Mark Khan - D-Day Assault: The Second World War Assault Training Exercises at Slapton Sands

To Bea my partner and Aimee my daughter.
Thank you both for being there.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Mark Khan 2014

ISBN 978 1 78159 384 4
eISBN 978 1 47383 729 4

The right of Mark Khan to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Introduction

A s a very small boy I used to be taken to Slapton Sands and on one occasion I remember playing on the beach and glanced down to find something lying on top of the shingle. The something I had found was a spent .30 calibre cartridge case. Pleased with my find and curious as to what it was, I took it home. It was my introduction to collecting and to military history, particularly the military history of Slapton Sands. As a schoolboy in the 1970s living in the village of Blackawton, at the weekend I used to walk to the beach at Slapton Sands, a distance of roughly five miles each way. I would scour the beach area for more spent cartridge cases and built up a collection of these and other Second World War related items as well. Often I would be joined by a good friend from school and my big brother.

Over the years my curiosity grew and I began to look for information about how the various items I had found came to be there. Information at the time was hard to come by, even though the Second World War had occurred only thirty years previously.

Local people were often not keen to talk about a period of time that many of them would rather forget. Additionally, the peaceful South Hams, like much of the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s was a very different world than it is today. People were less worldly-wise and lived in many ways a simpler lifestyle. For many the changes that occurred during the war years seemed to be almost too much for them to cope with. Subsequently this seemed to lead to an unwillingness to speak about them.

In time I grew up and left the area, although I returned many times to visit, and eventually to live there again. Meanwhile I read and researched about the area during the Second World War, and became aware of the part it had played and of the many American soldiers who had been based in South Devon and trained at Slapton Sands.

A desire grew to do something with the knowledge that I was acquiring. After many years, the opportunity finally came to do this. Working as a full-time military historian, the idea for this book was formed, to fill the gap in the recording of the true events that took place at Slapton Sands and their significance in relation to the outcome of the Second World War.

My original intention had been to focus on purely the military exercises. Much had already been written about the civilian evacuation of the South Hams, so I had not planned to cover this in any detail. However, once I started properly to research the subject, I became aware that the evacuation was an integral part of the story and needed to be included. It dawned on me how much fortitude had been shown by the evacuees and the important part that they played in unlocking the door of Hitlers fortress Europe. Further research uncovered stories of Government disdain and Treasury penny pinching towards those who had so willingly and uncomplainingly given up their homes and in many case suffered significant personal and financial loss. There were also those decent and fair-minded individuals who made the straightforward case that the people who had been evacuated must be treated fairly and properly looked after, and the story of how the Americans came to the rescue also came to light.

Slapton Sands is often mentioned in relation to the exercises that took place during January and May 1944. Unfortunately, this often focuses on the events of the night of 28 April 1944 when two landing craft where sunk and one badly damaged in Lyme Bay whilst en-route to take part in Exercise Tiger, resulting in a tragic loss of life. The story of the loss of the landing craft has become synonymous with Slapton Sands, and in the process the real story of the evacuation and the exercises and training that took place in the South Hams has become lost. The contribution that both the people and the area made to the success of the Normandy landings is often unrecognised, overshadowed by conspiracy theory, conjecture, plain misunderstanding or sometimes a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. This book is an attempt to redress this and to tell the story of the area and its people and also to fully recognise the contribution they made to the success of D-Day and the subsequent victory against Nazi Germany.

The story of D-Day is well known and is not detailed in this book, having been covered in great detail elsewhere. To the men taking part, it had been a long journey. Mostly citizen soldiers, they fought together alongside their friends and comrades, providing mutual support to each other. Many were injured and many killed in the battles to liberate Nazi occupied Europe. Some of the story of D-Day may be better understood once this book is read; how it was shaped by the events that took place during the training, experimenting and the many assault landing exercises that took place at Slapton Sands and its hinterland. D-Day itself was an enormous task. It was not only a brilliant triumph on the day and the days that followed it, but also in its planning and preparation beforehand. The assault training was a major component of this.

Visiting the South Hams area today it is difficult to imagine the events that took place in 1944. It is a beautiful area with much to see and do. Its people are friendly, courteous and helpful. If reading this book informs, educates and entertains I will have done my job as an author. I would aspire to go one step further by encouraging people to visit the area and enjoy meeting the local people. The countryside is wonderful and there are many attractions to visit. If whilst visiting and after reading this book they also take a moment to think about the events of 1944 in their true context, free from controversy and conspiracy then I have truly succeeded in what I set out to do.

Acknowledgements

No author is capable of producing a book without significant help from others. This has been said many times; it is now my turn to do so!