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.
