2. Chroniclers of the battle of Waterloo, fought in 1815, have recorded how British infantry squares engaged one another by mistake and other allied cavalry, causing many casualties.
Similar incidents happened in the Crimea in 1854, during the American Civil War of the 1860s and the Boer War of 1899-1902. War diaries from World War I are peppered with accounts, mainly of British artillery shelling British troops by accident, poison gas clouds being misdirected, or a worn gun barrel firing shells inaccurately.
In World War Two, many allied aircraft were lost to so-called friendly fire, because of poor aircraft recognition skills, or the split seconds in which a pilot had to decide whether to engage an oncoming plane or not.
Historians now think that the famous RAF fighter ace Douglas Bader was shot down by one of his wingmen, not the Germans. Similarly, allied aircraft engaged and sank a whole squadron of allied minesweepers off the French coast in 1944, through recognition problems. All sides lost even submarines to their own forces.
Deaths caused in this way are particularly distressing as they are clearly avoidable, so some kind of formal enquiry is always held - even in a world war. The aim is less to establish blame, but tighten up on procedures to ensure the mistake is not repeated.
Of course, each time the Germans introduced a new aircraft design that resembled the silhouette of an allied plane, the risks started all over again. When the United States military sensibly introduced camouflage suits in Normandy in 1944, they suffered many casualties because until then the only troops to wear camouflage in combat were the Nazi SS. The new uniforms were hastily abandoned.
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