D-DAY PRACTICE: DIEPPE, SLAPTON SANDS

via wiki.org

History of D-Day practice neither grand or glorious.

The real D-Day turned the tide in World War Two, but the two D-Day practice events left more dead than the real D-Day.

Through those deaths communications improved. Coordination improved. And suppressing news improved.

No one wanted it out that commanders had screwed up a D-Day practice the killed nearly a thousand men.

That was the cost in man power when Americans held a practice invasion on England. Slapton Sands still looks like a normal place.

We drove through southern England and heard about Slapton from the locals. The tank at the top of the post is the memorial.

It seems like a small token for the deed done.

Then there was the earlier Canadian invasion of France at Dieppe. From cbc.ca:

Of the nearly 5,000 Canadians who participated in the raid, 913 were killed, while about 3,300 others were wounded or taken prisoner. The Royal Armoured Corps and Royal Canadian Air Force lost 119 aircraft with 62 casualities.

When you train for war, you want to use your training. Sometimes training can’t overcome the bigger picture.

Ask anyone who’s gone through an Army boot camp how they feel about their weapon. Most of them will admit to a closer relationship to their rifle than they remember with their girlfriend back home.

They want to use their new skills in ways that matter.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, Churchill’s chief of combined operations who was in overall charge of the raid, said the lessons learned were put to good use later in war, particularly in the planning for the D-Day landings. He later said: “I have no doubt that the Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe. For every man who died in Dieppe at least 10 more must have been spared in Normandy in 1944.”

Slapton Sands

Driving England’s southern coast isn’t like Big Sur, or driving 101 through Oregon.

The history on the beaches hides in plain site, no place as much as Slapton.

After hearing the story of D-Day practice I expected to see a huge memorial, maybe a museum. Instead America got a tank.

It seems like less is more, a way to minimize the event for oblivious travelers.

From npr.org:

The rehearsal was given the code name Operation Tiger. The plan: To get landing boats into the English Channel, then have them simulate a water landing on the beaches of the Devon coast. The man in charge was the great Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“He wanted to put them out in the rough waters of the channels, have them shaken around, [exposed to] seasickness, everything else that soldiers are prone to,” Milton says.

“Then, the idea was for these ships and tank landing craft involved in this operation, to bring them up toward Slapton Sands where there was going to be shellfire and gunfire so the men would land in real battlefield conditions.”

But to ensure the safety of their men and the effectiveness of the whole exercise, Allied Command had to keep the operation a secret — even from their own men.

The fog of war gets thick once the guns start firing. If German torpedoes weren’t enough, English artillery finished the day.

Yet the carnage wasn’t over. Many of the ships continued on toward the beach at Slapton Sands. Eisenhower had ordered live fire to be used in the rehearsal, because he had wanted to simulate real-world conditions.

“Now, the idea was that the shelling would stop very, very shortly before the American soldiers came onshore, so that the wreckage of war would still be around,” Milton said. “The smells of war, the sounds, the shell-blasted beach would be there. But there was a terrible mixup of timings, which meant that as the American soldiers came onto the shore, the British were still shelling the beach. [This] meant the Americans came under devastating friendly fire from the British.”

Within minutes, 300 more American troops were dead. Gerolstein helped ferry some of the wounded to the hospital.

“The orders were, in the hospital, you will not ask these men anything,” he says. “You will not ask them anything, you will just take care of them.”

Today we ask things. We want to know. Sometimes we get the answers we want. Other times we get the truth.