Back Fire : The Tragic Story of Friendly Fire in Warfare from Ancient Times to the Gulf War

London: Robson Books. Very Good/Very Good. 1998. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0860519554 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Brown cloth with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. 253 pages clean and tight. It has been estimated that during the First World War 75,000 French soldiers were killed or maimed by `friendly fire', the euphemism commonly used for being killed by one's own colleagues or allies, presumably in error. As recently as the Gulf War the heaviest British casualties suffered in a single engagement were caused when US forces fired at British armoured vehicles, killing nine of the men inside. A quarter of all American casualties in Iraq in 1991 were caused by other American soldiers. How can this happen? How widespread is it? To what extent is the problem covered up? In this startling and revelatory study, military historian Geoffrey Regan presents a chilling expose of war's most incomprehensible tragedies and attempts to answer these questions. Covering an impressive sweep of history from the days of Alexander the Great to the twentieth century - including Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands and the Gulf War - Regan describes the incidents in detail and examines the causes behind them: be they the result of weapons mishandling or malfunction, or the faulty identification of targets through human frailty. Human frailty has, indeed, a very large part to play in the problem of `self-inflicted casualties', with numerous examples of the artillery bombarding friendly positions through the misreading of grid references or mishearing an order, or of ground support bombers misreading maps, wrongly identifying smoke signals or even getting the date wrong. This harrowing and engrossing study examines the truth behind the most tragic examples of military incompetence and sheds explosive new light on a sadly ancient problem. .