2RHPZ
06-14-2004, 12:33 PM
Untold Stories of D-Day
By Thomas B. Allen
A grand hoax, top secret maps, and live-ammunition
rehearsals set the stage for June 6, 1944, when 200,000
soldiers stormed Normandy's beaches to help free Europe.
The BIGOT maps and documents were created in isolated
cocoons of secrecy. One was hidden in Selfridges
department store in London. BIGOT workers entered and
left Selfridges by a back door, many of them knowing
only that they were delivering scraps of information
that somehow contributed to the war effort. Others with
BIGOT clearances worked on Allied staffs scattered
around London and southern England. So restricted was
the BIGOT project that when King George visited a
command ship and asked what was beyond a curtained
compartment, he was politely turned away because, as a
sentinel officer later said, "Nobody told me he was a
Bigot."
The system occasionally broke down....The strangest
breach of security came from the London Daily Telegraph,
whose crossword puzzles alarmed BIGOT security officers.
One puzzle, on May 2, included "Utah" in its answers.
Two weeks later, "Omaha" appeared as an answer. The
puzzle's author, a schoolmaster, was placed under
surveillance. Next came "Mulberry," code name for
artificial harbors that were secretly being built in
England for use off invasion beaches. Then came the most
alarming answer of all: "Neptune."
This time the schoolmaster was arrested. Confounded
investigators finally decided that the words had been
the product of an incredible series of coincidences. Not
until 1984 was the mystery solved: One of the
schoolmaster's pupils revealed that he had picked up the
words while hanging around nearby camps and
eavesdropping on soldiers' conversations. He then passed
the odd words on to his unwitting schoolmaster when he
asked his pupils to provide ingredients for his
crosswords.
But nothing was more secret?or more vital to Operation
Neptune?than the mosaic of Allied intelligence reports
that cartographers and artists transformed into the
multihued and multilayered BIGOT maps. On them were
portrayed details of Hitler's vaunted Atlantic Wall, a
network of coastal defenses designed to repel invaders.
To discover what the Allied invaders faced, American,
British, and French operatives risked their lives?and
sometimes gave their lives?in the process of filling in
the BIGOT maps. Revelations about Normandy's undulating
seafloor came from frogmen who also got sand samples on
beaches patrolled by German sentries. Such BIGOT map
notations as "antitank ditch around strongpoint" or
"hedgehogs 30 to 35 feet (9 to 10 meters) apart" were
often the gifts of French patriots. French laborers
conscripted by the Nazis paced distances between
obstacles or kept track of German troop movements. A
housepainter, hired to redecorate German headquarters in
Caen, stole a blueprint of Atlantic Wall fortifications.
French Resistance networks passed on precious bits of
information, particularly the condition of bridges and
canal locks. Wireless telegraph operators transmitted in
bursts to evade German radio-detection teams. Other
messages got to England in capsules, borne by homing
pigeons that the Royal Air Force had delivered to French
Resistance agents in cages parachuted into
German-occupied Normandy. Germans, aware of the winged
spies, used marksmen and falcons to bring them down. But
thousands of messages got through.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The disaster that could have scuppered Overlord
By Ben Fenton
(Filed: 26/04/2004)
At four minutes past two in the morning on April 28, 1944, the
prosaically-named USS LST-507 was torpedoed as it approached Slapton
Sands on the Devon side of Lyme Bay.
The moon had just dropped beneath the horizon of a calm, dark sea
and, until that moment, all was going well with Exercise Tiger.
Then the landing ship, packed to the gunwales with men and armoured
equipment, erupted and was soon aflame from stem to stern.
The initial explosion was the first sign for the commanders of
Exercise Tiger, a 30,000-man, 300-vessel dress rehearsal for the
Normandy landings, that things had gone horribly wrong.
In the next 10 minutes, USS LST-531 had been torpedoed and sunk and
USS LST-289 hit and crippled, its stern blown clean off.
By the end of the night, 198 US Navy personnel and 551 US Army
soldiers, including hundreds of irreplaceable specialist engineers
and 10 senior officers, were dead or missing.
The loss of three LSTs - landing ship, tank - meant that there would
be no reserve of any kind for the actual landings, due to start 38
days later.
But the scale of Operation Overlord, the name given to the D-Day
landings, and the unstoppable momentum of its build-up meant that
the great tragedy of Slapton Sands had to be ignored, hushed up and
consigned to the later study of historians.
Bad as it was, it could all have been far worse. In all, there were
eight LSTs at sea that night when a nine-boat patrol of German motor
torpedo boats sailed through the Royal Navy's protective screen.
The landing craft were part of an eight-day exercise meant to
foreshadow the June landings and Slapton had been chosen for the
rehearsal because of its close resemblance to what would become Utah
beach on the east coast of the Cotentin peninsula.
Earlier in the day, LSTs had landed more than 20,000 infantrymen and
amphibious tanks of the US 4th Infantry Division on Slapton, a
three-mile stretch of shingle on the south Devon coast between
Torbay and Plymouth.
The night-time rehearsal was for the back-up teams that would be
needed on Utah, the second wave consisting of army engineers and the
heavy equipment that could not be put ashore in the vicious opening
of the invasion.
For security, the hard-pressed Royal Navy relied mostly on the
picket of vessels strung out along the outer edge of Lyme Bay.
Originally, a First World War-era destroyer, Scimitar, and a
corvette, Azalea, were assigned to protect the convoy, but Scimitar
was damaged in a collision the day before and had to put in to port.
A communications failure meant that no replacement was sent to help
the convoy until it was too late.
On the night of April 28, the LSTs, unknown to any of the ships'
captains, had followed inaccurately typed communications orders and
were using a slightly different radio frequency from the corvette or
the picket. The patrol of German vessels, attracted by the large
number of radio communications obviously coming from the west side
of the bay, closed in, passing through the picket line.
They were seen by one of the naval ships, which reported the attack
to the corvette. While the convoy's only protector moved off to find
the intruders, its captain assumed the LSTs would have heard the
warning and taken evasive action. But they did not and, unprotected,
steamed on towards the shore, presenting an easy target to the nine
supercharged E-boats of the 5th and 9th Schnellboote Flotillas.
Fortunately for the remaining LSTs, the Germans carried only two
torpedoes each that night instead of the usual four. They were
enough to account for LSTs 507 and 531, which sustained 202 and 424
dead respectively. Another 123 were killed on board LST 289. But
although the losses were awful, there was an even greater concern to
Gen Dwight D Eisenhower and his team of D-Day planners.
The 10 senior officers lost that night were all "bigoted", meaning
that they were cleared to see information in the Bigot category, a
classification higher than Top Secret which was used for all
Overlord material.
If any of the 10 had been taken prisoner by the E-boats, something
that the confusion of the night had made eminently possible, they
might have been persuaded to part with vital information, including
the location of Utah beach.
The whole success of Overlord lay in convincing the Germans that the
Normandy landings were a diversionary attack with the real assault
to come opposite the Kent coast in the Pas de Calais.
While those 10 men were missing, Eisenhower might have to work on
the assumption that his landings would be met with the full force of
the German army, with disastrous consequences.
Huge efforts were made to recover bodies from Lyme Bay and, against
all odds, the 10 officers were found.
The US Army did not acknowledge the disaster of Slapton until well
after D-Day but there was not, despite what post-war conspiracy
theorists claimed, any effort to cover up the extent of the
casualties.
In the event, the 4th Infantry Division landed safely at Utah beach
on June 6, 1944, suffering casualties only 10 per cent of the number
lost in the chill waters of Lyme Bay.
Also story in topic at:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16100
By Thomas B. Allen
A grand hoax, top secret maps, and live-ammunition
rehearsals set the stage for June 6, 1944, when 200,000
soldiers stormed Normandy's beaches to help free Europe.
The BIGOT maps and documents were created in isolated
cocoons of secrecy. One was hidden in Selfridges
department store in London. BIGOT workers entered and
left Selfridges by a back door, many of them knowing
only that they were delivering scraps of information
that somehow contributed to the war effort. Others with
BIGOT clearances worked on Allied staffs scattered
around London and southern England. So restricted was
the BIGOT project that when King George visited a
command ship and asked what was beyond a curtained
compartment, he was politely turned away because, as a
sentinel officer later said, "Nobody told me he was a
Bigot."
The system occasionally broke down....The strangest
breach of security came from the London Daily Telegraph,
whose crossword puzzles alarmed BIGOT security officers.
One puzzle, on May 2, included "Utah" in its answers.
Two weeks later, "Omaha" appeared as an answer. The
puzzle's author, a schoolmaster, was placed under
surveillance. Next came "Mulberry," code name for
artificial harbors that were secretly being built in
England for use off invasion beaches. Then came the most
alarming answer of all: "Neptune."
This time the schoolmaster was arrested. Confounded
investigators finally decided that the words had been
the product of an incredible series of coincidences. Not
until 1984 was the mystery solved: One of the
schoolmaster's pupils revealed that he had picked up the
words while hanging around nearby camps and
eavesdropping on soldiers' conversations. He then passed
the odd words on to his unwitting schoolmaster when he
asked his pupils to provide ingredients for his
crosswords.
But nothing was more secret?or more vital to Operation
Neptune?than the mosaic of Allied intelligence reports
that cartographers and artists transformed into the
multihued and multilayered BIGOT maps. On them were
portrayed details of Hitler's vaunted Atlantic Wall, a
network of coastal defenses designed to repel invaders.
To discover what the Allied invaders faced, American,
British, and French operatives risked their lives?and
sometimes gave their lives?in the process of filling in
the BIGOT maps. Revelations about Normandy's undulating
seafloor came from frogmen who also got sand samples on
beaches patrolled by German sentries. Such BIGOT map
notations as "antitank ditch around strongpoint" or
"hedgehogs 30 to 35 feet (9 to 10 meters) apart" were
often the gifts of French patriots. French laborers
conscripted by the Nazis paced distances between
obstacles or kept track of German troop movements. A
housepainter, hired to redecorate German headquarters in
Caen, stole a blueprint of Atlantic Wall fortifications.
French Resistance networks passed on precious bits of
information, particularly the condition of bridges and
canal locks. Wireless telegraph operators transmitted in
bursts to evade German radio-detection teams. Other
messages got to England in capsules, borne by homing
pigeons that the Royal Air Force had delivered to French
Resistance agents in cages parachuted into
German-occupied Normandy. Germans, aware of the winged
spies, used marksmen and falcons to bring them down. But
thousands of messages got through.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The disaster that could have scuppered Overlord
By Ben Fenton
(Filed: 26/04/2004)
At four minutes past two in the morning on April 28, 1944, the
prosaically-named USS LST-507 was torpedoed as it approached Slapton
Sands on the Devon side of Lyme Bay.
The moon had just dropped beneath the horizon of a calm, dark sea
and, until that moment, all was going well with Exercise Tiger.
Then the landing ship, packed to the gunwales with men and armoured
equipment, erupted and was soon aflame from stem to stern.
The initial explosion was the first sign for the commanders of
Exercise Tiger, a 30,000-man, 300-vessel dress rehearsal for the
Normandy landings, that things had gone horribly wrong.
In the next 10 minutes, USS LST-531 had been torpedoed and sunk and
USS LST-289 hit and crippled, its stern blown clean off.
By the end of the night, 198 US Navy personnel and 551 US Army
soldiers, including hundreds of irreplaceable specialist engineers
and 10 senior officers, were dead or missing.
The loss of three LSTs - landing ship, tank - meant that there would
be no reserve of any kind for the actual landings, due to start 38
days later.
But the scale of Operation Overlord, the name given to the D-Day
landings, and the unstoppable momentum of its build-up meant that
the great tragedy of Slapton Sands had to be ignored, hushed up and
consigned to the later study of historians.
Bad as it was, it could all have been far worse. In all, there were
eight LSTs at sea that night when a nine-boat patrol of German motor
torpedo boats sailed through the Royal Navy's protective screen.
The landing craft were part of an eight-day exercise meant to
foreshadow the June landings and Slapton had been chosen for the
rehearsal because of its close resemblance to what would become Utah
beach on the east coast of the Cotentin peninsula.
Earlier in the day, LSTs had landed more than 20,000 infantrymen and
amphibious tanks of the US 4th Infantry Division on Slapton, a
three-mile stretch of shingle on the south Devon coast between
Torbay and Plymouth.
The night-time rehearsal was for the back-up teams that would be
needed on Utah, the second wave consisting of army engineers and the
heavy equipment that could not be put ashore in the vicious opening
of the invasion.
For security, the hard-pressed Royal Navy relied mostly on the
picket of vessels strung out along the outer edge of Lyme Bay.
Originally, a First World War-era destroyer, Scimitar, and a
corvette, Azalea, were assigned to protect the convoy, but Scimitar
was damaged in a collision the day before and had to put in to port.
A communications failure meant that no replacement was sent to help
the convoy until it was too late.
On the night of April 28, the LSTs, unknown to any of the ships'
captains, had followed inaccurately typed communications orders and
were using a slightly different radio frequency from the corvette or
the picket. The patrol of German vessels, attracted by the large
number of radio communications obviously coming from the west side
of the bay, closed in, passing through the picket line.
They were seen by one of the naval ships, which reported the attack
to the corvette. While the convoy's only protector moved off to find
the intruders, its captain assumed the LSTs would have heard the
warning and taken evasive action. But they did not and, unprotected,
steamed on towards the shore, presenting an easy target to the nine
supercharged E-boats of the 5th and 9th Schnellboote Flotillas.
Fortunately for the remaining LSTs, the Germans carried only two
torpedoes each that night instead of the usual four. They were
enough to account for LSTs 507 and 531, which sustained 202 and 424
dead respectively. Another 123 were killed on board LST 289. But
although the losses were awful, there was an even greater concern to
Gen Dwight D Eisenhower and his team of D-Day planners.
The 10 senior officers lost that night were all "bigoted", meaning
that they were cleared to see information in the Bigot category, a
classification higher than Top Secret which was used for all
Overlord material.
If any of the 10 had been taken prisoner by the E-boats, something
that the confusion of the night had made eminently possible, they
might have been persuaded to part with vital information, including
the location of Utah beach.
The whole success of Overlord lay in convincing the Germans that the
Normandy landings were a diversionary attack with the real assault
to come opposite the Kent coast in the Pas de Calais.
While those 10 men were missing, Eisenhower might have to work on
the assumption that his landings would be met with the full force of
the German army, with disastrous consequences.
Huge efforts were made to recover bodies from Lyme Bay and, against
all odds, the 10 officers were found.
The US Army did not acknowledge the disaster of Slapton until well
after D-Day but there was not, despite what post-war conspiracy
theorists claimed, any effort to cover up the extent of the
casualties.
In the event, the 4th Infantry Division landed safely at Utah beach
on June 6, 1944, suffering casualties only 10 per cent of the number
lost in the chill waters of Lyme Bay.
Also story in topic at:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16100