In two days, many here on the forum will commemorate the Allied invasion of Normandy, also known as D-day. For those of you who learned your history from, "Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Longest Day," and other assorted movies, the landing force was actually made up of roughly equal numbers of American and British Commonwealth soldiers attacking at five beaches along a 50 mile stretch of French coastline. From East to West the beaches are: Sword-British, Juno-Canadian, Gold-British, Omaha-US, and Utah-also US.

It is an event that took place during the training for the landing at Utah beach that I am relating here. A tragic event that was kept hidden from the troops and public during the war and for a long time afterwards.

On the South coast of Devon lies a lagoon and a beach. This beach was chosen by the American Army as the site for training of the troops for the invasion of Normandy due to its resembalnce to Utah Beach. For several days in late April, 1944, 300 ships and over 30,000 American soldiers and sailors practised and rehearsed their part in the invasion. There were the normal screwups that occur during any rehearsal, whether military or otherwise, but nothing major. Until the night of April 27th. On that night, the 6th of a planned 7 rehearsals were due to take place, complete with tanks and a artillery barrage.

At around 2a.m. nine German fast-attack boats spotted the ships circling in the bay and attacked. The only defence was a British Corvette which attempted to warn the American ships. Unfortunately, due to an error in radio frequencies they couldn't raise them. The shore batteries had also spotted the attacking boats but were ordered not to open fire because it would reveal their positions.

Three of the landing ships were hit by torpedoes with one severally damaged and two sunk taking many soldiers and sailors down with them. Because of poor training, many men were wearing their lifejackets around their waists instead of their chests and when they were inflated, the soldiers were flipped upside down and drowned.

The final tally was 198 sailors and seamen dead and a further 552 soldiers dead,and 89 wounded or otherwise injured from burns and broken bones. The ironic thing was that this death tally far exceeded the tally incurred during the actualattack of Utah Beach just 5 weeks later. In order to keep the Germans from learning about the invasion, the bodies were quickly buried and all mention of the tragedy was hushed up until after the war.

I realize this forum is an unusual place for another history lesson but I also realize that a very large number of readers are interested in the subject. I hope you don't mind me indulging myself.

The attack on Dieppe, although in some ways a disaster did teach the allies a number of valuable lessons which were implimented later on. As for the plans for Market Garden having been known by the Germans ahead of the attack, there is no evidence to support this. The primary failure of the entire plan was that it was too ambitious for the number of men available. The number of bridges that they needed to capture and do so quickly was simply too many and the failure of the 82nd Airborne to grasp the importance of capturing the bridge at Nijmegen proved to be a major error on their part.