EVERETT – In the early morning hours of April 27, 1944, general quarters sounded on Joe “Eddie” McCann’s landing assault ship.
He and thousands of other U.S. servicemen were in the middle of a nighttime dress rehearsal for the Normandy invasion in early June.
It appeared the general-quarters alarm was false, because the all-clear claxon sounded a short time later. McCann, 75, a longtime Everett resident, went to get a cup of coffee when he heard and felt a thump.
What he found out later was that nine German torpedo boats had worked their way into the English Channel near a place in Britain called Slapton Sands and had a field day attacking the unarmed landing vessels containing 23,000 sailors and soldiers practicing for the assault on Utah Beach.
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“D-Day: Reflections of Courage” airs at 8 and 11 p.m. today on the Discovery Channel. |
Called Exercise Tiger, the operation turned into a disaster that was kept a military secret for decades.
About 750 American soldiers and sailors died in the attack. The toll would have been higher if it hadn’t been for men like McCann, a junior petty officer whose main job was to drive a 36-foot landing craft that took fighters to the beach.
Under attack, McCann was ordered to get his boat in the water and search for survivors. In numerous trips, he picked up 45 people, most of them wounded, and brought them to the safety.
His story, and that of other brave warriors on both sides of the battle, will be told this weekend in a BBC production depicting some of the remarkable events leading up to and including D-Day.
The production, “D-Day: Reflections of Courage,” will be aired on the Discovery Channel today, the 60th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe.
Discovery and the British company Dangerous Productions spent 18 months making the film. Actual war scenes, interviews of people involved and actors playing roles of some of the characters – including McCann – are included, producer Peter Georgi said.
The biggest challenge was to remain true to facts and to the people from so many countries who lived through it, Georgi said.
“We wanted to tell the story in a dramatic way with characters,” he said in a telephone interview. “We wanted the drama, and to be 100 percent factually accurate and respectful of the situation.”
He said it was humbling to meet some of the people who lived through those times.
McCann, who helped put a national spotlight on the Exercise Tiger disaster, was one of those interviewed in the film. He also participated in the D-Day invasion.
In his Everett home, McCann talked about how he ran away at the age of 13 and bribed a man he met on the street to pretend to be his father, part of a subterfuge that got him into the Navy at such a young age.
By the time he was 15, he was a veteran of numerous invasions in North Africa and Sicily, and an experienced coxswain. That’s why he was picked to start looking through the oily, flaming water for survivors off Slapton Sands.
What haunts him still were the orders to pick up only the living.
“I was forbidden to take the dead out of the water,” he recalls, and it was devastating to McCann when he came across a dead officer who had befriended him.
The producers mailed a copy of the film to McCann, who watched it last week.
“I’m pleased with it,” he said.
And the film drove home the senselessness of such wholesale killing. “What I was wondering is why can’t we all get along like brothers?” he said.
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