One of my favourite beaches is Slapton Sands in Devon, England, a pebble beach I visited in 2016 and 2017.
TumbleStone Blog has a series of Posts on this fascinating beach and its history and geography. The first Post, dated 8 September 2016, is here. One of the Posts discusses the tragedy of Exercise Tiger, a practice for D-Day, with a planned landing on Slapton Sands. Slapton Sands had a number of similarities to Utah Beach, where US soldiers were to land. On 28 April 1944, in the bay off Slapton Sands, the convoy of landing craft carrying US troops was intercepted by German E-boats. Two of the landing craft were sunk and one badly damaged, with the loss of 749 of the US servicemen. Due to the secrecy surrounding D-Day and its preparations, the disaster was kept secret and often it was decades later before relatives learned what really happened to their fathers, brothers or sons.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of this tragedy, an installation artist, Martin Barraud, has laid 749 bootprints in the pebbles of Slapton Sands.
The installation was unveiled by the Remembered charity and will raise money for veteran employment projects. An article in the Daily Mail on 28 April 2019 provides an excellent and well-illustrated account of Barraud’s project as well as the history of “Exercise Tiger”.
See also this short BBC video clip on the installation.
Martin Barraud is in the middle of an ambitious installation project in the UK called “There But Not There”. His aim is to make visible the dead of World War One, giving them a shape and a name. As an Evening Standard article puts it, “There are ghostly Tommies in St Pancras station, in a chapel in the Tower of London, in a football stadium: either a six-foot aluminium silhouette with head bowed, or a Perspex figure you see, then somehow don’t see, sitting down.” Barraud, has given every one of them the name of a real soldier.
By November this year, the centenary of the end of the war, he hopes to have sold a figure to represent every one of the 883,246 men from Britain and Ireland who died, the funds to go to military charities.
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