Exercise Tiger: How the top secret rehearsal for D-Day went devastatingly wrong – Briohny Williams 28th April 2024 at 9:00am
In the early hours of 28 April 1944, 30,000 American service personnel were preparing to take part in a rehearsal for the Normandy Landings.
Slapton Sands in Devon was chosen as the landing area for Exercise Tiger as it closely resembled Utah beach, having a shingle beach.
But the mock landing was marred by real gunfire – and a very real enemy – that led to the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers and sailors.
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The plan was to land the attacking force from a number of ships called LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank).
The Royal Navy was to bombard the shore ahead of the landing, to simulate the shelling of the German defences on Utah beach before the troops went in.
Live ammunition was to be used to harden the soldiers to the sights and sounds of battle.
But the exercise was a catastrophe from the start.
Prior to the landing, American forces were not informed that the Royal Navy had changed its radio frequency, causing delays.
The commanding officer of the US forces, Rear Admiral Don P Moon, postponed the landing by an hour, but several of the LSTs did not receive the message and went in at the original time.
This led to hundreds of troops being landed on the beach at the same time the bombardment went in.
At least 300 US soldiers and sailors are believed to have been killed in this friendly fire incident.
That was not the end of the ordeal for the Americans.
A follow-up convoy of LSTs carrying combat engineers was then meant to have gone in, being protected by two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Azalea and HMS Scimitar.
But HMS Scimitar was not on station, having earlier collided with one of the American landing craft, forcing her to remain in Plymouth for repairs.
HMS Saladin was dispatched in her place, but the delay meant she arrived too late, leaving just Azalea to protect the eight-boat flotilla.
In the meantime, nine German E-boats had spotted the convoy and launched an attack.
Over the next three hours, two American ships were sunk and a third was hit, but managed to make it to shore.
A fourth LST was damaged by friendly fire as one of the other ships shot at an E-boat, but hit its American neighbour instead.
Lieutenant Eugene E Eckstam, a medical officer on board the first LST to be sunk, recalled in his memoir: “The screams and cries of those many Army troops in there still haunt me.
“Gas cans and ammunition exploding and the enormous fire blazing only a few yards away are sights forever etched in my memory.”
Some died in the attack, while others – without the necessary training in how to leave a sinking ship – drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the freezing British waters.
One US Army veteran who survived Slapton Sands and went on to land at Omaha Beach has been sharing his experience on TikTok.
Former Staff Sergeant Jake Larson, who is known as ‘Papa Jake’, explained how things did not go as planned.
“I happened to be in the first [Landing Ship, Tank] to the left that headed from Plymouth to Slapton Sands,” he said.
“The British were preparing us with live fire.
“Well, before the British got to us, two German E-boats came in, they sent out two torpedoes.
“They sunk the two ships to my right and they shot up our armed guard on top of us and shot out our air so we were breathing the fumes from this raw diesel.
“Four hundred of us were laying on the floor vomiting and breathing through our wet handkerchiefs.”
When the few who survived reached the shore, Mr Larson said they found themselves defenceless against the German torpedo boats.
They were only carrying their M1 Garand rifles, which in the veteran’s opinion was “like a pea shooter” against the German E-boats.
To keep up the morale of the troops and not give Germany any sort of advantage before D-Day, the failed operation was kept a secret.
Mr Larson explained: “When we got out of that landing ship, a full bird colonel came up and swore us to secrecy that we wouldn’t say a word.
“We couldn’t talk about this even to our commanding officers when we got back under penalty of court-martial.
“Over 40 years this was a secret. My family didn’t even know about it.”
With the invasion of Normandy a success and a turning point in the fight against Nazi Germany, what happened at Slapton Sands was washed away by time.
In the 1980s, a man called Ken Small discovered a Sherman tank that had been lying on the seabed about three-quarters of a mile away from Slapton Sands since 1944.
His son Dean spoke to Forces News about what happened during Exercise Tiger.
He said: “You had hundreds and hundreds of very young [men] – most of them 17, 18, some lied and were actually 16.
“And there they were in Lyme Bay, not really knowing what was going on. They knew they were practising, but they didn’t know what for.
“It was 2 o’clock in the morning approximately and then all of a sudden they come under attack from German E-boats.
“I’ve spoken to veterans and some of them said they thought it was just part of the re-enactment, that they were just making it more real.”
The exact number of casualties is unknown, but is thought to be 749 killed and around 200 wounded, plus the two LSTs that were sunk and the two more that were damaged.
Dean Small’s father Ken recovered the Sherman tank from the seabed, and to honour all those who died during Exercise Tiger he turned it into a memorial which is still visited today.
