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One of the earliest instances of friendly fire on record came during the British Civil War of the 17th century. Royalist commander Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull had been captured by Parliamentarians and was being escorted down the River Trent when his own men, unaware that their commander was on the boat, fired upon it, killing Pierrepont's captors and the Earl himself.
The horrors of war can make men do crazy things. During the Austro-Turkish War of the 18th century, a Hapsburg-Austrian army of at least a few thousand men were moving to protect the town of Karánsebes. Once there, schnapps was bought, and when one drunken camp didn't share with the other, fights broke out and escalated until shots were fired. By the end of the fight between Austrians and Austrians, 150 soldiers were dead, with another 1,200 seriously wounded.
One of the many tragedies of confusion during the convoluted Napoleonic Wars occurred in 1801, during the Battle of Algeciras Bay. Under cover of night, the English HMS Superb snuck between two Spanish gunships and fired at both from each side. By the time the two Spanish ships retaliated against their invisible attacker, the Superb was safely out of the way and the Spanish ships destroyed each other.
Three months into World War I's extensive Battle of Verdun, German soldiers who were occupying Fort Douaumont cooked a meal with slightly less than the appropriate level of caution. This oversight caused the ignition of the fort's entire ammunition supply, including flamethrower fuel and grenades. A total of 679 German soldiers blew themselves up, all in pursuit of a warm meal.
Celebrated children's author C.S. Lewis served in World War I, and was wounded in France in 1918 after a misfired British artillery shell fell upon his location, killing two of his comrades.
On November 15, 2022, a stray missile struck a small farm in Poland close to the Ukrainian border, killing two civilians. Most immediately suspected the missile to have come from Russia, which would have been the first definitive attack by Russia on NATO soil. However, over the following days, both NATO and Poland came to the agreement that the missile was most likely a stray missile fired by Ukraine, as the country launched countermeasures against a barrage of Russian missiles.
The nine companies of the US 177th Army Division are known as the Lost Battalion, due to a tragic misstep that cost at least 197, and maybe as many 350, soldiers their lives. Surrounded by German troops and with almost no means of communication, the battalion sent out a carrier pigeon with requests for artillery support. Inaccurate coordinates caused the artillery fire to rain down directly onto the US troops, causing massive casualties. It wasn't until a final carrier pigeon, the now-famous Cher Ami, was sent out to request a halt to the incessant shelling that the bombardment was finally called off.
Two years later, in the Pacific theater, torpedo-equipped ships belonging to the Japanese navy fired at Allied ships. All of the torpedoes overshot, flew straight past their intended targets, and sank four of their own ships instead.
The massive and now infamous British passenger ship, the RMS Laconia, was transporting personnel off the coast of West Africa when it was attacked and sunk by German U-boat submarines. What the Nazi subs didn't know was that the Laconia was carrying nearly 2,000 Axis prisoners of war, mostly Italians. In all, 1,420 of the prisoners ultimately perished.
The German-Italian scales were symbolically leveled in 1942, on the Eastern European front, when Nazi general Karl Eibl was hastily retreating back to his Axis army lines after the brutal wintertime defeats of the USSR's Operation Little Saturn near Stalingrad. Unfortunately, a group of Italian soldiers mistook Eibl's vehicle for the beginnings of a Soviet push, and blew him to bits.
Near the end of the war, the Nazi Luftwaffe made a last-ditch attempt to surprise and overwhelm Allied air bases in Northern Europe. Some 900 aircraft were sent out, but, due to the secrecy surrounding the operation that kept many German troops on the ground from being aware of the attack, almost 300 planes were downed by Luftwaffe's own anti-aircraft operations. It was the single biggest loss in the Nazi air force's history.
Just a week after Germany's official surrender, Nazi U-boat captain Wolfgang Luth was walking drunk back to his quarters at the German Flensburg-Marwik naval base when a new 18-year-old recruit on guard duty shot him in the head, believing him to be an enemy.
In May of 1940, German bombers were sent on an attack of the French city of Dijon. However, due to a navigational error, the Luftwaffe bombers ended up bombing their own German city of Freiburg, resulting in 57 casualties.
In 1944, Axis powers were transporting around 800 Allied POWs in unmarked train cars (not pictured) from Rome into Germany. As the train passed over the Ponte Paglia bridge in Italy, Allied bombers flew overhead and landed plenty of successful hits on the train and the bridge, unaware that 800 of their own people were locked inside. Some escaped, but at least 400 prisoners died in the bombardment.
On July 5, 1950, mere weeks after the start of the Korean War, the Australian Air Force attacked a train convoy they thought to be North Korean, but was in fact transporting thousands of American and South Korean soldiers. More than 700 soldiers were killed.
Possibly the most destructive friendly fire incident in history occurred on May 3, 1945. In a disgustingly irresponsible move, the British Royal Air Force bombed three Axis-controlled ships, the Cap Arcona, the Theilbek, and the Deutschland, despite being warned by Swedish intelligence that POWs might be aboard. As a matter of fact, the ships were operating as floating concentration camps and carried around 8,000 imprisoned Jews, Russian POWs, and prisoners of other origins. The Allied bombings resulted in the loss of at least 7,000 lives.
During the Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israel inexplicably attacked the American ship USS Liberty, apparently due to a simple miscommunication. The attack resulted in 34 deaths and 171 injuries.
British forces took Hill 282 on September 23, 1950, but were immediately under fire of North Korean counteroffensives. For assistance, the soldiers called in a United Nations airstrike. Due to a tragic miscommunication regarding proper ground-to-air signaling, the napalm air strike hit the British soldiers' exact position, killing 60 soldiers.
On April 6, 2003, an F-14 Tomcat jet dropped a bomb on what was meant to be an Iraqi tank. What it was in reality was a group of vehicles transporting both American and Kurdish troops and a civilian translator. In the end, 23 people, including the translator, perished, with an additional 80 individuals seriously wounded.
Pat Tillman became an American hero when he gave up a lucrative career in professional football in order to fight in Afghanistan. Tragically, Tillman was shot dead at the age of 27 by confused American troops.
Sultan Munadi served valiantly as an Afghan translator for journalist Stephan Farrell. Both were kidnapped by Taliban forces in 2009. When British forces arrived to evacuate them, both Farrell and Munadi ran towards their rescuers. Farrell made it safely into the hands of the British, while Munadi, unarmed but still mistaken for a Taliban militant, was shot dead by the British forces as he tried to run to safety.
During the Gaza War of 2009 between Palestine and Israel, an Israeli tank fired at a building one of their own men was hiding in, causing the building to collapse and kill the Israeli soldier.
Sources: (PBS) (Military History Now) (CNN)
In the Helmand province of Afghanistan in January of 2008, British soldiers spotted what they described as Afghans "conducting suspicious activities," and decided to fire a Javelin rocket-powered grenade at their location without further investigation. The result was the wrongful killing of 15 Afghan allies occupying an allied sentry post.
This is far from the first time an army has accidentally attacked its allies. For as long as reliable conflict records have been kept, there have been incidences of friendly fire. Various studies estimate that anywhere from 2% to 20% of casualties in war are caused by friendly fire, and, shockingly, those statistics have barely changed over the last 200 years.
The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon caused immeasurable destruction in the region, including the Israeli Defense Force's worst friendly fire incident to date. The Israeli Air Force mistook Israeli ground forces for Syrian troops and attacked without mercy, leaving 24 IDF soldiers dead and another 108 seriously wounded.
War is a messy and dangerous racket. Everyone who engages in conflict can expect to witness tragedies and horrors beyond belief in the name of survival, but you'd think most combatants could at least count on their siblings in arms, no? Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and incidents of friendly fire are far more common than you might think.
Intrigued? Read on to learn about history's most infamous instances of friendly fire.
The worst incidents of wartime friendly fire in history
The fog of war and its tragic consequences
LIFESTYLE Conflict
War is a messy and dangerous racket. Everyone who engages in conflict can expect to witness tragedies and horrors beyond belief in the name of survival, but you'd think most combatants could at least count on their siblings in arms, no? Unfortunately, that's not always the case, and incidents of friendly fire are far more common than you might think.
Intrigued? Read on to learn about history's most infamous instances of friendly fire.