Sgtleo Here

Fascinating thread.....

Many of us 'over here' are fascinated in the activities of US troops prior to the Invasion ; whereabouts in the UK did you embark from ?

 

MartinBull Wing Commander

We had been in Cheshire and Devon area and sailed from a staging are near Portsmouth as I recall it. Much of those areas had been stripped of Brits and once you went into the staging area the only way out was by ship to France. Brit and American troops guarded the staging area(s) to make sure.


Where in London are you? Have Quasi relatives in Hants!!

Sgtleo

 

Hi Sgtleo. Were you still in Chartres when De Gaulle came there for the liberation speech? Also was the photogrpah Kappa with you? He took some of his most famous pictures in Chartres

 

For those of you who are interested in WW II happenings in England this I hope will interest you. Long read!!

Here's another WW II operation that many do not know or have never heard of::-

(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.



Sgtleo

 

Skipper:-

Sorry I just noticed your question re Chartres.

We were busy going about freeing Chartres and never saw DeGaulle until he was in Paris marching down the Champs Eleysees bold as brass while a few snipers were still trying to take him out.

Sgtleo

 

Yes, I do, and I can verify that we have a true BTDT with us. Hope one of his stories will be about the runup to Varsity.

Steve W.

 

Thank you Steve W.

Will get to Varsity if the readers are interested.
Right not I'm trying to teach UK 101!!

Sgtleo

 

Duplicate

 

welcome Sleo

you might be interested in the findings on E. Tiger found here, I was able to help the author with some of the KM materials. Because of this operation by the S-Booten the pens at 2 harbors were devastated by the RAF

Exercise tiger - Page 2

see also the first page as well please ........

 

Skipper:- This one is for you!! Be interested in your comments!!

Why I really wasn't too happy with some of the people living in Chartres when we were trying to and did take it.

I was NCOIC of the detail, while we were guarding a cross road outside Chartres,France at the time the 26th (ID) was in the area and Kraut POWS were coming back through. I noticed locals staring down from the bridge into river so I decided to take a look-see and walked up to the bridge(I was doing interpreting off and on for an Intel Unit).I had to tell the other guys to protect the crossroad so they couldn't go with me. I heard enough as I approached the Locals to know that they weren't going to give me any help or info. (I spoke,read and wrote French from my school days earlier.)

A Canadian "Bike" rider was passing so I asked him to secure my weapon(sure didn't trust locals) while I climbed down the river bank-swam out to an overturned 2-1/2 six-by and proceeded to dive. After a few dives,I located both GIs still in the truck cab. Swam back ashore to get help. Ordinance sent 2 huge wreckers to recover bodies/trucks.

I was taken to an Aid Station for hypothermia treatment(got dry uniform)and went back to my unit as we were loading POWs for shipment to rear.Got served some semi-hot powdered eggs out of a can with ketchup-what a choice!! I had just stuck a hand inside a GIs head a while ago!!

Never heard any more-not even the GIs names-but some time later I was told by a Lt. they were from the 26th ID! Have always wondered who they were when I recall this incident since I lived in Boston and the 26th ID had a lot of men from that area in it. The 26th ID was nicknamed "Yankee Div." and shoulder patch was "YD".

Questions I have/had follow:-

Could GIs have been saved if locals spoke up before I got inquisitive?

Could we have helped save those GIs if the Locals spoke up??

Why stand and stare and not report GIs were in the river?

Did they dislike us that much?

Would love to have an answer to a lot of questions I have never been able to answer!!

I know it's a lot of years since '44 but I'm still curious about those 2 GIs.

Maybe ! I'll never know but curiosity came back when I saw YD's Web Page some time back.

I have posted this story other places but still nothing for my efforts.

Sgtleo

 

Sarge -- Where in Boston did you/do you live? I grew up about ten miles north of the city and attended BC/BC Law.

 

This one I call a "Moving British Experience".



June 2,1944 Southern England:-

Imagine a small town in England with an inverted "Y" intersection where the troops,vehicles etc. will pass through on their way to the D-Day Staging areas. At the left hand corner of the "Y" is a bus stop for the double decker buses used in town.

The local "Bobby" decides to park two buses there while a Mech Unit, is coming down the road and since I knew what might happen I took it on myself to amble over and reminded him the larger vehicles will require more space for a wide right turn.

"You take care of the Yanks and I'll take care of the Brits" was his answer
.
Shortly thereafter the advance vehicles approached the intersection and a "Bird Colonel" yells over "Hey Sarge ask those buses to move will you". To CMA I went over and told him the story to which he replied "Tell that SOB that whatever happens is my fault-you are just a passer-by! (This area had been the target of a lot of bombing and the vehicles were all out in the open!!!) He wasn't about to get caught like that.

Back up the road he went and soon the halted vehicles were all squeezing right and down comes a 10 ton tank retriever taking down street signs and all that good stuff.

The tank retriever driver jockeys into position and puts his chain on the front bus and starts to pull away-dumb a** driver on the bus had set his emergency brake so he left about a year's worth of rubber on the street even after he was told he was going to be pulled out of the spot. The second bus took off like he was jet propelled while the "Bobby" was in a real fit.

Bird Colonel came back to tell me his name etc. and said "Thanks for the help Sarge if they want me tell them to come and get me-I'll be on a troop ship so they can find me". Me and my friends went back into the Local for another pint or two laughng like H**l!!

Sgtleo

 

dgmitchell

A Double Eagle no less. Surprised to meet one here. Did you know a Charlie McCoy,also a Double Eagle, who was the High School Coach?

Played for the informals(with Ed King the ex-Governor) at the Heights before he entered the Marines. Later became a Navy Chaplain and went all the way up to Navy Captain

Remember the old song "Southie is my home Town". That's my theme song because you can take the boy out of Southie but never the Southie out of the boy.

Small world ain't it.

Sgtleo

 

It is a small world, to be sure, but there are actually several people from the Boston area scattered around this forum. I did not go to BC High so I really did not know anyone from there. I do recall Governor King from my childhood. I do recall the song you mention -- at least I think I do -- from a class I took at BC on the history of Boston's neighbourhoods. I spent some time in Southie when I worked for Boston Edison back in the 80's. We had a storage facility there.

 

dgmitchell:-

Did you ever run across a Professor/Author(considered the ultimate on Boston Irish) by the name of Tom O'Connor at the Heights. He's still there as a Professor Emeritus. Has a number of books published that are real classics about Southie and the Boston Irish.

Sgtleo

 

Oh, yes, he was most certainly on the faculty when I was there. I received my undergraduate degree in history and tried for 3 years to fit one of his classes into my schedule. Alas, I was never able to do that. I actually met with him to discuss doing a senior thesis with him but we could not agree on a topic so went in another direction.

I studied the history of Boston in a class taught by Andy Buni, a professor who had also grown up in Southie. It was a great class and Boston is a great city. Have you always been in the city itself? I grew up and lived in Lynnfield for 25 years.

 

An incident we were asked to look at:- The Plomion Massacre

On September 1st, 1944 before the retreating SS left the area of Plomion, France, they murdered townsfolk including many innocent women and children, burning down houses with incendiary grenades. Sadistic evidence was everywhere. Plomion is almost on the France-Belgium border in the vicinity of Hirson. The SS unit was not identified.

Data on the Plomion Massacre:-

951st Field Artillery Battalion with 9th ID - (the first US Corps to reach Belgium.)
The day before (August 31), German SS troops executed 14 males of all ages in Plomion.

As related by the men of the 951st FA Bn.:-
Later on the morning of September 2, we started to leave this position. A young Frenchman about my age came up to my jeep with his World War I rifle. He lived in Plomion and had escaped from the SS troops before the massacre. He begged me to take him with us to help in the war, but there was no way we could take a civilian. He was a very brave man and would have been worth his weight in gold. He was one of the few male survivors of Plomion.

In April 1996, Lt. Russell Kelch and I went back to Plomiom, France. We were able to get the complete story of the Plomion tragedy from two kindergarten teachers taking children on a walk. The teachers knew of this event and showed us a document about the massacre. The German SS were looking for someone who had taken a shot at them, and when the SS couldn't find the sniper, they ransacked and burned the village. When the villagers wouldn't turn anyone over, the SS arrested 14 men and boys who had not fled the village. The 14 were beaten and executed.
A monument has been erected in the meadow where this atrocity occurred. As we stood looking at the monument, Lt. Kelch said, "You know, there were times in my life when I wondered if this really took place or if it was all a dream. That's why I never spoke of it much." I replied, "And now we know it really happened."

Originally published in 951st Battalion FA Newsletter, Fire Mission
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
A monument was erected in the meadow to commemorate this atrocity.

The inscription reads as follows;
Quote "Ce monument a été élevé vers 1950 sur les plans du sculpteur R. Antoine et de l' architecte R. Cabet. Les 14 stèles s' élèvent à l' endroit même où sont tombés, lors de la débacle allemande du 31 août 1944, quatorze plomionnais victimes d'une ultime riposte".end Quote
(MY Free Translation = This monument was erected circa 1950 using the plans of Sculptor R. Antoine and Architect R.. Cabet. The bas relief was erected on the same spot where they fell at the time of the German Massacre of August 31,1944, 14 Plomion people ,victims of an ultimate retaliation).

Plomion Monument today:-


Would be interested in any feedback on this massacre

Sgtleo

 

Here is a link to the full Plomion article referenced above.

TymeTravlr's Page

 

dgmitchell

Here's a list of other massacres etc that we had on our records:-

I have listed a number of SS atrocities that happened in Belgium and France. There were many others in Greece,Holland and even in Germany. I can find no sympathy for men like SS Col Peiper regardless of whether he was physically present or not. Not all these were performed by Peiper's men but rather others as well!!

With Command - Responsibility accompanies it!!

BELGIUM:-

BANDE (Christmas Eve, 1944)-34 men killed.

THE MALMÉDY MASSACRE (December 17, 1944) 84 of their comrades lay dead

ATROCITY AT STAVELOT Kampfgruppe Peiper, systematically executed 130 Belgian civilians

THE WERETH KILLINGS (December 17, 1944) eleven slain black soldiers.

France

THE NORMANDY MASSACRES (June, 1944) SS soldiers brandishing their machine pistols opened fire killing thirty five men.

On the 7th and 8th of June, in the grounds of the Abbaye Ardenne, the headquarters of SS Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer’s 25th Panzer Grenadiers, twenty of the Canadians were shot.

June 8, twenty six Canadians were shot at the Chateau d’Audrie

After the war, investigations established that separate atrocities were committed in 31 different incidents involving 134 Canadians, 3 British and 1 American

LE PARADIS (Pas-de-Calais, May 26, 1940 A company of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, trapped in a cowshed, surrendered to the 2nd Infantry Regiment, SS 'Totenkopf' (Death's Head). When the 99 prisoners were
in position, two machine guns opened fire killing 97 of them.

WORMHOUDT ATROCITY (Pas-de-Calais, May 27/28 , 1940 The day after the Le Paradis massacre, around 100 men of the 2nd Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery, were taken prisoner by the No 7 Company, 2nd Battalion of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler.The prisoners were marched across fields to a nearby farm and there confined in a barn with not enough room for the wounded to lie down. There the massacre began. About five stick grenades were lobbed in amongst the defenceless prisoners who died in agony as shrapnel tore into their flesh. When the last grenade had been thrown, those still standing were then ordered outside, five at a time, there to be mown down under
a hail of bullets from the rifles of the executioners.

ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE (Central France, June 10, 1944)452 women and children in the local church were then suffocated by smoke grenades lobbed in through the windows and shrapnel grenades

THE TULLE MURDERS (Near Limoges, Central France, June 9, 1944) the SS murdered 99 men in the town of Tulle

ASCQ (Near Lille, April 2, 1944) Altogether 70 men were shot beside the railway line and another 16 killed in the village itself.

OUTRAGE AT IZIEU (Central France, April 6, 1944) The Gestapo, led by the regional head, Klaus Barbie, entered the home and forcibly removed the forty four children and their seven supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks like sacks of potatoes. All were transported to the collection centre at Drancy outside Paris where they were put on the first available train to 'points east'.

FRAYSSINET (Near Tulle, Central France, May 21, 1944) fifteen hostages were taken and executed. These hostages were all young males from one child families.

SAULX VALLEY ATROCITIES (August 29, 1944)Robert-Espagne All males were then rounded up (49 in number). Three machine-guns, firing in unison, sent their deadly stream of bullets into the helpless group. In the village of Couvonges, 26 men were killed and 54 out of the 60 houses were burned to the ground. The village of Beurey-sur-Saulx was also
targeted by the SS and seven inhabitants met their deaths, the church and houses put to the torch.

In Mogeville, three people died as a result of the SS retaliation. Similar atrocities were also carried out almost simultaneously in the villages of Sermaize-les-Bains, (thirteen died), Cheminon and Tremout-sur-Saulx by the SS 3rd Panzer-Grenadier Division.

I know of NO Documented actions such as these by the Allies.
Isolated instances could and did happen I agree.

Sgtleo

 

Following up on Sarge's most recent post, here is an interesting link I found that adds a bit of detail to Sarge's info and adds some other massacres as well.

Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in Western Europe