D Day rehearsal that killed 600 men | Hacker News Reader

D Day rehearsal that killed 600 men

medium.com

27 pointsindianhistoryy11 comments

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The spelling in this article (at the time of writing) is all over the place.

> This is not the D day landing which happened in the

> Normandy beaches in June 1944 but a rehearsal to D day

> landing which killed more than 600 men in friendly fire.

> The second batch met with a fierce fire defensive position

> resulting in the killing of at least 400 soldiers.

> The E boats were driven off after reinforcements arrived

> but the damage is done, 300 more soldiers died in this day

> for D Day rehearsal.

I'm not great at math, but: 400+ + 300 > 600

That doesn't even seem to be the extent of the deaths caused by this operation [1].

It also seems that this article may have been partially/mostly sourced from Wikipedia (for example, look at the bullet points of recommendations in each) [1]. The Wikipedia article also reads better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Tiger

I read the first few paragraphs without noticing a single typo. Then went to read it out loud to share it with my wife and realised that almost every single sentence contains either a grammatical or spelling error.

The brains auto-correct when reading/comprehending is quite impressive.

brain's

Indeed. Far superior to my phone's auto-correct.

When this auto-correct is too good, you are dyslexic.

There are many kinds of dyslexics, of course. In my case it makes it very hard to recognize spelling or grammar errors. Especially in my own text. If I read it and understand it, the brain refuses to see errors. I need to use my finger or a pen to follow the text break this auto-correct.

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. From the results of this exercise it seems it really was necessary, in order to avoid the same catastrophes on D-day itself. However the operation did alert the Nazis that something was up, and they apparently did reinforce the landing sites in preparation for an assault.

As a side not since this is HN: The article summary box lists Nazi Germany as a party to the exercise with all of the E-boats, presumably due to article quality control requirements in the Wikipedia system.

I stumbled over "On the built up to the exercise 3000 residents of Slapton were evacuated so safe guard the secrecy of the mission". Funny that the words ("built up" instead of "buildup", "so" instead of "to") are wrong, but gramatically correct - looks like someone used autocorrect, but didn't pay attention if the suggestions made sense :D

But what do you expect from a "channel" (no idea how Medium calls them) called "History of Yesterday" that attributes images to "Wiki"?

To clarify the causalities as the article seems incorrect; it appears that most if not all were a result of the German torpedo boats, not friendly-fire:

> German torpedoes hit three of the LSTs [...] the toll of the dead and missing stood at 198 sailors and 551 soldiers, a total of 749 [...] There were accusations not only of a cover-up, but also of heavy casualties inflicted by U.S. soldiers, who presumably did not know they had live ammunition in their weapons [...] Nor was there actually any evidence of anybody being killed by small arms fire.

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...

This was a MUCH better read than the original linked Medium post. Thank you! So it was the German attack on the boats that killed everyone, not a rehearsal to D day landing which killed more than 600 men in friendly fire as the Medium post claims.

This has just 34 claps, and only had 19 when I initially read it an hour or so ago. Not much of a measure of quality, but still something.

I think this is one of the noticeable times something got yanked out of /new and shoved on the homepage. I suspect it was Arc's "AI"; a human probably wouldn't pass this as presented.

This blog post is in dire need of some sources to support the horrendous things it describes.

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