When Americans and Russians Went to War

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

I’ll just come out and say it—Vladimir Putin is a proper idiot.

I didn’t always feel this way. Back when President Obama was regularly photographed wearing those dorky bicycle helmets, Putin always seemed to be wrestling anacondas in outer space or some such. At the time, I longed for an American leader with perhaps a bit more serum testosterone. With the benefit of hindsight, I had no idea how good we had it. Nowadays, our Presidents tend to fall over when they go out for a bike ride and then stop to chat with reporters. 

What clinched it for me was Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now, admittedly, I have a couple of buddies who are fighting over there, so I’m hardly impartial. However, it is tough to believe that, even this deep into the enlightened Information Age, nations can yet still go to war simply because a single charismatic lunatic wants them to.

What a Mess

Putin thought he would be toasting his own strategic brilliance in Kiev three days after his battalion tactical groups roared across the frontier back in February of 2022. Now, some two and one-half years later, Ukrainian forces are making good progress on their counter-invasion of Russia. Old Vlad did not see that coming. 

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Putin is rapidly running out of cards to play. He’s postured and blustered and threatened and screamed. However, along the way, he’s also burned through half a million Russian casualties. That’s a mind-boggling number. The butcher’s bill has become so astronomically high that he can no longer afford to quit. If he backs off even a little bit, some ambitious sycophant is going to defenestrate him (Toss him out of a window. That happens quite a lot over there). It seems he’s painted himself into a corner. He has no off-ramp.

The Desperate Rantings of a Desperate Despot

All he’s got left are nuclear threats. Maybe his antique nukes still actually work; maybe they don’t. Nobody is exactly waiting in line to test that out. However, it is the specious iconography of Russian heroes facing down Imperialist Yankee Americans that keeps his poor misguided people energized these days. 

These Russians are monsters. Tens of thousands of dead and wounded Ukrainian civilians speak to this reality. The truly pathetic bit is that nobody over on our side of the pond cares. Most Americans couldn’t locate Ukraine on a map. Making the world safe for democracy was something our grandparents raised to an art form. By contrast, we’re fairly apathetic – we have our own problems. However, that was not always the case. 

Back in November of 1944, Russians and Americans were allied together to rid the world of what was arguably history’s greatest geopolitical evil. However, one gargantuan misunderstanding blossomed out of control and soon had Russian and American fighter planes blowing the living crap out of each other in the bright blue skies above Niš, Yugoslavia. As word of Russians killing Americans and vice versa would not have done much for the war effort back home, the details were mostly suppressed. Now some eight decades later, they nonetheless remain fascinating.

The Fog of War

War is chaos. It always has been. Back in the days before the microchip, communications were sketchy at best. If they had radios at all, those of most tactical aircraft were as big as steamer trunks and only communicated on a handful of discrete frequencies. Given that they ran on vacuum tubes, these devices often failed unexpectedly as well. Mix in the fact that Russians don’t speak English and Americans don’t speak Russian, and you have the recipe for tragedy. That tragedy struck on 7 November 1944.

Anyone who has ever done any flying appreciates that everything looks different from above. Target identification is reliably difficult from the air, particularly when you are screaming along at treetop level and 400 miles per hour in the cockpit of a Lockheed P38 Lightning.

The Situation

On 6 November, an American P38 group led by Colonel C.T. “Curly” Edwinson rendered superlative service supporting the Soviet 6th Guards Rifle Corps in its advance against German forces. The Russians had been so impressed they had requested that the same unit provide air support the following day. However, they neglected to inform the American chain of command that they had advanced some 100 km overnight. Now Russian and German units were intermixed. The 6th Guards Rifle Corps was on the move between Niš and Belgrade when it was spotted by Colonel Edwinson’s roving group of P38s.

The War Plane

The big twin-engine P38 fighter represented the state-of-the-art in armed interceptors at the outset of WW2. By 1944, however, the Fork-Tailed Devil, as the Germans referred to it, was badly outclassed by more nimble single-engine types. As a result, Lightnings were often used for ground attack missions. The concentrated firepower of four M2 .50-caliber machineguns all clustered together alongside a single Hispano 20mm cannon in the nose was devastating against terrestrial targets like tanks, trains, and trucks.

By this point in the war, the inexorable push by the Americans, British, and Canadians in the west was bumping up against their Soviet counterparts moving in from the east. As all tanks looked pretty much the same from above at such high speeds, it was a reasonable thing that the Lightning jocks might accidentally mistake the Russian T34s for German Panzerkampfwagen Mk IVs, Vs, and VIs. When the lead P38 formation stumbled upon the lumbering armored column, they did what all good fighter pilots do—they rolled hot, guns a ‘blazing.

The Tragedy

The results were predictable. The Lightnings blew the dog snot out of the Soviet column, killing 31 Russian soldiers and wounding a further 37. The Corps commander, LTG Grigory Petrovich Kotov, died in the attack. 

One of the reasons the Lightning was used for ground attack at this point in the war was that it had such a distinctive silhouette. Nothing else really looked quite like that from the ground. The Soviets did briefly mistake the attacking Lightnings for twin-boom German Fw-189 reconnaissance aircraft. However, as the Soviets did not care much for getting strafed, regardless of the nationality of the attacking machines, they got on the horn and scared up a few Russian Yak fighters.

The Yak-9 looks a bit like a German Messerschmitt Bf109 in dim light. Once the Russian fighters showed up on station there resulted a mighty scrap. The American Lightning pilots shot down a Yak before somebody noticed the red stars on the wings and threw water on the party. Realizing what they had done, the Lightnings formed a Lufbery Circle over the city of Niš to think things through.

Circular Reasoning

The Lufbery Circle was named after one Raoul Lufbery, the leading fighter ace of the Lafayette Escadrille in WW1. While Lufbery did not originate the maneuver, it did inexplicably become associated with his name. Some have speculated that this was because he helped train quite a few incoming pilots in the technique during the war. 

A Lufbery Circle was simply a large horizontal circular formation wherein a group of fighters would follow one after another such that their weapons could cover the blind spots of the plane ahead of them. By orienting the formation above an enemy trench or ground target, the circle allowed repeated attacks without so much concern over aerial ambush while the attacking pilots were preoccupied. In this case, the American aviators just needed a few minutes to think.

War Gets You Going Too Fast Sometimes

The Yak pilots formed up low over the city and attacked the Lightnings from below. One P38 exploded in flames. The American pilots then began shooting back, red stars or not. Around that time, a further group of Soviet fighters showed up to join the fray. 

This aerial melee went on for another quarter hour. However, fifteen minutes is a literal lifetime in air combat. When passions finally abated, two Lightnings and three Yaks had augured in. One of the Yaks had fallen to Soviet antiaircraft fire.

The Rest of the Story

Colonel Edwinson didn’t bother to tell anybody what happened for the next three days. Once the details became apparent, all involved felt frankly awful. Edwinson was quietly reassigned stateside but went on to make General, so apparently that turned out OK. The United States formally apologized for the incident, but the Soviets never quite forgave us. They always have been a suspicious lot.

The feeling was mutual. When finally the war was winding to a close, no less a luminary than General George Patton lobbied quietly to turn captured German formations eastward and take the fight on to the Russians. He could sense that we would be fighting eventually and felt we might as well just go ahead and get it on.

Half a century later, the Cold War finally ended. US and Warsaw Pact forces never quite got around to slugging it out in the Fulda Gap. That desperate fight over Yugoslavia back in 1944 represents the only instance of truly unfettered combat between our two nations. In February of 2018, American special operators pretty much slaughtered a Russian Wagner unit that attacked their FOB in Syria, but those were mercenaries. You can find the details here.

In retrospect, we are all clearly better off that nobody seriously listened to Patton back then. He died soon thereafter under suspicious circumstances anyway. Even today, conspiracy theorists believe he was offed by the Russians.

Ruminations On War

READ MORE: CPL Ben Roberts-Smith: Never Meet Your Heroes

The two biggest kids on the playground will always want to fight. Tragically, that’s who we are. To paraphrase the Terminator, it is in our nature to destroy ourselves. We can’t seem to help it.

Back in late 1944, the Germans were tooling up to launch Operation Watch on the Rhine, a little party we later came to refer to as the Battle of the Bulge. At the same time, a horrible misunderstanding unfolded in the skies above Yugoslavia. Good guys killed good guys, and the exchange left geopolitical scars that never quite healed. Now well into the 21^st century, Vladimir Putin seems desperate to thump chests yet again. Let’s all just hope he falls out of some window someplace before he can get too carried away.

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