r/todayilearned • u/jacknunn • 1d ago

TIL that 39 days before D-Day, a top-secret full-scale rehearsal for the Utah Beach landings was conducted in England called Exercise Tiger. It was attacked by German E-boats, killing 749 American servicemen—more than were killed during the Utah Beach landings on D-Day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Tiger
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u/kurburux 1d ago

Terrible losses but it wasn't for naught. They still learned from them.

Vice Admiral Kirk of the US Navy immediately realised the huge damage E-boats could inflict on slow-moving landing craft with minimal defences and feared that the German success in Lyme Bay could be repeated on D-Day, with disastrous consequences. On 4 May 1944 he sent a signal to Admiral Ramsay of the Royal Navy arguing for heavy aerial and naval bombardment of Cherbourg:

In my opinion the E-boats must be destroyed or driven from the Cherbourg area, prior to D-Day. The only successful defense against the E-boat is to sink it before it can reach an attack position.

On the other hand it almost lead to D-Day getting canceled:

The attack was reported to Eisenhower on 29 April. Eisenhower was enraged that the convoy was sailing in a straight line and not zig-zagging, that the attack reduced reserves of LSTs, that it indicated to the Germans that the Allies were nearly ready to invade, and that ten American officers with knowledge of the invasion were missing. Each had BIGOT clearance for D-Day, giving them knowledge that could have compromised the invasion should they have been captured alive. As a result, D-Day was nearly called off while Eisenhower's order to find the missing bodies and any incriminating papers they might have had was carried out. All ten were recovered.

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u/Pooch76 1d ago

Wow, they really were fast: The main wartime production boats, from S26onwards (but often designated the S100 class), were very seaworthy,[4] heavily armed and capable of sustaining 43.5 knots) (80.6 km/h; 50.1 mph), briefly accelerating to 48 knots (89 km/h; 55 mph).[5] These were armed with torpedoes and Flak guns; commonly one 37 mm at the stern, one 20 mm at the bow with a twin mount amidships, plus machine guns.

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u/Not_invented-Here 21h ago

I belive both MTB and E boat crew suffered quite a bit of body damage. Due to the vibrations and impacts of them dealing with waves in the North Atlantic. 

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u/warbastard 1d ago

Interesting that Eisenhower was angry when he seemed to be the level headed guy managing the egos of generals. I guess he demanded competence and vigilance from everyone and basic errors at the bottom can absolutely balloon into a giant problem for everyone else.

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u/Crazy_Ad_91 22h ago

Eisenhower had a well known and extremely fierce temper. He was even known to throw things when angry and was remarked by his staff to have a bulging temple and laser like stare when he was angry.

All that said, he knew it was an ill look for a leader and he worked very hard to keep his temper either hidden or under control as he feared it compromised leaders to let your temper control you vs you control your temper.

Hence why the public persona of him was this level headed cool as a cucumber guy. It’s for the most part what he allowed the public to see, while behind closed doors he was a bit more lively.

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u/DeathMetal007 1d ago

Specifically, intelligence compromises are very hard to determine until the evidence is found, in this case the officers’ bodies. Eisenhower had multiple ways of getting intelligence about army conditions like Special Officers. None of that helps when you may have a captured officer who could leak the largest sea invasion ever mounted.

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u/malumfectum 19h ago

He was under an enormous amount of pressure overseeing plans for the largest and most important amphibious invasion in history. It’s difficult to imagine anyone not losing their temper under those circumstances.

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u/GhostPepperDaddy 15h ago

Literally the highest of stakes on the line for the future of the entire world. Throwing things because the plan was almost undermined and because of preventable deaths of their own soldiers is beyond understable.

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u/VirginiaLuthier 22h ago

He was smoking four packs a day back then.....imagine

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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 20h ago

Sure, but back then cigarettes were good for you.

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u/Gruffleson 10h ago

Yeah, that's what 10 out of 9 doctors would say.

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u/-Nurfhurder- 23h ago

Eisenhower was famous for having a temper.

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u/Hambredd 7h ago

I'm confused by your statement? A lot of soldiers just died and D-Day was at risk of being discovered by the Germans —it be weird if he wasn't angry.

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u/anally_ExpressUrself 1d ago

How many people had BIGOT clearance back then?

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u/AnArgonianSpellsword 23h ago

Probably quite a few, anyone who needed to know the troop movements and objectives of D Day would have it, BIGOT was either British Invasion of German Occupied Territory or just TO GIB backward to show they had invasion plans for somewhere other than North Africa.

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u/mcpingvin 1d ago

Well at least 10.

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u/cybercuzco 23h ago

White southerners were given it at birth but plenty of northerners had it too.

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u/The_Demolition_Man 14h ago

Redditors are so cringe

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u/ninjagorilla 21h ago

They also learned they hadn’t included rescue craft in the flotilla and they learned they needed to better train the men assaulting the beach what to do about bodies and casualties during the assault (too many of them wandered away from the assault to gawk)

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u/jeckles 16h ago

All ten were recovered, that seems remarkable.

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u/Escapade84 20h ago

Ah yes, incriminating papers that would implicate the allies in attacking…during a world war. Yep.

Weird choice of words, that.

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u/IAREOWL 19h ago

Are you fucking dense? They were incriminating papers because they revealed exactly when and where the allies would attack. If a defending nation knew those plans they could react and concentrate their forces

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u/kurburux 19h ago

Article talks about how even the location of the rehearsal was telling some hints to the Axis.

Merely knowing that exercises were taking place at Slapton was of interest to the Germans; the historian Stephen Ambrose suggests that the insistence in May by Hitler that the Normandy area be reinforced was because "he noticed the similarity between Slapton Sands and the Cotentin beach".

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u/Escapade84 19h ago

incriminating

adjective
Causing, showing, or proving that one is guilty of wrongdoing.

You don’t like it, but I said what I said. I might have used a word like sensitive, or confidential instead.

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u/jaa101 9h ago

The officers may have had secret D-Day plans with them that they should not have been carrying in the field. That would have been a crime. The Germans captured documents like this during Operation Market-Garden that were never supposed to have left England.

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u/nav17 1d ago

E-boat was the Western Allies' designation for the fast attack craft (German: Schnellboot, or S-Boot, meaning "fast boat"; plural Schnellboote) of the Kriegsmarine of Nazi Germany during World War II; E-boat could refer to a patrol craft from an armed motorboat to a large Torpedoboot.[1] The name of E-boats was a British designation using the letter E for Enemy.

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u/Lord0fHats 1d ago

For people who like a point of reference it was basically the German equivalent of American PT Boats.

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u/joe9teas 1d ago

And the British MTB.

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u/kingtacticool 20h ago

There is one being restored at the moment. It will be the only one to exist when they are done.

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u/trainbrain27 16h ago

It already is, but it will be, too.

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u/kingtacticool 16h ago

Didnt know they were done with it. Neat

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u/trainbrain27 16h ago

I meant that it's still in existence, so it's already the only one. It's not fully restored. Their website is down, but here's an interview from 2024.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d7bGQgUOXA

The metal shelving in the video may well have been made near me.

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u/kingtacticool 16h ago

Oh ok. Misunderstood your comment.

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u/pyeeater 1d ago

I just watched Pressure, where it was referenced and it never mentioned E-boats , which i thought was a bit strange.

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u/phant0md 1d ago

That’s cause the friendly fire incident was the day before the attack. The attack the next day was during the same training exercises but separate incidents.

Eisenhower in the movie felt guilt over the friendly fire, but would not have felt guilt for a German attack. Makes sense not to include it since they were somewhat separate events and would have muddied the sense of personal responsibility they were trying to project in the movie.

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u/jacknunn 1d ago

That's how I learned about this. Thank you Wikipedia!

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u/RatBustard 10h ago

Delta flight?

I watched it today on a Delta flight.

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u/sir_mrej 15h ago

Pressure wasnt a movie about the preattack. So it wouldnt go into detail about it.

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u/jaa101 1d ago

The Magic Army is a great novel by Leslie Thomas based on these events, and the wider history of the US Army's presence in England before D-Day.

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u/alottanamesweretaken 1d ago edited 1d ago

Weren’t there way more than 749 US casualties at D-Day?

Edit: oh just Utah Beach, like the title clearly states. Sorry/thanks

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u/kgunnar 1d ago

That number is for Utah Beach, which was more lightly defended and easier to take. Omaha Beach is where the major casualties were.

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u/ahorrribledrummer 1d ago

There were. This only accounts for one beach. D-Day landings occurred at five beaches.

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u/vferriero 1d ago

There were other beach landings on D-Day (Juno, Sword, etc.). I’m assuming this was practice specifically for Utah and OP is counting only casualties on the Utah beach landing and not all beaches on D-Day.

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u/Malvania 20h ago

Not only just counting Utah Beach, but only counting those landing on the beach. The airborne landing just behind the beach suffered thousands of casualties

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u/Dewey081 1d ago

I always thought it was friendly fire (artillery) that killed the soldiers. TIL

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u/denismcd92 1d ago

It was both, more were likely killed by the friendly artillery

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u/Dewey081 23h ago

The movie Pressure didn't do a great job with the depiction of Op Tiger, IMO. No mention of e-boats that I can recall. But it makes sense with the timings of the beach landings, e.g. landing craft pushed ashore prematurely into firendly arty by harassing german patrol boats.

That's Hollywood for you, I reckon.

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u/iRebelD 1d ago

Fucks sake

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u/Ok-Airline-8420 6h ago

It was a live fire exercise.  I grew up near Slapton and they were ALWAYS finding EOD on the beach up until the 90s, and still do occasionally.

There is also a rumour of a secret mass grave and the death toll was much higher than reported.

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u/jacknunn 1h ago

That I would believe

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u/Sirscraticus 1d ago

Been to Slapton Sands many times, it's a well known story in Devon, there is even a recovered tank on display

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u/LJ50 13h ago

I visited there with my grandparents when I was about 10 and my granda got chatting to a guy about the story… he walked over to his car and got a book called out of a cardboard box, came back and handed it to us. Turns out we’d been talking to the author of The Forgotten Dead, Ken Small. The book was literally just published at the time and he’d been down there that day waiting for a photographer to take some promotional pictures.

Great book and an incredible story.

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u/SkiahMutt 22h ago

I had no idea about Exercise Tiger before moving to a small town in Missouri! I happen to live pretty close to a memorial centered around one of the LST's anchors, and near the Exercise Tiger Memorial stretch of Highway 54. It was really eye-opening to read about.

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u/Spargewater 22h ago

That is fascinating. I just learned something new about WWII. I can understand the researcher saying, "was never covered up; it was 'conveniently forgotten." My uncle was wounded later in the battle of Hurtgen Forest. No one has heard much about that battle because even though we had a lot of casualties.

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u/Useful-ldiot 21h ago

I recently watched a movie called "pressure" that overlaps pretty heavily with this and it talks about Exercise Tiger and how D-Day was nearly cancelled several times. But the movie almost exclusively focused on the weather and didn't mention the e-boats at all. I could have just missed that part of the plot, but I remember being pretty confused as to why the practice run failed.

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u/Beezewhacks 20h ago

Separate events. The movie left out the German attack, which followed the self-inflicted casualties the next day.

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u/concorde77 23h ago edited 23h ago

Lions Led By Donkeys did a whole episode about it on their podcast a while ago. I definitely recommend it!

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u/AnothaOne4Me 16h ago

My grandpa served with the 1st Engineer Special Brigade and was there

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u/The_Possessor 16h ago

If you like the English series Foyle’s War there’s an episode involving this.

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u/Ok-Airline-8420 5h ago

I grew up near Slapton and the whole exercise was live fire as well.   There is a rumour the death toll was much, much higher than reported and there is a secret mass grave with the KIAs reported as having died later at D Day itself.   I don't think that's true, but a lot more died to friendly fire that were expected.

There was a lot of ordnance fired and EOD was being found on the beach well into the 1990s, and still turns up occasionally.  There used to be big signs with pictures of what they look like and DONT TOUCH on the beach.   Bullets embedded in tree trunks occasionally messes up chainsaws.

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u/LaFrescaTrumpeta 1d ago

also accidentally bombed their own guys on the beach 😭

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u/jacknunn 22h ago

I just learned how the British did that to their own troops by mistake when defending Singapore as well, when I was at fort siloso the other day