When the opposing sides don’t wear uniforms, and there is no ethnic difference- in close combat how in hell do you know who to kill?
And didn’t this come up a lot back in the day when armies were often created by grabbing all the local townspeople and making them fight? Wasn’t it frequently the case that even when there were uniforms, they were often limited to just the top brass?
More recently… in Vietnam, when North was fighting South… did the Vietnamese were uniforms?
It seems highly likely that over the centuries people have ended up killing their own people.
So what do we actually KNOW about this subject? There are so many war historians, it must have been examined.
In a lot of combat situations, even when there’s no uniform, there’s some identifying clothing or tattoo or something. A lot of times, it’s just a red (or whatever) armband or bandana. But it’s always something.
You shouldn’t be asking “how do you know who to kill?” You should be asking “How do you know who NOT to kill?” Then the alternate solutions are easy. Perhaps you only fight alongside people you know, or work out a hand signal, or there are ethnic differences, or there’s a challenge/password system.
I remember reading of a skirmish between 2 Central American countries, both of whom had outfitted their army with surplus US army uniforms. Now that can be a problem!
The fight started on a bridge at the border. At first, each army was at their end of the bridge shooting at each other, so they were distinguishable. But as they came together in the middle in hand-to-hand combat, it would have been much harder to differ friend from foe.
“A deathwhite mist slept over sand and sea:
Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew
Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold
With formless fear; and even on Arthur fell
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;
And some had visions out of golden youth,
And some beheld the faces of old ghosts
Look in upon the battle; and in the mist
Was many a noble deed, many a base,
And chance and craft and strength in single fights,
And ever and anon with host to host
Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn,
Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash
Of battleaxes on shattered helms, and shrieks
After the Christ, of those who falling down
Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.”
Back in the era of horse cavalry and massed infantry, soldiers stuck by their colors and obeyed their side’s bugle calls: As long as you knew where your regimental colors (a flag on a pole) were, you knew roughly where your regiment was and, by process of elimination, where the enemy was. Therefore, it was vitally important to keep the colors flying; heroes were made when a soldier rescued the colors in the middle of battle.
The flip side of this was the tactics of massed infantry: Soldiers knew the formations, as they had drilled them on the parade grounds, and knew they would be damned and doomed if they deviated from them in the heat of battle. One of the most important tactics, therefore, was to force the enemy’s infantry to break formation, something that would result in a complete rout as the individual soldiers turned into a panicky mob and tried to flee in every direction at once.
These tactics obtained until the Great War and machine gun fire. That converted relatively fluid Napoleonic tactics into static trench warfare tactics, at least on the Western Front, and made it generally easier to know where your comrades were.
Short answer: there’s been a lot of “friendly fire” throughout history. It’s common even in the days of hand-to-hand fighting and it became progressively more likely as the range of engagement grew with missile weapons and artillery. By the US Civil War, there are numerous stories of units firing on their own side, especially early in the war when uniforms were less standardized. The familiar Confederate battle flag with the crossed bars was designed specifically because the original Confederate flag looked too much like the old Union flag when viewed from a distance.
And it wasn’t just people attacking the wrong side by misidentifying – although this isn’t directly related to your question, one of the reasons for formation tactics and constant drill is to reduce the danger of accidental wounding or death from the weapons of the guy next to you.
But yes, flags, ad hoc measures like colored rags, formations, and sound (shouting, bugles and drums, and so on) have all been used to try and mitigate the danger of accidentally engaging friendlies on the battlefield.
Having watched the movie Hotel Rwanda, I wondered the same thing as the OP. How the heck did the Hutus and the Tutsis tell each other apart during that genocide when neither one wore uniforms? I would assume a tribal thing like that makes it even harder.
Didn’t their ID cards show ethnicity? I don’t remember the movie showing fighting involving armed Tutsis, but it’s been awhile.
It is typical for Vietnam war movies to refer to the enemy as the “Viet Cong,” who were irregulars and didn’t have a normal uniform. There was also the Army of North Vietnam, who I believe always wore uniforms (can anyone confirm). The Army of the Republic of Vietnam too.
Typically, non-uniformed troops tend to be less involved in full out combat, and more of a hit-and-run group, and thus may be more choosy with their targets. Some units of the various Yugoslavian wars might apply.
The Hutus and Tutsis did have ID, but the most obvious sign of which group you were in was your skin color. This is not truly an ethnic difference; Hutu and Tutsi referred to a social class, and for centuries you could move from one to another. (Tutsis were the professional class, while Hutus were generally laborers, but a Hutu could become a Tutsi before the British came along just by making a lot of money and leaving the land).
The British decided to categorize them as two different ethnic groups and if you weren’t obviously one or the other, they’d give you an identity based upon skin color. Naturally, being just a little bit racist, those with lighter skin were called Tutsi and those with darker skin were Hutu. The genocide was primarily Hutu against Tutsi (though the Tutsi had tried similar purges previous). If you had a lighter skin, you were immediately considered a target unless someone could vouch that you were Hutu.
Let’s say for example that it’s 1141 and you’re a man-at-arms fighting in the Battle of Lincoln. It’s a civil war and everyone fighting is vaguely French. Nobody’s wearing a uniform and you’ve lost your sense of direction in the middle of all the fighting. You see another man-at-arms conveniently facing the other way right in front of you and you wonder “Should I stab this guy or what?”
I believe a common practice was to have battlecries. One side would yell out “Victory for Stephen!” and the other would yell out “Victory for Matilda!” If you noticed somebody was yelling out something other than what you were yelling you tried to kill him. If you saw somebody wasn’t yelling anything, you’d probably try to kill him too - even if he was on your side, he wasn’t doing his part.
This probably also helped the average warrior keep track of how the battle was going. As long as you could hear other people yelling your side’s battlecry, you knew your side was still fighting (this was one reason why continued yelling was encouraged). If you noticed that your side’s battlecry was tapering off, you might figure it was a good idea to shut up and start thinking about switching teams.
Underline mine. Setting aside that it wasn’t “just grabbing everybody”, the locals knew each other.
So long as one side is in uniform, both sides are: our guys are either “the ones in uniform” or “the guys in normal clothes”. This worked for many of the old wars in Spain, from the times of the Carthaginians and Romans (both of whom were in uniform).
For the war against the French and the civil wars of the XIX century we’re back to the same situation: the government guys would usually be in uniform, the other guys (despite all those pretty uniforms some dreamer designed and drew) would be in regular clothes. For several of those wars, the rebels wore red berets, but of course that can get lost; thing is, their clothing below the neck was different from that of the government guys, who did have enough budget for pretty clothes.
Naturally, don’t forget the brightly colored uniforms. As decorative as they were considered, bright uniform colors were worn for a good reason. In comparison, sailors (in particular, those press-ganged) often served in some or most of the clothes they were wearing when they came on board.
I would say that you are oversimplifying massed infantry tactics, which swayed between different points of the triangle infantry - cavalry - artillery. For example, while Europe was still using the Spanish square (pikemen and muskets), Gustaf Adolphus (re)introduced heavy cavalry to the battlefield. Introduction of the infantry square and bayonets negated the risk of cavalry, while the infantry square itself was defeated by Napoleon through his combined use of infantry, horse drawn artillery (an infantry square makes a great target for round shot) and cavalry. On the other hand, by Waterloo he was defeated by a pure infantry general, who held the terrain and could form squares quickly enough to meet cavalry charges.
I’d say that all of the above already were outdated by the Crimean War, with the introduction of the Minié rifle. Massed infantry fire could easily decimate charging cavalry at range, as the 93rd Highlanders demonstrated against the Russian Heavies, without need of forming squares. Machine guns merely meted out this equation further. What led to the static warfare of the Great War was the fact that both sides could form defensive lines from coast to coast, meaning that nobody had any room left to maneuver in, which led to the introduction of shock tactics.
I’m sure I made a ton of mistakes in the above, but what the heck =)
Which led to the tank, basically the re-introduction of heavy cavalry to the European battlefield once again, which led to anti-tank missiles, which were basically pikes, and so on and so on.
One additional note - if you knew in advance that you were going to be in a confusing situation, it wasn’t that unusual to have impromptu uniforms. A good example is raiding parties from ships - ship’s crew generally didn’t need uniforms except for officers, since you knew which side you were on by the shape and flag of the ship. If they left the ship, all bets were off. Ergo, headbands, arm-bands, skins and shirts - pretty much anything kids use to distinguish sides in games these days were used.
with Hutus and Tutsis, besides the skin color and height differences (which don’t go away just because we close our eyes and try to believe the zero difference between everybody propaganda) the murderers could just ask the village neighbors. Or maybe the murderers were the neighbors in the first place. People in the village would know which family is from which group, so then they could either go kill themselves or they could point them out to the murderer gang from outside the village. Then when Tutsi returned and did some reprisal killings, it was even easier because you could be sure that everybody alive in a particular area is Hutu, with all Tutsis fled or previously murdered.