The tragedies of the fog of war, but the two planes do not look alike on the ground. Different cowlings, plexiglass nose front, etc.
However, at a distance, they could look similar because of the twin engines. Because a gunner only has a few seconds to sight and shoot, he might not be able to properly identify who is flying towards him.
Today, fighters have radio transponders on them to broadcast an identification signal. SO do our armored vehicles.
Supposedly, Lucas copied the dambuster’s attack for the rebel attack in the first Star Wars movie.
The Mosquito really was a remarkable aircraft.
I can understand this friendly fire shootdown of a famous aviator being kept secret during the war, but not this long.
Alfred Pierce, in his wonderful history of U.S. electronic warfare in World War II (published by the Society of Old Crows) tells the story of an American B-24 outfitted as an electronic surveillance plane sniffing off the coast of Italy in 1942, prior to the invasion of Sicily. They detected what they thought was emissions from an ME-110 nightfighter and the tailgunner fired a few burst at what appeared to be an ME-110 tailing them. The pursuing plane broke off contact after this.
A few days later they got a note from members of a British nightfighter outfit, also in Africa, telling them they needed to improve their aim. It appears that the detector, which was tuned to the known frequency band of the ME-110 had detected harmonics of the British nightfighter’s radar. The harmonics were generated by the EW aircraft’s receiver, not emitted by British nightfighter.
I was reading a story on the Dambuster raid a couple of years ago which had a picture of Gibson and his crew posing at their airplane before the raid. The caption noted that every single member of that crew was later killed in action during the war. Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how many sacrificed everything.
There was a really good old movie about the dam busting raid.
It was my introduction to the remarkable Mosquito.
They skipped the bombs (they were round)on the reservoir into the dam.
So the RAF didn’t kill him, a nervous tail gunner killed him. Can’t really blame him.
Chaos happens, even to heroes.
butch ohare was killed in 1943(?) on a night fighter mission in the pacific, i believe by an avenger rear turret gunner.