Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 28, 1994 TAG: 9404280228
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER Note: above
DATELINE: VICKER LENGTH: Long
Vance Martin and Jack Cumbie were 18 years old and fast asleep on their ships when they got their first taste of war.
It was nearly a drowning gulp of sea water.
Fifty years later, as the victorious wartime allies on two continents prepare to commemorate the silver anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France, some veterans are reflecting on another, more obscure anniversary.
For Martin, now a retired Radford Army Ammunition Plant worker, and Cumbie, a retired Roanoke restaurateur, the terrifying events that played out on the moonless morning of April 28, 1944,in the English Channel remain their defining memories of World War II.
"I think about that just as much as I do the invasion," Cumbie says. "It's something you carry with you."
Yet for all the time that has passed since then, it's only in the past decade that historians - and even the veterans themselves - have come to understand what really happened that caused more than 700 Americans to die in the one of the nation's worst military training disasters.
\ Martin hailed from Montgomery County; Cumbie from Vinton. With World War II in progress, Martin was drafted into the Navy; Cumbie volunteered.
In the spring of 1944, both young men found themselves stationed in southern England, where the invasion force that would go on to liberate Europe from the Nazis was taking shape.
Allied commanders had already picked a stretch of the Normandy coast as their invasion site. Next, they found a beach in southern England that closely resembled one of their targets in France.
Throughout the spring of 1944, the allies destined for Utah Beach rehearsed amphibious landings off Slapton Sands - often with live ammunition fired in front of them, to truly simulate the conditions they'd face.
In the dark morning hours of April 28, Martin, Cumbie and thousands of other men found themselves part of the most elaborate mock invasion yet.
Exercise Tiger had begun the day before, when the first wave of assault troops had "stormed" ashore.
Out in the English Channel, the last convoy of eight troop ships (called 'landing ship, tank,' or LST for short) sailed through the night, intending to play the role of the "follow-on" forces that would arrive on D-Day plus One.
Martin dozed in his bunk on LST 289; Cumbie was asleep on LST 499.
About 2 a.m., both men were awakened by the alarms of "general quarters" - the call to battle stations.
Cumbie figured it was just another drill. He dashed to his assigned post; as a "talker" for a 20-millimeter gun, he donned headphones to receive firing orders and pass them on to the gunner. "I put the earphones on and heard the fellow say, 'Torpedo off starboard.' I turned around and said, 'Listen to that fool.' But by then we were beginning to turn and I knew it was no maneuver then."
Over on LST 289, "everybody was lazy getting up," Martin remembers. Those sailors, too, thought this was just some admiral's idea of a war game.
But then Martin heard the officers yelling "get the hell going, this is the real thing!"
"We got going then," he says.
As he ran to his post on the gun turret, Martin felt his ship jolted by gunfire. His fellow gunners were already in place, firing wildly into the night.
With the red bursts of tracer fire arcing so prettily across the sky, "it looked like Christmastime," Martin remembers thinking.
Martin strapped himself into his gun turret, but found there was little to do. The Germans were so close, and moving so fast, the Americans couldn't get a fix on them.
\ The Germans had gotten lucky. Nine E-boats - small, fast ships that hunted with torpedoes - had been on routine patrol in the channel when they picked up heavy radio traffic from one of the English ports. They suspected merchant ships carrying war supplies.
But when they went to investigate, they spotted an even more inviting target - the final convoy of Exercise Tiger LSTs, protected by just a single British warship.
And as it turned out, that escort wasn't even on the same radio frequency as the American troop ships.
The German torpedoes sliced through the water toward their victims.
\ LST 507 took the first hit and burst into flames. A few minutes later, LST 531 exploded.
"We didn't know what was going on," Martin recalls. "It looked like a big haystack blowing up" - the other ships went up in flames that fast.
Except as these "haystacks" exploded, Martin could see bodies flying through the illuminated sky.
His ship lurched into a series of zig-zags designed to evade the torpedoes racing toward them.
It worked.
"We had a good lookout who saw the torpedoes coming," Cumbie says. "If he hadn't spotted it, we'd have been sunk, too."
But the 289, with Martin on board, wasn't so lucky.
A torpedo slammed into the rear of the ship; the stern shattered, spewing oil on the deck.
Martin's call had been a close one. His gun had been crumpled in the explosion. With his ship now burning, he tried to leave his gunners' seat, but found his safety belt had jammed shut. Thinking quickly, he remembered the knife in his pocket and cut himself free.
Martin grabbed a hose and fought the fire, his ears still ringing from the explosion.
But his ears could still pick up one unmistakable - and horrifying - sound. "You could hear men out there, yelling for help, with the oil burning on the water. You couldn't hardly do anything."
Two ships sank. Five others - including Cumbie's 499 - followed standard procedure, and zig-zagged back to port. The eighth, Martin's 289, evacuated many of its men, but stayed afloat - and limped back into harbor.
The next day was Saturday, but, as Cumbie recalls, all the men of the 499 marched straight to church anyway. "We didn't go to church too often in England," he says. But that morning, "we thanked the good Lord that we made it."
To this day, the death toll from Exercise Tiger remains a matter of dispute - the U.S. military says 749 died, some veterans and amateur historians put the figure closer to 1,000.
No matter the number, one thing is agreed upon: One reason so many men died is that they hadn't been trained how to use their newly-issued life preservers. Instead of fastening the devices under their armpits as they were supposed to, the men hooked them around their waists - which seemed a more natural position.
Too late, the men found that when the life preservers were inflated, the powerful tubes flipped them upside down. Many men drowned that way, trapped beneath the waves in their own life preserver.
\ The disaster off Slapton Sands had an immediate impact on Allied preparations for D-Day, says Paul Stillwell, the chief historian at the U.S. Naval Academy's Naval Institute and the author of a new book on the Normandy invasion.
First of all, it exposed a long series of mix-ups.
The radio frequencies were straightened out. The new life preservers were scrapped in favor of the old variety.
The attack on Exercise Tiger also revealed what may have been a fatal flaw in D-Day planning: Exposure to German E-boats.
To correct that, Stillwell says, the Americans hustled in more than 100 Coast Guard vessels and Navy P.T. boats to help guard the invasion fleet. "Maybe it was just a psychological lesson, but Tiger showed there was a need for vigilance," Stillwell says.
As part of the allies' renewed vigilance, all the men involved in Exercise Tiger were threatened with court martials if they told anyone about the accident. Martin managed to smuggle a letter home anyway, telling his mother he'd been torpedoed but was OK.
Military authorities didn't release any information on Tiger's casualties until after D-Day. By then, Stillwell says, the event was simply lost in the other wartime news. Not until the 1980s did historians begin writing books on the subject.
As a result, many Tiger veterans feel they haven't gotten proper recognition for what they went through. "Not that we need any glory," Martin says, "but it ought to be told."
by CNB