Severely damaged, she was taken under tow by the tug Great Emperor and for four days was attacked by
E-boats and bombers as she struggled back to the Tyne at three knots.
However, a group of
E-Boats on a standard mission out of Cherbourg somehow slipped through and, on spotting the landing craft, opened fire.
But a string of blunders meant hundreds of troops were killed in a friendly fire horror - and the dry run later became a real battle as German
E-boats attacked exposed vessels at Lyme Bay.
The troops were killed on April 28 when a Royal Navy convoy carrying them was attacked by
E-boats (torpedo boats) from Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine.
It ended tragically when hundreds of Americans drowned as the Allied convoy came under attack by German
E-boats.
These were the 8th Zerstorer-Flotille (Z-32, Z-24, ZH-1, formerly the Dutch destroyer Gerard Callenburgh, and the "orphaned" T-24) the 5th Torpedoboot-Flotille (T-28, Mowe, Falke and Jaguar); and the 5th and 9th Schnellboot-Flotillen, equipped with motor torpedo boats (called
E-boats by the Allies).
The Government of India has launched the country's first
e-boats to reduce rising levels of pollution in the highly congested city of Varanasi.
From there, the vital intelligence was gathered by tracking the movements of the German
E-Boats sailing from France.
These little coal laden ships scuttled between the Thames and the North East rivers - never an easy trip, as by day and night they were a target for the Luftwaffe and by the
E-boats of the Kriegsmarine.
"We were attacked by dive bombers, U-boats and
E-boats would fire torpedoes at us.
The original plan allowed that Force Z would turn back at about 1900 because it would have been foolhardy to have taken Rodney and Nelson (two 1920s battleships with very primitive anti-air and anti-E-boat capabilities) and the carriers Indomitable and Victorious (who did not have a night-fighter capability) into the relatively narrow waters of the Tunisian Straits, which were heavily mined and infested with Italian submarines and Italian and German
E-boats, with shore-based enemy aircraft to the northeast and the west.
A flotilla of nine German
E-boats had been ordered to investigate unusual radio activity in the area and believed they had stumbled across several destroyers.