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America Accidentally Attacked the Soviet Union and Other Lesser Known History Moments

Khalid Elhassan February 27, 2020 34 min

Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star - Aircraft — American F-80s in action during the Korean War. Squdron

34. “It’s Hit the Fan”

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, center, delivered the Soviet protest of America’s bombing an airfield on Soviet soil. UN

The following day, when Quanbeck returned from a mission, he was met by Diefendorf who informed him: “It’s hit the fan“. Instead of crossing the coast well south of the Soviet border the previous day, the duo had done so well to the north. Rather than attack an airfield on North Korean soil, they ended up attacking Sukhaya Rechka, a Soviet airfield on the outskirts of Vladivostok, nearly 80 miles north of the border with North Korea.

Understandably, the Soviets were quite alarmed, unclear whether the attack was a mistake, or a deliberate provocation that presaged the outbreak of World War III. The following day, October 9^th, 1950, the Soviet government presented an official note of protest to the United Nations.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.