A D-Day rehearsal in Devon cost more American lives than many real battles
In April 1944 American troops practised the Utah Beach landing on Slapton Sands in Devon. Before dawn on 28 April, German torpedo boats slipped out of Cherbourg and struck a convoy in Lyme Bay, killing at least 749 servicemen. With the invasion weeks away, survivors were sworn to silence and the disaster barely made the news.
Slapton Sands was chosen because its layout, a gravel beach backed by a strip of land and then a lake, resembled Utah Beach. Around 3,000 residents were moved out, some of whom had never left their villages. Exercise Tiger, scheduled for 22 to 30 April, involved 30,000 troops and nine large tank landing ships, and Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted on live fire so the men would be hardened to real battle.
Trouble began on the first practice morning. Admiral Don P. Moon postponed H-hour by an hour because some ships were late, but not every landing craft got the message, and a wave that hit the beach on the original schedule came under fire; the number hurt is unknown. The next night, nine E-boats evaded British patrols. Convoy T-4 was sailing in a straight line with only one escort, the corvette HMS Azalea, because the destroyer HMS Scimitar had been damaged in a collision and gone for repairs, a fact the Americans never learned because they used different radio frequencies. Two landing ships sank, including LST-531, which went down within six minutes.
Eisenhower was furious. Ten missing officers held BIGOT clearance and knew where and when the Utah and Omaha landings would happen; the invasion was nearly called off until all ten bodies were recovered. Vice Admiral Kirk urged heavy bombardment of Cherbourg to neutralise the E-boats, and the historian Stephen Ambrose suggests Hitler's May push to reinforce Normandy came after he noticed how Slapton resembled the Cotentin coast. Lessons followed: standard radio frequencies, proper lifejacket training and small craft assigned to collect survivors on D-Day.
Official histories said little. SHAEF released a lower toll of 639 only in August 1944, alongside D-Day casualties, and it went largely unnoticed. The Devon resident Ken Small, after finding debris while beachcombing in the early 1970s, bought the rights to a sunken tank and raised it in 1984 as a memorial. He argued the event was never covered up, just conveniently forgotten.
Source: Exercise Tiger
