Friendly Fire
Acacia, Welcome to Able2Know, glad to have you here. The following info about Friendly Fire is for you.
Reader's Companion to Military History
Friendly Fire:
"Friendly fire," an ironic term for casualties in combat inflicted by one's own armed forces, has been a constant feature of warfare. It became a political and organizational issue only in the twentieth century, principally in the armed forces of western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Operating under media scrutiny and dependent upon public support, these military establishments cannot ignore the phenomenon of "fratricide" or "amicicide." Friendly fire is a serious problem: estimates of such casualties run from a low of 2 percent of all casualties to more plausible highs of 10-15 percent of all combat casualties. Friendly fire incidents are especially demoralizing since they destroy confidence in one's own comrades, commanders, and supporting arms.
The heat of battle has always created problems in distinguishing between the enemy and one's own forces. When battles were fought in classical and medieval times, distinctive insignia and tight formations simplified killing the right people, but arrows and thrown spears surely did not discriminate when launched into a melee. In some struggles, mounted knights trampled their own bowmen and men-at-arms. The introduction of firearms complicated identification problems by adding dense smoke and opening distances between the combatants. Artillery, even fired at short distances at visible targets, could kill friendly infantry when foot soldiers joined in close combat; such an incident occurred among British troops at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in the American Revolution (1781). In the American Civil War, Confederate infantry killed General "Stonewall" Jackson (1863) and Micah Jenkins (1864), mistaking their mounted staffs for Union cavalry.
The revolution in weaponry in the twentieth century made friendly fire more likely and more destructive. Foot soldiers could still kill their comrades through error in battle or (more likely) in nighttime mistakes in security and patrolling operations, but the chief culprits became field and antiaircraft artillery, and aircraft, especially those attacking ground targets. Also, warships shot down friendly aircraft, and aircraft destroyed friendly aircraft; these problems led to the development of electronic transponders that communicated identification-friend-or-foe (IFF) signals. Tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, lacking adequate observation capacity, added to the sources of danger. The whole art of fire support coordination developed not only to inflict damage on the enemy, but also to prevent friendly fire. The fielding of automatic geographic-position-sensing devices from the 1980s onward through satellite communications should reduce friendly fire casualties that occur through position misreporting. Nevertheless, the use of infrared sights, hypervelocity munitions, terminal-guidance systems, and whole groups of standoff weapons that depend on electronic target identification increases the potential for accidental deaths.
The experience of the American armed forces reveals the changing dimensions of the problem. Artillery barrages that fell on friendly infantry units were commonplace in World War I. Although artillery forward observers improved this situation in World War II, the far greater involvement of aircraft made matters worse. U.S. Navy ships shot down twenty-three transports and killed about one hundred paratroopers in the invasion of Sicily (June 1943); bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces made two major bombing errors in the Normandy campaign (July 1944) and killed over six hundred American soldiers, including the highest ranking U.S. casualty of World War II, Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair. In the war with Japan, artillery, naval gunfire, and airplanes killed marines and soldiers in relatively small numbers in almost every operation. U.S. Navy ships sometimes destroyed fighters of their own combat air patrols, but the development of fighter-direction techniques reduced these incidents late in the war. Friendly fire incidents plagued subsequent operations in Korea and Vietnam, especially (in the latter conflict) attacks by armed helicopters. One of the worst incidents in Korea occurred when U.S. Air Force aircraft attacked and killed or wounded seventy-six British soldiers (August 1950).
The Gulf War of 1990-1991 again proved the persistence of the friendly fire problem. Of the 146 coalition troops killed in combat, 35 died in friendly fire incidents; of 467 wounded, 72 fell in such incidents. In April 1994, two air force fighters shot down two army helicopters over the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq and killed 26 crew and passengers.
The friendly fire issue raises the longstanding dilemma of reconciling realistic training of troops with concern for safety. Some armed forces do not consider this a problem; the pre-1945 German army and the Soviet armed forces conducted field training notorious for resulting in casualties. In the United States, training deaths are controversial and taken seriously; between 1988 and 1995, 170 service personnel have died in combat and over 4,000 in on-duty accidents. Finding technological aids and operational techniques to reduce friendly fire casualties should also curb training accidents, but war and realistic training will still take their toll of accidental deaths.
Allan R. Millett
Charles F. Hawkins, "Friendly fire: Facts, Myths, and Misperceptions," Naval Institute Proceedings (June 1994): 54-60; Charles F. Shrader, Amicicide: The Problem of Friendly fire in Modern War (1992).
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A person very close to me came back from the war, a man who had lived in a very narrow environment all his life. He asumed without sounding me out that I was the same as he in outlook and judgement of the war. He told me with a never changing grin tales of passing through villages shooting the residents; how they would take turns putting bullets into old men and women as they went along. He collected nipples he cut off the dead girls. I listened wordlessly each time, not encouraging, not accusing. It was the 70s. I had by this time spent a number of years demonstrating in places like New York, D.C. and Los Angeles. Now I was exhausted and discouraged and had no fight left - for the time being. I was looking to build a life for the first time ever. I have no idea where that person ended up or how he lived his life. According to some, he did his duty, like countless other young Americans, and deserved to slip back in society and be counted. I don't know what should be his fate. I don't believe we can rid society of these types in the forseeable future.
Thanks alot BumbleBeeBoogie.
Regarding shooting prisoners, the author of The Bad Seed (forget his name right now) wrote a fictionalized acount of his experience as a Marine in the First World War, in which he reported small-scale mutinies, with some of the leathernecks shot on the spot, and the shooting of German POW's during the horrible fight for Belleau Wood. After the book was published, the Marine Corps strenuously denied the implied charges, and this author confirmed in published interviews that he had witnessed such events--and the threat of lawsuit faded away as newspapers published letters from other Marines who claimed to have seen the same events.
Both such atrocities and "friendly-fire" incidents are probably as old as warfare itself. In our own history, Pennsylvania and Virginia militia fired upon one another on the march to Fort Duquesne, until Washington rode between them, and broke it up. When Fort William Henry fell, the Indian allies of the French started slaughtering the wounded English and Americans, until Montcalm ordered his troops to protect them. So the Indians bided their time, and when the paroled survivors marched south to Fort Edward, they fell on the column and slaughtered any who could not escape, including women and children. Such atrocities continued throughout the Virginia Blue Ridge, and in the Carolinas, which were defended by the Virginia Militia, commanded by Washington. Small wonder, then, that during the Revolution, when Mohawks raided at the instigation of the English, he had no qualms about sending Sullivan to exterminate them. The survivors fled to Canada, where they reside to this day. The Revolutionary War in the South was particularly bitter, and both sides slaughtered with a will, and after small engagements in which regular troops were not invovled, they often hanged their prisoners. Washington would not tolerate indiscipline, and always approved the summary execution of looters and rapists--but that authority did not extend to the often self-appointed Tory or Rebel militias.
I could go on and on about this, but it is a sickening subject.
