The episode remained secret for a long time: before D-Day in Normandy, June 6, 1944, the 80th anniversary of which Emmanuel Macron is commemorating this Thursday, there was another landing. On April 27, 1944, the Allied army, led by General Eisenhower, future President of the United States, organized a dress rehearsal on the beach at Slapton Sands, a town in Devon, in the southwest of England.
3,000 local residents were evicted from their homes for the exercise, called “Tiger” and prepared for more than four months. Some 30,000 soldiers and 3,000 warships replaced them. Allied radio signals are picked up by the German army; the Nazis send nine speedboats from the port of Cherbourg. Eight ships were torpedoed, two sank in the Channel, 946 American soldiers (some sources mention 749 deaths) died.
No publicity was made around this event, the Germans did not suspect that they had just thwarted a repeat of the landing in Normandy. Forty days later, Operation Overlord was a success; it changed the course of the Second World War. For a long time, the deaths of April 27 were not properly honored. Until 1984, the exercise was classified as a defense secret in the United States; the archives remained rare and fragmentary.
It was not until June 5, 2012 that a plaque in their honor was placed at Utah Beach, near the Landing Museum. Finally, it pays tribute to these invisible heroes whose sacrifice contributed to the historic feat of D-Day.