Eighty years ago the Kriegsmarine shows its teeth in the Channel

 

 

In Exercise Tiger, a major rehearsal for the D-Day, a large force of US troops, carried in eight LSTs, were to land on Slapton Sands in Devon. The Germans had good intelligence from radio intercepts and sent six Schnellboote  (E-boats to the allies) to attack. The American convoy had only one escort and the Germans sank two of the highly vulnerable LSTs, large, unmanoeuvrable and poorly armed. Over 700 men were killed.

On Crete a group of resistance fighters led by the British SOE officer Patrick Leigh-Fermor kidnapped the island's German military governor General Kreipe, who had replaced the originally intended target, Friederich-Wilhelm Mueller a few weeks before. Mueller had been responsable for a number of atrocities and was executed after the war. Kreipe was rather anti-Nazi and got on well with Leigh-Fermor who capped a quotation from Horace that the German began. The operation had little military value but it was rapidly announced to the public by the British, who saw it as boost to the morale of Greeks under German occupation.

General Franco read correctly which way the war was going and conceded a series of Allied demands. Spain agreed to a sharp cut in exports of strategically crucial tungsten (wolfram) to Germany. German agents, notably around Gibraltar from where they had provided valuable intelligence, were to be expelled. Interned Italian merchant ships were to be released and the surviving Spanish "volunteer" forces fighting for Germany were to be withdrawn.