On arriving home from school on12 November, 1943, my two brothers, two sisters and myself were told by our parents that we were to be evacuated from our home. As well as our coastal village of Torcross, this affected the villages of Stokenham, Chillington, Sherford, Slapton, Strete, East Allington and Blackawton, as well as many outlying farms and hamlets. In all, this totalled about 3,000 people and 30,000 acres of land. This mammoth task had to be completed by 21 December - approximately six weeks. All the villagers were told to attend their parish churches at a given time. They were then informed by the Lord Lieutenant of Devon that the area was required for battle training using live ammunition, the beach at Slapton Sands being similar to Normandy. Torcross villagers had to attend Stokenham Church, about one and a half miles inland. I remember Jack Colliver, a shopowner in the village, saying they had the meeting in the church instead of the village hall so that no one could swear at the buggers! Within a very short time, everyone had found somewhere to go. We all went to share a large farmhouse at a hamlet called Chivelstone with an aunt and uncle. Father was a butcher and around 50% of his customers lived outside the evacuated area, so he made a little lock-up shop in the corner of a garage at nearby East Prawle by kind permission of George Jarvis. We never returned to school on the following Monday, but were engaged in helping farmers to thresh their corn ricks, bale hay, and remove turnips to feed the cattle and sheep which neighbouring farmers looked after. All fat cattle and sheep were quickly sold. We were about the last family to leave the village on 20 December, 1943. All the furniture had gone the day before, along with my younger brother and sister, George and Una. Father and Mother left in the butchers van, overloaded with butchery equipment. My elder brother, John, rode the bike via Stokenham where he had to hand the key in at the village hall. That left me with two men whose lorry was full of our hen houses and coops, complete with poultry. There was no room for me inside the lorry, so I had to sit on a large bag of coke on the tailboard with my head between the staves of a ladder which was tied to the roof. As I left the village everything was so quiet and eerie. We had been at Chivelstone for around six weeks when one of the fields on the farm was taken over by the US Army. A large camp was soon built by black soldiers, which was the first time that most of us had seen a black man. As soon as the camp was completed, the white soldiers moved in. Unknown to us at the time, the blacks and whites could not agree and fights were always taking place. From the middle of March 1944, the whole area was awash with American troops, complete with sweets and cigarettes which they supplied to all and sundry (this was the first time I knew you could smoke a camel!). It was not long before we could hear a lot of shell fire, and then realised the practice was in full swing. From the top of the hill, we could see the Navy shelling our villages. The first anyone knew about the Exercise Tiger disaster was at Beesands, when the fishermen said that something had gone wrong, and that American Military Police were patrolling the shoreline looking for bodies. The landing craft were attacked just off Lyme Bay as they were heading for Slapton Sands where the practice landings were to take place. It appears that some German E-boats happened across the craft by accident, and thought it was a convoy of ships. Apparently the first salvo of torpedoes went under the flat bottomed landing craft; had the enemy realised earlier, the tragedy would have been much worse as only three landing craft were sunk. About 700 men were lost, mostly drowned. Sadly, instead of having their life-jackets under their armpits, the troops had put them around their waists believing they would ride higher in the water and be spotted more easily. Consequently, as soon as they were in the water, gravity and the weight of the packs on their backs turned them turtle, and they were drowned. This must have been a result of poor instruction. The tragedy took place on the night of 28 April, although we were unaware at the time that so many had perished. During the next few weeks, the practising with live ammunition went on by day and night. Of course, there were more casualties, but not on the scale of Exercise Tiger. On the morning of 6 June, we were aware that the invasion had taken place. We had heard gunfire rumbling in the distance all night, plus the fact that almost all the troops had vanished. We were proved correct when we heard the six o'clock news. It was on a Sunday night during August 1944 when my brother John, myself, and Dick and Harry Friend (who lived in the farm cottage) decided to walk the five miles and sneak into the evacuated area. We came over the hill to Torcross, and were surprised to see most of the village still intact. All of the farm buildings at the back of our house had been demolished and the orchard had disappeared; it looked to us that it had been used as a tank park. The place was quite ghostly - no birds, only rats and rabbits everywhere. We came across plenty of tins of food with labels missing, which we carried back with us. It was fun opening them because you did not know if you were going to have bully beef, hash or peaches. We made a couple more sorties home before we had official permission to return on 8 November. We were the first family to return to the village, and had been back about ten days before the electricity was turned on. It was not long before all the farmers were hard at work in the fields. The biggest danger then was finding live shells and mortar bombs. Almost daily the bomb disposal squad were in action. It remains a miracle to us that no-one was killed by what was left behind. As recently as this summer, some live shells were found and detonated on the spot as they were too dangerous to move. We had a family Christmas in 1944, back in our own home again, and soon things returned to normal.