The Niš incident, a fierce aerial combat between Americans and Soviets in WWII

La Segunda Guerra Mundial estalló con la invasión de Polonia por parte de una alianza formada por la Alemania nazi y la Unión Soviética.

An analysis of the engineering of the legendary American fighter Lockheed P-38 Lightning
The fighter that killed the mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor in a top-secret mission

Once the invasion of eastern Poland was complete, the USSR did not become involved in World War II, but Stalin continued to support Germany by supplying 1.6 million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of oil, 500,000 tons of iron ore, and other large quantities of raw materials. This colossal Soviet aid allowed Hitler to fuel his war machine to invade Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

The Soviet Union's position changed radically on June 22, 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of the USSR. From then on, Stalin drew the USSR into World War II on the side of the Western Allies. Thanks to this, the United States and the United Kingdom provided enormous military aid to the USSR, without which the Red Army could not have defeated the German Army on the Eastern Front, as acknowledged by Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the USSR.

Although the Americans and Soviets were allies, a serious dogfight took place between fighters from both countries on November 7, 1944. It occurred near Niš, Serbia, and was one of the numerous friendly fire incidents during the war. Twelve P-38 Lightning long-range fighters of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) mistakenly attacked a Red Army ground column, which also included Yugoslav communist partisans. The American fighters were under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Clarence T. "Curly" Edwinson and belonged to the 82nd Fighter Group, based in Foggia, Italy. The Red Army column suffered 31 deaths in the attack, including Lieutenant General Grigory Petrovich Kotov, commander of the 6th Guards Rifle Corps, and 37 wounded.

The disaster didn't end there. After the attack on the Red Army column, Curly's P-38s attacked the Soviet-held Niš airbase, believing it to be a German base. In turn, Soviet anti-aircraft artillery and fighters that managed to take off attacked the American P-38s, mistaking them for German Focke-Wulf Fw 189s, which also had twin tails.

In this incident, the Americans lost two P-38 fighters and the Soviets three Yakovlev Yak-9 fighters, one of which was accidentally shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft defenses. Eventually, the Soviet fighters managed to distinguish their attackers from American fighters and were able to show them their red stars. By then, the dogfight had already lasted 15 minutes. This incident caused tensions between the United States and the USSR, which were resolved with an apology from the Americans, claiming it was all a misunderstanding. Although the USSR accepted the apology, Soviet propaganda claimed years later that the attack had been intentional.

This incident was kept secret until after the war. Today, most of what is known about these events comes from Soviet and Yugoslav sources. In 2015, the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center, an intergovernmental institution based in Niš, inaugurated a monument in that Serbian city dedicated to the Soviet soldiers who died in that incident. Today, Russia continues to use that incident to strengthen ties with Serbia and distance it from the West. In fact, three months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian embassy in Serbia and two Russian entities in that country promoted the installation of a second monument in Niš.

Last Saturday, the channel Yarnhub published an excellent video digitally recreating what happened in the Niš incident, with great realism and good documentation about those events, in order to shed light on what really happened on November 7, 1944 in that Serbian city:

---

Main image: Yarnhub.