The disaster that may have saved D-Day

SLAPTON SANDS, England - Lured across the English Channel by an unexpected frenzy of radio chatter, the Nazi predators sliced through the waves toward an unknown enemy.

It was shortly after midnight on April 28, 1944. Within a matter of 2-1/2 hours, an ambush by a German E-boat flotilla had brought misery to hundreds of American families.

A secret dress rehearsal for D-Day had been interrupted with deadly consequences.

Nicknamed "Long Slow Targets" by their crews, the U.S. landing craft proved to be no match for the 50-mph German torpedo boats. The hit-and-run attack left two American vessels ablaze and sinking. A third had been struck in the stern and was badly damaged.

As hundreds of American servicemen floundered amid the burning oil and cold water off England's southern coast, futile cries of "help" and "mom" echoed across the darkness. At least 749 U.S. sailors and soldiers would be dead by dawn.

Code-named Exercise Tiger, the ill-fated D-Day dry run was at the time America's costliest incident of the war (only Pearl Harbor was worse). The attack claimed more than three times as many lives as the amphibious landing at Utah Beach in France, the assault they had been practicing for at Slapton Sands in picturesque Devon county.

But now, 65 years after the disaster was hushed-up by military chiefs, historians believe lessons learned from the little-known tragedy helped to ensure the success of the D-Day landings less than six weeks later.

"These people were training for a military operation in the midst of a war," said Dr. Harry Bennett, a World War II expert based at Britain's University of Plymouth. "Without Exercise Tiger, the liberation of Normandy, France and Europe might have been a more protracted and bloody process."

Haunted by carnage
For the servicemen who made it back to shore, such sentiments don't make the horrors they witnessed any easier to bear.

Many survivors say it isn't memories of Utah or Omaha beaches that haunt them decades later. It's the carnage of the pre-invasion practice gone wrong that live on in their nightmares.

Steve Sadlon, who was a radio operator aboard the first landing craft struck by the German E-boats that night, recalls being awakened by the "scraping" sound of a torpedo that failed to detonate. Moments later, an explosion ripped through LST 507, which was fully loaded with trucks, military equipment and soldiers. (LST is an acronym for Landing Ship, Tank.)

Steve Sadlon, 86, of Ilion, N.Y., earned a Purple Heart after being injured during Exercise Tiger.

"It was an inferno," said Sadlon, speaking from his home in Ilion in upstate New York. "The fire was circling the ship. It was terrible.

"Guys were burning to death and screaming. Even to this day I remember it. Every time I go to bed, it pops into my head. I can't forget it."

Sadlon, who was aged 20 at the time, retrieved his pistol and a floatation belt before leaping into the frigid English Channel.

"Guys were grabbing hold of us and we had to fight them off," he recalled. "Guys were screaming, 'Help, help, help' and then you wouldn't hear their voices anymore."

Tracers light the sky
Paul Gerolstein, then a gunner's mate 2nd class, recalls a fireball rising "60 or 70 feet in the air" after Sadlon's LST was struck by the second torpedo.

"Our radar gave us the German positions and we started to return fire," said Gerolstein, an 88-year-old retired police lieutenant who now lives in Port Charlotte, Fla. "I vividly remember the German tracers were light green while our tracers were red.

"The convoy was given orders to scatter and the battle was over before we knew it.

"But my captain, John Doyle, decided to stay. 'We came here to fight the Germans and we will stay here and fight,' he ordered. We went back and threw cargo nets over the side and picked up 70 or 80 survivors."

Gerolstein recalls working with a "strong as a bull" colleague named Gerhard Jensen to pull seven or eight wounded servicemen to safety.

Paul Segner / msnbc.com This Sherman tank, which was recovered from the sea about a mile off Slapton Sands, England, serves as a memorial to the U.S. servicemen killed while preparing for D-Day.

Sadlon ended up spending about four hours in the frigid English Channel before he was finally hauled aboard an American landing craft. Unconscious and suffering from hypothermia, he was initially mistaken for dead.

But, like many Exercise Tiger survivors, he would participate in the D-Day landings just 40 days later.

"In comparison to the E-boat attack, Utah Beach was a walk in the park," Sadlon said.

D-Day nearly scrapped
The deadly ambush left Allied commanders rattled. Ten U.S. officers with detailed knowledge of the looming Normandy invasion were missing and the possibility that any of them been taken prisoner on the German E-boats was a major concern. Scrapping "Operation Overlord," the name given to the D-Day landings, was discussed at the highest levels.

But the emergency ended when all ten bodies were eventually recovered. The German crews had no idea they had stumbled upon a secret test run for the Normandy invasion.

The reverberations of the disaster, though, were to last for decades. Determined to ensure the sneak attack would not jeopardize the planned D-Day assaults and concerned about the impact on morale, historians say the U.S. military moved to keep the disaster cloaked in secrecy.

Doctors treating injured soldiers and sailors at English hospitals were told to act as if they were veterinarians treating animals. Injuries and ailments only. No questions were to be asked about what had occurred. Medical staff were also told not to keep any records. 

Officials informed victims' families simply that they were "missing in action" after maneuvers at sea. The servicemen were threatened with court-martial if they ever discussed what had occurred. Many took the "ever" very literally.

Nathan Resnick, who was aboard one of the other landing craft in the attacked convoy, said: "We were told not to say anything. I was married for 40-something years and never told my wife a word."

Frank Derby, a gunner's mate 3rd class who now lives in Fallston, Md., added: "Our officers made it very clear that we'd be court-martialed if we breathed a word of it. That scared the hell out of all of us."

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