Re: Tactics in Late WWI


Vince Brannigan wrote:
> Spiv wrote:
> > "Jack Love" <jackxxloveyy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> > news:eo86p19ma6nihojoe36tmal3c4536sbsb5@xxxxxxxxxx
> >
> >>On Sun, 04 Dec 2005 00:40:13 -0600, kenney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>In article <5vv3p1lenh9kcn74rb9uthqki2n2gcp3iq@xxxxxxx>,
> >>>fmccall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Fred J. McCall) wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>The European Powers never bothered to
> >>>>look at events of the US Civil War with an eye toward what could be
> >>>>learned, so entered WWI totally clueless.
> >>>
> >>>They paid considerable attention to the Russian Japanese War of 1904
> >>>which proved it was possible to storm trench lines if you accepted the
> >>>casualties.
> >>
> >>Proving the europeans haven't changed: picking the wrong group of
> >>people to learn their lessons from. Russians and Japanese have
> >>-never- been noted for their concerns about casualties...so, of
> >>course, they managed to maximize the result in WWI.
> >
> >
> > Casualties? The US wanted a full scale landings in France in 1942. The
> > Brits told them to behave themselves. Look at the US D-Day beach assault
> > training at Slapton Sands in Devon. The US used live ammunition and told the
> > "defenders" to shoot those hitting the beach in landing crafts. Many US
> > soldiers were told to machine gun their own men, when objecting to do so.
> > They machine gunned their own men on Slapton Sands. The US used live
> > ammunition in training, killing many of their own men on Salisbury Pains in
> > WW1 too. Such disregard to the lives of their own men was not only the
> > forte of the Japanese and Soviets.
> >
> >
> nonsense
>
> virtually all the dead at slapton sands were killed in teh torpedo attack
>
> " Information about that pending ceremony scheduled for 15 November,
> 1987, set the news media off. There were accusations not only of a
> cover-up, but also of heavy casualties inflicted by U.S. soldiers, who
> presumably did not know they had live ammunition in their weapons,
> firing on other soldiers. Nobody questioned why soldiers would bother to
> open fire if they thought they had only blank ammunition ... or why a
> soldier would not know the difference between live ammunition and blanks
> when one has bullets, the other not. Nor was there actually any evidence
> of anybody being killed by small arms fire.
> There surfaced a new an allegation made earlier by a local
> resident, Dorothy Seekings, who maintained that as a young woman she had
> witnessed the burial of "hundreds" of Americans in a mass grave (she
> subsequently changed the story to individual graves). Dorothy Seekings
> also claimed that the bodies are still there.
> At long last, somebody in the news media -- a correspondent for BBC
> television--thought to query the farmer on whose land the dead are
> presumably buried. He had owned and lived on that land all his life,
> said the farmer, and nobody was ever buried there.
> That tallies with U.S. Army records that show that in the first few
> days of May 1944, soon after the tragedy, hundreds of the dead were
> interred temporarily in a World War I U.S. military cemetery at nearby
> Blackwood. Following the war, those bodies were either moved to a new
> World War II U.S. military cemetery at Cambridge or, at the request of
> next of kin, shipped to the United States. "

The Navy has a version at: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq20-1.htm

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

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060



Related Resource: Operation Tiger overview

(NOTE: The following article represents the views of the author and not
necessarily the views of the Naval Historical Center.)
'Slapton Sands: The Cover-up That Never Was'
By Charles B. MacDonald
(Extracted from Army 38, No. 6 (June 1988): 64-67


"It was a disaster which lay hidden from the World for 40 years . .
.. an official American Army cover-up."
That a massive cover-up took place is beyond doubt. And that
General Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized it is equally clear."
Generals Omar N. Bradley and Eisenhower watched "the murderous
chaos" and "were horrified and determined that details of their own
mistakes would be buried with their men."
"Relatives of the dead men have been misinformed -- and even lied
to -- by their government. "
It was "a story the government kept quiet ... hushed up for decades
.... a dirty little secret of World War II."

What was that terrible event so heinous as to prompt those
accusations of perfidy 43 years later from the British news media from
some American newspapers and in a particularly antagonistic three-part
report from the local news of the ABC affiliate in Washington D. C.
WJLA-TV?

-----

It was two hours after midnight on 28 April, 1944. Since the moon
had just gone down, visibility was fair. The sea was calm.
A few hours earlier, in daylight, assault forces of the U S 4th
Infantry Division had gone ashore on Slapton Sands, a stretch of beach
along the south coast of England that closely resembled a beach on the
French coast of Normandy, code-named Utah, where a few weeks later U.S.
troops were to storm ashore as part of history's largest and most
portentous amphibious assault: D-Day
The assault at Slapton Sands was known as Exercise Tiger, one of
several rehearsals conducted in preparation for the momentous invasion
to come. So vital was the exercise of accustoming the troops to the
combat conditions they were soon to face that commanders had ordered
use of live naval and artillery fire, which could be employed because
British civilians had long ago been relocated from the region around
Slapton Sands. Individual soldiers also had live ammunition for their
rifles and machine guns.
In those early hours of 28 April off the south coast in Lyme Bay, a
flotilla of eight LSTs (landing ship, tank) was plowing toward Slapton
Sands, transporting a follow-up force of engineers and chemical and
quartermaster troops not scheduled for assault but to be unloaded in
orderly fashion along with trucks, amphibious trucks, jeeps and heavy
engineering equipment.
Out of the darkness, nine swift German torpedo boats suddenly
appeared. On routine patrol out of the French port of Cherbourg, the
commanders had learned of heavy radio traffic in Lyme Bay. Ordered to
investigate, they were amazed to see what they took to be a flotilla of
eight destroyers. They hastened to attack.
German torpedoes hit three of the LSTs. One lost its stern but
eventually limped into port. Another burst into flames, the fire fed by
gasoline in the vehicles aboard. A third keeled over and sank within
six minutes.
There was little time for launching lifeboats. Trapped below decks,
hundreds of soldiers and sailors went down with the ships. Others leapt
into the sea, but many soon drowned, weighted down by water-logged
overcoats and in some cases pitched forward into the water because they
were wearing life belts around their waists rather than under their
armpits. Others succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water.
When the waters of the English Channel at last ceased to wash
bloated bodies ashore, the toll of the dead and missing stood at 198
sailors and 551 soldiers, a total of 749, the most costly training
incident involving U.S. forces during World War II.
Allied commanders were not only concerned about the loss of life
and two LSTs -- which left not a single LST as a reserve for D-Day --
but also about the possibility that the Germans had taken prisoners who
might be forced to reveal secrets about the upcoming invasion. Ten
officers aboard the LSTs had been closely involved in the invasion
planning and knew the assigned beaches in France; there was no rest
until those 10 could be accounted for: all of them drowned.
A subsequent official investigation revealed two factors that may
have contributed to the tragedy -- a lack of escort vessels and an
error in radio frequencies.
Although there were a number of British picket ships stationed off
the south coast, including some facing Cherbourg, only two vessels were
assigned to accompany the convoy -- a corvette and a World War I-era
destroyer. Damaged in a collision, the destroyer put into port, and a
replacement vessel came to the scene too late.
Because of a typographical error in orders, the U.S. LSTs were on a
radio frequency different from the corvette and the British naval
headquarters ashore. When one of the picket ships spotted German
torpedo boats soon after midnight, a report quickly reached the British
corvette but not the LSTs. Assuming the U.S. vessels had received the
same report, the commander of the corvette made no effort to raise
them.
Whether an absence of either or both of those factors would have
had any effect on the tragic events that followed would be impossible
to say -- but probably not. The tragedy off Slapton Sands was simply
one of those cruel happenstances of war.
Meanwhile, orders went out imposing the strictest secrecy on all
who knew or might learn of the tragedy, including doctors and nurses
who treated the survivors. There was no point in letting the enemy know
what he had accomplished, least of all in affording any clue that might
link Slapton Sands to Utah Beach.
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.
All the while, a detailed and unclassified account of the tragedy
rested in the National Archives. It had been prepared soon after the
end of the war by the European Theater Historical Section.
For anybody who took even a short time to investigate, there
clearly had been no cover-up other than the brief veil of secrecy
raised to avoid compromise of D-Day. Yet, in at least one case --
WJLA-TV in Washington -- the news staff pursued its accusations of
cover-up even after being informed by the Army's Public Affairs Office
well before the first program aired about the various publications
including the official histories that had told of the tragedy.
Yet why, a long 43 years after the event, the sudden spate of news
stories and accusations?
That had its beginnings in 1968 when a former British policeman,
Kenneth Small, moved to a village just off Slapton Sands and bought and
operated a small guest house. Recovering from a nervous breakdown, Mr.
Small took long walks along the beach and began to find relics of war:
unexpended cartridges, buttons and fragments from uniforms. Talking
with people who had long lived in the region, he learned of the heavy
loss of life in Exercise Tiger.
Why, Mr. Small asked himself, was there no memorial to those who
had died? There was that monument the U.S. Army had erected to the
British civilians, but there was no mention of the dead Americans. To
Mr. Small, that looked like an official cover-up.
From local fishermen; he learned of a U.S. Sherman tank that lay
beneath the waters a mile offshore, a tank lost not in Exercise Tiger
but in another rehearsal a year earlier. At considerable personal
expense, Mr. Small managed to salvage the tank and place it on the
plinth just behind the beach as a memorial to those Americans who had
died. The memorial was dedicated in a ceremony on the 40th anniversary
of D-Day.
That ceremony prompted the first spurt of accusations by the
British and American press of a cover-up, but they were soon silenced
by publication of two detailed articles about the tragedy: one in
American Heritage magazine co-authored by a former medical officer, Dr.
Ralph C. Greene, who had been stationed at one of the hospitals that
treated the injured; the other in a respected British periodical, After
the Battle. Those were carefully researched, authoritative and
comprehensive articles; if anybody had consulted them three years
later, they would put to rest any charges of a cover-up and various
other unfounded allegations.
Kenneth Small, meanwhile, wanted more. Although persuaded at last
that there had been no cover-up, he nevertheless wanted an official
commemoration by the U.S. government to those who had died. Receiving
an invitation from an ex-Army major who had commanded the tank
battalion whose lost tank Mr. Small had salvaged, he went to the United
States where the ex-major introduced him to his congresswoman, Beverly
Byron (D-Md.), who as it turned out is the daughter of Gen.
Eisenhower's former naval aide, Capt. Butcher.
With assistance from the Pentagon, Rep. Byron arranged for a
private organization, the Pikes Peak Chapter of the Association of the
U.S. Army in Colorado, where the 4th Infantry Division is stationed, to
provide a plaque honoring the American dead. She also attached a rider
to a congressional bill calling for official U.S. participation in a
ceremony unveiling the plaque alongside Ken Small's tank at Slapton
Sands.
Information about that pending ceremony scheduled for 15 November,
1987, set the news media off. There were accusations not only of a
cover-up, but also of heavy casualties inflicted by U.S. soldiers, who
presumably did not know they had live ammunition in their weapons,
firing on other soldiers. Nobody questioned why soldiers would bother
to open fire if they thought they had only blank ammunition ... or why
a soldier would not know the difference between live ammunition and
blanks when one has bullets, the other not. Nor was there actually any
evidence of anybody being killed by small arms fire.
There surfaced a new an allegation made earlier by a local
resident, Dorothy Seekings, who maintained that as a young woman she
had witnessed the burial of "hundreds" of Americans in a mass grave
(she subsequently changed the story to individual graves). Dorothy
Seekings also claimed that the bodies are still there.
At long last, somebody in the news media -- a correspondent for BBC
television--thought to query the farmer on whose land the dead are
presumably buried. He had owned and lived on that land all his life,
said the farmer, and nobody was ever buried there.
That tallies with U.S. Army records that show that in the first few
days of May 1944, soon after the tragedy, hundreds of the dead were
interred temporarily in a World War I U.S. military cemetery at nearby
Blackwood. Following the war, those bodies were either moved to a new
World War II U.S. military cemetery at Cambridge or, at the request of
next of kin, shipped to the United States.
Yet many like Ken Small continued to wonder why it took the U.S.
government 43 years to honor those who died off Slapton Sands. Those
who wondered failed to understand U.S. policy for wartime memorials.
Soon after World War I, Congress created an independent agency, the
American Battle Monuments Commission, to construct overseas U.S.
military cemeteries, to erect within them appropriate memorials and to
maintain them. Anybody who has seen any of those cemeteries, either
those of World War I or of World War II, recognizes that no nation
honors its war dead more appropriately than does the United States.
Only the American Battle Monuments Commission--not the U.S. Army,
Air Force or Navy -- has authority to erect official memorials to
American dead, and the American Battle Monuments Commission limits its
memorials to the cemeteries, which avoids a proliferation of monuments
around the world. Private organizations, such as division veterans'
associations, are nevertheless free to erect unofficial memorials but
are responsible for all costs, including maintenance.
Soon after the end of the war, veterans of the 1st Engineer Special
Brigade, which incurred the heaviest losses in Exercise Tiger, did just
that, erecting a monument on Omaha Beach to their dead, presumably to
include those who died at Utah Beach and those who died in preparation
for D-Day.
At Cambridge, there stands an impressive official memorial erected
by the American Battle Monuments Commission to all those Americans who
died during World War II while stationed in the British Isles. That
includes the 749 who died in the tragedy off Slapton Sands, and there
one finds the engraved names of the missing.
Long before 15 November, 1987, the U.S. government had already
honored those soldiers and sailors who died in Exercise Tiger.CHARLES
B. MacDONALD is a former deputy chief historian at the Army's Center of
Military History. He is the author of a number of books including
Company Commander and A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the
Battle of the Bulge, his most recent work.
13 May 2002

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