Meanwhile the tragedy was kept a top secret. Miraculously, the bodies of every one of those officers with highest-level clearance were found. This was so serious the Allied commanders even considered changing details of Operation Overlord presuming that the enemy would discover the details. When the news reached the Allied commanders it greatly worried them that so many lives were lost, particularly the missing officers who, if in German hands, had plans that would reveal the Allied intentions for the D-Day landings. The carefully prepared radio frequencies were issued with serious typographical errors which resulted in the LSTs being on different radio frequencies to the Corvette and the commanding officers onshore. The destroyer, having suffered damages, was in port for repair and a replacement was not available. ![]() The convoy was supposed to be accompanied by a Royal Navy Corvette and a World War I destroyer. Subsequent investigations revealed two main reasons for the tragedy: firstly, a lack of naval escort vessels and, secondly, an error in radio frequencies. In all, 749 American soldiers and sailors died that night – 946 in total during Exercise Tiger. Others succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water. Many leapt into the sea but soon drowned, some weighed down by the waterlogged coats and others who had wrongly put their lifebelts around their waists rather than under their armpits. There was little time to launch lifeboats and some of the lifeboats were jammed. Trapped below decks hundreds of soldiers and sailors went down with the ships. However LST 289 managed to limp back to shore but only after suffering a number of deaths and casualties amongst the men aboard. Several minutes later LST 289 was torpedoed. The ship burst into flames, rolled over and sank in six minutes. LST 531 was hit by two torpedoes shortly after LST 507 was hit. ![]() After about 45 minutes or so the survivors of the attack were ordered to abandon ship. LST 507 was torpedoed, hitting its auxiliary engine room and cutting all electric power. The ship burst into flames, the fire fighting attempted by the crew proving futile as most of the fire fighting equipment was inoperative due to the power failure. It was here that the E-Boats made contact and opened fire. Since they could not see any naval escorts, they quickly positioned themselves for a torpedo attack.Īs the convoy approached Lyme Bay it was manoeuvring a loop to head back towards the shore. As they headed towards the Lyme Bay area, they suddenly came in visual contact with the LST convoy. They followed the usual channel route without any sign of a convoy or ‘enemy’ ships. ![]() a group of nine German E-Boats set out on a normal reconnaissance mission from their base in Cherbourg into the Lyme Bay area. On the night of 27th of April, a few minutes after 10:00 p.m. Another MTB patrol was sent to watch Cherbourg, where the German E-Boats were based. Since German E-Boats, fast moving boats armed with torpedoes and with a top speed of up to 40 knots, patrolled the English Channel at night the Commander had placed extra patrols across the mouth of Lyme Bay, consisting of two destroyers, three motor torpedo boats (MTB) and two motor gunboats from the Royal Navy. ![]() The Commander in Chief in Plymouth was responsible for the safety of the rehearsal. A follow up convoy of eight LSTs was expected later that night and it was this convoy which met with tragedy. The first assault landings were made on the morning of the 27th April, following the ‘bombardment’ and was continued throughout the day. The exercise was conducted between 22nd and 30th April 1944 and commenced with the marshalling and embarking of the troops to the LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks – a flat bottomed four and a half thousand tons assault ship capable of carrying several hundred men, lorries and tanks) off the coast of south west England. So vital was the exercise that the commanders had ordered the use of live naval and artillery ammunition to make the exercise as real as possible to accustom the soldiers to what they were soon going to experience. ‘Exercise Tiger’ under the command of Admiral Don P Moon of the United States Navy was one of several assault rehearsals conducted at Slapton Sands on the Devon coast. Slapton’s unspoiled beach of gravel, fronting a shallow freshwater ley and backed by grassy lands seemed perfect to the American forces to simulate practice landings for the launch of Operation Overlord on 6th June 1944, the D-Day landings in Utah Beach, France. Exercise Tiger was the code name for one in a series of large-scale rehearsals for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, which took place in April 1944 on Slapton Sands in Devon.
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