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ity of the 479-member chamber of militaryin 1988Forty years after D-Day, details of a disaster unfoldBy N. Y. Times News Service DARTMOUTH, England - For weeks the rumors would not go -away. Was it possible, neighbor asked neighbor in the Devon countryside as winter turned into spring, that several hundred bodies of American soldiers lay buried in an unmarked grave beneath the rich green turf in a pasture of a farm owned by Nolan Tope?When told of the “secret mass grave,” Tope, SO, was the loudest of the scoffers. He said he wouldn’t welcome anyone poking in his fields during lambing season, looking for dead Gl’s. He closed his farm to outsiders and threatened legal action against trespassers.But Dorothy Seekings was one of those convinced the field held a dark secret. She said she had seen the dead piled on the ground 40 years ago while the mass grave was prepared.“The bodies were in American uniforms,” she said of the mystery, which has only recently been cleared up by research into old United States Array records. “There were great mounds of earth in the field and I was told they were going to be buried there. I certainly never heard that they were moved.”In this section of Devon called the South Hams, Seekings’s account reawakened a time long past — thewar years when American troops preparing for the assault on the French seacoast occupied the tidy villages and set up camps in the green fields. The inhabitants were ordered out of the area and evacuated to other parts of the country. The 40th anniversary of D-Day on June 6 and the preparations for the invasion will be marked in local observances this spring.The selection of South Hams was not an arbitrary one. The coast on one side of the evacuated zone has five miles of pristine beach called Slapton Sands. American combat troops from the VII Array Corps used the wide beach and the broadwaters of Lyme Bay to train for theinvasion of France, code-named Operation Overlord. With low grassy dunes and fast-climbing hills, Slapton Sands closely resembled VII Corps’ destination in the coming invasion, Utah Beach in Normandy.The 3,000 evacuees held little animosity for the Americans. “It was a question then of doing your bit for the war effort, recalled John Hannaford, a butcher at Tor-cross at one end of the beach, who was 17 in 1944. “We were told to get out and it was a year before people were allowed to return.”In the spring of 1944, the waters in the area were choked with invasion landing craft, and in the fields, beneath camouflage nets, munitionsand supplies were stacked ready forD-day.Five weeks before the Normandy landings, American forces here staged Exercise Tiger, a nighttime operation to put troops and supplies ashore at Slapton Sands under simulated combat conditions.In the darkness, out on the cold waters of Lyme Bay, disaster struck.Somehow, several German E-boats — fast coastal raiders — slipped into Lyme Bay in the early morning hours of April 28 and put torpedoes into three of the unprotected landing ships carrying about(See Disaster, Page 11)
Newspaper Details
Salina Journal
Salina, Kansas, US
Thu, Apr 26, 1984
Page 13
Full Page
Clipped by
Carmel C.
IN, DZ 15 Jan 2019
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