Exercise Tiger April 28, 1944
In early 1944, at Slapton Sands in the South West of England, American forces were about to practice for the D Day Landings at Utah Beach. Slapton Sands resembled Utah Beach in many ways including the cliffs that lay behind the 1800 year old shingle barrier and beach. Along the Atlantic Wall in France, German listening posts picked up prolific signals emanating from American forces in the South West of England. They were listening in on Exercise Tiger.
Exercise Tiger involved 30,000 soldiers comprising two assault forces and was planned to take place from 22 - 29 April 1944. Assault Force "O" was made up of the following major units: 1st Infantry Division and the 29th Infantry Division, with support from some other units, one of which was the 743rd Tank Battalion, which was an integral part of the 30th Infantry Division. Assault Force "U" was headed up by the 4th Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Airborne Division, also with support from some other units.
Landing craft were used to deploy the soldiers, and their equipment, onto the beaches. A convoy of ships set sail from local ports, including Dartmouth and Plymouth with escorts provided by the Royal Navy. HMS Scimitar, a destroyer, was to take the lead and a corvette, HMS Azalea, bring up the rear. The first signs of anything going wrong was that HMS Scimitar was rammed and holed by another vessel and was ordered to remain in port. Nobody thought to inform the commander of the exercise of this fact. The convoy started without an escort and the corvette, HMS Azalea, had no radio contact with the Landing Craft - it was not deemed necessary! A typing error in the frequencies has come to light as a probable cause - the ships did not have the same information!
In those early hours of 28 April off the south coast in Start Bay, Lyme Bay, a flotilla of eight LSTs (landing ship, tank) was ploughing toward Slapton Sands, transporting a follow-up force of engineers and chemical and quartermaster troops not scheduled for the 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. German torpedoes sank LST 507, LST 531 and badly damaged LST 289. 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. The losses were 4 times more than lost on D Day itself at Utah.
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. General Eisenhower ordered all bodies recovered, especially 10 personnel who had on their possession actual maps of the Utah Beach. All bodies were recovered, with the whole sorry episode hushed up the mission was still secure.
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.
Kenneth Small, UK