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.
And your pint is? WWII was a bloody mess, had lots of botched stuff happening, why bother with this bit of still unacknowledged history? Other than making the US look bad because there was live ammo rather than dummy , what is the purpose? This is meaningless to the living as well as the dead. These soldiers died in a valiant effort to defeat the Axus powers why diminsh that with this?
I forgot about that. With no gas pressure built up in the rifle barrel from firing a live bullet, the blank wouldn't give enough pressure to automatically reload the next round.
read both of PFs books dealing with wwII, and sledge's "with the old breed."
But I've also been in the army, and fired blanks. And I call bullshit.
If it was on "TV" then it must be true.
You are right. It was also gas-operated as was that other great WWII infantry weapon the BAR.
My analysis: British civilians created this rumor and repeated it to themselves to explain all the deaths from the hushed-up E-Boat attack.
If dozens were "guilty" of killing scores of our own some vets would have talked by now.
More and more I feel a relic of a dead age, and I'm only 45!
War is HELL! Shite happens! The frustration of the Men involved must have been unspeakable but that's the way anything involving imperfect humans can go. The need to get this out is, I suspect, a modern thing. Hell, didn't Churchill let some 5,000 Brit troops go to their deaths rather than save them and thus let the Germans know that their code was cracked? War is Hell--there is nothing else to say.
LOL. In this case I think there was a massive mistake. I remember little about it but they interviewed some old locals and many supposedly wouldn't talk about it. If this article is right it does freak me out that someone could be moronic enough not to be able to tell live ammo from blanks, especially since you need to mount something on the end of the bore so the semi and auto actions will work. In the special I thought it was artillery fire that killed them.
Don't sell yourself short. :-)
I don't think this will hold water. Sure maybe someone fired back at the surprising Germans and in the confusion there was some friendly fire hits(provided someone had live rounds), it's possible but I don't believe it is to the degree this story states. That many people couldn't have had live ammo and not known it quicker.
Nightly newspeople would be in sackcloth throwing ashes over themselves...
yeah, and the committee should have had a Republican majority as the Pres. was a Democrat(Roosevelt)---people today are so full of bullshit, it makes me laugh my ass off---ww2 vet
Actually, I would say this is the legacy of Hitler and Stalin. WWII was so horrible (what? 60 million dead?) the civilized (note I say civilized) world said never again. Unfortunately it seems it was a unilateral statement. Korea was nasty, so was Viet Nam but I would be safe in saying that we have never prosecuted a war in the last 60 years like WWII. And look at the outcomes:
1 stalemate
1 lost due to fighting with one arm tied behind our back and a mispeception laid upon the American public by the Alphabets,
1 won , well kinda because we had to go back 10 years later to finish the job, and the jury is still out on this one
If you want to call Grenada and Panama wins, well they were more police actions. If we really wanted to clean up the sewer in Latin America, well why have we let the flea infested Castro survive for 40 freaking years. Now we have another cancer in our hemisphere and , guess what, we will let it grow.
Now, I am sure someone will bring up we won the Cold War, but honestly, it sounds romantic to say we won it, but did not Russia really lose it more than us winning it.
This may sound like a negative screed, but I am just pointing out that because of Hitler's and Stalin's horrors in WWII, (even though the leftists throw out Hiroshima more than Hitler in their anti-war diatribes),I do not know if a war to save civilization can ever again be allowed by the politician, media, leftists et al, to be prosecuted the way it needs to be.
Also having experience with BFAs and having fired lots of blank and live ammunition, I agree. You'd have to be a complete imbecile not to know the difference.
The Browning .30 cals are recoil operated. They need one of these:
screwed onto the muzzle, as well as a cartridge stop installed in the feed mechanism.
It is highly improbable that a soldier trained enough to get and keep the weapon firing would not know he is firing live ammo.
I expect to read this headline any day now: Democrats Outraged that GWB and Rumsfeld Did Nothing to Stop Friendly-Fire Disaster!
Should say they need that adapter to fire balnks.
You don't need a Bachelor of Science degree to call this bravo sierra. Isn't the Guardian a hardcore leftwing rag?
The movie was "The Best Years of Our Lives" I think.
That movie was called "The Best Years of Our Lives", directed by William Wyler, and starred Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, and Hoagy Carmichael. Harold Russell was the double amputee vet and received 2 Oscars, one for best supporting actor and a special Oscar for giving hope to disabled vets. Looked it up on Yahoo when you mentioned it. Saw it (on TV!) as a kid and remembered being impressed .
Blu, ya beat me to it!
By the numbers and the black granite panels I believe you're referring to the Vietnam War. The lower number that you refer to as "friendly fire" is in the ball park of what I remember being described as "non-combat fatalities" which included un-intentional friendly fire, intentional friendly fire including the "fragging" of officers(aka murder), deaths with medical causes, e.g. appendicitis, motor vehicle accidents, accidental drownings, aircraft accidents, etc. I remember an accident in 1972 with a CH-47 losing one of its rotors, coming off by mechanical failure. About 40 soldiers died.
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