Friendly fire WWII

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Originally Posted by Brian

Hi Laurent
A sad tale, but do we know how many other paratroopers were killed in this incident?

The wikipedia webpage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...s#World_War_II gave numbers for D-day casualties to friendly fire, but I do not believe them. Still, you can see the sources cites and try to find more.

Another example of certainly too high casualty number given by this page is for 27 June 1942, where "Wellingtons bombed for two hours British troops, killing 359 men" (sic). Given that between 26 and 28 June 1942, 600 Commonwealth men died in North Africa, I strongly doubt that more than half of them were killed in only one friendly fire case.

By the way the war diary of one of the units supposed to have been bombed on 27 June 1942 is online (http://www.warlinks.com/armour/4_cly/4cly_42.php) and there is nothing about a bombing attack on this date.