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U.S. GIs in British WWII Disaster Honored
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.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-04-26 |
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