Moon Over Lyme Bay

A Suppressed Disaster Before D-Day

He thought that this was no day to die. As Angelo Crapanzano clung to a raft in the freezing cold water, he could not stop thinking about how he had never been with a woman and how he could not leave the world without rectifying that. In the pitch-black night floating in Lyme Bay, he had no sense of direction. He did not know who had attacked their ships or whether further danger lurked nearby. He wondered if rescue would come or if capture awaited them. Around him echoed the cries of pain and despair of his fellow officers. As time dragged on, the voices gradually faded. One by one, the men succumbed to exhaustion and cold, slipping into unconsciousness and releasing their grip. Three soldiers chose to swim away in a desperate attempt to find land, despite Crapanzano’s warning that they had no idea which way to go. They vanished into the darkness. Nearby, an Army captain gripping the raft lost his mind, screaming as he let go and disappeared into the sea.

LST

Steven Sadlon enlisted in the U.S. Navy on January 12, 1943. He eventually boarded LST-507 at Evansville on the Mississippi River. LSTs, or Landing Ship Tanks, were used for transporting troops, vehicles, and equipment directly onto beaches during amphibious assaults. Since they were large, slow ships, this made them easy targets for enemy attack and crew members would sarcastically refer to the vessels as “Large Slow Targets.”

In April 1944, while stationed in England, Sadlon participated in Exercise Tiger, a rehearsal for the Normandy invasion. On April 28, LST-507 entered the English Channel as part of the exercise, along with seven other LSTs destined for Slapton Sands, England.After midnight, Sadlon, serving as a Radioman on the ship, heard a torpedo pass beneath the vessel before another struck the auxiliary engine room. The explosion knocked him unconscious and set the ship ablaze. “I was in my chair when the explosion occurred,” he recalled, “and my head hit the overhead and the transformer went down and it was a good thing I wasn’t in back of it, since transformers were as big as a refrigerator.” After regaining consciousness, he reported to his station, destroyed the ship’s secret codes as required by procedure, and retrieved his gun from the crew’s quarters in case he encountered the attackers. “I wasn’t supposed to have a revolver,” he admitted, “but I kept one to carry ashore on liberty in London for protection.”

As fires spread, Sadlon peered into the tank deck below and observed trapped soldiers and sailors amid the flames. “I heard the screams—just a horrible, horrible sight. They couldn’t help themselves. They had been in the tank deck waiting for the landing and ready to unload.” He rushed to the rear of the ship and saw that his friends were there among the gathered soldiers and sailors. A signalman was refusing to leave: “I’m not going into that water,” he stated. “It’s too cold.” Sadlon responded: “You have two choices. Either you burn to death or you freeze to death. I’m going to take my chances of freezing to death because I don’t want to burn to death because those flames are real close.”

Sadlon and several others jumped into the freezing, oil-covered water to avoid burning aboard the ship. They struggled to move away from the flames sustained by the diesel oil in the water: “We scattered the flames with our hands and we got away from the ship.” Sadlon heard a low, mechanical humming sound and thought that a small boat may be approaching. “Help!” he screamed, but an assistant navigator in the water with him talked him out of it: “Save your breath, it won’t do you any good.” Sadlon kept quiet and within moments he lost consciousness and was now one of many bodies floating in the frigid water.

Crappy

Crapanzano, a Petty Officer First Class of the LST-507, had begun to feel the onset of illness. He was scheduled with another officer to lead the engine room watch from midnight until 4:00 a.m. As he stretched out in his bunk before the shift, he immediately sensed something was wrong. His heart was pounding rapidly, and he recognized the unmistakable signs of a high fever. Despite his condition, he reported to the engine room at midnight with three other sailors, feeling weak and uncertain how long he could remain on duty.

Not long after, the engineering officer arrived. Crapanzano admitted he was unwell and was promptly instructed to report to the sick bay. There, the pharmacist’s mate checked his temperature and found it had climbed to 104 degrees. He told Crapanzano firmly that he should be resting, not standing watch. Crapanzano suspected the fever was a reaction to a recent tetanus booster, recalling that he had experienced a similar response during basic training. Though still burning with fever, he returned briefly to inform the engineering officer of the diagnosis. The officer told him to go back to his quarters and assured him that he would take over the watch. By then, it was around 1:00 a.m.

As he made his way back to his bunk, Crapanzano experienced an odd sensation:it felt almost like a warning, urging him to locate his life jacket and keep it close. Life jackets were often left scattered carelessly throughout the berthing area, and many crewmen neglected to carry them properly. After searching, he found his resting atop a locker, marked with his nickname, “Crappy,” scrawled across the front. He placed it beside his pillow and soon drifted into sleep.

He was jolted awake by the blare of the action stations alarm. Reacting instantly, he slipped on his life vest, hurried to the ladder, and descended into the engine room. His watch read 1:55. Gunfire from the 40mm mounts echoed overhead. When he asked an officer what was happening, the man shrugged and replied, “I guess they’re trying to make it as real as possible.”

Crapanzano resumed his duties, adjusting engine speeds as commands came down from the bridge and logging each change. His final entry was made at 2:30. Moments later, an enormous explosion tore through the ship. The roar was overwhelming and darkness swallowed the compartment. He was thrown violently, striking his head as he fell. After briefly losing consciousness, he came to with freezing seawater pouring around his legs. He scrambled up the ladder to escape.

A torpedo had struck the auxiliary engine room, just in front of the compartment where he had been working. The six men stationed there likely died instantly, unaware of what had hit them. The blast had knocked out power and lighting. With the pumps disabled, there was no way to combat the spreading fire. Once on deck, Crapanzano encountered chaos: “The ship was burning furiously from the bow almost right down to the stern. Even the water was burning around the ship. There was fuel oil burning in the water because some of the storage tanks had ruptured from the force of the explosion.” Army DUKW trucks stored on the tank deck, loaded with gasoline, were also ablaze.

The ship’s captain ordered the crew to jettison ammunition. The men formed lines and began passing cans of 40mm shells overboard. After roughly ten minutes, the captain realized the ship could not be saved and gave the command to abandon it. At that very instant, another torpedo streaked past the stern, missing by mere feet, as the men watched in horror: “It was a terrifying moment,”Crapanzano recounted.

About half an hour after the initial strike, the soldiers and sailors left the ship. Disorder and fear reigned. Many of the Army personnel lacked experience in maritime emergencies. While most Navy sailors had properly secured their life jackets, several soldiers wore their inflatable belts incorrectly around their waists rather than under their arms. There was no time to correct them. Men leapt into the sea in desperation, sometimes landing on others already struggling in the water. What do we do now? was their prevailing thought. Crapanzano swam toward the stern, one of the few areas not engulfed in burning fuel. Others clung to the ship’s exposed screws as it tilted steadily. The ocean was bitterly cold.

Soon, a large oval life raft drifted near them. Though its interior had been scorched away after passing through flames, its outer ring remained afloat. Eleven men seized it, wrapping their arms tightly around the rim. They kicked hard to move clear of the burning wreckage and to keep circulation in their numbing limbs. Crapanzano was now left to wonder: Will they send help?

Nightmare

Medical personnel were assigned to every LST, but their ability to treat the wounded during combat was modest at best. Among those serving aboard LST-507 was Lieutenant Eugene Eckstam, Medical Officer. When the alarm rang out, he hurried to the wardroom, which functioned as the ship’s makeshift first-aid station. The space was spare: two tables bolted to the deck, a bench along the outer bulkhead, and a metal cabinet secured to the wall containing the ship’s medical supplies. While LSTs could later be converted into temporary hospital vessels, in transit they carried only the bare essentials.

On reaching the wardroom, Eckstam learned that shots had been fired, though no one knew from where. The prevailing assumption was that a gunner on a nearby vessel had been firing at imagined targets in the dark. Since the noise had subsided, Eckstam decided to go above deck to assess the situation himself.

While Eckstam was passing the captain’s cabin, a violent explosion erupted: an overwhelming blast followed by the wrenching grind of twisting steel. The force hurled him to his knees. Dust and rust cascaded down as the lights failed, plunging the passageway into blackness. In the stunned silence that followed, his knees throbbed. What just happened? The thought echoed in his head.

Though the ship had lost power, Eckstam had memorized the locations of the emergency battle lanterns. One was within arm’s reach, mounted across from the captain’s door. He seized it and quickly located the others, restoring patches of light to the darkened corridor. The explosion had torn the first-aid cabinet partly from the wall; it hung askew, its doors flung open and its contents scattered across the deck.

The wounded began arriving gradually. Some managed to walk in on their own; others were carried or supported by shipmates. There were fewer casualties than he had feared. One man had suffered a fractured femur, which Eckstam stabilized with a splint. As reports filtered in, however, the broader picture grew grim. The ship’s midsection was ablaze, an impassable furnace cutting off movement between bow and stern on both the main deck and below.

Eckstam inspected every accessible compartment, searching for injured men and preparing to secure the vessel. The goal was to seal the hatches between compartments to maintain buoyancy and slow the sinking of the ship. With other officers preoccupied and confident in his understanding of shipboard procedures, he undertook the task himself.

One decision in the process would haunt him for years. He approached the hatches leading to the tank deck, attempting to call out and look inside. What he saw was an inferno, an overwhelming blast of heat and flame that made entry impossible. From within came the desperate cries of trapped Army personnel. The screams were searing but he knew no one could survive that fire, nor could anyone reach them. Smoke would soon overcome them. In an excruciating decision, he shut the hatches, which were designed to be sealed from either side. The choice would revisit him in nightmares long after the war: “Worst of all were the agonizing screams for help from the Army men trapped in there. I can still hear them.”

Eckstam returned to the wardroom, where a few additional wounded had been treated. An officer soon informed him that the captain had ordered the ship abandoned. The command was almost redundant, since the fire had grown so intense that the steel decks were becoming unbearably hot beneath their boots.

Reluctant to plunge into the frigid sea, Eckstam knew the shock that such sudden immersion could inflict on the human body. Yet the lifeboats in his sector were useless without electrical power and the smaller rafts were stuck; their retaining pins were now corroded. With no other option, he climbed down a cargo net that had been lowered over the side and dropped into the water. Swimming hard to escape the suction of the sinking vessel, he pushed himself away from the doomed ship.

Sharks

For Ralph Bartholomay, a Naval Gunner aboard LST-507, there was an almost dreamlike quality to the ordeal, as though events were unfolding at a distance from reality. He had gone to his bunk convinced the exercise was merely another rehearsal for the coming invasion. The blare of an electric horn shattered that illusion. What followed next felt like a blur: He recalled pulling on a clean pair of dungarees; his pockets were empty, with no time to put on socks. He kept to the essentials based on his training: he put on a life jacket and a steel helmet.

One torpedo streaked beneath them, then another. Because the LST rode relatively high in the water and the torpedoes ran deep, the ship narrowly escaped being hit. The next one came without warning and when it struck, the blast came with a blinding flash and a violent cascade of seawater and debris. For an instant, the ship and the men upon it were etched in white light, like the frozen image of a camera’s flash. Even at his distance from the impact, wreckage and spray rained down over them.

Flames spread rapidly, quickly overwhelming the available firefighting gear. They were ordered to abandon the ship, but the lifeboats assigned to his section would not launch. As he made his way down toward the main deck, preparing to leave, a sailor pleaded for help starting a “Handy Billy,” a gasoline-powered emergency portable pump. The man was desperate to reach the auxiliary engine room, where he said trapped crewmen were screaming. Smoke billowed from the hatch, making entry impossible. The only alternate escape led to a main-deck hatch blocked by burning vehicles. Realizing there was no way to reach those below, Bartholomay turned and prepared to jump.

Training instructions echoed in his mind: remove the helmet, cross the arms tightly over the chest, check below, leap clear, and swim away from the hull. They had practiced countless times, but never in fifty-degree water slicked with fuel oil. In training, there were no enemy vessels, and rescue was always immediate in the safety of a swimming pool. Reality bore little resemblance to rehearsal.

When he surfaced, he began to choke on the salt water, which was mixed with oil. The water was relatively calm, but each time he opened his eyes, they burned from the fuel. After swimming what he judged a safe distance from the suction of the sinking ship, he paused to conserve his strength. Roughly four hundred men had sailed aboard. Now the darkness around him was eerily quiet.

Fragments of survival advice ran through his mind, but the shock had dulled his thinking. He remembered hearing that shedding clothing could increase buoyancy but would also hasten heat loss. The choice seemed cruelly absurd. A fellow sailor without a life jacket swam up, already exhausted. They stayed together for a time, speaking little; conversation required energy neither possessed. Eventually the man claimed he saw a friend clinging to wreckage nearby and decided to swim toward him. Bartholomay saw nothing and tried to dissuade him, but the sailor went anyway and vanished into the night.

Someone shouted about sharks, but that fear barely registered for Bartholomay. The water was too cold for there to be sharks, he thought. A faint breeze and the current began drawing wreckage into a tighter cluster. “It was dark again and I had trouble seeing,” he remembered, “but I could make out shapes close by, nothing of any size but a lot of them.” Something brushed against him: a coarse, large object. His first thought was that there may indeed be sharks in the water. Reaching out cautiously, he touched what felt like fabric. Gradually, he figured out that the shapes around him were all bodies.

Victor

Arthur Victor, a Hospital Apprentice Second Class aboard the LST-507, had been fast asleep in an upper bunk, crammed into a compartment with seven other sailors, when violent banging jolted him awake. At first, the noise sounded like heavy tools striking the deck overhead. Around him, men were scrambling in confusion, shouting into the darkness. When he called out, “What the hell’s going on?” a voice answered bluntly: “We’re under attack!”

He leapt from his bunk onto the cold steel floor and dressed in haste. In the rush, he forgot his life belt. Pushing through the crowd, he climbed the ladder topside. Yet when he emerged onto the deck, he was startled by the stillness. There was no gunfire, no visible enemy. Instead, there was a calm bay under a bright moon and a scatter of stars. The air was sharp and clean, almost peaceful. It hardly felt like a battlefield.

He made his way to his station at the stern, where his colleagues were staring silently out to sea. In hushed tones, they told him that what he had heard were tracer rounds striking near the gun turrets. Victor assumed a submarine or German E-boat had fired upon them, but the sudden quiet gave him hope that the threat had retreated.

After several tense minutes, he wandered to the port railing near a raft and paused, absorbed again by the strange beauty of the night. A friend named Rutherford joined him and the two began reminiscing about women back home. The explosion came without warning.

The blast hurled Victor across the deck. His head smashed against a steel bulkhead with such force that he nearly blacked out, saved only by his helmet. Dazed, he staggered upright and saw flames and thick smoke pouring from a massive hole amidships. A torpedo had torn through the starboard side, ripping into the tank deck and engine room.

Panic swept the deck. Some men ran wildly, shouting, “We’re all gonna die!” Others rushed toward the fire only to recoil in terror. Victor and Rutherford tried to steady them, but hysteria ruled. When cries of “Men overboard!” rang out, they turned to see sailors thrashing in the water. Life preservers were tossed down, but several men slipped beneath the surface before help could reach them.

Efforts to fight the fire failed. The heat and smoke were unbearable. Attempts to free a lifeboat proved futile; the explosion had jammed it in place. Even hacking at its steel cables with axes made no difference. The boat that could have saved dozens would sink with the ship.

The gunnery officer struggled to impose order. He ordered that ammunition be thrown overboard to prevent further catastrophe. Then the life raft was cut loose, but it splashed into the sea upside down. A sailor volunteered to go overboard and right it. Victor and Rutherford offered to join him, but gunnery officer insisted one man was enough.

When the order to abandon ship came, men poured over the side. Victor removed his helmet and was about to jump when he heard frantic pleas behind him. Another corpsman, paralyzed with fear and unable to swim, clung to him. The man’s life belt was inflated; Victor promised not to leave him. Together they climbed over the rail and leapt.

The icy water swallowed them. When they surfaced, the terrified man grabbed Victor in a chokehold, nearly dragging them both under. In desperation, Victor fought him off, striking him repeatedly until the man calmed enough to float in his belt. Victor maneuvered them to the stern rail, where the corpsman clung to it tightly. Victor urged him to swim the short distance to the raft, but the man refused, frozen by fear. “He was crying hysterically,” Victor recalled, “moaning that he couldn’t swim and was terrified of water.” Knowing the ship was sinking and lacking a life belt himself, Victor finally made the decision to swim away alone. The man’s screams followed him, but he never looked back.

At the raft, only a handful of survivors clung to its sides. Many had already perished before reaching it. Soon more men crowded around, until it was dangerously overloaded. The freezing water sapped their strength. Some gave up and slipped silently beneath the surface. Victor could not comprehend how young, strong men could die so quickly.

Another raft was spotted in the distance and Victor briefly removed his waterlogged jacket to swim toward it, but it filled before he could reach it. Now exposed from the waist up, he felt the cold bite deeper. Suddenly, flames spread across the water nearby. Victor believed they were finished. Just as he prepared to push away from the raft, the fire mysteriously died out only yards from them. The reprieve left him trembling with relief. In that moment, he resolved not to surrender to panic.

Throughout the night, men died in steady succession. A nineteen-year-old corpsman slipped away despite desperate attempts to save him. Another young man followed soon after. Victor’s close friend Scott, overwhelmed by fear, went limp in his life belt. After checking for a pulse and breath, they let him drift away, though Victor was uncertain if he had truly been dead. “How could he be, when he was so vibrant and full of life?” Victor wondered. “How could he die like that? The doubt would live in me all the rest of my days.”

They watched in horror as LST-531 exploded in the distance, erupting in fire and flinging bodies into the air before vanishing beneath the sea. The sight drove some survivors into renewed panic. At one point, soldiers attempted to force their way onto the raft, arguing that sailors were better suited to the water. Victor, though half-naked and without a belt himself, stood firm, warning that any attempt to board would be resisted. The confrontation ended in tense silence. At one point, Victor encountered an expert swimmer who had little issue being in the water and acted as if nothing were out of the ordinary. When asked where he came from, the man replied, “Out there, where the other raft and boat were drifting around.” After a brief rest, he said goodbye and swam back into the darkness.

The cold gnawed at them relentlessly. Victor vomited from swallowing oily seawater and urinated in his trousers for warmth. Beside him, a Black mess steward clung quietly. When someone shouted a racial slur and demanded the man be pushed off, Victor wrapped an arm around him and declared that anyone who tried would have to answer to him. No one challenged him further.

Hours passed in fog and darkness. The raft slowly rose higher as fewer men remained. Around dawn, perhaps twenty survivors were left. Victor felt numb, exhausted, tempted to surrender to sleep. Yet thoughts of home and sheer stubbornness stiffened his resolve. If anyone survived, he told himself, it would be him. To hell with it! he thought. Stay cool and not cold and you’ll be OK.

At first light, a ship emerged from the mist like an apparition. They shouted and waved as a small rescue boat approached. In the confusion, one of the men near Victor slipped away and vanished. When Victor tried to climb aboard, he fell between the raft and the boat, his legs battered by the bow until someone hauled him in. Wrapped in a jacket and covered with a tarp, he lay trembling.

They were taken aboard LST-515. Victor refused a stretcher and dragged his unfeeling legs up the ladder himself, considering it a gesture of gratitude. Stripped, given brandy, and put to bed, he later saw the corpsman he had left behind, alive. Though the man would not speak to him, Victor felt relief knowing he had survived. Victor was surprised to learn that the expert swimmer, named Lewis, had also survived, found still swimming by himself when he was rescued. After resting, he watched as bodies were pulled from the sea. Corpses lay everywhere. For him, no sight in the war would ever be more dreadful.

Survivors

Bartholomay survived by clinging onto a piece of debris with several others. The sight of living men had lifted his spirits. They grasped a small, unstable piece of wreckage. One man repeatedly tried to climb onto it, only to flip it and spill them back into the water. The effort had an absurd quality to it, but no one had the energy for anger. He heard the faint putter of an engine and a distant voice calling out. He could not imagine a more welcome sound. As the boat drew closer, he recognized it as LST-515 returning to search for survivors. Summoning the last of his strength, he swam toward it. The distance could not have been more than ten yards, but it felt like the longest swim he had ever made.

By dawn, when the LST-511 returned to search for survivors, only Crapanzano and one other man out of the original eleven remained clinging to the raft. Crapanzano had endured roughly four and a half hours in the freezing water. After three hours, he could no longer feel his legs; the cold had rendered them useless. He feared permanent damage, possibly even amputation. Still, he believed the high fever he had earlier may have helped him withstand the frigid conditions.

When Crapanzano spotted a rescue boat from the LST-511 approaching, relief overtook him. Certain he was saved, he finally let himself lose consciousness. He awoke later in a bunk aboard the rescue ship. The first words he spoke were to ask whether his legs would survive. The medical orderly assured him that, despite the ordeal, there appeared to be no lasting harm.

Eckstam remembered little of being in the water for hours. The following morning, he and several others were rescued. He later wondered “if many ‘dead’ victims were really in a state of hibernation, and what would have happened had we been able to immerse them in warm tubs. But who ever heard of a tub on an LST in wartime? We couldn't even do a reliable physical exam under the circumstances.”

Since he was unconscious nearly the entire time in the water, Sadlon remembered the least of his ordeal. He regained consciousness aboard another LST, where he had been placed on a mess table and covered with blankets while suffering from shock. He asked: “Where the heck am I?” He learned from a rescuer how he had nearly not made it: “You know, you are lucky,” the man told him. “We picked you up and piled you with the dead.” The man had seen Sadlon frothing at the mouth and picked him out of the pile. Sadlon never saw the man again: “I don’t even know who saved me.”

Blame

The bodies of the fallen were brought to a beach in the Lyme Bay area, initially buried in a mass grave. The daughter of a baker who supplied the U.S. troops recalled seeing “bodies, in American battle dress, laid flat and stacked, one on top of the other—there must have been dozens, all wet.” The convoy had been attacked by German S-Boot torpedo boats (known to the Allies as E-boats) that had sailed from Cherbourg. Several vessels had been hit: LST-507 and LST-531 were sunk, LST-289 was heavily damaged, and LST-511 had been accidentally hit by friendly fire. Official documents state that 248 recovered bodies were sent to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Later, most were either repatriated to the United States or reinterred at Cambridge American Cemetery. Detailed breakdowns of Army and Navy records account for approximately 270 recovered bodies. The overall death toll was reported as 639, including 442 from the Army and 197 from the Navy, according to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in August 1944. An earlier Army-based estimate from April 1944, later cited in historical works, put the toll at 749 dead.

Sadlon remained bitter that survivors were denied leave because Allied commanders feared that revealing the disaster in Lyme Bay might jeopardize the upcoming Normandy invasion. He also believed mistakes contributed to the tragedy, claiming that Rear Admiral Donald P. Moon had failed to provide the promised naval escort for the LST convoy departing Plymouth. In reality, the situation predominantly involved communication failures in terms of the missing escort. The convoy was supposed to have been protected by two Royal Navy ships: HMS Azalea at the rear and HMS Scimitar at the front. However, the Scimitar never arrived because it had been accidentally rammed by an American landing craft (LCI-324) on its way to Slapton Sands on April 27, 1944, causing significant damage. The destroyer had to return to Plymouth for repairs, a decision the captain disliked but had to follow. Critically, no one informed the commander of Exercise Tiger, Admiral Moon, that the Scimitar would be absent, leaving the convoy with only one escort. The Commander aboard HMS Azalea knew that HMS Scimitar had left the convoy but had no way to relay this to the American LSTs. The exercise planners had never anticipated the need for direct communication between the Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, so the two forces were operating on separate radio frequencies.

When the German E-boats attacked, ships were ordered not to stop for survivors. However, Lieutenant John Doyle, commanding LST-515, disobeyed orders to rescue those in the water, an action Sadlon believed saved his life. After recovering in hospital, Sadlon and other survivors were isolated at a British base and later assigned to dangerous ammunition-unloading duties. He eventually received the Purple Heart quietly, without ceremony, which he viewed as another effort to suppress details of the disaster. Sadlon later participated in the invasion itself, anchoring off Utah Beach, where he witnessed another tragedy when a destroyer struck a mine and its dead sailors were brought aboard his ship. Radioman Second Class Sadlon left the Navy on March 15, 1946, later serving in the Naval Reserve and being recalled during the Korean War.

Two Moons

After the attack in Lyme Bay, the surviving LSTs followed their standing orders to head for the nearest coastline and took refuge near Chesil Beach and Portland Isle. Wounded American soldiers were ferried ashore by small landing craft and carried up the beach on stretchers while local civilians looked on in shock. British personnel who witnessed the scene were immediately ordered to forget what they had seen and never discuss it. Fred Moon, a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman, was assigned to Netley Hospital, a large military hospital near Southampton that treated wounded soldiers. While stationed there in 1944, Moon helped care for casualties from Exercise Tiger. Moon recalled that the medical staff were ordered to keep the incident secret and warned that revealing it could lead to being “tried for treason and shot,” according to his paraphrased account.

The survivors were treated in hospitals or taken to bases across southern England, often under strict security. Many were isolated, guarded, or warned under threat of court-martial not to speak about the disaster. Although naval survivors normally received “survivor’s leave,” the men involved were kept in Britain so that news of the heavy losses would not spread before the upcoming invasion of France. The secrecy was intended to protect morale and conceal the scale of the disaster during preparations for Operation Overlord, the codename for the Battle of Normandy.

At higher command levels, information about the disaster emerged slowly. Early reports suggested several hundred casualties and the loss of valuable landing ships. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote on April 29 that the disaster “was not a restful thought to take home with me….apparently we lost a considerable number of men…we are stretched to the limit in the LST category, while the implications of the attack and the possibility of both raiders and bombers concentrating on some of our major ports make one scratch his head.”

Admiral Moon had overseen the rehearsal from his flagship and was responsible for the naval component of the operation. Following the attack, his initial reaction was captured in a handwritten note in which he stated: “This was a costly egg in our omelet.” He was soon summoned to meet senior officers aboard another ship, where he was confronted by a superior officer, Rear Admiral Arthur Struble. According to attendee Commander John Moreno, inside Struble’s stateroom, Moon waited by the door while Struble looked out toward Plymouth Harbor. Struble noticed a newly arrived British submarine displaying a broom on its periscope, a traditional sign meaning it had “swept the seas” of the enemy. Seeing this, Struble commented that at least someone had fulfilled their duty. Struble then turned to Moon “brutally snarled” the question: “All right, Moon, what happened?” Moreno later pinpointed this as the moment when Moon’s “mind snapped.”

Following the meeting, Moon spent hours interviewing officers and escort commanders to understand the failures that had allowed the German attack to succeed. Their discussions revealed serious operational problems: escort ships had poor communication arrangements with the convoy, warning signals about German E-boats had not been acted on in time, and there was confusion over who had overall authority. Moon learned from the escort’s Lieutenant Commander George Geddes that he “didn’t pick up the survivors…[W]e have had instructions not to pick up survivors until the actual attack is considered to be over. Being the only escort present, I considered my correct action to remain with the convoy while I radioed for assistance.”

Witnesses later recalled that Moon appeared exhausted and distressed in the aftermath of these revelations. Several officers who saw him that evening described him as deeply troubled by the disaster and the loss of life. Moreno later attended a dinner in which “poor Moon was out of his mind.”

At the same time, Allied intelligence worried that German forces might have captured officers who possessed sensitive knowledge about the invasion plans. This concern triggered an urgent search for bodies in the water to ensure that none of the missing officers with knowledge of D-Day preparations had been taken prisoner. While the officers who possessed highly classified information were eventually accounted for, many bodies were never recovered.

On May 6, Admiral Moon submitted his report on the disaster. He concluded that the tragedy had yielded valuable but needlessly costly lessons, many of which, such as proper use of life belts and procedures for launching landing craft, should have been obvious beforehand. He also noted a less intuitive lesson: vehicles should not be overloaded with fuel, carrying only what is necessary for safety. Moon recommended increasing escort ships to protect all sides of a convoy, though he acknowledged that Britain in 1944 lacked the resources to meet such demands. He further urged expanding air operations to target German E‑boats and their bases.

Admiral Moon, serving aboard his flagship Bayfield in Naples, took his own life on August 5 after a sleepless night. He became the only high‑ranking American officer to die by suicide during World War II. Some survivors, such as George Geddes and Moses Hallett, believed Moon viewed himself as responsible and ended his life out of remorse. In this sense, Moon came to be seen as another delayed casualty of the Tiger disaster. Geddes himself nearly became a scapegoat during the Royal Navy’s investigation, but ultimately no individual was blamed. Rear Admiral Brind, reviewing the case months after the event and just after Moon’s death, concluded that responsibilities were too unclear at multiple levels of command to assign fault, and he recommended that no action be taken against any officer involved. Moon had made himself the scapegoat before any official decisions had been taken. Lieutenant Moses Hallett recalled “being told by someone that I could forget about being court-martialed because Moon ‘had blown his brains out.’”

Missing this context at the time, Time magazine was at a loss trying to explain his death in 1944: “An impeccable Navy career had come to a tragic end…Though war has always had its combat suicides, Army and Navy annals record no precedent among officers of comparable rank.” In contrast to the official explanation of “battle fatigue,” Moreno offered his view that Moon’s “reaction to the attack…was to be greatly disturbed. He never got over it and it was the direct cause of his subsequent suicide.”

Remembrance

Survivors often avoided speaking about their experiences for decades. The lack of official acknowledgment compounded this; while there were scattered press reports and brief mentions in postwar books, the disaster received little attention. Exercise Tiger largely failed to enter America’s collective memory, overshadowed by better-known battles.

For decades, formal commemoration remained sparse. One of the most poignant individual acts of remembrance was that of Manny Rubin, a survivor who settled in Plymouth and, every April 28, cast flowers into the sea at Slapton Sands in honor of the dead. For more than forty years until official memorials were erected, his private ritual stood as one of the only tributes to the forgotten victims of Exercise Tiger.

Steven Sadlon was disappointed with the lack of attention the incident received: “It burns me up that this was kept secret so long and the way we were treated.” He praised the action of Captain Doyle, without whom his story would have remained untold: “Doyle went on against orders…All of the other LSTs just left. They didn’t stop to pick us up. That’s what hurts, you know.” Doyle never received a medal for his efforts. At his gravesite in Missoula, Montana, the following tribute is enscribed: “This monument is a tribute to Captain Doyle with the deepest respect from his crew of the LST 515 and the 100 men plus, as survivors of the sunken LSTs 507 and 531.”

Angelo Crapanzano kept his Bronze Star hidden in a drawer. “I wanted to forget,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t talk about what happened. The words wouldn’t come out without me filling up. I just kept the memory of the nightmare bottled up inside—and it smoldered.” After watching a segment featuring Exercise Tiger on the TV program 20/20 in 1984, Crapanzano wrote to Joseph McCann, asking whether McCann had been the man who rescued him from the water. Crapanzano recalled clinging to a burned-out raft and believed the odds were strong that McCann had been his savior. Soon afterward, McCann called him and confirmed that he had indeed picked him up. He explained that during his first pass, he thought the three men on the raft were dead. On returning, however, he saw movement and pulled them aboard his landing craft. One of the rescued men, whom he now knew to be Crapanzano, had been muttering about his legs.

After the call ended, Crapanzano was overwhelmed: “I sobbed uncontrollably for about ten minutes. My wife was startled and couldn’t understand why I was so upset. When I told her, she sighed, ‘My God, that was close!’ Fate had given me a second chance and made me wait forty years to hear the unbelievable truth.” Crapanzano recently passed away on January 31, 2025 at the age of 97, survived by his four children. His obituary noted he was “a proud veteran serving in the US Army during WWII.”

Shortly before 4 a.m. on the morning of the disaster, Captain Doyle’s voice came over the loudspeaker of the LST-515: “Now hear this! Hear this! We’re having a disagreement on what to do. Some want to go back to our base to save the ship and our lives. But my navy men and I agree that you don’t win wars by running. I have no authority over army soldiers and I won’t risk your lives without voluntary consent from you. The E-boats might return and we could still be sunk.” Corporal Eugene Carney recounted that many aboard the ship shouted “Let’s stay and fight!” in unison, as if they had rehearsed that moment. “We were so angry,” Carney remembered, “that we would have fought the Germans with pocket knives.” For Carney and other survivors, telling their stories was a relief. “I’ve had to keep this locked in my mind and heart all these years,” he wrote, “because no one seemed to remember or care to talk about this.”