Exercise Tiger

They all know it's existential and, you know, they're very well aware that it's the biggest seaborne invasion in history, and every other attempt so far has failed.

You know, both, you know, in the, in Dieppe and other large, large scale efforts, but also even in their training exercise, in Exercise Tiger, which was only six weeks earlier, which was amongst their own men it failed and hundreds died.

And, and so the idea is, you know, how do you have the audience really get into the head space of a character who, or a bunch of characters, who are charged with this responsibility that is ultimately gonna cost the lives or could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people?

Mm.

Anyway, so it's World War II and it's 72 hours before D-Day.

General Eisenhower is smarting a little bit because he lost a huge number of men in Operation Tiger.

So he's naturally very wary and very careful about the operational situation that he is in.

They have the upper hand at the moment.

And mentally I suppose he'd just come off the back of a really horrendous...

Tiger.

Tiger.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

And he's like, surprise, two people are sitting here and a bomb goes off and it's surprise.

suspense is two people are sitting here without the knowledge that there's a bomb under the table you know we're looking at the time a countdown now the audience knows something that that the rest don't that the bomb is going to go off and then it gives this conversation a different type of meaning because they're talking about you know are we going to get almond coffee or whatever price of eggs and and um you know it's it's the same principle but it the the challenge and the difficulty with pressure is how do you make that digestible and how do you instill that fear, so to speak, in an audience with really complex systemic issues.

And there's a lot of different techniques that we use, but some of the things are like beginning with exercise tiger.

But Rick Bigelow's, uh, uh, the, uh, outstanding patent attorney, a veteran himself, a son of a veteran, and, uh, he provides historical look-backs for all of us.

And there was something that happened prior to D-Day called Exercise Tiger, Operation Tiger.

And it was a large scale Allied rehearsal for the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

April of 1944, held at Slapton Sands, Devon, England, and here's our man, Rick Bigelow, to talk about this little understood and little known tragedy.

Looking forward to that.

So, again, Rick Bigelow on tomorrow regarding Operation Tiger at Slapton Sands, where we lost over 700 people preparing for D-Day.

The stories of the heroism, what these men and women went through for all of us, it's...

It's beyond inspiring.

And I wanted to know more about it.

But Rick helpfully provides the beach assault scene at the beginning of the movie was something called Operation Tiger.

a practice landing at Slapton Sands on the southern coast of England.

They were practicing for D-Day, and it was a disaster.