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| Lt (j.g) Henry Saucier served on LST-507 during the ill fated Exercise Tiger. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/61273273 https://www.exercisetiger.org.uk/lst-507/ |
Henry Quitman Saucier never had a chance to reach 100 years old today. Instead, he sacrificed his life for our freedom.
Henry was born on February 19, 1920 in Harrison, Mississippi. His parents John and Ida were also both born in Mississippi. His father worked as a grocery store merchant and later as a farmer. Still later he was a supervisor for the county. Henry had an older brother and sister and two younger sisters. By 1940 Henry had completed two years of college at Mississippi State and he graduated in 1941.
He volunteered for the navy in July 1942. After being commissioned an officer he was assigned to LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank). He eventually reached the rank of lieutenant junior grade. He served on LSTs in the invasion of Sicily and Italy. His LST was sent to England to prepared for the invasion of France.
On April 28, 1944, Lt. Saucier's LST-507 was participating in Exercise Tiger, a practice beach landing at Slapton Sands, England which looked a lot like the Normandy beaches. German E-boats avoided Allied patrols and found the American LSTs unguarded. LST-507 was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 202 army and navy personnel including Lt. Saucier. One other LST was sunk and two others damaged. A total of 746 men were killed.
The Americans hushed up the details of these deaths in order to not giveaway the location of the tragedy. They were afraid that the Germans would guess the Slapton Sands exercise would tip their hand that similar-looking-Normandy was the target of the invasion, not Pas de Calais, which they hoped the Germans would focus on. More info was released in August 1944, but did not get much attention. It was not until the late 1980s that the details of Exercise Tiger reach greater public notice.
His grave is at Bassfield City Cemetery in Bassfield, Mississippi.
Last year on this date I profiled Medal of Honor hero Frederick Timmerman, 2nd Marine Division. You can read about Frederick here.
On behalf of the fallen, if you would like to see more people become aware of this project to honor the WW2 fallen, be sure to share with others on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Thanks for your interest!
I created this video to explain why I started this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXt8QA481lY.
Please consider joining the public Facebook group to increase the exposure of this project. Go to: WW2 Fallen 100
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