WWII history

The little known D-Day operation that accidentally killed more than 100 U.S. troops

Seventy-two years ago Monday, the United States and its World War II allies began the invasion of France on a day that would become known as D-Day. Thousands of men jumped from aircraft into the French countryside, while thousands more landed on shell-raked beaches from wooden landing craft. Many of them would be wounded or killed.

June 6, 1944, and the days after, became a storied time in American history. Even though the Russian military was doing the lion’s share of the fighting, the United States would come to see D-Day as the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the moment where the Americans and their allies toppled the Atlantic Wall and quickly advanced into France on the drive toward Paris and eventually Berlin.

But there’s a chapter in this history that often gets lost in its re-telling: a little-known operation called COBRA that set the stage for victory in France but began by killing and wounding hundreds of Americans, including a top-ranking general, in one of the worst friendly-fire incidents in U.S. military history.