Did you know about the air battle between American and Soviet planes in World War II?

Friendly fire has been a tragic fact of warfare since at least the days of ancient Greece, and World War II was no exception. On November 7, 1944, almost exactly 81 years before the publication of this article, U.S. and Soviet planes clashed in the air over Yugoslavia due to what appears to have been an American navigation error. The death of a Soviet general in the incident caused a diplomatic uproar (kept secret from the populace at large at the time), and foreshadowed the occasional aerial battle that would occur between the former-allies-turned-enemies during the Cold War.

On November 7, 1944, an uncertain number of American P-38 Lightning (Like Lightning From a Clear Sky) fighters (possibly twelve) took off from Italy and headed east across Adriatic Sea to strike at German trains and motorized columns retreating from the advancing Red Army in Yugoslavia. The group strafed and destroyed a German locomotive at the cost of losing one plane to flak fire (the pilot was rescued by local peasants), then flew further east in search of more targets. They eventually came upon what they thought was a German column and moved in to strafe them.
 
The target was not, in fact, a German column, but an advancing Soviet unit. The initial American attack killed over 30 men, including one General Grigory Petrovic Kotov. The soldiers on the ground have mistaken the Lightings for German Fw-189 Uhu recon planes at first, since those had a twin-boom design similar to the Lightning, and were sometimes used to strafe ground targets. (Though it should be noted that Fw-189s would not have appeared in such large groups.)