The D-Day Invasion That Failed
By: Kent Stolt
Tags: Disaster, D Day Invasion, Dwight Eisenhower, World War II, History

One ill-fated training exercise almost spelled disaster for the Allies in World War II

www.nationalgeographic.com

Code name: Exercise Tiger. It was late April 1944 and military men on both sides of the English Channel knew what would be coming soon: the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, most commonly known as the D-Day. As this day drew nearer, tensions were growing and the stakes were getting higher.

On the Allied side, there were, of course, the tactical strategies and planning of exactly when, where, and how the invasion would be launched. Smoothly and efficiently coordinating all the amphibious forces as they converged in France was going to be critical to achieving success.

Without the precise efforts of hundreds of landing craft crews, soldiers of the greatest invasion force the world had ever seen might as well be slaughtered before they even got to the French beaches across the English channel, in Normandy. Instead of being a day of liberation, D-Day would become a colossal defeat for the free world.

The Allies knew it. So did the Nazis.

Exercise Tiger was one of several secret pre-invasion training runs taking place in the southern coast of England, near Slapton, an evacuated village. Three hundred and thirty-seven ships were involved in the dress rehearsal for D-Day. On the night of April 27, one of the convoys taking part in the exercise was sailing towards the shore, loaded down with men and materiel, just like it would happen in the oncoming battle. Since this was solely a training exercise, only a few escort ships were present to provide protection.

Everything was orderly and going to plan until after midnight, when the stillness was shattered by a series of explosions. The Allies’ large, but slow-moving, Landing Ship Tank boats, or LSTs, were suddenly rocked by terrible agitations in the waters.

A flotilla of nine small German surface boats, known as E-boats, had come upon the convoy after having picked up radio traffic that was busier than usual. Seeing an inviting target in this assembled infantry landing, the black-coloured Nazi ships moved in quickly under cover of darkness and started firing their torpedoes at the Allies’ transport ships. Then, just as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone, escaping before anyone could even detect their presence.

During the attack, on the decks of the Allied ships, shock and confusion soon gave way to panic. They couldn’t understand what was happening. This was only supposed to be a training exercise! Yet, the explosions were real.

As if coming from nowhere, green tracer bullets started shooting wildly into the night. Boats were aflame and leaning badly. The air was filled with the sound of men screaming and yelling over the growl of ship engines. Infantrymen, boys really, who had not yet seen action and didn’t know better, started firing blindly into the night and ended up hitting their own troops’ boats. Improper instructions for the deployment of the newly designed inflatable life vests ended up sending many servicemen to watery graves.

As if that wasn’t chaotic enough, a simple typographical error in their written orders gave boat captains the wrong radio frequency for calling in emergency help. None of the communication attempts was going through.

At the first light of dawn, the waters near Slapton Sands beach were covered with still-burning oil and hundreds of lifeless bodies. Some of the men were still in the frigid waters of the English Channel, barely clinging to life. In all, 749 navy and army personnel were lost that night. Many of the victims’ remains were never recovered.

Within hours from the disaster, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower forbade any mention whatsoever of what happened during Exercise Tiger. Local civilians and the actual survivors were told not to say anything about what they had seen and lived through, lest they be immediately court-martialed.

As one soldier who survived the night recalled: “We were told to keep our mouths shut and taken to a camp where we were quarantined.”

The reasoning was simple and the warning dire: what would it do to the confidence and morale of the commanders and men gathering throughout England to form the greatest invasion force ever assembled if word of this disaster got out only weeks before the planned D-Day landings?

Eisenhower knew a bad omen of this magnitude could spell disaster if it was revealed to the public. Not to mention the fact that news of this event would alert the Nazis to the fact that the invasion was going to take place soon.