During World War II, America Accidently Bombed Switzerland

Michael Peck

Security, Europe

On April Fool’s Day, no less.

On the first of April, 1944, the United States committed an act of war against the nation of Switzerland.

Though it was April Fool’s Day, the citizens of the Swiss town of Schaffhausen found nothing funny about sixty tons of high explosive descending without warning on their heads. Nor were the U.S. and Swiss governments amused. With the United States embroiled in a global war that neutral Switzerland was desperately trying to stay out of, the stakes were too high for both nations.

The facts of the incident sound as depressingly mundane and familiar as any other accidental bombing. On that Saturday morning, 438 B-17 and B-24 bombers of the Eighth Air Force, escorted by 475 P-51 and P-47 fighters, took off from their bases in England. Their targets were German chemical plants in the city of Ludwigshafen in southwestern Germany. Among the heavily laden bombers lumbering aloft were twenty-three B-24 Liberators of the 392nd Bombardment Group.

The 392nd would be led by a Pathfinder bomber, equipped with air-to-ground radar designed by the British for Royal Air Force night bombing. Though the United States favored high-altitude precision bombing in daylight, western European skies were overcast so often that the Americans might as well have been bombing at night. So like the RAF, the Eighth Air Force often relied on Pathfinders to find the target and signal the other bombers when to release their loads.

But as the majestic formations of heavy bombers droned across France and into Germany, they ran into cloud cover as high as twenty-one thousand feet. That’s where the radar-equipped Pathfinder was supposed to save the day. Except that its radar malfunctioned, which meant the B-24s had to essentially guess whether they were bombing the right place, according to the recollection of a squadron commander cited in the 392nd’s website:

Without visual reference with the terrain, the lead navigator had to rely solely upon prebriefed estimates of winds aloft to carry out his dead-reckoning type of navigation. Of course, winds aloft can change by the hour as high and low air pressure patterns move, thus blowing the airplane formations from their briefed route. The navigator was helpless in knowing when and how much change was occurring.

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