World Notes BRITAIN

Around midnight on April 28, 1944, a force of 25,000 U.S. troops was preparing to make an amphibious landing at Slapton Sands, on the southern coast of England. The operation, known as Exercise Tiger, was a practice drill for the invasion of Normandy, just five weeks away. But things went badly. The night before, a British destroyer detailed to escort the convoy collided with another ship and was anchored at port, leaving the landing craft inadequately protected.

At about 1:30 a.m., German torpedo boats slipped into Lyme Bay and launched their weapons against the convoy. The toll: 749 Americans dead, four times the number that perished on Utah Beach. Most were raw recruits who had never seen the enemy. For the sake of wartime secrecy, news of the tragedy was withheld. The dead were never honored with an official monument.

That neglect has long troubled Ken Small, a local innkeeper. Small learned of the disaster in the early 1970s, after finding American coins and ammunition washed up on the beach, and he began lobbying the U.S. and British governments for a memorial. This week a simple but official plaque will be dedicated to the dead of Exercise Tiger. "I am not a religious man," says Small, "but I felt something driving me on to do this."