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In the dark of a moonless night in late April, 1944, nine German E-boats launched a devastating torpedo attack on a convoy of American LSTs off the coast of England.
Two of the LSTs were sunk, and a third one hobbled into port.
In all, 749 American soldiers and sailors died in the attack, the worst loss ever in an American training exercise.
In the days following, not one
word of the military disaster ever appeared in the press as the Allied leaders clamped down a wall of secrecy. In the preparation for the invasion at Normandy, slated for just over a month away, the Allies did not
want one word of the disaster to get out.
And while there has never been an official cover-up, the tragedy off the coast of southern England has never become well known in military or history annals. You'll
rarely find an account of it in any World War II history books.
One Minnesotan, though, knows all about the attack and its aftermath. When the Germans hit LST 507 that morning, Sgt. Winfred Polzin of Braham,
Minnesota, was in the hold of the ship. He was one of the few that got out.
Nearly 60 years later, his memory of that night is vivid.
The training operation he remembers was called Exercise Tiger.
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Winfred Polzin grew up on a farm in South Dakota. He attended the Brookings Agricultural School, and in 1938 he moved with his family to Minnesota. In the midst of
the Great Depression, his family had lost their farm near Watertown.
Polzin's father rented a farm near Braham, and young Winfred worked at a variety of farming operations in the next couple of years.
On Dec.
7, 1941, Polzin heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio. He knew his days as a civilian were numbered.
"The farmer I was working for said he would try to get me deferred, but I said no. All the other guys
were going in, and I decided I might as well go in too."
It didn't take long for that draft notice to appear. On Jan. 23, 1942, Polzin was sworn into the U.S. Army at Ft. Snelling. He was soon on his way to Ft.
Francis, Wyoming, for training.
"We weren't there very long -- they were pushing us out pretty fast." Polzin was sent to Texas for motorcycle maintenance school. "It had been very cold in Wyoming, and we
arrived on the train on a Sunday in Texas with our overcoats on. All they guys there were sitting around wearing t-shirts. They must have wondered where these guys came from."
The young mechanics were not only
learning about their two-wheelers, they were also able to take them for a spin now and then. "I wrote home that the first thing I'm going to do when the war is over is buy a motorcycle. But I never did."
In
August, realizing that with the advent of the Jeep, the need for motorcycle mechanics was probably not great, the Army had the outfit shipped overseas on the USS Manhattan for training in Ireland. Polzin was
assigned to a supply company.
The company was sent to Africa soon after the invasion in 1942, and the unit was one of the first ones in the war to take charge of a new vehicle officially called by the Army an
amphibious truck or a DUKW — or more informally a "duck."
The amphibious trucks had to be driven across the Sahara Desert to prepare for the invasion of Sicily. "It was 120 degrees out there. Oh, my goodness it
was hot. You'd couldn't even touch the trucks."
One of the amazing things about the new trucks was that by letting air out of the tires, a driver could take them right over the desert. "You couldn't even walk in
that sand, but we could go 30 or 40 miles an hour through it. In later models you could control the air pressure from the driver's seat. There was a built-in air compressor.
If a tire got hit by a bullet, you could pump enough air pressure into that one tire to keep it inflated until you got where you were going."
The unit practiced with the DUKWs and then took part in the landings
at Sicily. "We were hauling everything, ammunition, gasoline, artillery shells, rations, you name it."
After the capture of the island, the supply company next landed in Italy and Polzin was assigned the job of a
truck driver bringing supplies to the American troops in the treacherous Italian mountains.
"We really had to learn to drive. There was a lot of night driving and we only had those little black-out lights. When
we first started out, when we got to the sharp turns on the mountains, we have to do part of the turn, back up, and then do the rest. After a while, though, we'd just make the turn with your tires right on the edge
of the road. Sometimes you'd meet a convoy coming the other way, and the roads were so narrow that you'd actually brush the other trucks as they went by. Whooooooosh."
Polzin's unit was pulled out of Italy at
the end of 1943 to join in the preparation for the invasion of France. The army company ate Thanksgiving dinner aboard a Navy transport en route to southern England.
Polzin was now assigned to the 478th
Amphibious Truck Company of the First Engineer Special Brigade based near Devon, England. "The English people were mostly happy to see us. They knew they needed help to win the war. I talked with one English soldier
who had been at Dunkirk. He said that after Dunkirk he walked the beaches of the English channel on patrol with five rounds in his rifle. He said if the Germans had invaded England, they couldn't have stopped them."
A lot of the practice was getting the DUKWs into and out of the LSTs, which in Navy parlance was "Landing Ship, Tank," but in the Army lingo was "Large Stationary Target."
By this time, Polzin had advanced up
the Army ladder and was now a sergeant in charge of 42 men and 35 amphibious trucks. He didn't have to drive any more, only tell others how and when and where to do it.
Slapton Sands on the south coast of England
was picked for Exercise Tiger because it resembled Utah Beach, the ultimate destination of the 447th Amphibious Truck Company and a good share of the rest of the invasion force.
There had been several other
exercises as the Navy and Army learned to coordinate the massive landings. Exercise Tiger was the largest of them all to that point, and it included real shelling of the beach. There were 300 ships, 30,000 men and
30 LSTs involved in the operation.
"I was unfortunate enough to be in the last ship in the convoy," Polzin recalled. He also was in one of the last of the 22 DUKWs that was brought aboard LST 507 that day. The
trucks were among the last that would be landed in that day's exercise, about 24 hours after the initial landing.
The German E-boats, similar to American PT boats, somehow got wind of the training exercise and
sent a group of nine boats to the area outside Slapton Sands. "They knew something was going on, and they came out to see what it was."
What the Germans found was a group of American LSTs that seemed to be
unprotected. There was a British corvette assigned as an escort, but it wasn't in position to prevent the attack. Another escort had returned to port because of some damage.
Besides the lack of escorts, the
American convoy was also doomed by a mistake in assigning radio frequencies. When a report was given on the approach of the E-boats, the British commanders didn't pass it along because they thought the American
ships were on the same frequency. They weren't.
At 1:30 in the morning of April 28, LST 507's officers were concerned enough about a possible attack that they sounded general quarters.
Polzin at that moment
was in the hold or what is called the "tank deck" of the LST. He wasn't supposed to be there. "Most of the other men were topside where they had been ordered. I was disobeying orders by staying with the trucks."
When the general quarters sounded, Polzin watched a sailor come and batten down the hatch, or doorway, that led to the top levels of the ship. "He used a big pipe to really fasten that door down tight. He wasn't
fooling around."
Another half an hour went by and nothing happened. Suddenly, at 2:03 a.m., a deafening explosion rocked the ship. A torpedo had hit amidships on the starboard side.
"I was in the forward part of the tank deck, and I looked down at the stern and it was all on fire. I saw guys standing on the DUKWs with the fire all around. I'm sure those guys never got out."
Polzin and one
other soldier were all who were still in the forward section of the deck and their only exit was through the hatch that had just been closed. "I had watched him tighten it with that pipe, and I had to open it with
my bare hands. I don't know where I got the strength, but I did it."
Reaching the upper deck, Polzin could see the raging fire at the rear of the LST. The power had been knocked out by the torpedo explosion, and
there was no way to control the conflagration. It was clear the ship was doomed.
"I could see guys floating all over the place, but I didn't want to go over the side yet. They hadn't yet announced 'abandon
ship.'" Polzin had time to talk things over with a small group of men, and also to wrap his wristwatch in a waterproof container.
Finally, at about 2:30 a.m., a sailor told the soldiers that the captain had
ordered the ship abandoned. Polzin climbed down the cargo net to the water. "There were lifeboats, but I didn't see them. If I had, I'd have been in one."
"It was very crowded going over the side and guys were
screaming and hollering. It was only time I've ever seen that kind of panic. Guys were running around the deck and they'd hit the chains that were used to tie down the Jeeps, and down they'd go. It had to hurt, but
they'd just get up and start running and screaming again."
As soon as Polzin got in the water, he was grabbed by another soldier. "He had me around the head, and he was dragging us both down. I knew I had to get
free from him, and I kicked him away. When we came up, I saw his life belt floating a few feet away. It must have come off him when he jumped in the water. I swam a few feet and got it for him, but when I turned
around he was gone.
"I'm sure glad I didn't know that guy. That would have been even worse. But I can still see him just like it was all happening right now. I'll never forget that."
The water was about 42
degrees, and there were no American ships nearby to save the floating survivors of LST 507. "I'm sure that most of the guys who died were killed by hypothermia."
Polzin estimates he was in the water for an hour,
maybe longer. Daylight was just beginning to break when LST 515 approached the scene. "I was told later that the skipper of that LST had been ordered to head back to port, but he disobeyed orders to come and get us.
I heard later that he was court martialed."
The men in the water were helped up the cargo nets to the deck of the LST. "I was so cold, I couldn't even close my hands anymore."
The men were told to take off
their clothes and wrap themselves with blankets. There were 244 survivors out of about 1,000 men on the two LSTs that were sunk.
LST 531, a sister ship of the one Polzin was on,
sank so fast after it was torpedoed that only 40 of the 600 men aboard survived.
"When we were leaving the ship, we had to find whatever clothes we could. I grabbed a sailor's pants and shoes, but a lot of
guys only had their blankets. When we got to the beach, there we were, marching along, some guys only wearing a blanket and no underwear."
They were taken to a nearby hospital.
"They had instructed the
hospital people not to talk to us. They wanted to keep the whole thing a secret. They didn't want the Germans to know what kind of damage they did to us.
"But by noon, we were pretty hungry. We hadn't eaten in a
long time, and many of the guys had thrown up what they had eaten. I approached one of the nurses and asked her what we could eat. She looked at me and said, 'Lunch is over.' And that was that. She didn't dare say
another word."
The army transported the 244 survivors to a house. "But there was nothing there, only an empty house. The Red Cross heard about us, though, and came and got us. They brought us to one of their
R&R facilities and gave us shoes and socks and saving gear and toothpaste — everything we needed. We finally got some food. They had big tables laid out with all kinds of food."
The 244 men were now under the
protection of the Red Cross and not the Army. As good soldiers will do when given the chance, they spent the weekend heading into town for some recreation.
"For three days we could go anywhere we wanted, but
then the Army heard about us. They came and got us and brought us back to a camp barracks and told us we couldn't talk to anybody. If we went to the PX, we had to have an armed guard go with us. When we went to eat,
we had guards with us."
The men were finally sent back to their units. The 427th Amphibious Truck Company had lost 28 men and many of its trucks in the attack. They had to get replacement men and trucks in a
hurry to be ready for D-Day on June 6.
The irony of the series of events was that the company didn't take any casualties at all in the landing on Utah Beach. In fact, more Americans were lost in Exercise Tiger
than were lost on D-Day at Utah Beach.
Polzin's company spent the following weeks ferrying supplies from the ships to the supply dumps at Utah Beach. When larger ports were finally opened, the company was given
the job of cleaning up the beach. "We were even assigned German prisoners to help fix the trucks and to do other work. I was in great demand because I could speak German."
In January, 1945, the company was sent
home. "They just didn't have much use for amphibious trucks any more. There were no more invasions planned."
Sgt. Polzin ended up at Ft. Lewis, Washington, as a boot camp instructor. "It was good duty. The young
guys who were in camp had a lot of respect for those of us who had been overseas."
On Sept. 4, 1945, Polzin was mustered out at Camp Randall in Wisconsin. In later years he farmed, worked at a creamery, sold
cows, and worked as an arc welder, a job he retired from in 1984.
He married his hometown sweetheart, Dallas, in 1945 while en route to his posting in Washington, and they had three daughters. Polzin has nine
grandchildren and three great grandchildren. His wife passed away some time ago.
At his home in Cambridge, Polzin spends some of his time creating intricately carved wooden art objects. He is member of the
American Legion at Pine City, and he's a three-time past post commander of the VFW at Rush City.
Looking back at Exercise Tiger, Polzin said there was never any doubt in his mind, even when he was in the water,
that was going to survive. "I guess I had the reputation of being pretty calm. When word got back to our company that I had been trapped on the tank deck and I was probably dead, one of the guys said, 'No way. If
Polzin's dead, I've got to see his body.' They never thought I'd get killed."
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