Niš incident
Тhe 3rd Ukrainian Front and Yugoslav partisan troops sought to block their retreat, which the Western Allies interdicted with aircraft based in Italy.
On 7 November, the 82nd Fighter Group of the Fifteenth Air Force was assigned to launch strikes against German motorized columns and trains moving between Sjenica and Mitrovica.
[2] At the beginning of the strike the 95th Fighter Squadron claimed a German locomotive destroyed in a strafing attack, and Captain Charles King's P-38 was shot down by flak.
[3][4][5] Continuing eastward, the three squadrons of the 82nd spotted the vehicle column from the 6th Guards Rifle Corps moving from Niš towards Belgrade, and attacked at about 10:00 a.m., from southeast over Mount Jastrebac, some 50 miles into Soviet held territory.
The American planes shifted their fire to the Soviet fighters which were taking off in spite of clearly visible large red star markings on their wings.
The report of the 866th IAP, the first Soviet account of the air battle, began by describing the incident as follows:[7] On 7 November 1944, at 12:50 [Moscow time] a group of 12 Lightning aircraft carried out a ground attack on units of the rifle corps of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, moving west along the road from Niš in the area of Čamurlija.
Four aircraft in formation on an extended bearing carried out an attack, one at a time...Two [four-plane] flights of Lightnings flew in formation on an extended bearing...After the first attack anti-aircraft fire opened up on the aircraft from the air defenses of the Niš airfield, anti-aircraft fire shot down one Lightning, which fell 1 kilometer north of the airfield.
Lt. Krivonogikh, repelling the attacks of two Lightnings, set one of them on fire with a vertical maneuver, which fell burning 8 to 10 kilometers north of Niš, on the mountain in a forest tract.The 288th Fighter Aviation Division report diverged from the initial report of the 866th IAP, claiming that Koldunov personally ended the air battle when he approached the lead P-38 at close range and waggled his wings to show the red star on his aircraft, and exaggerated the American strength, describing an attack by "up to 18 Lightnings" rather than the original twelve.
The division suffered losses on the ground when the 611th Fighter Aviation Regiment, relocating by vehicle from the Niš to Kruševac, was strafed by Lightnings, killing a mechanic and seriously wounding another.
On 14 December, American ambassador to the Soviet Union W. Averell Harriman apologized on behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George C. Marshall and offered to send liaison officers to the 3rd Ukrainian Front to prevent further incidents; Stalin rejected it, because a line of demarcation had been drawn indicating the boundaries of Allied air actions.
In his memoirs, Biryuzov quoted Koldunov and Syrtsov as describing the air battle as an unprovoked attack by "two groups of American aircraft," one circling over Niš and the second dive-bombing Soviet troops.
The pilots stated that the American aircraft "blockaded" the airfield and continued to shoot despite multiple Soviet approaches trying to display their red stars.
Biryuzov described the action as a "provocative allied aviation raid," and recalled that an American liaison officer apologized to him, but that this "insincere step" could not "revive those who perished, just as destroyed cities could not be restored."
A Russian-designed monument commemorating the Soviet soldiers killed in the incident was unveiled in Niš in 2015, the impetus for which came from the Russian embassy in Belgrade, Serbian government and the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center.
The Russian ambassador described the monument as a preservation of the "memory of the heroes and the combined struggle against Nazism," "taking into account the present events in Europe.
