In World War II, when an American commander inspected the front line, an embarrassing thing happened, he was not killed by the enemy, but was killed by his own aircraft, and he became the highest military general of the US army killed in World War II.
So, who is this U.S. military commander? How did he get killed by his own plane? How did this accident end?
First, the hapless U.S. military commander, who was killed by his own plane, was named Leslie James McNair.
Born in Minnesota, USA in 1883, McNair gained a high starting point as a soldier and attended the United States Military Academy at West Point.
This military academy located in New York State, the United States, is the first military school in the United States, is also one of the world's four major military schools, in the history of more than 200 years of school history, here for the U.S. military to train a large number of military talents.
Just in the same period as McNair, there were "Iron General" Patton, "Five-Star General" MacArthur, Allied Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower, etc., all of which were among the most famous generals in World War II.
In 1904, at the age of 21, McNair graduated with honors from West Point and subsequently joined the artillery unit as an officer.
During World War I, he followed the famous American General John Joseph Pershing as a training staff officer of the 1st Infantry Division and went to France to fight.
It is worth mentioning that on the march, McNair met another combat staff officer in the same boat, the two talked about everything, and became lifelong friends, but at this time, everyone did not know that this staff officer named George Marshall would be prosperous in the future, become a big figure in the US army, and even voluntarily rejected the throne of the US marshal.
In this way, McNair's friends are basically big people, so his military career is also all the way to "rocket", at the age of 35, he was promoted to brigadier general, becoming one of the youngest generals in the US Army in World War I.
In late 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War broke out, his old friend Marshall had taken up the high post of Chief of Staff of the Army and was in need of mobilizing a group of trusted officers to his side.
To this end, he specially promoted McNair to serve as his assistant, responsible for the organization, training and equipment of the army, and promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general.
McNair also lived up to his promise, doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and got a nickname "Army Brain".
However, McNair was almost 60 years old at the time, did not know enough about mechanized combat, and he was from the artillery, so he always excluded the tank unit, not only presided over the reduction of the strength of the US armored division and the number of tanks, but also put forward an incredible theory - "tanks are used to fight infantry, anti-tank is artillery", which led to the early stage of the war the US armored force has not been developed.
It was also because of McNair's neglect of the tank unit that in the first confrontation between the American army and the German army, the Katherine Pass, the American Sherman tank was hoisted by the Tiger tank, and the exchange ratio reached a staggering 8:1, resulting in the joke of "Tiger tank phobia" once circulated in the Allies.
However, due to Marshall's special relationship with McNair, the other generals and soldiers, although they were not accustomed to him, were helpless.
In addition, in order to grasp the first-hand information of the battlefield, McNair often went to the extremely dangerous front line to inspect, and as a result, after being transferred to North Africa in 1942, McNair was once shelled by the German army, but he was lucky enough to escape a disaster, and has since been known as "life-threatening" in the army.
But no one expected that when the situation in World War II began to reverse and the Allies launched the Normandy landings, his good luck ran out, and McNair became the highest ranking person in the List of American Casualties in World War II, and it was no one else who killed him, it was the US military's own aircraft bomb.
In June 1944, the Allies prepared to launch the Normandy landing operation to open a "second battlefield", and in order to carry out this unprecedented campaign, the Allies gathered a total of 2.88 million people, and McNair was also transferred to the French front.
However, although the Allies later succeeded in achieving the Normandy landing, the German army soon stabilized, relying on the hedge terrain to block the attack layer by layer, so the Allies, although they had the advantage of numbers and firepower, they could not break through the German forward defense line, resulting in a very slow advance after the landing, and could only advance one or two kilometers a day.
Therefore, in order to improve this situation, Bradley, the commander of the US 1st Army Group, nicknamed "General Of the Big Soldiers", decided to launch "Operation Cobra", the core of which was to abandon the previous wide front mode of operation, to break through the surface, and concentrate firepower to penetrate the entire front of the German army.
In Bradley's view, his plan was definitely a big innovation, so in order to show his new tactics, he invited a large number of high-ranking American military officers to come and observe, including Lieutenant General McNair, an old classmate of the West Point Military Academy.
After receiving the invitation, McNair quickly agreed to come to the game as a friend and "special guest".
On 25 July, the operation was officially launched, with 1,500 B-24 heavy bombers and 550 fighter-bombers taking turns. In the 8-square-kilometer target area, the U.S. military dropped 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary bombs, and the battlefield was suddenly filled with fire, like hell on earth.
The B-24 Liberator bomber was the largest number of large bombers produced by the United States during World War II, and it was also the most used bomber, with as many as 19,000 bombers, and it not only participated in the war in Europe, but also was the "air overlord" in the vast sea and air battlefields in Africa and Asia.
However, before the official implementation of the plan, it was actually resolutely rejected by the Army Aviation Corps, because Operation Cobra required heavy bombers to bomb along a route parallel to the German line and maintain a distance of two to three kilometers from the American front, but these bomber pilots had never been trained in low- and medium-altitude tactical support bombing, which was likely to cause accidental bombing.
Moreover, the parallel route to the German front would put the fighter under the threat of anti-aircraft fire for a long time, causing unnecessary losses.
However, in order to achieve a perfect bombing effect, Bradley insisted that the 8th Air Force send all heavy bombers, neither side would give in, and finally the lawsuit went all the way to the Allied commander-in-chief Eisenhower, who directly made support, and the aviation corps had nothing to say, agreed to send heavy bombers, but for the problem of accidental bombing, they had to say that they would "avoid it as much as possible by radio and other means."
During the heavy bombing that covered the sky, the fears of the U.S. Army Air Corps became a reality, as a result of the sudden cloud over the bombing target area and the extremely low visibility, the air force mistakenly deviated from the direction of flight, and the American position on the other side was regarded as the German front.
What is worse is that because units at all levels are calling on the radio, the US military communication network suddenly collapsed, and no one could accurately contact each other, which in turn led to one incident after another of accidental bombings.
Coincidentally, in order to correctly assess the combat effectiveness of Operation Cobra, McNair insisted on coming to the front line himself despite the persuasion of his subordinates, while he was lying in a scattered pit to observe the bombing situation not far away.
As a result, he was surprised to find that many of his planes had flown over his head and then dropped rain-like bombs, and McNair's men quickly pulled him around to hide, but they still did not escape the fate.
Eventually, a bomb landed in the scattered crater where McNair was hiding, and a huge explosion blew him to an altitude of more than 20 meters, killing him instantly, and his body was blown to pieces, and finally only the fragments of the three general stars on the collar could be identified.
In addition, McNair's death set a record, he was the highest-ranking U.S. military general killed in World War II, and in this internecine killing, a total of 111 American soldiers were killed by mistake and 490 wounded.
Even more unfortunately, two weeks later, McNair's son, Colonel Douglas McNair, chief of staff of the U.S. 77th Infantry Division, was also killed by Japanese snipers in Guam.
The news that Lieutenant General McNair had killed his own plane caused a huge shock among the Allied high-rankings, but in order not to affect morale, Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower specially ordered a low-key treatment, so in the end it could only be buried in secret.
However, at the funeral, among the four people who carried the coffin alone, the commander of the 1st Army, Bradley Ray, the deputy commander Hodges, and the commander of the 3rd Army, Patton, all three of them later became four-star or five-star generals in the US Army, which was enough to reflect the importance that the military attached to McNair, and McNair himself was posthumously awarded the four-star general ten years after his death.
It is also worth mentioning that although McNair's death was a major loss for the US military top brass, it was a very pleasant and good thing for the US armored forces.
After McNair's death, the M26 Pershing tank, which had been limited to research by him, finally entered the fast lane, a new tank designed by the U.S. military to deal with the German Tiger tank, and before the end of World War II, one of the best tanks in the world was finally put into active service.
The same is true of tank destroyers, who, when McNair was in power, stubbornly demanded that the destroyers must be different from tanks, so there was no turret roof, which led to the problem that such equipment had always been afraid of rain, afraid of being bombed, and even a grenade could reimburse the whole vehicle, but soon after McNair's death, the armored roof was quickly added.
Perhaps it was because of McNair's stubbornness that forced the U.S. armored forces to pay a lot of unnecessary losses and countless soldiers to die tragically, so that his good luck would be exhausted, so that he died at the hands of his own people.