One of the things commanders of armies would like to do is reduce the amount of friendly fire incidents. A friendly fire incident is when soldiers, or troops of any kind are fired upon by their own side in error. Just about every war has this happen. The more troops involved and the longer the war goes on, the more friendly fire incidents usually are. I think it might be safe to say with the advent of longer-range weapons it was easier to make a mistake and kill people who are on your own side. When wars were hand-to-hand I believe the opponents knew each other and there were only very rare instances where a person might get killed, because someone believed he was the enemy when he wasn’t. In 1643 Robert Pierrepont, the first Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull was a commander in the English Civil War. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant General of the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Norfork. He was on the side of the king. At one time he was even the High Sheriff of Nottingham. Unfortunately for him he was captured and members of his army may not have realized it, because they heaped friendly fire on his position and killed him.

One of the incidents of friendly fire in the American Revolutionary War occurred when a man named Benjamin Huger was killed. He was one of five brothers from South Carolina who served on the American side. He had become close friends with Lafayette, after meeting him in Georgetown in 1777. His son was instrumental in getting Lafayette out of prison in the 1790s. Huger met an unceremoniously end in Charleston, South Carolina, when American troops mistook him for the enemy and opened fire, killing him. If his name looks familiar it might be because you recognize the name as being the same as the Confederate General Benjamin Huger. This general was his grandson.

Due to the sheer number of forces fighting in the American Civil War there were many friendly fire incidents, some are much more famous than others. One of the most famous took place at the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. One of the greatest generals of the Civil War, Thomas Stonewall Jackson was wounded as a result of friendly fire. He was returning from an intelligence gathering mission with some of his men when Confederate troops thought they were Union cavalry and opened fire on them. Jackson died from his wounds eight days later and perhaps the death of one of the greatest Confederate generals had something to do with their loss of the war. One can only imagine how the troops that fired upon him felt when they learned who he was. He wasn’t the only Confederate General to be shot by his own men, another great Confederate General named James Longstreet was involved in the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. He was heading a mounted column when the Confederates mistook them for Union troops. Longstreet survived and was laid up for five months. Another general in the same incident, Micah Jenkins was shot in the head and died instantly. The Union also had its share of friendly fire incidents. One of the more famous ones took place in 1865 when a union naval vessel, the USS Peterhoff was heading toward Wilmington to blockade the port. The ship was rammed and sunk by the Monticello another Union ship, because it had been mistaken for a blockade runner. All hands were rescued.

In World War I the British unintentionally launched a gas attack for the first time, on their own troops. I think most of us realize if you are going to launch a gas attack you better know which way the wind is blowing. Either the British miscalculated or the winds changed, but the result was the same. The gas, which was chlorine gas, floated over the British trenches. The British gas masks were not very good and many soldiers remove them because they couldn’t see out of them and they made it very hard to breathe, because of this two thousand British soldiers were injured and ten died. To make matters even worse the German artillery hit some of the gas cylinders and blew them up. In that same war the Germans suffered a horrific calamity during the Battle of Verdun. The German Army had temporarily occupied a French outpost and were very careless with their cooking fires. This carelessness caused grenades to go off and blew up flamethrower fuel which then blew up the ammunition cashe. Hundreds of soldiers were killed instantly including their regimental staff. This wasn’t the end of it, some of the eighteen hundred wounded soldiers attempted to escape the horror but were mowed down by other German soldiers thinking they were the French colonial African infantry.

World War II mistakes of friendly fire could probably fill several books, but is important to at least mention one or two of them. At the beginning of the war in 1939 the British submarine HMS Triton misidentified another British submarine the HMS Oxley. The Triton claimed their challenges went unanswered, so they assumed the other submarine was a German U-boat. Triton fired two torpedoes at it. The Oxley was the first Royal naval vessel to be sunk and also the first vessel to be sunk by another British vessel in the war. Only two sailors survived from the Oxley. It is said this incident was kept secret and the facts were only released in the 1950s. Near the end of World War II the last major Luftwaffe campaign took place in 1945. The Germans had scraped up as many planes as they could and the idea was to support their troops in the Battle of the Bulge. The whole operation was top secret, so secret in fact German troops on the ground didn’t know about it. When the planes flew over the German lines the German troops opened up with all their antiaircraft guns. The total number of German planes taking off was nine hundred and the total number of planes shot down was three hundred, resulting in the deaths of many pilots and aircraft destroyed which could never be replaced.

There have been estimates of how much damage friendly fire has caused in different battles and the estimates range from destruction of a small amount of men and material to over 70% in some cases. When we talk about planes attacking troops, sometimes all they have to go by is the position the troops are in, since most of the time they can’t differentiate friend from foe. Even on the ground it can be tough unless you are right on top of the other troops and can recognize their uniforms. Sometimes even that is difficult, because many of the uniforms look alike. Perhaps we will solve this problem in the future, but for now it is probably correct to say there will be more friendly fire incidents.