Disaster Before D-Day: Exercise Tiger
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2021
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The D-Day landings of June 6 1944 were the largest amphibious landing in the history of warfare, and are famed as a major turning point towards Allied victory. But they weren’t without planning and practice. In late April 1944, the Allies launched one of their trial runs, Exercise Tiger, off Slapton Sands in Devon. The aim was a closely choreographed landing, the result was a disaster. In this episode from our sibling podcast Warfare hear Dr Harry Bennett from the University of Plymouth discussing the players in this trial run, and how it became the Battle of Lyme Bay.
Watch The Lincolnshire Buffalo: With Dan Snow where Dan was given exclusive access to the WWII Buffalo LVT recently dug up in Crowland, Lincolnshire.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, hello, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. |
| 0:04.0 | Good to have you listen. |
| 0:05.0 | This week in 1944, British and Allied forces were preparing for D-Day's Normandy landing |
| 0:11.0 | as the greatest amphibious assault of all time. |
| 0:13.0 | And we have got some big news coming up folks, I guess we have. |
| 0:16.0 | History hit, working with brilliant historians, have uncovered a D-Day shipwreck for the first time. |
| 0:23.0 | That podcast coming up later this week. |
| 0:26.0 | In the meantime, we've got an episode from our brilliant sister pod, Warfare. |
| 0:30.0 | We're going to talk about exercise tiger, the disastrous exercise that took place off slapped in the sand |
| 0:35.0 | when German e-bokes got amongst a dress rehearsal for D-Day and sank, transports packed with attacking infantry. |
| 0:44.0 | It's a remarkable story and we've got Dr. Harry Bennett talking all about it from the University of Plymouth. |
| 0:50.0 | Speaking of amphibious assault, I want to tell you about another little project we've got going on at History Hit. |
| 0:55.0 | We've got to go on at History Hit TV at the moment. |
| 0:57.0 | We're hugely honored that we're invited by the discoverers of a second-mobile tractor vehicle, |
| 1:04.0 | a buffalo, a landing vehicle tract that was found in Kroland, Lincolnshire, in the fence in eastern England. |
| 1:13.0 | This brilliantly enthusiastic and volunteers have grown up with stories of these second-mobile vehicles |
| 1:19.0 | that were buried 30 feet below the soil just outside their town. |
| 1:23.0 | They went away, did the meticulous research required and discovered that there was truth to these stories. |
| 1:28.0 | They did some geophysed, they went digging, and they excavated an extraordinary, tracked landing craft |
| 1:35.0 | of the kind that you usually associate with the great campaigns of the Pacific War, going ashore in Iwo Jima, for example. |
| 1:41.0 | But these LVTs were used, they were used in the war in Europe. |
| 1:46.0 | Allied forces crossed the Rhine in 1945 into Germany proper. |
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