8 ms·

The D-Day rehearsal that cost 800 lives (2014)

103 points by smacktoward 7y ago

steve19 7y ago
That is fascinating, especially how the people responsible managed to keep it hushed up for so long. > The D-Day rehearsal, codenamed Exercise Tiger, was a disaster on a grand scale with the loss of life greater than the actual invasion of Normandy just months later I am not sure how they did the maths on this. According to the WWII and DDay Foundation [0] 12,000 men died in the air operations in preparation for the landing, and 2,500 Allies troops died during the landing. I can only thing they mean the proportion of death was higher (death/participants). [0] https://www.wwiifoundation.org/students/wwii-facts-figures/ https://www.wwiifoundation.org/students/wwii-facts-figures/
- dogma1138 7y ago
  I assume the 12,000 figure includes the paratroopers that were dropped just before the landing? Otherwise I can’t understand how 12,000 airman could die over Normandy German air defenses were strong but not nearly strong enough to inflict such damage considering the size of the allied air force deployed over the European theater at the time. Tho I’m actually quite surprised by the low number for the actual amphibious landing, but this could not include the push past the initial fortification line.
  - greedo 7y ago
    If they're including the strategic bombing during the run up to D-Day, I could see 12k deaths in the air. They lost over 2000 aircraft during this period. The 8th Air Force alone had 26K casualties in Europe. Add in the losses incurred by the RAF and it doesn't seem unreasonable.
- mirimir 7y ago
  > The First U.S. Army, accounting for the first twenty-four hours in Normandy, tabulated 1,465 killed, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The after-action report of U.S. VII Corps (ending 1 July) showed 22,119 casualties including 2,811 killed, 5,665 missing, 79 prisoners, and 13,564 wounded, including paratroopers. https://www.historyonthenet.com/d-day-casualties https://www.historyonthenet.com/d-day-casualties So it was actually pretty close: ~800 US troops killed during the rehearsal vs 1465 during the actual landing. Somehow, from "Saving Private Ryan", I had imagined that the death tole was much greater.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    Of the six beaches (2 US, 3 UK and 1 Canadian) Omaha was, I believe, by far the most heaving defended.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Only the one Beach actually had very strong defences the other 5 beaches did not have many initial casualties.
      - elcapitan 7y ago
        IIRC the main difference was that the Allies failed to take out (with bombings and artillery fire) defenses on Omaha beach as they did on the other beaches.
        pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        I've read somewhere that some Allied pilots feared hitting the beaches and so released their bombs late; I don't know how true this is though.
  - deeg 7y ago
    You probably need to include most of the missing as part of the death toll. I think KIA are confirmed deaths and a lot of soldiers drowned and had their bodies carried off by the currents, never to be found.
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      That, and "including paratroopers" suggests a lot of people hit in the air, dropped over water, or killed after landing who might never have been recovered. Wikipedia suggests that the airborne missions in Normandy alone involved 1,000 dead and 4,500 missing, so listing a total death toll of 1,000 would have to be beaches-only.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > That is fascinating, especially how the people responsible managed to keep it hushed up for so long. I wonder why was this not disclosed right after Germany and Japan capitulated. That seems to be the logical time to disclose such.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Almost all the war defaulted to secrecy. But the war wasn't really over when the Axis capitulated; even as they were surrendering it was clear the next conflict would be with the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent China), and so the military remained mobilized to a lower degree. Along with the same secrecy mindset. That's why things like Enigma remained secret for so long, as well as a lot of the nastier bits of the war.
  - Someone 7y ago
    As the article says: ”News of what happened remained a secret for a matter of months - the Germans could not find out about it. Following D-Day, Operation Tiger did appear in reports and the American Army magazine Stars and Stripes. In terms of the dead, that was a loss of the men's lives, but a bad day in the office for the admirals - it was one tragedy among many. There was never a cover-up but the story was lost from the public.” Reading https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-1.html https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualti..., ”a bad day” seems a correct description. 5e US had, on average, about 10,000 men killed each month in 1944, or 300 a day, with over 18,000 in December, over 550 a day. That doesn’t make 800 an extreme outlier. Also, what do you put on the front page as a journalist in a country that has been at war for years: “a hundred soldiers were killed yesterday, but we made progress”, or “three months back, 800 soldiers were killed in an exercise, but we couldn’t tell because it would have endangered the D-day landings”? I don’t think that, after the initial necessary secrecy, the news needed suppression.
- usrusr 7y ago
  > I can only thing they mean the proportion of death was higher (death/participants). Edited from "deadly" perhaps, which could mean both (absolute and relative). Still surprised though that the absolutes are so close.
- clarkmoody 7y ago
  > hushed up for so long War is the most heavily-propagandized government activity, since most of the population would not support the effort if they knew the whole truth. Just ask around for the average American's impressions of the World Wars, and you will see the lingering results of this propaganda effort via government education and state-approved history curricula. Indeed, the truth is the first casualty of war.
pjc50 7y ago
I thought this was going to refer to Operation Smash http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2009/05/18/dday_exercise_smash_feature.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2009/05/18/dday... , but that was ten days earlier and not quite as deadly. Or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid two years previously, which demonstrated all the things that could go wrong with a cross-channel raid at the cost of thousands of lives. (People would do well to remember that even the successes of WW2 were written in blood, especially when invoking them in a contemporary political context)
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Windsor, Ontario, Canada has Dieppe Memorial Gardens, and it had a Lancaster bomber mounted on a pedestal in Jackson Park for decades: https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-to-swap-parts-overseas-to-help-keep-lancaster-bomber-flying-in-britain https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-to-swap-part... The Lancaster was used to incinerate German cities, and the only clearly superior bomber was the B-29, used to incinerate all of the Japanese cities, save 5 for atomic bomb targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster Of course, as a child, I had no idea of the solemn significance of any of that.
adrow 7y ago
This event was also a plot line in an episode of Foyle's War (Series 5 "All Clear").
jokoon 7y ago
I always wonder what is keeping the world away from WW3. I guess that nuclear weapons make it too frightening to start any large conflict if it can involve mushroom clouds. I don't think leaders would really retaliate a nuclear attack, since it always is preferable to de-escalate a nuclear conflict than to escalate it. Mutual assured destruction is something nobody is interested in.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Cold war doctrine was the other way around; it was assumed that once the other side's missiles launched, you were already dead, and the only way to prevent that launch was as strong a commitment to retaliation as possible. Hence the UK deploying its nuclear deterrent at sea, since the UK is small enough that Soviet ICBMs had enough coverage to destroy all military installations on the island several times over. Along with most of the population. Mutual assured destruction may be the only thing limiting the Kashmir conflict, for example. The definitive film on this is of course Dr Strangelove.
  - azernik 7y ago
    GP stated: > I don't think leaders would really retaliate a nuclear attack This is actually a fairly reasonable assumption, and is a major headache for deterrence - credible threats are hard to make. Cold War policy was designed around discrediting the assumption, but only because it is such a reasonable one. Once the missiles are flying, there is no rational reason to retaliate; and states have an incentive to exaggerate their willingness to retaliate. This is the whole motivation of a branch of deterrence theory called "signaling", whose main study is the way that actors can commit themselves to escalation in a way that is costly to back down from, in order to make an opponent think you're not bluffing. See also madman theory. This was one reason for the switch from the "massive response" of the Eisenhower years to the "flexible response" of the Kennedy years; it strained credulity that anyone would actually go through with massive response in reaction to minor conflicts. In related policy, the USAF may crack down on nuclear missile crews who are unwilling to fire in the case of a nuclear war, but they're even more paranoid about crews publicly saying they wouldn't pull the trigger.
wayanon 7y ago
The cock-up of the destroyer being absent and radio error reminds me of the channel dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

103 points by smacktoward 7y ago

That is fascinating, especially how the people responsible managed to keep it hushed up for so long. > The D-Day rehearsal, codenamed Exercise Tiger, was a disaster on a grand scale with the loss of life greater than the actual invasion of Normandy just months later I am not sure how they did the maths on this. According to the WWII and DDay Foundation [0] 12,000 men died in the air operations in preparation for the landing, and 2,500 Allies troops died during the landing. I can only thing they mean the proportion of death was higher (death/participants). [0] https://www.wwiifoundation.org/students/wwii-facts-figures/ https://www.wwiifoundation.org/students/wwii-facts-figures/

dogma1138 7y ago
I assume the 12,000 figure includes the paratroopers that were dropped just before the landing? Otherwise I can’t understand how 12,000 airman could die over Normandy German air defenses were strong but not nearly strong enough to inflict such damage considering the size of the allied air force deployed over the European theater at the time. Tho I’m actually quite surprised by the low number for the actual amphibious landing, but this could not include the push past the initial fortification line.
- greedo 7y ago
  If they're including the strategic bombing during the run up to D-Day, I could see 12k deaths in the air. They lost over 2000 aircraft during this period. The 8th Air Force alone had 26K casualties in Europe. Add in the losses incurred by the RAF and it doesn't seem unreasonable.
mirimir 7y ago
> The First U.S. Army, accounting for the first twenty-four hours in Normandy, tabulated 1,465 killed, 1,928 missing, and 6,603 wounded. The after-action report of U.S. VII Corps (ending 1 July) showed 22,119 casualties including 2,811 killed, 5,665 missing, 79 prisoners, and 13,564 wounded, including paratroopers. https://www.historyonthenet.com/d-day-casualties https://www.historyonthenet.com/d-day-casualties So it was actually pretty close: ~800 US troops killed during the rehearsal vs 1465 during the actual landing. Somehow, from "Saving Private Ryan", I had imagined that the death tole was much greater.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Of the six beaches (2 US, 3 UK and 1 Canadian) Omaha was, I believe, by far the most heaving defended.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Only the one Beach actually had very strong defences the other 5 beaches did not have many initial casualties.
    - elcapitan 7y ago
      IIRC the main difference was that the Allies failed to take out (with bombings and artillery fire) defenses on Omaha beach as they did on the other beaches.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        I've read somewhere that some Allied pilots feared hitting the beaches and so released their bombs late; I don't know how true this is though.
- deeg 7y ago
  You probably need to include most of the missing as part of the death toll. I think KIA are confirmed deaths and a lot of soldiers drowned and had their bodies carried off by the currents, never to be found.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    That, and "including paratroopers" suggests a lot of people hit in the air, dropped over water, or killed after landing who might never have been recovered. Wikipedia suggests that the airborne missions in Normandy alone involved 1,000 dead and 4,500 missing, so listing a total death toll of 1,000 would have to be beaches-only.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
Fnoord 7y ago
> That is fascinating, especially how the people responsible managed to keep it hushed up for so long. I wonder why was this not disclosed right after Germany and Japan capitulated. That seems to be the logical time to disclose such.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Almost all the war defaulted to secrecy. But the war wasn't really over when the Axis capitulated; even as they were surrendering it was clear the next conflict would be with the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent China), and so the military remained mobilized to a lower degree. Along with the same secrecy mindset. That's why things like Enigma remained secret for so long, as well as a lot of the nastier bits of the war.
- Someone 7y ago
  As the article says: ”News of what happened remained a secret for a matter of months - the Germans could not find out about it. Following D-Day, Operation Tiger did appear in reports and the American Army magazine Stars and Stripes. In terms of the dead, that was a loss of the men's lives, but a bad day in the office for the admirals - it was one tragedy among many. There was never a cover-up but the story was lost from the public.” Reading https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualties-1.html https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualti..., ”a bad day” seems a correct description. 5e US had, on average, about 10,000 men killed each month in 1944, or 300 a day, with over 18,000 in December, over 550 a day. That doesn’t make 800 an extreme outlier. Also, what do you put on the front page as a journalist in a country that has been at war for years: “a hundred soldiers were killed yesterday, but we made progress”, or “three months back, 800 soldiers were killed in an exercise, but we couldn’t tell because it would have endangered the D-day landings”? I don’t think that, after the initial necessary secrecy, the news needed suppression.
usrusr 7y ago
> I can only thing they mean the proportion of death was higher (death/participants). Edited from "deadly" perhaps, which could mean both (absolute and relative). Still surprised though that the absolutes are so close.
clarkmoody 7y ago
> hushed up for so long War is the most heavily-propagandized government activity, since most of the population would not support the effort if they knew the whole truth. Just ask around for the average American's impressions of the World Wars, and you will see the lingering results of this propaganda effort via government education and state-approved history curricula. Indeed, the truth is the first casualty of war.

pjc50 7y ago

I thought this was going to refer to Operation Smash http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2009/05/18/dday_exercise_smash_feature.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/dorset/content/articles/2009/05/18/dday... , but that was ten days earlier and not quite as deadly. Or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid two years previously, which demonstrated all the things that could go wrong with a cross-channel raid at the cost of thousands of lives. (People would do well to remember that even the successes of WW2 were written in blood, especially when invoking them in a contemporary political context)

redis_mlc 7y ago
Windsor, Ontario, Canada has Dieppe Memorial Gardens, and it had a Lancaster bomber mounted on a pedestal in Jackson Park for decades: https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-to-swap-parts-overseas-to-help-keep-lancaster-bomber-flying-in-britain https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-to-swap-part... The Lancaster was used to incinerate German cities, and the only clearly superior bomber was the B-29, used to incinerate all of the Japanese cities, save 5 for atomic bomb targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Lancaster Of course, as a child, I had no idea of the solemn significance of any of that.

adrow 7y ago

This event was also a plot line in an episode of Foyle's War (Series 5 "All Clear").

jokoon 7y ago

I always wonder what is keeping the world away from WW3. I guess that nuclear weapons make it too frightening to start any large conflict if it can involve mushroom clouds. I don't think leaders would really retaliate a nuclear attack, since it always is preferable to de-escalate a nuclear conflict than to escalate it. Mutual assured destruction is something nobody is interested in.

pjc50 7y ago
Cold war doctrine was the other way around; it was assumed that once the other side's missiles launched, you were already dead, and the only way to prevent that launch was as strong a commitment to retaliation as possible. Hence the UK deploying its nuclear deterrent at sea, since the UK is small enough that Soviet ICBMs had enough coverage to destroy all military installations on the island several times over. Along with most of the population. Mutual assured destruction may be the only thing limiting the Kashmir conflict, for example. The definitive film on this is of course Dr Strangelove.
- azernik 7y ago
  GP stated: > I don't think leaders would really retaliate a nuclear attack This is actually a fairly reasonable assumption, and is a major headache for deterrence - credible threats are hard to make. Cold War policy was designed around discrediting the assumption, but only because it is such a reasonable one. Once the missiles are flying, there is no rational reason to retaliate; and states have an incentive to exaggerate their willingness to retaliate. This is the whole motivation of a branch of deterrence theory called "signaling", whose main study is the way that actors can commit themselves to escalation in a way that is costly to back down from, in order to make an opponent think you're not bluffing. See also madman theory. This was one reason for the switch from the "massive response" of the Eisenhower years to the "flexible response" of the Kennedy years; it strained credulity that anyone would actually go through with massive response in reaction to minor conflicts. In related policy, the USAF may crack down on nuclear missile crews who are unwilling to fire in the case of a nuclear war, but they're even more paranoid about crews publicly saying they wouldn't pull the trigger.

wayanon 7y ago

The cock-up of the destroyer being absent and radio error reminds me of the channel dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Dash

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]