradition. They get involved in these little traditional things that are extremely dangerous to warfare.
There were about five LSTs coming over, and one of their escorts had gotten into a little bit of an accident and had a little hole in the bow, and they radioed back to their base. You see, the British answered to the British admirals. It was a strange coalition that took place. Because of pride and tradition, it got to be very touchy, so you had to use kid gloves. They called their admiral, and their admiral told them to come on back, and nobody told Admiral Moon. So they go back to port, and it left this whole group of five LSTs exposed.
Now these LSTs were only a short distance, maybe 80 miles from the French coast. And there were these E-boats – an E-boat is over 100 feet long, they’re narrow boats equipped with two torpedoes and 40-millimeter and other machine guns and cannons, and they could do about 25 knots. So they went out on the prowl, and they were devastating some of our shipping lanes, because they would sneak in, torpedo a couple of ships and then leave. They were black; you couldn’t see them, and in the confusion of darkness …believe me, the confusion during war is the thing that kills you.
So they picked off and sunk three of our LSTs that were loaded with troops. Altogether we lost in the neighborhood of 750 men.
And they kept this so quiet. We knew aboard our flagship that something was going on in the distance, but we were getting it in dribs and drabs. I didn’t find out until I read the book. I knew that there were a couple of LSTs, only because of what the radio operators had picked up. And the radio silence is very, very strict during a condition like this, and everything is in code. You can’t get this kind of information until after, and this was kept quiet for in the neighborhood of 40 years. It’s one of the biggest disasters of World War II.
Exercise Tiger: The Dramatic True Story of a Hidden Tragedy of World War II
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