- 7 hours ago
The Allies kept killing their own men from the air — and every time they fixed the problem, it happened again.
On July 11, 1943, a hundred and forty-four American transport planes flew over the Allied fleet off Sicily. The ships had been under German attack all day. One vessel opened fire, and within seconds every gun in the fleet joined in. Two generals watched their own planes go down — with no way to stop it.
The Allies had a year to fix this before D-Day. You'll learn about the solution — thousands of aircraft painted with black and white stripes using brooms and rags in a 48-hour scramble. On June 6, it worked perfectly.
Six weeks later, American bombers dropped three thousand tons of explosives on their own infantry. You'll hear about the planning meeting where ground and air commanders walked away with opposite understandings — and no one wrote the decision down. About the smoke markers that drifted onto American positions. About the three-star general identified only by the stars on his shoulder.
Eisenhower swore it would never happen again. That lasted fourteen days. Then it happened again — because two allied forces were using the same signal to mean opposite things.
On July 11, 1943, a hundred and forty-four American transport planes flew over the Allied fleet off Sicily. The ships had been under German attack all day. One vessel opened fire, and within seconds every gun in the fleet joined in. Two generals watched their own planes go down — with no way to stop it.
The Allies had a year to fix this before D-Day. You'll learn about the solution — thousands of aircraft painted with black and white stripes using brooms and rags in a 48-hour scramble. On June 6, it worked perfectly.
Six weeks later, American bombers dropped three thousand tons of explosives on their own infantry. You'll hear about the planning meeting where ground and air commanders walked away with opposite understandings — and no one wrote the decision down. About the smoke markers that drifted onto American positions. About the three-star general identified only by the stars on his shoulder.
Eisenhower swore it would never happen again. That lasted fourteen days. Then it happened again — because two allied forces were using the same signal to mean opposite things.
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LearningTranscript
00:00144 american transport planes flew straight into the guns of their own fleet it was the night of
00:06july 11th 1943. the pilots of the 52nd troop carrier wing had been told the route was clear
00:13they were carrying 2 000 paratroopers of the 504th parachute infantry regiment over the coast of
00:19sicily reinforcements for the invasion that had begun the day before the flight path took them
00:24directly over the allied armada anchored offshore what the pilots did not know was that the fleet
00:30had spent the entire day under german air attack junkers 88s had been hitting the ships in waves
00:35since morning gunners on every vessel were exhausted angry and primed to shoot at anything in the sky
00:42no one had told most of them that friendly aircraft would be passing overhead that night
00:46some ships claimed later the message never arrived others said it came too late it didn't matter
00:51the result was the same the first c-47 crossed the coastline at about 10 20 22 in the evening
00:58a single ship opened fire within seconds every anti-aircraft gun in the fleet joined in
01:05tracers lit up the sky from horizon to horizon the transport planes were flying low and slow 150 miles
01:12per hour at 600 feet they had no armor no defensive weapons and they were full of men planes started
01:19falling almost immediately one caught fire and tried to veer away from a ship beneath it it hit the
01:24water trailing a long ribbon of flame and men spilled from the fuselage some of them burning entire
01:31formations broke apart pilots who kept flying dropped paratroopers wherever they could scattering them
01:36across miles of hostile countryside some paratroopers landed in the sea and drowned under the weight of
01:42their equipment some were shot while hanging from their parachutes eight pilots gave up entirely turned
01:48around and flew back to tunisia still carrying their full loads and two of the most senior american
01:54officers in the mediterranean stood on a captured airfield watching the whole thing happen major
02:01general matthew ridgeway commander of the 82nd airborne and lieutenant general george patten had come to the
02:07field to greet the incoming paratroopers instead they watched their own anti-aircraft guns destroy their own
02:15planes there was nothing they could do no way to signal the ships no way to stop the chain reaction
02:21of fire that was spreading from vessel to vessel from shore battery to shore battery by the time it was
02:27over 23 planes had been shot down and 37 more were damaged 318 men were casualties 81 paratroopers and 60
02:37air
02:38crew were dead it was the worst friendly fire incident in american military history and it wasn't even the
02:44last one that week two nights later 112 planes carrying 1800 men of the british first parachute brigade flew
02:53toward the southeast coast of sicily 33 drifted off course and passed over an allied convoy the sailors
03:00had been warned about a german air raid they opened fire more transports went down more paratroopers died
03:06under friendly guns here's the thing you need to understand this was not a freak accident caused by
03:12one mistake this was a systemic failure no reliable way to tell a friendly plane from an enemy one at
03:18night in combat under stress and the allies knew it they had almost a full year before the next major
03:24airborne operation plenty of time to fix the problem and they did fix it they came up with something simple
03:31visible and almost impossible to miss it worked beautifully and it solved absolutely nothing
03:40the solution was paint after sicily allied planners spent months studying what had gone wrong
03:46the conclusion was straightforward gunners on ships and on the ground could not tell friendly aircraft
03:53from enemy ones especially at night especially under stress the existing electronic system called
04:00identification friend or foe sent a radio signal from the aircraft that friendly radar could recognize
04:07but a study concluded that on the day of the next major invasion with thousands of planes in the sky
04:12at
04:12once the system would be completely overwhelmed it would break down and when it broke down gunners would
04:19do what they had done over sicily shoot first
04:29so the planners went low tech five alternating stripes three white two black painted around the wings and
04:37fuselage of every allied tactical aircraft 18 inches wide on single engine planes 24 on twin engine bright
04:45unmistakable visible from the ground and from the air the rule for every gunner was simple if it doesn't
04:52have stripes shoot it down the idea wasn't entirely new back in 1942 the raf had painted white stripes on
05:00the undersides of their hawker typhoons because the plane's profile looked almost identical to a german
05:06fuck wolf 190 british anti-aircraft crews kept shooting down their own fighters the stripes fixed it now that same
05:14concept would be applied to every fighter every transport every medium bomber every reconnaissance
05:20plane every glider in the allied expeditionary air force the only exception was the four engine
05:26heavy bombers the luftwaffe had almost no heavy bombers left so there was little chance anyone would
05:32confuse a b-17 with a german aircraft air chief marshal trafford lee mallory approved the scheme on may 17th
05:401944 but secrecy was critical if the germans found out and painted their own planes with the same markings
05:47the whole system was useless so the order to actually start painting didn't go out until june 3rd
05:53for transports and june 4th for fighters and bombers two days before the invasion what followed was one of
06:02the most frantic painting operations in military history ground crews across every airfield in southern
06:08england worked through the night with brushes rollers rags and brooms there was so much demand that it
06:15nearly exhausted britain's entire supply of black and white paint the results were rough up close the
06:23stripes looked like they had been applied by amateurs which in most cases they had but precision didn't
06:29matter visibility did colonel bud anderson a p-51 pilot with the 375th fighter group walked to his mustang
06:38before dawn on june 6th he had been told to expect new markings but when he saw the enormous black
06:43and
06:44white bands wrapped around his aircraft he stopped he couldn't believe how big they were on june 1st a
06:51small test flight had been flown over the invasion fleet to familiarize naval crews with the markings
06:56five days later over 11 000 striped aircraft flew more than 14 000 sorties over normandy friendly fire
07:04incidents against aircraft were almost non-existent and the luftwaffe which the planners had feared
07:10would swarm the beaches barely appeared three german planes overflew the landing zone on june 6th
07:16three the stripes had done exactly what they were designed to do the problem that killed hundreds over
07:23sicily gunners unable to recognize their own planes was solved the allies had learned the lesson applied the
07:30fix and moved on but friendly fire is not one problem it is a family of problems and the next
07:37one was already taking shape six weeks into the normandy campaign this time the threat would not
07:44come from gunners shooting at planes they couldn't identify it would come from planes dropping bombs on
07:49troops they couldn't see and no amount of paint was going to fix that
07:57six weeks after d-day the allied advance had stalled the problem was the terrain normandy's farmland was
08:05divided by hedgerows dense walls of earth roots and vegetation some of them centuries old taller than
08:11a man thick enough to stop a tank every field was a fortress german defenders hid behind the bocage with
08:18machine guns mortars and anti-tank weapons and the americans had to fight for each one separately
08:25daily advances were measured in yards by the end of june 39 000 americans were dead or wounded and the
08:31front line had barely moved the allies had total air superiority swarms of fighter bombers roamed over
08:38normandy almost unopposed destroying german vehicles gun positions and supply columns but against dug-in
08:45infantry hidden behind hedgerows fighter bombers were not enough what the generals wanted was something
08:51heavier something that could erase an entire defensive line in a single blow so they turned to
08:57the strategic bombers the same b-17 and lancasters that had been built to flatten factories and cities
09:03from 20 000 feet and this is where the problem changed shape entirely invasion stripes solved
09:10identification they told the gunner on the ground that is a friendly plane do not shoot
09:15but what happens when the friendly plane is the one doing the shooting and it cannot see the difference
09:20between its own troops and the enemy a thousand yards ahead of them field marshal montgomery tried it
09:26first on july 18th he launched operation goodwood a massive armored assault east of kane preceded by the
09:33largest tactical air bombardment of the war to that point 2077 aircraft dropped 7800 tons of bombs on
09:41the german positions the ground shook for miles british tankers watched the explosions from their hatches
09:47and assumed nothing could survive that kind of punishment they were wrong
09:53the bombers had released their loads well back from the german forward positions deliberately because the
09:59pilots were terrified of hitting their own troops the result was that the city of kane was destroyed over
10:06three thousand french civilians were killed and the actual german defensive line was barely scratched
10:12the 88 millimeter guns on borgeboos ridge the real threat sat outside the bombing zone entirely they
10:19were untouched when the british tanks rolled forward they drove straight into those guns
10:24major hans von look commanding a battle group of the 21st panzer division repositioned five 88
10:31millimeter batteries into a firing line and waited the british came across open ground and the 88s opened
10:38up tank after tank brewed up crews bailed out of burning shermans and cromwells only to be caught in
10:45machine gun crossfire a trooper in the fife and forfar yeomanry looked ahead and saw nothing but burning
10:51vehicles in three days the british lost between 250 and 400 tanks goodwood ground to a halt not the most
11:00exciting way to discover a fundamental flaw in your doctrine but goodwood proved something important
11:06the problem with using strategic bombers and close support was not identification it was precision
11:12a b-17 dropping bombs from four miles up could miss its target by 500 yards in perfect conditions
11:19that margin was acceptable when the target was a ball bearing factory when the target was a line of german
11:25trenches 800 yards from your own infantry 500 yards was the difference between destroying the enemy
11:31and destroying yourself eisenhower was furious montgomery insisted goodwood had achieved its real goal
11:38drawing six german panzer divisions to the british sector away from the americans that may have been true
11:45but the losses were staggering and the front line hadn't moved and now it was omar bradley's turn to try
11:52he had a plan that accounted for every single mistake and what happened next would kill a three-star general
12:00and change allied air doctrine forever if this story has you hooked hit like and subscribe there is a lot
12:07more coming because bradley was about to learn that a perfect plan and a perfect outcome are two very
12:13different things bradley flew to england to make his case in person he wanted the biggest airstrike
12:21ever used in direct support of ground troops and he wanted it aimed at a single narrow strip of german
12:27front line a few miles west of saint lowe the target zone was 6 000 yards long and 2 200
12:34yards deep
12:35inside it sat the panzer lair division one of the best armored units germany had left
12:41if the bombers could destroy it bradley's infantry and tanks would punch through the gap and break into open
12:46country the entire stalled normandy campaign depended on this working bradley had studied goodwood
12:53carefully he knew exactly why it had failed and he was determined not to repeat it his troops would
12:59pull back only 1200 yards from the german front close enough to attack immediately after the last bomb
13:05fell before the surviving germans could recover from the shock the air commanders were not happy with that
13:11number they wanted 3 000 yards of safety zone at that distance they said they could guarantee no bombs
13:18would fall on american troops bradley refused 3 000 yards meant his infantry would need over an hour to
13:25cross the gap by then the germans would be back in their positions dug in and waiting the whole point
13:32of
13:32the bombing was the shock and shock has a shelf life measured in minutes they compromised at 1200 yards
13:40fighter bombers would cover the nearest 250 yards the heavy bombers would hit everything behind that
13:46and bradley insisted on one more thing a clearly visible bomb line not a map coordinate not a set
13:53of grid numbers a road the saint low to perrier's highway ran east to west directly along the german front
14:01it was paved straight and unmistakable from the air every pilot would see it every bombardier would know
14:09nothing north of that road bradley also demanded that the bombers approach from the east flying
14:15parallel to the road parallel to the front line that way if a plane released late the bombs would fall
14:23deeper into german territory not back onto american positions it made perfect sense it was the safest
14:30possible geometry the air commanders listened they nodded and then they planned a perpendicular
14:36approach the reason was practical 1800 heavy bombers flying parallel along a 6000 yard front would need
14:45hours to cycle through the target box was too narrow a perpendicular approach coming in from the north
14:51crossing the road and dropping on the south side could push the entire bomber force through in under 90
14:57minutes maximum saturation in minimum time that was what bradley wanted he just didn't want it done this way
15:06here is where the catastrophe was built bradley left the planning meeting on july 19th believing the
15:11approach would be parallel the air commanders left the same meeting planning a perpendicular run no one
15:18wrote down the final decision no one confirmed it in writing no one asked the obvious question do we
15:24actually agree on this there was one more problem that nobody talked about even after bradley ordered his
15:31front line units to pull back 1200 yards some elements of the 30th infantry division were still
15:37dug in as close as 800 yards from the german positions they had not been told to dig deeper they
15:43had not been warned that heavy bombers would be flying directly over their heads and on the morning of july
15:4924th when 1600 bombers lifted off from england the men of the 30th division were looking up at the sky
15:55with no idea what was about to happen the weather was clearing the plan was in motion and the bombs
16:02were already falling july 24th the sky over normandy was clearing but not fast enough the bombers were
16:12already in the air heading south from england air marshal lee mallory sitting at bradley's headquarters
16:17near the front looked at the clouds still hanging over the target and decided visibility was insufficient
16:24he sent a cancellation order but the message had to travel from normandy back to eighth air force
16:29headquarters in england and from there out to the individual bomber formations already approaching the
16:35french coast it was like trying to recall a bullet most of the bombers got the message and turned back
16:40some did not and the ones that didn't come in from the north perpendicular to the front line not
16:47parallel this was the first time bradley realized the air commanders had never agreed to his approach
16:52route he watched the bombers cross directly over his own positions and understood in that moment
16:58exactly what was about to go wrong bombs fell on the 30th infantry division 25 men were killed 131 were
17:07wounded soldiers were buried alive by walls of earth thrown up from the explosions and their comrades
17:13scrambled to dig them out with bare hands the operation was postponed 24 hours that night neither first army
17:24headquarters no one told the 30th division that the bombers would be coming back tomorrow on the same
17:30perpendicular route in fact 7th corps sent a message at 1 55 in the morning reassuring commanders that there
17:37would be no bombing north of the road july 25th clear skies 9 38 in the morning 600 fighter bombers
17:46hit
17:46german strong points along the front then for the next hour 1800 heavy bombers of the 8th air force
17:52came in from the north again perpendicular again directly over american lines the corps artillery fired
18:00red smoke shells to mark the no bomb line along the road but there was a breeze blowing from the
18:05south
18:05and the red smoke drifted north away from the german positions back over the american ones the first wave of
18:12bombers saw the road clearly and hit their targets but their bombs threw up enormous clouds of dust and
18:18debris that obscured the road completely the second wave could not see the road at all what they could
18:24see was smoke they aimed for it and the smoke was now sitting on top of the 30th infantry division
18:30each successive wave of bombers shifted the point of impact further north the dust from one group's bombs
18:37became the aiming point for the next the error compounded itself wave after wave for over an hour
18:49he watched the bomb lines creep toward him flight by flight he described a moment of frozen panic
18:56knowing the bombs were coming unable to move unable to do anything except watch
19:02then the sound hit he called it a gigantic rattling like enormous seeds in a dry gourd he threw himself
19:11under a farm wagon and pressed his face into the dirt the blast waves came in continuous flutters against
19:18his chest and eyes men around him were screaming some were buried some were not moving at all a hundred
19:26yards
19:26from where pile lay lieutenant general leslie mcnair was in a slit trench mcnair was the commander of army
19:33ground forces the man responsible for training the entire american army he had come to normandy as part of
19:40a deception plan pretending to command a fictitious army group to fool the germans a bomb landed directly
19:47on his position his body was thrown 60 feet the medics who found him could not identify the remains
19:54the only thing recognizable was three stars on what was left of a shoulder 111 americans were killed
20:02490 were wounded 164 men of the 30th division were diagnosed with blast induced shock unable to speak
20:11unable to stand unable to fight an associated press photographer named bead ervin who had gone
20:18forward to document the attack was killed by a bomb from a b-26 marauder that fell short
20:23the ap ran photographs of american soldiers frantically digging their comrades out of
20:28collapsed foxholes the caption read after german shelling it was a lie the censors would not allow
20:35the truth that evening eisenhower crossed the channel back to england he was shattered and he made a
20:41decision heavy bombers would never again be used in direct support of ground troops the problem had been
20:48studied the lessons had been learned the solution had been implemented and it had killed a three-star
20:53general and over a hundred of his own men twice on consecutive days the ban lasted exactly 14 days
21:03on august 7th 1944 13 days after cobra lieutenant general guy simmons launched operation totalize
21:12it was the first major offensive planned and commanded by the first canadian army the objective
21:18was to smash through german defenses south of cannes and drive toward falez cutting off the retreat of the
21:24entire german force in normandy simmons was considered one of the most innovative commanders in the
21:30allied army and totalize reflected that he had invented a new weapon for the attack the kangaroo
21:36an armored personnel carrier built by ripping the guns out of american m7 priest self-propelled howitzers
21:43and filling the empty hull with infantry for the first time soldiers would advance behind armor instead
21:50of walking beside it the first phase went in at night six columns of tanks and kangaroos guided by
21:57searchlights radio beams and lines of tracer fire from beaufort's guns punched through the german forward
22:03positions in the dark it worked by morning the canadians had broken through the first line of defense
22:08and were on verrier ridge ground that had cost them nearly 2 000 casualties to reach in the failed
22:15attacks of the previous month then came the second phase and for that simmons needed bombers the united
22:22states eighth air force was assigned to hit german reserve positions at hautmenil directly ahead of the
22:28advancing canadian and polish armored divisions the canadians were told to mark their own positions
22:34with yellow smoke grenades yellow meant friendly yellow meant do not bomb here no one told the americans
22:41the eighth air force had selected yellow as the color for their target marking flares yellow meant
22:48bomb here the same color opposite meanings two branches of two different national militaries operating
22:55under the same allied command and nobody had cross-checked the signals it was not sabotage it was not
23:01incompetence in any single office it was a system in which the left hand had no idea what the right
23:08hand
23:08was doing the bombers came in over the canadian lines one b24 damaged by german flak jettisoned its
23:15bomb load to stay airborne the aircraft behind it saw the bombs fall and interpreted it as a signal
23:22the lead plane has found the target they released the next formation saw those bombs hit the ground
23:28and did the same the error cascaded backward through the formation each crew following the one ahead
23:34each one dropping further north further from the germans deeper into the canadian rear around 315
23:41allied soldiers were killed among the wounded was major general rod keller commander of the third
23:48canadian infantry division hit when american bombs struck his headquarters he never commanded in the
23:54field again now here is where this story turns from tragedy into something worse because you might expect
24:01that after cobra and after totalize two catastrophic short bombings in three weeks every possible
24:08precaution would be taken the next time and precautions were taken new procedures were written new coordination
24:14protocols were established lessons were officially learned six days later on august 14th operation
24:22tractable launched this time it was raf bomber command 800 lancasters in halifaxes different air force
24:30different country same result 77 bombers dropped their loads on the canadian rear areas 165 polish and
24:39canadian soldiers were killed 241 were wounded and riding in an armored car directly inside the bomb zone
24:46was general simons himself the man who had planned the entire operation sitting next to him was air marshal
24:55sir arthur coningham commander of the second tactical air force coningham was one of the architects of
25:01allied close air support doctrine he had literally helped write the rules that were supposed to prevent
25:07exactly this from happening both men survived but the men around them did not all share that luck four
25:14massive friendly fire bombings in 21 days sicily's lesson produced invasion stripes goodwood's lesson produced
25:21bradley's bomb line cobra's lesson produced eisenhower's ban totalize's lesson produced new coordination
25:28protocols and each time the next operation killed more allied soldiers with their own bombs the fixes
25:36were not fixing anything which raised the question that no one in the allied command seemed willing to
25:41ask out loud what if the problem was not the specific mistakes but the machine itself
25:49every fix was logical every fix made perfect sense and every fix assumed the next disaster would look
25:56like the last one it never did the problem was not paint or smoke or approach angles the problem
26:03was that the allied war machine had grown into the largest military operation in human history
26:10and its parts could not talk to each other a bomber crew at 20 000 feet over normandy had no
26:16way to
26:16communicate with the infantry below them none no shared radio frequency no direct link if a bombardier saw
26:25something wrong smoke drifting markers in the wrong place troops where they shouldn't be he could not
26:31call down and ask his only channel went back to his group commander who relayed to wing headquarters who
26:37relayed to eighth air force headquarters in england who relayed to the ground force liaison who relayed to
26:43the corps commander in france by the time a correction traveled that chain the bombs were already falling
26:49and it was not just the radios the allied force in normandy was a coalition american british canadian
26:57polish with separate air forces separate armies separate headquarters separate procedures the eighth
27:05air force used one system for marking targets the raf used another the canadian army used the third when
27:12these systems overlapped on the same battlefield no one was responsible for making sure they were compatible
27:18and no one discovered the conflicts until men were already dead then there was the physics of carpet
27:24bombing itself the drift that had crept across the 30th division at cobra each wave's dust becoming
27:30the next wave's aiming point was not a malfunction it was built into the method every formation followed
27:37the one ahead every bomb cloud shifted the target further from where it was supposed to be
27:42it could not be eliminated by better planning only by not using carpet bombing at all and no one was
27:48willing to give that up because when it worked nothing else came close but the problem of friendly fire
27:55was not limited to bombers hitting ground troops it showed up everywhere allied forces operated near each
28:00other without clear coordination and nowhere more dramatically than in the skies over yugoslavia
28:06on november 7th 1944 colonel clarence edwinson led three squadrons of p-38 lightnings from the 82nd fighter
28:15group on a ground attack mission over serbia their orders were to destroy german transport columns
28:21retreating between stanica and mitrovica about 60 miles southwest of the city of nice the soviets had
28:28been advancing through the balkans for weeks and the day before american p-38s had successfully supported
28:35soviet ground troops in the same area the two allied air forces were operating closer together
28:40than they ever had the problem was that soviet forces had advanced 60 miles further than american
28:47intelligence showed edwinson's pilots took off with outdated maps they destroyed a german locomotive
28:53near stanica confirming in their minds that they were in the right area then they flew northeast and
29:00spotted a long column of vehicles and troops on a road near nice they assumed it was german it was
29:06not
29:07it was a soviet rifle corps marching in full daylight with red banners and an orchestra the soviets were
29:14celebrating the 27th anniversary of the october revolution the p-38s attacked soviet anti-aircraft guns
29:22around the nearby airfield opened fire and shot down one lightning the soviet airbase commander general
29:29vladimir sudets was on the field at that moment he saw the attack and assumed the aircraft were german
29:35faulkwulf 189s which looked remarkably similar to the twin boom p-38 he scrambled 10 yak-9 fighters within
29:44minutes american and soviet pilots were in a dogfight over a city that had been liberated by the soviets
29:50weeks earlier the battle lasted 15 minutes captain koldanov a soviet ace flew close enough to the lead p-38
29:58to show the red star on his wings only then did both sides realize what was happening by that point
30:05three soviet fighters and two american p-38s were down over 30 soviet soldiers on the ground were dead
30:12including a general both governments buried the incident immediately the last thing either side needed
30:19with victory in sight was proof that the allies could not tell each other apart same war same alliance same
30:26problem a system too large and too fast for its own coordination to keep up
30:33the numbers fill entire chapters of after action reports that most people have never read exposed
30:40friendly fire incidents alone account for thousands of casualties across the war but numbers are the
30:46simplest way to not think about what actually happened because every one of those numbers was a specific
30:52person who was killed by someone on his own side and in most cases no one back home was told
30:59the truth
30:59about how he died corporal gus carozas was 19 years old on the night of july 11 1943 he was
31:07assigned to
31:08the 376th parachute field artillery battalion of the 82nd airborne division and his job was to carry the
31:15breach block assembly of a 75 millimeter field gun that single piece of equipment was so critical that
31:22it earned him a distinction no one in his unit wanted he was the first man out of the second
31:27plane
31:28and because of the weight and importance of what he carried he was the only paratrooper in his stick who
31:34was given a white parachute everyone else jumped with standard olive drab nobody mentioned this to him
31:40before the jump a 19 year old kid descending through a sky full of friendly tracers under a bright white
31:47canopy that caught every light in the darkness he landed most of the men behind him did not make it
31:53out of the plane before it was hit carozas survived sicily he survived the war he is 95 years old
32:00and lives
32:00in southport indiana most were not that lucky and for the families of the men who died the truth was
32:07often
32:07the last thing they received after cobra the war department did not acknowledge that lieutenant
32:13general mcnair had been killed by american bombs until over a week after his death the initial
32:19announcement claimed he had died in action which was technically true and deliberately misleading
32:24reporters in london already knew the real cause the censors knew they knew they released the truth
32:30only after it had already leaked beat ervin's widow catherine did not learn the full circumstances of her
32:36husband's death for months when a fellow photographer finally wrote to her with details she wrote back
32:43her letter was later quoted in a newspaper column filed from germany she wrote that there had been so
32:48many hopes and plans between a husband and wife plans that would never come true now little sounds of
32:54shattering hopes and dreams she said are big noises now that is what friendly fire left behind not
33:01lessons learned not doctrines improved not protocols updated those things happened and they mattered and
33:08they saved lives in later wars but for the men who were buried alive at saint low for the paratroopers
33:14who
33:14burned over jela for the canadians and poles who died under their own bombers south of can the lesson
33:20came too late and for their families the truth came even later some of it is still coming now if
33:27this video
33:28helped you understand a part of the war that doesn't get talked about enough hit like and subscribe and
33:33turn on the bell that's the only way to make sure you don't miss what's coming next because the algorithm
33:38won't show it to you otherwise here's a question for the comments whose responsibility was it the
33:44pilots who dropped the bombs the planners who drew the lines or the system that couldn't connect them
33:50let us know what you think and tell us where you're watching from country city wherever you are
33:55these stories belong to everyone and the people who live them deserve to be remembered
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