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

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-27185893

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

103 52 7 years ago

steve19• 7 years 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/

dogma1138• 7 years 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.

greedo2• 7 years 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.

mirimir2• 7 years 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

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• 7 years ago

Of the six beaches (2 US, 3 UK and 1 Canadian) Omaha was, I believe, by far the most heaving defended.

deeg• 7 years 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.

brianpgordon• 7 years ago

Wikipedia's number is 4,414 deaths:

Research under way by the National D-Day Memorial has confirmed 4,414 deaths, of which 2,499 were American and 1,915 were from other nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy_landings#cite_note-Al...

mattrp• 7 years ago

If this interests you, look at the number of casualties in the days after d-day. D-day itself gets commemorated not because it was the highest amount of casualties but because it signified both the resolve of the allied world and the strength of our non-commissioned and junior officers to take charge and lead despite complete chaos. D-day was a massive undertaking so large and risky that just training for it risked enormous casualties (as outlined by the article - the incident mentioned isn’t a secret it has been well documented for a long time). Therefore it was with tremendous risk to execute and the fact that the casualty count wasn’t catastrophic is a testimony to the men on the beach. Another great series is band of brothers which shows how these men self organized and led each other despite not having a predefined blueprint for every scenario. Something we could all learn from - how many of our teams run this way versus needing constant commanding from ‘generals’ and blueprints for every scenario?

dragontamer2• 7 years ago

Most of the deaths were on Omaha beach, where US Bombers completely missed their targets. US Bombers hit the farmlands miles inland, instead of the bunkers. In effect: the Bombers of Omaha Beach forgot about momentum and dropped the bombs "over" Omaha Beach (instead of "over the sea", where momentum would carry the bombs to Omaha Beach). IIRC, there were also Paratroopers who were dropped around the bombings, to slow down any reinforcements.

The soldiers on Omaha beach were expecting:

1. Surprise Attack

2. Bomber support

3. Paratroopers preventing reinforcements

#1 and #3 were negated because the Nazis just happened to be holding practice drills at the time and were on the beach anyway. #2 was negated because the bombers missed.

Sometimes, it comes down to luck.

Fnoord• 7 years 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.

pjc503• 7 years 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• 7 years 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/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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

pjc503• 7 years ago

I thought this was going to refer to Operation Smash 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 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• 7 years 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-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

Of course, as a child, I had no idea of the solemn significance of any of that.

adrow• 7 years ago

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

jokoon3• 7 years 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.

pjc503• 7 years 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.

azernik2• 7 years 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.

Steve442• 7 years ago

This is one of the reasons the "letter of last resort" the British submarines carry must remain secret. It’s the not knowing which helps keep the balance of peace.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36824917/trident-what-...

wsxcde• 7 years ago

Mutual assured destruction may be the only thing limiting the Kashmir conflict, for example.

On the contrary, Kashmir militancy project was started by Pakistan in the late eighties after a botched attempt by the central government in India to rig an election in the state. This was well after the first Indian nuclear tests in 1974. Subsequently, India did another round of nuclear testing 1998 and that too resulted in an attempted stealth invasion of Kargil. So if anything, nuclear weapons have escalated the conflict not the other way around.

Just to be clear, there were always separatist elements in Kashmir, just like there used to be some in Punjab and there still are in Balochistan. But with development and intra-country migration, it becomes hard to sustain a separatist movement and that's why all the other movements in India have all but petered out. It is likely this would've happened in Indian-controlled Kashmir too, given that the valley was largely peaceful after 1948 and until the 1990s.

But a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances -- first the rigged election, then Pakistani arming of the separatists, the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets winding up which meant the ISI and their jihadi cousins-in-arms were looking for a new project, the Indian Army's human rights violations and introduction of AFSPA in the valley, harassment of and violence against Kashmiri Hindus which caused a mass exodus of pro-India elements from the valley, and the western policy of ignoring jihadi violence in Kashmir until 9/11/2001 because they were historically aligned with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia rather than India which was assumed to be in the Russian sphere of influence --- resulted in the conflict blowing up to where it is now.

You'll notice that many of these contributing factors have disappeared and the situation is likely to get better in the next couple of decades.

wnkrshm• 7 years ago

But it would have happened. The Sovjet Union had developed an automated retaliatory system, named 'Perimeter'. In the case of an alarm, it would have given the government executive the option to flip a switch and activate the system. Or, if there was no signal from the executive anymore and nuclear explosions are detected, the system activates by itself. If the system detects actual nuclear explosions on its territory, the retaliatory strike would be executed.

All this was mediated by command & control ICBMs (i.e. rockets without warheads but with detectors and comms) that the system would launch on warning and by switching the system on, the actual silos would respond to automated commands from these rockets. A system very hard to disable from outside.

The craziest thing about this: The Sovjets didn't even advertise this system existed but it did.

Perimeter is rumored to still be in operation, since Vladimir Putin likes to drop comments from time to time along the lines of 'we will never launch preemptively but retaliation will be swift and certain'.

Edit: typo

Edit2: So this system was created to automatically ensure retaliation even if the Sovjet union was effectively wiped out or if nobody wanted to make the decision to conduct a retaliatory strike while missiles are incoming but haven't hit yet.

rdtsc• 7 years ago

One of the purposes for Perimeter was to keep the hotheaded generals in check. That is, if the detection system has a glitch, they don’t rush to launch everything, but instead just turn on Perimeter.

I also think it was a large enough system that Western intelligence probably knew about it, but couldn’t publicly acknowledge it, as it might expose the source of their knowledge.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

It is ironic that Dr. Strangelove predicted it along with even the "pointlessness of having a doomsday device as a deterrent and then not telling anyone".

greedo2• 7 years ago

There's some debate about whether Perimeter was ever deployed, or rejected after some design phases. Also, its reliance on siloed ICBMs to launch communications warheads causes a problem; you have to intermix them with normal missile silos (or they get preferential targeting). And those normal missile silos are also the classic first strike targets.

cr0sh3• 7 years ago

Also known as "Dead Hand":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand

spodek• 7 years ago

I guess that nuclear weapons make it too frightening to start any large conflict if it can involve mushroom clouds.

You don't need nuclear weapons to want to avoid war.

wayanon• 7 years 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

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

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