D-Day Deceptions and Disasters
How the forgotten Slapton Sands debacle improved allied chances in Normandy
EVERY SPRING, AS THE COMMEMORATON OF D-DAY APPROACHED, my father, retired Navy Lt. Bernard Eisner, recalled the young men who went down with their ships during World War Two and might not have been counted and recognized among the heroes of war. As for himself, my dad had been far off on D-day, executive officer of LST-463—a tank and troop carrier—in the South Pacific. Still, though, he felt deep kinship with every sailor who had not come home.
In particular, my dad was preoccupied with the story of Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands, a devastating Nazi attack on Allied ships off the southern English coast, 39 days before the June 6, 1944 invasion. German intelligence had detected an Allied buildup of troops, personnel and ships in the vicinity of Lyme Bay, about 75 miles across the Channel from Nazi-occupied France. Luftwaffe spotters alerted the small Nazi S-1 torpedo boat fleet at Cherbourg, France, some of which slipped by British surveillance and scored a bloody victory. The fast-moving boats sank two of eight LST’s and damaged a third, killing at least 749 fighting men. Some historians said 1,000 sailors and soldiers had perished, one of the worst training disasters in U.S. military history.
My father rarely spoke about his own exploits in the war, but he shivered as he told me about this event and how the men must have suffered on those LSTs, which were lumbering easy targets. Not only those who drowned in the cold Channel waters, not only those who died instantly on the impact of the torpedoes. More than anything, the men trapped below deck. The immediate survivors would have died in the conflagration or suffocated. Legs would have been broken by the impact. “Death traps,” he would say—no chance to survive such an attack.
Preparing for the liberation of Europe, the Allied Command under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had chosen Slapton Sands as the perfect spot for a dress rehearsal. The beaches on that coast were flat and lined by high bluffs, much like the Normandy landing zones.
The Allies assembled an impressive armada—221 vessels, including eight LSTs, British support craft and smaller boats. Hundreds of troops loaded onto each of the landing ships, manned by officers and crew who easily could have trained stateside with my father. To make the rehearsal as real as possible, the trucks and tanks also onboard the 462-foot long LSTs were loaded with fuel, and all weapons carried live ammunition.
Intelligence Quotient
To date, the Allies had been expert in confounding and fooling German intelligence. They had invented fake troop movements and created airfields populated by ersatz balsawood planes and inflatable rubber tanks. They succeeded in confusing the timing of an attack and diverting attention away from the intended landing zone of the D-Day invasion.
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At Slapton Sands, they were not so lucky. As Exercise Tiger launched before dawn on April 28, 1944, Nazi analysts were on the lookout. German reconnaissance detected unusual ship movement along Lyme Bay. Luftwaffe reconnaissance spotted the troop and equipment concentrations along the coast and radio surveillance confirmed what they saw. Intelligence officers relayed their findings to the German S-Boat squadron based across the Channel at Cherbourg.
Under a dozen of the highly maneuverable S-boats skirted detection when they left their base and raced across the water to attack. The Exercise Tiger fleet had established radio silence except for emergencies, but the Nazis knew what they were doing. When British spotters detected the marauders, they broke silence only to find that a typo in the order of battle plans had provided faulty radio frequencies.
Three of the eight LSTs were hit. One made it to shore, A second exploded in flames, accelerated by the fuel laden vehicles on the loading deck. A third LST was blasted so fully that it sank within six minutes.
“We sailed along in fatal ignorance,” recalled Lt. Eugene E. Eckstam, a medical officer aboard the first LST that sank. “We sat and burned, gas cans and ammunition exploding and the enormous fire blazing only a few yards away.” The official account said the attacks killed untold “hundreds of men. Some of them succumbed to blast injuries and burns, others to drowning or hypothermia.”
“There was little time for launching lifeboats,” wrote Charles B. MacDonald, a historian whose account was published by the Naval Historical Center. “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.”
Buried at Sea
News of the disaster was withheld for a time by the Allies, not only for morale but to withhold potentially helpful information about the coming invasion from the enemy. It was duly reported in Stars and Stripes a month after D-Day. Accounts were written over time. Yet conspiracy theories emerged in the 1980s following publication of The Forgotten Dead, a book by Ken Small, a retired English policeman, who described the mistakes that led up to the disaster at Slapton Sands.
My dad asked me, as a reporter, to look into the story. Was there a coverup or not?
He died in 1996, before I had a definitive answer. But it appears clear now there was no coverup beyond a month or so of operational security after D-Day. I agree with the title of the article by Charles MacDonald on Slapton Sands: “The Coverup That Never Was.”
The deaths off Slapton Sands, though horrific, were not in vain. The Allied command tried to correct the mistakes of the exercise; they redesigned life preservers and trained sailors and soldiers how to use them. They instituted new procedures for rescuing men knocked overboard. They also locked down security and maintained secrecy up until the Normandy invasion. Meanwhile, with the Luftwaffe already depleted, Slapton Sands showed that the Nazi S-Boats were the greatest remaining threat in the English Channel. By the end of June, the Royal Air Force had disabled or destroyed them all.
Even as the first troops were landing on the morning of June 6, the bulk of the Nazi defense force was concentrated 150 miles north of the invasion beaches, around Calais, thanks in large measure to Eisenhower’s magnificent deception ops. Ike’s prediction on the eve of D-Day would prove true, that the invasion led to “the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” The U.S. quickly put its full weight behind the island hopping campaign in the Pacific to defeat Japan.
Four months later, my dad, a 25-year-old, was one of those on station 9,000 miles from Normandy to complete that task. He was officer of the deck on the morning of October 20, 1944, as the United States launched another invasion, MacArthur’s assault at Leyte Island to retake the Philippine Islands. About two dozen LSTs were on hand. LST-463, facing heavy mortar and artillery fire, was among about a dozen landing ships to reach the beach that morning. MacArthur, arriving on the cruiser, USS Nashville, famously waded ashore and declared, “I have returned.” The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the largest Naval contest in modern history.
I wish dad were here so I could tell him that he no longer need worry about why his comrades died at Slapton Sands—and that history has been kind to them. Aside from the multiple historical accounts of their valor in Exercise Tiger, one episode of Foyle’s War, the wartime British police drama, is dedicated to the story of Slapton Sands.
As I watch the images this week of the few centenarian D-Day veterans returning to Normandy, welcomed and cheered once more, I remember my dad, another brother in arms. All are honored and remembered.
SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner is the author of a nonfiction trilogy about World War II: The Freedom Line, The Pope’s Last Crusade, and MacArthur’s Spies.
What a great story for D Day. It is the generation before ours. We were the children of those who lived it. And now we relive its memories as nostalgia once removed, if that makes sense. And journalistically it’s still worthwhile to keep correcting the historical record, even when you debunk the coverup rather than prove it. Thanks for the great yarn, to add to the quality SpyTalk canon.
Thanks Peter for sharing such a great story. Although I have read many accounts of WWII and D-Day, I must admit that I was unaware of Slapton Sands. Your dad's gripping explanation of the dangers for those lost at sea, I found particularly moving.