The boys who lied about their age to fight in WW2.D-Day: James Holland answers your questions.Altogether 98 troops died at Woolacombe preparing for D-Day, most of them Americans. Meanwhile, on 25 October 1943, five GIs were killed and 14 wounded by machine-gun fire intended to pass over their heads on the ATC’s Exmoor firing range. Each course was tough, taking no account of the weather: on 18 December 1943, three landing craft foundered in the surf, swamping the tanks on board and drowning 14 amphibious DUKW vehicles turned turtle in other incidents. In a complex stretching over 16 square miles, and including beaches, cliffs, headlands, sand dunes and 10 miles of Atlantic coastline, the ATC trained commanders and machine-gun, mortar, rocket launcher, demolition and flamethrower teams in the assault techniques they would need to overwhelm the defenders of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
In south-west England, the US Army opened its own version of Inveraray – the Assault Training Centre (ATC) – at Woolacombe on the north Devon coast, with training beginning there in September 1943.
Ten fully equipped infantry men dashed into the loch and vanished for ever
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