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Offbeat Warfare Facts that Will Confound History Buffs

Khalid Elhassan February 15, 2021 36 min

Consolidated B-24 Liberator - Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress — Staff Sgt. Alan E. Magee poses for the camera halfway into his ball turret. Historic Wings

Yogi Berra in the US Navy. Bronx Pinstripes

17. Yogi Berra Shot Down an Airplane on D-Day. Unfortunately, It Was American

Nineteen-year-old Yogi Berra enjoyed D-Day. As he put it: “Being a young guy, you didn’t think nothing of it until you got in it. And so we went off 300 yards off the beach. We protect the troops. If they ran into any trouble, we would fire the rockets over. We had a lead boat that would fire one rocket. If it hits the beach, then everybody opens up. We could fire one rocket if we wanted to, or we could fire off 24 or them, 12 on each side. We stretched out 50 yards apart. And that was the invasion. Nothing happened to us. That’s one good thing. Our boat could go anywhere, though. We were pretty good, flat bottom, 36-footer“.

Yogi Berra’s D-Day rocket boat. The Yogi Berra Museum

Yogi Berra’s craft lingered off Normandy after D-Day, furnishing further support to the expanding Allied beachhead there. The Luftwaffe could do little to disrupt the Allied effort, but what little it did was enough to make people jumpy. Naval vessels off the beachhead were instructed to fire on an airplane that flew below a certain height, so Berra and his crewmates shot down a plane that appeared suddenly below the clouds. Unfortunately, it turned out to be American. Fortunately for the pilot, he bailed out, and was fished out of the water by Berra’s boat.

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.