Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 29, 1994 TAG: 9404290124
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SLAPTON, ENGLAND LENGTH: Medium
Before a remembrance service at the 13th-century parish church in Slapton, veterans walked near a Sherman tank memorial to the men of Exercise Tiger, who died off Slapton Sands in the early morning dark of April28, 1944.
Morning fog clung to a sand spit and to the steel gray sea 30 yards away, as one survivor sat by the monument and recalled the day his comrades died.
"I was very alone, and very frightened," said Richard Meredith, who spent five hours in 42-degree water that day.
He was 17, and kept thinking, "My mother was going to be so angry if I don't come home. I'm the youngest of six boys who were in the service then."
Meredith, of Danzers, Mass., went on to land at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6. "It was a lot safer that day. We had all kinds of protection," he said wryly.
On April28, only one British warship was providing escort for the U.S. Navy tank-landing ships, or LSTs.
Roger Shaeffer, of Bellevue, Wash., was 22 when LST 289 was hit by German torpedoes. "We saw a big ball of fire, trucks being blown through the air, bodies," he said. "We didn't know what happened."
His ship made it to shore with few casualties.
Exercise Tiger brought nearly four times the fatalities the division later lost in the D-Day landing.
After morning prayers at the memorial, a dozen American and 35 British veterans made their way to the small stone church in the village, where they were joined by U.S. and British officials and Slapton residents evacuated in 1943, before the secret landing practices began.
Villagers who couldn't fit into the church stood on the lush grass among the gravestones, joining in the hymns and prayers that boomed out over loudspeakers.
Evelyn Brannock of Perry, Kan., was there to remember her brother, Pvt. James Oliver Cottrell, who was 20 when he died on LST 531.
Brannock said her brother's body was never recovered, and her parents died without ever learning how he died.
"I'm a little bitter," she said.
Because of the secrecy surrounding D-Day, the disaster was kept quiet and the casualties were not announced until nearly two months after the Normandy invasion.
The full details were not known until 1974, when the records were declassified.
The first official mention of the disaster came at an Aug.5 briefing, when the casualty list from the exercise was included in post-D-Day reports.
One final casualty came that same day. Rear Adm. Don P. Moon, in charge of the American part of the exercise, killed himself, at least in part because of his role in the losses at Slapton Sands.
by CNB