Like we said in our first video of friendly fire, you can't turn it off in real life, and it thrived
in World War II, in which identification and positional errors were commonplace
and only exacerbated by poor comms, poor training, and sketchy environments. If you haven't watched
that first video, it's worth giving it a quick one-two before starting this video,
as we go into causes and stats a bit more in the first. For the rest of you, hide under your
desk or something, coz we're about to call an aerial bombardment down on our own heads
and reveal 13 more shocking instances of friendly fire in the Second World War.
Italo Balbo served as Italy's Marshal of the Air Force, Governor-General of Libya,
and Commander-in-Chief of Italian North Africa during the Second World War, and he would have
replaced Mussolini if he didn't become a casualty of friendly fire on the 28th of June 1940.
A passenger on a Savoia-Marchetti SM.79
medium bomber, Balbo was en route to an Italian airfield in Tobruk, Libya,
which had recently been attacked by the British. Mistaking Balbo's SM.79 for another British plane,
the AA batteries defending the airfield fired, killing Balbo and everyone else on board.
Born as Spreewald, renamed Anubis, and renamed Spreewald once more in 1939,
the German passenger-carrying freighter by that name disguised herself as a British ship to
approach Bordeaux, France in January 1942. On the 31st of January, she was mistaken by German U-boat
Kapitänleutnant Peter-Erich Cremer as -- who would have thought? -- a British ship,
and Cremer's submarine U-333 shot two torpedoes at her,
setting her up in a blaze and opening her guts to the sea. A search for survivors was launched,
but this mistake resulted in the loss of German crewmen and Allied navy POWs alike,
with a total of 72 perishing. The Kapitänleutnant was court-martialled but found not guilty.
Maybe we're bending the rules with this one, but I think it deserves at least a dishonourable
mention. On the 13th of April 1942, Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires of the RAF
were showing off in a demonstration of tactical airpower in the now-uninhabited village of Imber
within British training grounds in England, when one of the Hurricanes mistook the spectators for
target dummies and laid waste to them, killing 25 military personnel, wounding 71, and doing
the enemy a favour. The 21-year-old pilot claims the weather contributed to his error of judgement,
and he went on to fly in the war, only to get shot down over France in June that same year.
Antoniotto Usodimare was an Italian Navigatori-class destroyer which served
in the Regia Marina during the Second World War, and her life was cut short by another vessel of
the Regia Marina, the Adua-class submarine Amba Alagi, on the 8th of June 1942. Under the command
of captain Sergio Puccino, the Alagi loosed three torpedoes at a friendly naval column en
route from Naples to Tripoli, thinking them the enemy. One torpedo hit the Antoniotto Usodimare,
sinking her and ending the lives of 141 of her 300-ish crewmen.
In 1941, the British merchant ship Speybank was captured by ze Germans, converted into
a minelayer and blockade runner, and renamed the Doggerbank. Serving in the Kriegsmarine,
the Doggerbank was en route to France on the 10th of January 1943 when, mistaken for the
British ship she used to be, she was torpedoed by a German U-boat and torn open to the Atlantic,
taking all but a few of crew of 365 to the ocean floor with her. Those who survived the
initial blast and the vessel's sinking slowly died or killed themselves on an unaptly named
"jolly boat" soon after, with but one sailor coming away from the ordeal with his life.
Operation Cobra was an Allied offensive launched shortly after the D-Day landings,
with the aim of smashing through German defences and advancing to the region of Brittany in France.
Cobra commenced with an aerial bombardment on the 24th of July 1944, though cloudy conditions
impacted visibility, and some of the 1,600 Allied aircraft spearheading Operation Cobra from the
sky dropped their payloads on American ground units, killing 25 men and wounding a further 130.
Some troops started firing on their own aircraft at this point, but their message must have somehow
been misinterpreted, for the next day, when the clouds were gone and the sun was shining,
Allied aircraft dropped bombs on more Allied troops, killing a further 111
men and wounding 490, blaming it on deflection errors, and dust and smoke.
The Royal Navy S-class submarine HMS Sunfish was launched in 1936 and served
in the Second World War, and in 1944, she was transferred to the Soviet Navy,
in which she didn't last long at all. On the 27th of July 1944, while en route to Murmansk,
Russia, she was intercepted by an RAF Coastal Command B-24 Liberator and -- you
guessed it -- bombed. All of her crewmen, which included some British liaison staff,
perished in this friendly fire attack, and the Liberator's aircrew was actually found to be
responsible for the attack, having ignored unmistakable signs that the sub was friendly
and not fired recognition signals themselves. Great way to boost Anglo-Soviet relations.
Born in Scotland and sold and resold until she ended up in Japanese hands, Jun'yō Maru was a
cargo ship which transported Allied POWs during World War II -- a "hell ship." On the 18th of
September 1944, she was bound for Sumatra and packed with more than 1,450 Allied POWs and 4,200
Japanese slave labourers. Enter the HMS Tradewind, a British submarine commanded by a British officer
who had no idea the Allied POWs were on board. As you might have guessed, he put the Jun'yō Maru,
along with more than 5,600 souls, under the waves, and those who were rescued were rescued by the
Japanese and forced to work on the Burma Railway, which was pretty much a death sentence in itself.
Launched on the first day of 1945, Operation Bodenplatte was the Luftwaffe's last major
offensive in the war. The plan was to gain air superiority in the Battle of the Bulge to free
up the Heer and the Waffen-SS, though it didn't go according to plan, and bad weather was much
to blame. While en route to Allied airfields, the pilots were flying over some of the most heavily
defended parts of German-occupied Europe, and they hadn't really thought to forewarn them about the
operation. As a result, German AA batteries, reinforced by the Allies, made a complete mess
of the Luftwaffe, destroying a total of 300 German aircraft and killing 237 pilots in just one day.
In the final days of the war in Europe, hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs were forced to march
out of German POW camps and westward across the continent. Theses marches were known collectively
as "The Long Walk," "The Black March," and "The Death March Across Germany," among other names,
and the lack of food and sanitation and the biting winter were just a few of the threats these
unfortunate souls were faced with. Another was Allied air attacks, in which pilots mistook the
marching POWs for marching Germans. On the 19th of April 1945, in a village in Germany called Gresse,
Allied POWs were strafed by RAF Hawker Typhoons, which killed 30 and gravely wounded 30 more,
but it's likely this sort of thing happened on more occasions than one.
The SS Cap Arcona was a German ocean liner employed by the Kriegsmarine in 1942
for a variety of purposes during the Second World War, including as a set in a German
propaganda film called "Titanic," as an evacuation ship, and as a prison ship.
In May 1945, she was packed full of POWs from Nazi concentration camps
when she and the other vessels she was travelling with were attacked by Hawker Typhoons of the RAF.
While the German guards were mostly above deck, the POWs were below it, suffering in the dark,
and only 350 of the 5,000 POWs on the Cap Arcona, who were from over 30 different nationalities,
managed to survive the initial blasts and the sinking of the ship. In comparison,
more than 400 SS personnel who were aboard the Cap Arcona were rescued by German trawlers.
While the scale is something else entirely, it's worth mentioning that
at least 15 Allied POWs died in the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki at the end of the war,
including eight British POWs and seven Dutch POWs. Other Allied POWs,
such as American POW Joe Kieyoomia and 24 Australian POWs, survived the blast.
Wolfgang Lüth is known for being the second most successful German U-boat captain of the Second
World War, having sunk 46 merchant ships and one French sub in just 15 patrols, and this poor Nazi
was the victim of a friendly fire incident on the night of the 13th of May 1945, after the war in
Europe was over. Lüth was stumbling back to Mürwik Naval Academy (which was still operational at this
point) after a night on the turpentine when he was confronted by a young German guard with a gun.
In his drunken stupor, Lüth failed to tell the guard the password to enter the facility,
and the guard hip-fired, shooting Lüth dead and leaving his wife and four children without
a husband and father. The young guard, eighteen at the time, was not charged.
So those were just another 13 examples friendly fire in World War II
among thousands. But what do you think? Is there an example you want to share? Do you
want to see a video about friendly fire in other conflicts? Please let us known in the comments.