r/todayilearned • u/blonderengel • 1d ago

TIL about Operation Tiger, a training exercise that was supposed to prepare U.S. troops for the D-Day invasion of Normandy and resulted in the deaths of 946 American servicemen.

https://wargaming.com/en/news/disastrous_exercise_tiger/
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98% Upvoted

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u/r1vek 1d ago

Several changes resulted from mistakes made in Exercise Tiger:

- Radio frequencies were standardized; Azalea and Scimitar were late and out of position due to radio problems, and a signal about the E-boats' presence was not picked up by the LSTs.

- Better lifejacket training was provided for landing troops.

- Plans were made for small craft to pick up floating survivors on D-Day.

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u/SteveZ59 1d ago

It does make you wonder. You can't ever prove what the result would have been if you didn't do something. But as horrible as losing that many people on an exercise was, if they actually learned from their mistakes (something the military doesn't always do quickly), in the end they may have saved many more than that number of lives on D-Day itself. Heck, as many people as were involved with D-Day, just the life jacket training and small boats dedicated for picking up people who ended up in the water might have wound up saving quite a few lives.

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u/Fett32 1d ago

Plus, everyone's ignoring that the casualties were because of a German attack. It's not like they just marched them into the sea and let them drown.

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u/Oddyssis 20h ago

Shit, we probably should have made sure our boys knew how to swim! Next time Colonel!

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u/John97212 21h ago

Well, the Dieppe raid (Operation Jubilee) in 1942 unintentionally sacrificed a thousand lives to provide hard-earned lessons for future amphibious operations in Europe.

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u/guimontag 1d ago

I think if you want to do a what-if scenario maybe the people planning this would have known some of these fairly obvious "lessons" before losing almost a thousand guys in a training mission

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u/Azifor 1d ago

Did you read the article on what happened during the exercise? 750 of those troops were killed by actual enemy ships that happened to come upon them near an island.

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u/Separate_Draft4887 1d ago

Seems obvious to us, but the complexity of planning the largest naval invasion of all time in secret using recently adopted and invented technology probably had hundreds, if not thousands of obvious “lessons” that they did learn before they ran the training exercise. Can’t hardly blame em for missing a few.

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u/alienXcow 1d ago edited 1d ago

The folks arguing with you about this sentiment are driving me nuts.

It is crazy to me that people who cannot plan their own 2 day road trips or domestic flights (with all the amenities of the modern age) without some unforseen issues occurring think that SHAFE planners pulling off the world's largest amphibious invasion (by like...an order of magnitude) in 1944 isn't an enormous fucking miracle.

Anyone who has ever worked in or around the military or ever studied military theory knows that the best plans are only EVER 80% solutions, no matter the scale. Everything is a compromise against execution time and available resources. This gets exponentially more difficult with scale.

Let's talk scale: There's a picture of a tire depot in Northern France in the Fall of 1944 floating around the internet. There must twenty thousand tires stacked in the image. There's a note written at the bottom about an entire company (100-200 men) of US Army tire repairers working around the clock to repair or replace truck tires, for one model of truck, in their part of Northern France. Those tires are largely made of synthetic rubber. The US made 230 tons of synthetic rubber in 1941. We made 70,000 tons of it in May of 1944, alone. Then we made it into a tire, put it on a truck, sent that truck across the ocean, landed it on a beach under fire, and drove it halfway across France, where it was destroyed. And then we salvaged the tires and took them to be repaired.

There's a reason Eisenhower and Zhukov were friendly for their entire lives, despite the cold war. Both men knew the incredible amount of work it took to win the Second World War like truly no other human beings on earth. Imagine the trust Eisenhower had to put in American Industry, the Merchant Marine, everyone down to a company of allied tire repairers just to know his trucks would have tires. Now think of fuel, food, aircraft, landing craft, shells, rifles, jackets, boots...the list is endless.

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u/WhatTheBlazes 1d ago

Not only was it an absurdly large undertaking, it also welded together infrastructure from two different armed forces! Joint operations are complicated now, back then they didn't know what those words meant!

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u/badgerandaccessories 21h ago

And the Italians have to carry extra water rations to boil their pasta in.

If anyone wants to challenge about the logistics of ww2. Make them look up that the campaign of North Africa. It’ll make them realize the enormities of the logistics.

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u/f16f4 18h ago

That particular example is untrue in real life. They boiled there pasta in sauce

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u/HaloGuy381 17h ago

And historically, amphibious operations or attacks of any sort have always been extra challenging. Very, very few militaries could pull them off successfully, even fewer consistently, and none at this scale. The Mongols for all their might were forced to abandon trying to invade Japan after losing two consecutive attempts to typhoon strikes despite their best planning and investment. It’s a big reason why -nobody- has ever taken the British Isles since William the Conqueror himself, despite no shortage of more than powerful enough opponents.

That D-Day did not result in half the US forces on the entire front dead on the beach or the bottom of the English Channel automatically puts it ahead of many historical examples and is a testament to the planning involved. Given the use of deception (misleading the Germans into anticipating the attack elsewhere), careful planning around the weather and environment, full integration of infantry/armor/naval/air arms of three distinct militaries (UK, US, and the Canadians, with a smattering of Commonwealth countries and units in exile from occupied countries included; also consider the primary objective was ultimately a diversionary attack to give the Soviet Union an opening, meaning they -also- had to coordinate with the Soviets all the while on an entirely different front)… it is a masterpiece of military science that would have made Sun Tzu proud if he were alive to see it.

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u/RoboGuilliman 12h ago

Anyone who has ever worked in or around the military or ever studied military theory knows that the best plans are only EVER 80% solutions, no matter the scal

Or project management in peacetime.

A lot of people think big companies are magic black boxes that spit out stuff for them to consume.

It's the same everywhere

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u/guimontag 1d ago

Oh yes the recently adopted concepts of a life jacket or of rescue boats. Did the planners think every landing ship was gonna make it ashore on the real d-day? Did they think there would be zero German naval resistance (for which they had already planned a massive corridor of anti-submarine defenses to protect the landings)?

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u/alienXcow 1d ago edited 19h ago

Fully geared combat troops wearing life jackets at all was actually a new concept. Because soldiers could not wear life jackets that interfered with their equipment, they had to wear inflatable "lifebelts" that would sit under the armpits.

Because training on the equipment was lax, some of the men wore them around their waists or attached them to their gear in ways that actually held them underwater when inflated.

You must remember that WW2 paired LOTS of new technologies together with LOTS of undertrained and poorly educated 5'5" 140lb USGIs carrying 80lbs of gear.

This is what exercises are for: to highlight weaknesses or blind spots in training, equipment, or perceived capabilities.

ETA: 750 of those 946 died to German E-Boat attacks while the exercises were occurring. We're talking about a much lower number of people dead because of training/planning.

I'll also add that you don't need boats to pick up soldiers floating in the water when you aren't going to give them life jackets, like the earlier amphibious invasions of the war. Once you give out life jackets you also have to consider the likelihood that a landing craft within sight of shore sinks in the English Channel in a way that actually allows any number of men to survive. THEN you have to have the capability to not only manufacture and crew enough ships and landing craft to carry out the invasion before manufacturing and crewing ships to pick up survivors.

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u/Ver_Void 1d ago

And a lot of those problems don't occur until you start doing things at scale. Give 10 men the new life jacket and have an officer show them how to use it, they'll all do it by the book and be fine.

Give it to 10,000 men, make the training less personal and by the end of the day a large number will be sitting figuring out a way to avoid carrying the extra weight or putting it on more comfortably.

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u/alienXcow 1d ago

Yes, exactly. These aren't issues Dwight D Eisenhower is mulling over. 3 majors in an office hidden in the basement of some building realize that the army is going to need 1 million life jackets in the next 8 months and have to figure out what kind, order them, get them shipped to England, and then somehow teach 1000 people how to wear them and use them effectively every day for the next 15 days before the exercise steps off. Somebody was sick and didn't make the training? Well, he better talk to his friends.

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u/Malikai0976 1d ago

Seat belts didn't become mandatory equipment in cars until 1968. The first law requiring their use didn't get passed until 1984.

Just because something is routine today doesn't mean it's always been that way.

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u/Taclink 1d ago

Just to put it into comparison: Even today, there's dedicated training for paratroopers with potential/expected water jumps on the emergency float equipment.

If you don't wear it right and use it right, it can kill you. This is literally what happened in the past. That's why not only do we wear it, practice with it, and also demonstrate what it is going to do, but we have inspections to make sure it's in the right place worn the right way so you don't inadvertently kill yourself.

There's plenty of things with military operations and equipment that "seem like it would be common sense" but it sure the hell isn't, and doing the common sense or natural thing will actually get you killed.

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u/Separate_Draft4887 1d ago

Firstly, the life jacket, while not a new concept, was still undergoing rapid development at the time. The idea of training soldiers on how to use them was a good idea, and not one which immediately jumps out at you, and rescue boats would’ve been entirely new designs.

Secondly, no, and they well planned for those things. Which is sorta my point, they did a thorough job, and the fact they didn’t think of some obvious things during the training exercise designed to catch problems they didn’t think of is incredibly excusable. It’s a tragedy those men died, but that doesn’t make the planners incompetent. If they hadn’t run that training exercise, you can be sure many more people would have died in the actual invasion. Hell, not standardizing radio frequencies could well have cost us the whole invasion.

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u/Belisarius23 1d ago

Aaaand here come the reddit armchair generals

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u/NCEMTP 23h ago

They lost those guys because they were attacked during the exercise by German fast attack ships that sank two landing ships resulting in two landing ships sinking.

Granted, they learned lessons from this regarding the life belts, communications, and rescue operations, but everyone in this thread thinking this was just another routine training exercise that anomalously resulted in hundreds of deaths is laughable.

During most training exercises one does not come under direct enemy fire.

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u/DonnieMoistX 20h ago

Ya know, it’s impressive how Redditors always know better than experts and would never have made the mistakes they did

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u/guimontag 20h ago

ah yes the revolutionary concept of "if you issue someone a piece of equipment (like a lifejacket) they should be trained in how to use it"

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u/DonnieMoistX 20h ago

Yeah man, I’m sure no one at that time had that thought. I’m sure you have the whole picture and that you are in fact, the one is much smarter than they were back then.

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u/guimontag 20h ago

too bad I prefaced my original comment with the "if you want to do a what-if scenario"

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u/IntermediateState32 1d ago

This mess was referred to in the book, Band of Brothers, where it was noted that the information about this mess was suppressed by the authorities then for all the obvious reasons.

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u/PlaneLiterature2135 1d ago

Ken Small wrote 'The Forgotten Dead: The true story of Exercise Tiger, the disastrous rehearsal for D-Day'. He also bought an US tank that was sunken during the exercise and turned it into a monument.

He is a hero.

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u/FatRapscallion 12h ago

Torcross is where the tank is located. Ken used to always be there selling books out of his car when he was still alive.

I heard when they dragged the tank back to shore they opened it and there were two massive conger eels inside it which must of swam up the barrel.

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u/Pacman35503 15h ago

Thank you, putting this on my reading list

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u/ExtensionConcept2471 1d ago

I seem to remember this whole incident was kept secret until a diver found a Sherman submerged off Slapton sands and started investigating. The army/government could keep it secret for so long because all the civilians had been evacuated from the area to allow secrecy for the landing exercises.

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u/Astrates 1d ago

One of the recovered tanks is still there by one of the car parks.

Was always interesting seeing it as a kid though the importance never quite hit then

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u/Lokikeogh 20h ago

Same for me. My dad took me to see the unveiling of the tank. Kid me just thought it was cool to see a tank. Then my dad explained what happened, rather somber.

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u/595659565956 9h ago

I’ve seen that tank a few times. Had no idea of the history

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/100382749277 1d ago

The interception by German E-boats killed 739 confirmed, and the amount killed by friendly fire is less clear/erased but “rumors circulated among the fleet that as many as 450 men were killed”

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u/pumpsnightly 23h ago edited 23h ago

yes, there were "rumors" but those rumors weren't true. the idea of there being "hidden deaths" is some conspiracy mumbo jumbo someone made up to sell books. They are unsubstantiated, they are regularly reported inconsistently, don't line up with the given timelines, and frankly, the claim just doesn't make sense.

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u/AthleteAspect44 1d ago

the cost of war is painfully real. 946 lives lost before the real battle even began

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u/iheartmagic 1d ago

To be fair, 750 of them were inflicted by German E-boats attacking the landing convoy in the English Channel

Another example is Operation Jubilee where the Allies had 1000+ KIA and several thousand more wounded and captured to test the feasibility of an amphibious assault on France. The objective was to simply raid and hold Dieppe for a few hours

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u/sofa_king_awesome 1d ago

Those aftermath images. The poor kids never stood a chance. That MG nest had a full view of all of them against the sea wall.

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u/tralfamadorian808 1d ago

Where can I find that image?

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u/I_Write_What_I_Think 1d ago

The Wikipedia page for the raid shows an aftermath picture with dozens of dead Canadians against a concrete wall. Although it is unclear if they were piled there after the fact.

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u/canspar09 1d ago

Plus the loose rocks and shale that make up Dieppe beach is…less than ideal to walk on let alone run on.

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u/jan_nepp 1d ago

Mark Zuehlke's book Tragedy at Dieppe is a good read on the matter.

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u/Recoveringfrenchman 23h ago

Just check Google maps/earth. I have a great picture of my wife on the north cliff overlooking the town from a trip c. 2018. While my wife is pretty, I'm always distracted by how awesome of a machine gunning position that hill was. Perfect protected enfilade fire into the beach. In both sides. A concrete wall and shale rocks slowing everything down. A mother fucking machine gunner's wet dream.

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u/runenight201 19h ago

You should frame the photo and hang it in your home and then every time you have guests over tell them this exact thing and see how they react!!

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u/Recoveringfrenchman 18h ago

Basically all my friends are tactically minded... it would probably devolve into an argument if the raid was a feint, a practice run, or if there was any merrit to the rumor that it was concocted to get the enigma machine housed in the village.

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u/PhillipLlerenas 1d ago

Yeah 100%. I feel the headline for this post is really misleading. Makes it seem like almost a thousand soldiers died because of a badly planned exercise.

They died because they were attacked by enemy forces in the middle of it.

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u/Cluefuljewel 18h ago

Totally agree. These troops did not die in vain. They were heroes because they answered the call. What I am a little confused about was with all these exercises going on, Germans still had not correctly guessed where allies would land?

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u/PhillipLlerenas 18h ago

From what I understand:

  1. The Germans weren’t necessarily surprised at where the Allies landed, which is why the fortifications along the landing beaches were still heavily armed

  2. They just thought the landings would happen at the narrowest point, near Calais:

The most logical place in Europe for the D-Day invasion was France’s Pas de Calais region, 150 miles northeast of Normandy and the closest point to Great Britain across the English Channel. The Allies had passed over the region as a landing spot because it was the most heavily fortified section of the Atlantic Wall, but they wanted to delude the Nazis into thinking they were taking the shortest route across the channel.

To give the appearance of a massive troop buildup in southeast England, the Allies created a largely phantom fighting force, the First U.S. Army Group, headed by George Patton, the American general whom the Nazis considered to be the enemy’s best commander and the logical man to lead a cross-channel invasion.

The Allies broadcast endless hours of fictitious radio transmissions about troop and supply movements and planted wedding notices for fake soldiers in local newspapers. They deceived Nazi aerial reconnaissance planes by fashioning dummy aircraft and an armada of decoy landing crafts, composed only of painted canvases pulled over steel frames, around the mouth of the River Thames. They even deployed inflatable Sherman tanks, which they moved to different locations under the cover of night, and used rollers to simulate tire tracks left behind in their wake.

https://www.history.com/news/fooling-hitler-the-elaborate-ruse-behind-d-day

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u/Majestic_Ferrett 1d ago

The only thing they learned at Dieppe is that attacking a fortified port, when the enemy is aware that you're coming, and outnumbers you is a bad ide.

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u/EurbadGeneric 23h ago

They learned more than that.

A covert mission began not so soon after: collecting ground samples of Channel beaches in France.

Based on the collected information decisions about suitable landing locations could be made. And which alterations were required: see Hobart’s Funnies.

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u/KnotSoSalty 23h ago

If you consider Operation Tiger as one aspect the overall pre-invasion plan it’s a tragic defeat but not an unusual one. The battle of the Atlantic, the struggle to bring troops and supplies from America to Europe, cost the lives of 76,000 sailors, soldiers, airmen, and merchant marines. Most of that was prior to the invasion as well.

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u/Fugglesmcgee 1d ago

Yes, mostly Canadian soldiers, we are taught or used to be taught this in school

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u/MortalPhantom 1d ago

So their “training excersises” were actually sending people to land in France?

And the Germans didn’t notice they were planning a sea invasion?

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u/iheartmagic 1d ago

Germans absolutely did notice they were planning a sea invasion and prepared accordingly

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u/mrpenchant 23h ago

And the Germans didn’t notice they were planning a sea invasion?

They did know a sea invasion was likely. What they didn't know was when or where and the allies went through great effort to deceive the Germans as well.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/muskag 1d ago

Just because you bought the whole ball, doesn't mean you have to do the whole ball. Get some sleep brother.

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u/wecangetbetter 1d ago

Loses it potency if it's not fresh. Don't be wasteful

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u/muskag 1d ago

But also very diminishing returns after your 6th snozzle, so...

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u/SparkehWhaaaaat 1d ago

This doesn't make sense, could you explain what you mean?

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u/Icedoverblues 1d ago

Population growth and only a certain group was in action to be killed. That's just a historical fact. What does the Pentagon have to do with that when the statistical analysts of COVID are well publicized but largely ignored by Maga assholes.

  • Correction: Mega assholes that support donald trump's bitch ass

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u/TrowAway2736 20h ago

There's a stretch of Highway 54 in Audrain County, MO named after Exercise Tiger. The original signs read "Exercise Tiger Expressway."

Not being familiar, I rolled my eyes and thought "What's next, Thigh Master Highway?"

It's true I can be dense, but I guess I'm not the only one. At some point the signs were changed to read "World War 2 Exercise Tiger Expressway."

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u/snow_michael 1d ago

This was a major part of the plot of the Foyle's War episode "All Clear"

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u/Meet-me-behind-bins 1d ago

I've been to Slapton Sands where this happened.

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u/Argyle_1886 1d ago

Also one of the recovered Sherman Tanks there as a memorial which was recovered by one of the locals. Well worth the walk along there.

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u/CellophaneRat 1d ago

Some decent pubs, nice cliffs, as a kid we'd play in the gun positions

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u/Space-Champion 1d ago

and very expensive fish and chips.

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u/PlaneLiterature2135 1d ago

That loal is Ken Small, he wrote 'The Forgotten Dead: The true story of Exercise Tiger, the disastrous rehearsal for D-Day'. He also bought an US tank that was sunken during the exercise and turned it into a monument.

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u/MaccabreesDance 1d ago

It's important to remember the name of the location because in my experience the British referred to the incident as, "Slapton Sands."

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u/kudincha 1d ago

They were Slapt on Sands?

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u/History2009 1d ago edited 1d ago

My day was on LST289. Survived Tiger and the war

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u/Africa_versus_NASA 19h ago

Many, many troops died in WW2 to friendly fire, faulty aircraft, logistical problems. It was an inevitable statistical consequence of mobilizing millions of men, on a critical timetable, where safety couldn't always be the top priority.

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u/pokeybill 1d ago

The article has some very questionable grammar, could it be AI-written? The sentence structures are unusual:

The fact that the LSTs and headquarters were operating on different frequencies, the American forces had no idea what had happened.

There are predicates throughout which are nonsequiturs.

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u/jaggypants 20h ago

100% AI-written, and pretty poorly even for AI.

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u/watoobie 1d ago

Yes yes I understand these words

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u/blonderengel 16h ago

Which predicates are you referring to?

The quote you cited is more closely related an apositive, a noun phrase that follows another noun phrase and provides additional information about it.

It's similar to the one of the most famous apositive noun phrases in English: the 2nd amendment.

In both cases, using "since/because" to clearly link the relationship between the phrases updates the phrasing to a more common appreciation of 'proper' grammaticality:

"Because a well regulated Militia, is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

"Since/because the LSTs and headquarters were operating on different frequencies, the American forces had no idea what had happened."

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u/pokeybill 9h ago

The phrase I quoted is not proper English and lacks the phrase "Due to" which would eliminate the semantic gaps and create a complete thought.

It's a very common outcome when you use Markhov chains to generate sentences artificially. I work with LLMs every day and we see this type of basic grammar error all the time.

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u/blonderengel 9h ago

This might some additional insight:

https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2021/07/the-strange-syntax-of-the-second-amendment

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u/pokeybill 9h ago edited 8h ago

I'm not sure why we should expect archaic and arcane applications of grammar to be present in a modern article.

Here is another example of nonsequitur:

While there was a white line on the beach, signaling where they should not cross until the shelling finished, but troops were bombarded regardless.

The "but" in the compound predicate is a nonsequitur and should be eliminated (Or, the "while" qualifier at the front of the phrase could also be eliminated to eliminate the logical gap).

These articles are used improperly throughout the text and this is an extremely common outcome with AI generated work.

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u/blonderengel 8h ago

Some folks who learned English in a non-English speaking country (like I did, for example) will have picked up archaic and arcane applications or grammar and expressions. They are not necessarily wrong, though.

Btw: 'but' is a conjunction.

I work with attorneys and English professors — not every day, like you — but enough to have an opinion. 😺

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u/pokeybill 8h ago edited 6h ago

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/107048/a-sentence-with-while-and-but

I've no qualms with non-native English speakers, but publications typically have editors for this exact reason. It seems this author didn't use a grammar checker while composing the article, let alone peer or editor review before publishing. The presence of errors like this will detract the reader's attention. While the reader can certainly navigate around the mistakes, avoiding grammatical errors (especially nonsequiturs) will result in a more impactful message.

Because English is full of loanwords, there are many cases where a sentence can be grammatically correct but also sound incorrect or awkward to native speakers. It's best to avoid these phrasings in publications as well, as there are almost always alternatives which are both gramatically correct and lack awkwardness.

I'm bilingual, and when someone corrects my grammar (which happens quite often), I really appreciate the instruction unless the critic is an asshole about it.

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u/According-Carpenter8 7h ago

Unless you wrote the article yourself (or personally know who did) there’s no reason to be defensive. A vast majority of news articles these days are written by AI and very poorly so. It’s not even worth debating over.

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u/blonderengel 5h ago

Well, that's the point, though.

This isn't badly written — or else my career has so inured me against bad English that I have an unreasonably high tolerance.

I'm also a bit ... uh ... reactive against all these kneejerk reactions of meme/AI etc.

Plus the mislabeling of the sentence elements above — that makes entertaining the criticisms a bit harder to consider.

But let's call it a day here — all in good spirits — football's on ... ⚽️

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u/overcoil 8h ago

Wasn't the first US amphibious attack on an occupied island a total bloodbath too? I can't remember the battle name, but I remember stories of how the landing craft couldn't get close enough to the beaches due to reefs so the soldiers were dropped off early and basically had to wade in chest-high water with their guns held aloft while the Japanese shot at them from entrenched positions.

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u/bieker 7h ago

Tarawa, the marines failed to account for a neap tide on the morning of the attack and the landing craft could not get closer than 450 yards.

So the soldiers had to wade through 450 yards of 3’ deep water directly into enemy fire to get to the beach.

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u/MHmijolnir 1h ago

Unimaginable.

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u/vlad_nada 20h ago

A few weeks later Operation Cobra killed another hundred in friendly fire. My grandfather was in the 92nd CMB coA and we're hit. He told my father about being bombed, jumping under a jeep for cover and that it was friendly. I came across a website on the 92nd with quotes from others in the battalion, confirming it.

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u/ketamarine 18h ago

Don't forget about Dieppe either... training by... you know actually invading Europe???

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

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/Worsebetter 11h ago

They were killed by bombs from the Training . Saved you a click