Veterans Gather to Remember Little-Known World War II Disaster That Killed 749 U.S. Servicemen

STOKENHAM, England (AP) - Sixty years ago, 749 U.S. soldiers and sailors were killed when their D-Day landing practice was attacked by German torpedo boats off the south coast of England. It was one of the least-known Allied disasters of World War II.

On Sunday, at St. Michael's and All Angels church in the coastal village of Stokenham, American and British veterans attended a memorial service for the men of Exercise Tiger, who died in the early morning darkness of April 28, 1944.

The eight-day exercise was the U.S. 4th Infantry Division's practice for the D-Day invasions, using the beach at Slapton, near Stokenham, because of its similarity to the Normandy landing sites.

The exercise involved 3,000 ships and 30,000 men. Only one British corvette provided escort for the slow-moving convoy of U.S. Navy ships to Slapton Sands.

Nine fast-moving German torpedo boats happened upon the convoy, sank two ships and badly damaged a third.

The attack killed nearly four times as many men as the division later lost in the D-Day landing, June 6, 1944.

The survivors were warned to keep it secret, and the casualties were not announced until nearly two months after the Normandy invasion. Full details were not known until 1974, when the records were declassified.

The convoy was lightly guarded and, because of a typographical error, the American ships were on the wrong radio frequency and unable to receive warnings.

Because the soldiers were top-heavy in full battle dress, many bodies were found floating feet up.

After Sunday's memorial service, the veterans and local residents attended a wreath-laying ceremony at a U.S. Sherman tank that had been lost at sea during the operation. It was recovered in 1984 to become a beachside memorial.

Slapton Sands disaster. The casualty figures were added to the official D-Day figures. I first read about it in Paul Fusell's "Wartime"; Paul is one of the good guys, a university professor who doesn't suffer fools lightly. He was an Infantry lieutenant who also wrote "Thank God For The Atomic Bomb"; you can imagine how well that endeared him to the so-called liberal leftist agents of change.

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq20-2.htm

'Slapton Sands: The Cover-up That Never Was'

"Nobody ever lifted that order of secrecy, for by the time D-Day had passed, the units subject to the order had scattered. Quite obviously, in any case, the order no longer had any legitimacy particularly after Gen. Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, in July 1944 issued a press release telling of the tragedy. Notice of it was printed, among other places, in the soldier newspaper, Stars & Stripes.

With the end of the war, the tragedy off Slapton Sands -- like many another wartime events involving high loss of life, such as the sinking of a Belgian ship off Cherbourg on Christmas Eve, 1944, in which more than 800 American soldiers died--received little attention. There were nevertheless references to the tragedy in at least three books published soon after the war, including a fairly detailed account by Capt. Harry C. Butcher (Gen. Eisenhower's former naval aide) in My Three Years With Eisenhower (1946).

The story was also covered in two of the U.S. Army's unclassified official histories: Cross-Channel Attack (1951) by Gordon A. Harrison and Logistical Support of the Armies Volume I (1953) by Roland G. Ruppenthal. It was also related in one of the official U.S. Navy histories, The Invasion of France and Germany (1957) by Samuel Eliot Morrison.

In 1954, 10 years after D-Day, U.S. Army authorities unveiled a monument at Slapton Sands honoring the people of the farms, villages and towns of the region "who generously left their homes and their lands to provide a battle practice area for the successful assault in Normandy in June 1944." During the course of the ceremony, the U.S. commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Gen. Alfred M. Guenther, told of the tragedy that befell Exercise Tiger."

Just took one google search

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