We've already discussed Exercise Tiger and won't repeat what we set out there, but we will note that while focus on Tiger tends to be on the American loss of life it caused, it very well may have resulted in avoiding disaster at Operation Overlord.
In that sense, Exercise Tiger might be remembered justifiably in much the same way that the August 19,1942 Anglo Canadian raid at Dieppe can be, a disaster whose lessons were so significant that the event is sort of a Pyrrhic defeat. That is, the lessons learned as a result of the disasters encountered there were so significant they served to avoid them occurring on the beaches in Operation Overlord.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox died.
Knox had been ill for a while, having suffered a series of recent heart attacks. He was 70 years old at the time of his death.
A Bostonian, he's served with the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the "Rough Riders", during the Spanish American War. After the war he had been a newspaper editor in Michigan, where he was also the state chairman of the Republican Party. He supported Theodore Roosevelt for President in 1912 and had agitated for U.S. entry into the Great War, in which he went on to serve as an artilleryman. He was a Vice Presidential candidate in the 1936 campaign, on the Landon Knox ticket. Roosevelt appointed the Republican Secretary of the Navy in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, Knox, while still Secretary of the Navy, was shunted aside to a significant degree in favor of Admiral Ernest J. King, that being somewhat of a tradition by that time.
USS Crook County at Inchon, 1950.
The ship was a LST that served in the Pacific during World War Two and then again during the Korean War. She was decommissioned in 1956.
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