Reading accounts from the latter days of the Second World War, one comes across stories of scirmishes between Allied (American in all the cases I have read so far) and Soviet planes in the skies over Germany. Did this happen often? What were the results? Did the other Allies (Britain etc.) also fight with the Russians on occasion? Were there ever any instances of ground troops getting involved? I know that for quite a while, both sides denied anything of the sort ever happened. Has this changed?
It probably happened more than once, but I’m only familiar with a single incident. A group of Yakolevs jumped a bunch of P-38s and got thoroughly punished for their efforts. When the surviving Russians got home, the Soviet command allegedly got hold of the U.S. command and announced that it was disgraceful that Allied pilots were fighting amongst each themselves, that they were about to execute the (surviving) offending Russian pilots, and that they demanded that the U.S. also execute theirs. I can’t find the book where I read of this incident, at the moment. This is supposed to have happened over Yugoslavia.
It is not unlikely that there were incidents. The Bell P-39 that the Russians used was not often used by the U.S. in the European Theater and the Russians would not have had much contact with P-38s, P-47s, P-51s, Spitfires, or Typhoons, so it is possible that as the Allied armies neared each other, the Russians might have mistaken Allied planes for German ones. (The opposite is also possible, since we had no Yaks or Laggs, etc., but U.S. and British pilots were generally given more training–including aircraft recognition–than Soviet pilots.) In other words, neither the Soviets nor the Yanks and Brits went looking to fight the other, but accidents could happen because of misidentified aircraft.
I am not aware of any U.S. and Soviet infantry exchanging fire, although it could certainly have happened at the squad or platoon level before someone figured out the error. However, the bluish German uniforms were pretty distinctive, making identification easier (at least in daylight).
This is off the point, but it reminded me of this occasion.
Our company bought a machine that was built in Italy from a company in North Carolina. The North Carolina company was owned by an Italian and it was his families company that had built the machine. Anyway, the designer of the machine came over to show us how to run the machine and the owner came with him to translate. We had an electrican come in to help get the machine going.
Both the Italian and the electrican were in their sixties and thru the interpreter they found out they had both served in WWII. Then the electrican mentioned flying over a part of Italy dropping bombs and how many of our planes were shot down. The Italians eyes got real big and he started yelling. It seems he was on the ground and remembered well that particular occasion and how many of his comrades were killed.
They were very cold with each other afterwards.