Friendly Fire FRIENDLY FIRE Death and wounds from friendly fire is commonplace in combat Among major World War II incidents, the following are illustrative of the problem At the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese planes attempting to bomb a Japanese fleet at Shanghai instead bombed the city, killing hundreds of civilians In July 1943, the U.S Navy shot down 23 USAAF planes ferrying paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne in support of the invasion of Sicily, killing 229 men During the Normandy campaign in 1944, U.S artillery mistakenly killed 111 American GIs and wounded 500 more A month later the RAF accidentally killed or wounded several hundred Canadians it was supporting during the battle to close the gap at Falaise Those incidents might be compared to an official French Army study made in 1921, which concluded that French artillery inflicted 75,000 casualties on friendly troops over the course of the Great War See also Aleutian Islands FRIGATE A Royal Navy (RN) class of anti-submarine warfare escort and hunter Larger, faster, “River”-class corvettes were reclassed as frigates by the RN from 1942 Over 150 were built by 1944 They were smaller than destroyer escorts and destroyers and did not have the range to serve with a battlefleet But they were more heavily armed and more stable in open ocean than were “Flower”-class corvettes Frigates were deployed by seven Allied navies by war’s end The new “Loch”-class, built in modular fashion from 1943, was equipped with the six-barreled or double Squid ASW mortar Three dozen “Bay”-class frigates were modified for service as anti-aircraft gun platforms in 1945 They were intended for use by the Royal Navy in the Pacific War FRITSCH, WERNER VON (1880–1939) German general As commander in chief of the OKW, he opposed and feared the plans of Adolf Hitler to make war against the Western Allies, believing that Germany could not win such a war He was pushed into retirement when Hitler engineered a purge of top Wehrmacht officers in 1938, including accusing Fritsch of concealed homosexuality Fritsch was acquitted by a Wehrmacht court but forced into retirement as Hitler took charge of the OKW himself The bloodless coup against the OKW cleared the last real obstacle to Hitler’s total control of Germany’s grad strategy, such as it was, and its war policy FRITZ Russian slang for a German soldier The German equivalent for a Soviet soldier was “Ivan.” After the great battle in front of Moscow in December 1941, and then at Stalingrad over the winter of 1942–1943, Soviet propaganda frequently portrayed “the Fritzes” as frozen and pathetic to undermine the earlier widely held view that they were super soldiers FROGMEN See divers; Fukuryu FRONT The forward positions where armies were in close proximity, as in “frontlines.” The continuous zone of combat contact in a given region might be 416