Posted on 05/16/2004 3:26:48 PM PDT by plato99
One of Britain's grimmest wartime secrets, the harrowing tale of how scores of young soldiers were massacred by their own side on a Devon beach, can now be told. Corroborating eyewitness accounts have revealed how American troops were killed by their own side in a terrifying 'friendly fire' disaster during training exercises for D-Day, 60 years ago. Many of the witnesses have carried their stories to the grave, but their families insist that the truth must now be acknowledged.
Their accounts tell how the sea ran red with blood as bodies bobbed in the surf and corpses were piled on the sand. As the scale of the tragedy sank in, the dead were hidden in a secret mass grave.
The authorities have never acknowledged what happened at Slapton Sands on 27 April, 1944. Now, a compelling dossier of evidence compiled by The Observer hints at a lengthy cover-up.
Officially, all the deaths in the D-Day training exercises have been attributed to a surprise attack on an Allied convoy, codenamed T-4, by German E-boats the following day, when more than 700 men died off the Dorset coast.
Now as commemorations to mark the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings are finalised, the official version of events can be challenged by testimony about the earlier tragedy at Slapton Sands. Statements collected by The Observer over several years reveal a truth almost too awful to contemplate, perhaps explaining why the Pentagon suppressed the details.
The accounts of those present that day indicate that, as thousands of GIs swarmed ashore from landing craft, they were cut down by bullets fired by comrades playing the role of German defenders, who had for some reason been given live ammunition.
Letters reveal how Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Wolf, from Baltimore, heard several shots 'zinging' past his ear as he observed the exercise from a vantage point nearby, and saw 'infantrymen on the beach fall down and remain motionless'. Under a hail of fire, Wolf quickly retreated.
Bullets also whizzed past Hank Aaron from West Virginia, driver to a general observing the exercises. Aaron scrambled from the line of fire, then looked up and saw five men dead.
Royal Engineer Jim Cory watched dumbfounded from an observation post as soldiers streaming from landing craft were 'mown down like ninepins'.
'We later found out it was a mistake. They should have had dummy ammunition, but they just carried on shooting, said Cory, who counted 150 bodies before he fled.
What he saw that day tormented him until his death last year. His widow, Mary, who recounted his story last week, said: 'He always hoped that one day he would get an official answer.'
His desire for confirmation of what happened was shared by London fireman Maurice Lund, who left a macabre taped confession on a cassette with his will, describing heaps of dead GIs left in the surf.
Yet there is not a single official mention in Army records of any bodies being found on Slapton Sands. Nor has the Pentagon ever mentioned any friendly-fire disaster in Devon that spring.
What happened to the bodies provides another twist to the secret of Slapton Sands. Witness statements suggest they were interred, at least temporarily, in a mass grave nearby. Detailed records kept by the station master at Kingsbridge, five miles away, reveal that three trains were secretly loaded with the bodies of GIs under military guard between July and August 1944. The trains, each able to carry at least 100 corpses, 'were crammed with men dug from mass graves', said local rail historian Ken Williams.
'The bodies were extricated after D-Day. A friend knew a man involved in the removal but he died before I could contact him', said Williams.
The historian's father, George, who served in the Royal Navy during the war, Williams soon realised the also saw the bodies of dozens of men killed by friendly fire washed ashore on the sands. 'He told me how the sea turned red.'
There was no shortage of potential burial sites in the remote fields behind the beach. Suspicion that US troops dumped bodies in hastily built graves around nearby Blackawton was first aroused 20 years ago, when Dorothy Seekings, a baker's daughter who supplied bread to the troops during the exercises, said she had seen lorryloads of GIs' bodies being buried near the village.
Seekings was ridiculed at the time, yet her description and the location now seem to match closely that of farmer Francis Burden, who sold the Americans fresh milk. One morning in April 1944, Burden stopped short as he crossed a narrow lane leading out of Blackawton.
A huge pit, up to two acres in size, had been dug by US troops, enough to take scores of coffins. Boxes big enough to hold a man were stacked nearby. Today, a discernible mound marks the location.
After the war, the field belonged to farmer Nolan Tope. Just before he died, Tope was asked if US troops had ever been buried on his land. He replied that Seekings 'knew only a small part of it' but vowed to take his secret to the grave.
His son Nigel discounts the mass grave theory, adding: 'In all my time farming here, I've never found anything suspicious, no bones, nothing.'
But another resident, who requested anonymity, is adamant that there was a large hidden grave.
Local author Ken Small, whose book The Forgotten Dead broke the story of the E-boat attack, dismissed the rumours until just before he died last March. He told the historian Williams that Seekings had been right. 'I was stunned,' said Williams.
Even so, many people still refuse to accept that hundreds of US soldiers may have been interred in the sleepy Devon countryside 60 years ago. Such scepticism fails to explain the account of former land girl Joyce Newby, who helped to make hundreds of coffin lids at a nearby timber yard in spring 1944. She said they were for victims of friendly fire at Slapton. Or that of former US serviceman Harold McAulley, who tells of dragging dead soldiers off the sands and later helping to bury corpses - the faces black with oil and burning - in a mass inland grave.
Yet the fresh evidence of the witnesses and finds of skulls and bones at Slapton and on nearby beaches over decades have not changed America's insistence that there was no friendly fire disaster. The Pentagon refuses to countenance that a second tragedy may have occurred during D-Day exercises.
A spokesman for the US Army Centre of Military History said: 'We don't know of any official incident other than the German T-4 convoy.'
Relatives draw hope from the fact it took 40 years for the truth behind the E-boat attack to be revealed. Three weeks ago, a remembrance service was held at Slapton Sands for the 749 US soldiers recognised as casualties of that catastrophe.
How many died in an earlier, similarly bloody incident may never be known.
The scale of devestation in regards to the Normandy Invasion operation are mind blowing.
are = is
I read a book on that incident a number of years ago, Smalls' book was published in 1988, but I thought I had read a book around 1980 on the topic. At the time they had to cover it up because of preparations for Overlord. But in subsequent years there was no reason not to come clean on the tragedy.
I've known about it for over thirty years now...and my knowledge came from published material that anyone could read.
That was my recollection as well . . . I just did some Google searches, and here's one comment relating to why the disaster was covered up almost immediately:
"Nobody knows for certain how many U.S. soldiers and sailors died in the so-called Battle of Slapton Sands. It was a top-secret operation. General Eisenhower feared that if German intelligence learned the details of the mock invasion, he might have to postpone or even cancel D-Day."
The English press does tend to be overly dramatic at times...as well as their military historians. Montgomery is a case in point.
We tend to be a bit over zelous sticking with our 50 and 60 and 100 year 'offical secrets' rules. That said the slapton sands incident has been the subject of many TV documentaries even in the absence of official acknowledgement up to know. There were that many witnesses there is little doubt it happened.
Tragic - but that's war. My own grandfather told me he saw more men lost in training accidents than he did in combat.
Imagine this in the modern media.
>>...US serviceman Harold McAulley, who tells of dragging dead soldiers off the sands and later helping to bury corpses - the faces black with oil and burning ...<<
Consistent with an explosion on a ship.
Please forward to William Jefferson Clinton. :)
And I once read that in World War One, 25% of planes were downed due to mid-air collisions during dogfights, as often with friendly planes was with the enemy.
If true it was worse than any recent "friendly fire" incident. Common sense has told me that the phenomenon was not exclusive to today's forces.
Perhaps they thought the soldiers had been directed to "play dead."
The other day, I was watching a film on the Battle of Bastogne, a mere crucial town on the road to Belgium's pivotal port during the last German push called the Battle of the Bulge.
The 82nd and 101st Airborne units were sent in on foot, as some days were required to get the 4th Armored under Patton the 175 miles they had to traverse in icy conditions.
The infantry, with little food, heavy weapons or ammo went in in high spirits to face the German Panzer advance. A Sgt recounts how one of his men didn't have a weapon, let alone ammo. He in its stead, found a good stick, a cudgel if you will and went along repeating as he swung it, "I'll have me a rifle tonight."
In that battle of a few days for one town, ten times our entire KIAs in Iraq were incurred and shrugged off as what it took.
Like they said at Ground Zero to Bush: "...Whatever it takes!"
In my mind, the media has no stomach to defend and represent freedom and just order. They are a cancer in the body of a fighting nation.
Can anybody verify that there was blue-on-blue small arms fire with live rounds? I had never heard this alleged before.
How could they not tell that they were firing live ammo? Why and the hell wouldnt they stop firing when they saw people falling over and blood spraying everywhere.
This IS in the modern media and they're doing the "now it can be told" spiel in order to taint the military in general in peoples' minds as inept when they're not busy being inhumane (ala the prison abuse story, for example).
See?
In that time period men on all sides did what they were told and our moron officers kept ordering them to fire.
Does this pass the smell test?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.