For decades debate, argument and allegations of an official military cover-up have revolved around the most infamous and disastrous D-Day rehearsal for American troops in World War II – Exercise Tiger, held at the end of April 1944. Richard T. Bass explores the controversy in a new book from Tommies Guides. In this Author POV for ArmchairGeneral.com, he summarizes some of his data and asks readers to give their opinions.
The focal point of dispute is the number of casualties sustained. Officially, 749 were killed and missing in action. This figure is based upon a hasty assessment made only hours after a seaborne convoy was attacked in the English Channel by German E-Boats, and it is a number that even today U.S. military sources rigidly maintain is correct.
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But there is evidence to the contrary that not only is the death toll much higher, but documents have been altered or rewritten to maintain that official figure. This includes the records of burials for casualties that simply doesn’t equate with testimony from witnesses who carried bodies from an English seaport to the cemetery. It isn’t just slipshod or careless record keeping: examination of service numbers and names reveal that some service numbers weren’t even issued. Names don’t match numbers. Some listed as not being buried in England are later shown to have been buried in the United States, some with dates of death on D-Day, June 6, 1944. British witnesses recall seeing bodies of American servicemen on railroad freight cars in August 1944 close to the exercise area, some two years before any deceased soldiers were repatriated to the United States.
Another contentious issue is the number of Allied ships sunk that night. Official reports state that two Tank Landing Ships were torpedoed and sunk, but this is contested by the German E-Boat operational logs which claim three large ships, one smaller craft and a destroyer, claims corroborated by individual craft of the attacking formations.
The mystery of why the Americans’ convoy’s lone escort ship failed initially to react positively to the attack may be answered in the U.S. Navy’s own Operation Order. Here the threat of just such an attack is over-emphasized, leading to the conclusion that it was expected. Planners of Exercise Tiger were aware of an identical situation scheduled for a later D-Day rehearsal when an Allied shipping convoy would be attacked by “enemy” small craft to test their reaction and defence efficiency, utilizing high speed gunboats of the Free French Navy based close to the exercise area.
The head of British national security had secret meetings with high level Navy planners of Exercise Tiger, and at that time he was tasked with ensuring that German agents under British control in England were believed by their masters in Nazi Germany. This was essential as they would feed false reports prior to D-Day as part of the great deception plan, and their intelligence had to appear trustworthy and truthful. It was a short step to pass true information about Exercise Tiger to convince Germany their future transmissions would also be truthful.
My questions: Was the cover-up that followed to distort the true loss of life? Was the man in charge of Exercise Tiger, Rear Admiral Don P. Moon, aware of the cover-up and about to tell the truth? He died August 5, 1944, in what was termed a suicide due to battle fatigue.
Post a comment below to offer your answers to these questions. After two weeks, we’ll post the author’s own POV on the answers.
This is always a very sad,disappointing incident to go over,akin to
the Indianappolis in 1945..I have known the accepted basic facts
for many years & hope that the possible much larger loss of life is
not true…I think that the Germans might be mistaken on the
number of ships sunk(i.e the inflated scores claimed by
fighter/bomber crews in both theaters)because of the heat of
battle. The other points are open to speculation.
Why would such great lengths be taken to cover up the actual
number of casualties? I suppose that officials were afraid of
exposing the vulnerability of the landing troops, but the incident,
as reported, certainly did that…even with understated casualties.
My father in law was a Sgt and tank commander on Exercise Tiger and
it was common knowledge among his battalion that the debacle at
Slapton
Sands was indeed so painful that all to this day have always thought
that the supreme command chose to keep the issue close hold to avoid
damage to the war effort. Only unlike today these men did not dwell on
whether there was a so called cover up but felt it made tragic but good
sense not to make it public for the sake of not damaging the war effort.
Today there is a wave of revisionist muckraking to rewrite history when
NOT one of the writers ever served a day in combat. Small wonder we
cannot win wars anymore. Bill McDonald Colonel USAF ret
As the author of “Exercise Tiger” I would respond to my own
question concerning Admiral Moon. I believe it is highly likely
that he did commit suicide, as do his surviving family members,
not as a result of stress of command but for the simple reason he
could bear the guilt of the failed rehearsal no longer. I am
probably more aware of cover-ups than most having worked in
that shadowy world connected with armed combat and feel well
qualified to state there is still a continuing cloak of secrecy drawn
over this tragic event.
Richard T. Bass
Do you know that there were 600 or so bodies from the sunken LST’s in Lyme Bay were brought into Portland and hidden in tunnels under the Verne. The bodies are still there and the tunnel entrances were blown up in 1994. It’s disgusting that these men remain on foreign soil and not repatriated.
This sad incident received quite a lot or press coverage here in
the UK some few years ago. This might have been either as a
result of the anniversary of the event, or the fact that a Sherman
tank thought to have been off one of the vessels sunk was
recovered from the sea( I believe it has been restored as a fixed
monument to the event). I seem to recall that a Royal Navy
warship was also ordered to provide an escort but had
mechanical problems and could not set leave harbour.
More than that I cannot add, I am afraid.
I am currently researching and writing a novel about the
debacle at Slapton Sands, on 27/28 April 1944. Any information
about that event, or the six months leading up to it, and the sub-
sequent landings at Normandy on 6 June, that anyone would
care to share would be appreciated. Everything will be held in
the strictest of confidence.
R/Glenn M. Isaacs
Would like to make contact with one of your commenters – Glenn M. Isaacs who responded on November 13th 2008 to the article on Exercise Tiger.
Would be happy for you to pass him my email address please.
Thankyou,
Richard
Mr. Bass,
Extremely pleased to see your response, and I would like to
pursue this event even further. I just ordered you book and I
am looking forward to receiving it.
You may contact me at by e:mail ike1937@bellsouth.net.
Best Regards,
Glenn M. Isaacs
This incident and the supposed conspiracy of silence surrounding it, has apparently resurfaced in a soon to be aired BBC production, on which Mr. Bass has apparently consulted. Unfortuneatly, like many consiracy theories, it appears to rely on selective uses of history or extrapolation based on conjecture.
Other than the normal information security precautions taken at the time of the incident in 1944, in which news of the attack was withheld from the public in order to prevent the Germans from discovering their success as well as divulging possible details about the pending invasion of Normandy, there is no evidence of an attempt to either “cover up” the events or somehow hide the facts. Indeed, in late July 1944, the US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes reported the events based on a press release from SHAEF headquarters. If subsequent operations in Normandy, France, Belgium, and Germany, during which tens of thousands were killed, overshadowed this tragic incident, perhaps that can be understood. In 1946, the official US Army historian for the European Theater of Operations published a detailed account of the training at Slapton Sands in general, and the events in April. They were later discussed in some detail in both Army and Navy official histories published following the war.
In the US Army official history of the Normandy invasion, published in 1951, which most historians agree has withstood the test of time for accuracy and forthrightness, the Exercise Tiger casualties are listed as 749 killed as well as approximately 300 wounded. It should be noted that these are solely Army casualty figures based on reporting from the units involved at the time and in the days following. Likely casualties to LST crews and embarked beachmaster units, Navy demolition teams, and others involved in the exercise but not listed by Army sources could well raise that number. While these numbers may be subject to some later adjustments based on subsequent reporting and the natural “fog” that surrounds such tragic events in wartime, they make no attempt to hide the extent of the casualties.
We cannot account for any casualties that may have been incurred ashore in the days that followed, which some “witnesses” attribute to friendly fire. Large-scale casualties ashore during the exercise due to “friendly fire” are pure specualtion based on memeories of civilains who had no way of knowing what they saw, and whose memories have been subjected to decades of interpretation.
Isolated cases of training accidents may well have happened. They were not uncommon in the days leading to the Normandy invasion, as live fire was increasingly used in close proximnity to maneuvering troops. However, in this case, the beach bombardment occurred on the 27th of April, the day before any landings were made (the E-Boat attack happened that night).
As trained historians well know, personal memories can be diffucult sources, and those dating back several decades particularly so. One can only speculate as to what they recount; but perhaps, with the large numbers of killed whose bodies ended up in the water off the shores of Slapton Sands, they may have seen the tragic results of the night’s attacks as they were collected for identificastion (a common practice).
As for German sources, an E-Boat crew, in the dead of night, engaged with the enemy in the confusion of battle, that inflates its impact on the enemy can hardly be seen as surprising. Those who have been in combat can attest to the fact that rarely are immediate reports either accurate or not exaggerated. To read such reports and proclaim they prove a coverup on the part of the Americans is, at best, poor historiography.
What can be discerned about Exercise Tiger is that hundreds of US soliders and sailors died that night (and we may never know the exact casualties- such is the nature of the fog of war); that the US Army and Navy have been open about that incident since as early as the summer of 1944; and that no conspiracy of silence surrounds the exercise and the attacks. At worst, given subsequent events in Europe during the final year of the war, they faded in the institutional memories of the units who landed in Normandy just six weeks later. To imply otherwise is as insulting to the casualties as it is to the units and commanders who went on to fight one of the great campaigns of recent military history.
My grandparents and my parents holidayed in that area of Devon from the 1920s onwards (I have cine film confirming this) and both couples retired there. I was therefore familiar with Slapton and the story of this disaster from the age of around ten (1956), although I didn’t properly register what I was told about what had happened until I began working on books about the war, in the early 1970s.
It was common knowledge, or perhaps I should say commonly accepted, in the local community that there had been a debacle due to friendly fire and that this story had been hushed up, so much so that even locals would hardly speak of it until the 1970s or 80s when they were in old age.
I had lunch with my mother one day in c1986 at the pub on Slapton sands: the retrieved tank is sited beside it, and (since I’d not seen it on previous visits) it prompted me to ask for a refresher; so she told me the story again and was quite matter of fact about the local silence in accordance with official cover-up: all kinds of secrets were kept during the war and for long after that, eg members of the SOE typically only identified themselves quite late in life, my best school friend’s parents included.
It was generally accepted by the ‘war generation’ that such things happened in war time and were best left unexamined. The oral history of this event was however quite clear and consistent: ‘locals’ and that included longtime visitors who became resident like my family, were ‘in the know’ – whilst the story wasn’t imparted to ‘strangers’ or grockles.
It’s not the only such incident of cover-up I know of personally – there was a fracas during the war at one of the pubs in Kingsclere, Berkshire, due to racial tensions, and shots were fired resulting in death – I forget whether the victim was a black US soldier shot by a local, but there was at least one US death and a general racial brawl. The bullet holes could still be seen in the pub walls a generation later, and as with the Slapton incident, this one at Kingsclere became part of local folklore, whilst I’m sure you will find no record of it in US (or local army) records.
The cause of death of the servicemen involved was of course surpressed (and no doubt a suitably uplifting one supplied to the family).
Read Ken Small account, he is the guy who raised the sherman tank
from the sea bed at slapton sands many years ago.
He passed away in 2004.
I am the son of one of the crew of the motor torpedo boats. My father who is no longer living told about this disaster and I would suggest that I have information that may be of interest to the author of the book. I have just watched ther documentory on TV which didn’t report on certain facts told by my father. If the author wished to conact me he can use the email address given.
Mr Whyte, it would be a public service if you could post your information here for the record!
I have posted information as you suggested.
After watching the programe Exercise Tiger, on Channel Five last night.
We are suprised that no mention was made of Ken Small, the author of “THE FORGOTTEN DEAD” All the information contained in this programe,almost word for word is contained in this book This book was published in 1988.
We personally met Ken in April 1993 By the tank that he fetched a shore from the sea off Slapton Sands and had a long chat with him, told us about his visits to the USA and his interveiws with some of the surviviors.
Have you read the book? did you use this information for your book and the input to last nights programme.
Am very suprised that no mention of Ken Small or his book was not menioned. We are sure that if Ken was still alive he would have a lot to say.
Just a final word we were invited by Ken to attend the fifty anniversary of this incident held at Slapton in Aprill 1994 in which visitors from the USA were invited to attended.
I agree that the programme didn’t give sufficient credit to all the research done in the past on this matter, notably by Ken Small – it seemed to think Richard Bass started looking into this as a previously unexplored incident – which is of course not the case. I posted as I did above since I wanted to record that the true story was known locally to many people, and it’s hard to believe they are all dead already, or didn’t hear it from their parents – so many must have been able to enlighten the makers of the programme, inc to the existence of Ken Small’s book, had they hunted around for information locally.
April 25, 2012,
I befriended a gentleman who survived x-ray, was alone on omaha beach until admiral moon interceded. On August 4 , 1944 , two days after my friend spoke with Admiral Moon, my friend was on the USS Wakefield headed to Boston. But his papers were lost. He shared the story with me , telling me also about Slapton
In regard to my earlier posting above – my mother (who will be 90 years old next year and still as sharp as a button) has a clearer picture of what my father went through as he had many nightmares for a few years after the war. I recall him saying that he had the job of picking up the bodies the morning after and he said that the men must have dived head first into the water as many were floating legs up due to their lifejackets (may west’s as he said) inflating when they hit the water and they couldn’t upright themselves. I also get the impression that he was “amongst them” as he said regarding the enemy and I got the impression the MTB was moving in between the boats warning them of the presence of the enemy which doesn’t fit with the story of them not being there when it happened. This episode troubled him throughout the years and he only spoke about it in his later years when it became public knowledge. He told me that he began to wonder if it actually happened as he heard nothing of it in the press at the time. I encouraged him to tell his story at the time it was made public but he said that it was best forgotten about.