War is a terrible business. But every once in a while, you hear stories of actual humanity poking through the killing and dying. Sometimes you hear it from the civilians trapped by war. Other times the stories come from the combatants.
In the middle ages we called such honorable behavior chivalry. As warfare moved away from one-one combat and toward more of an industrialized meat grinder, we lost a good deal of this sense of chivalry. But just sometimes, we hear tales of such awesomeness that give us hope that even in this age of mechanized slaughter, we haven’t completely lost our sense of honor and humanity. This is one such story.
It happened in In WW2, when the Allied bombing campaign of Germany was moving along at full steam. The campaign consisted of American bombers dropping bombs on German civilian and industrial centers during the day and the British doing the same at night. A few days before the Christmas of 1943, one Lieutenant Charlie Brown of the 379th Bombardment Group of the American Army Air Force’s 8th Air Force was on a mission over the city of Bremen, Germany. He was a new bomber pilot and he and his crew were on their first mission to strike an aircraft factory in the north of Germany.
Lt.Brown was the pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress, dubbed Ye Olde Pub. First, a little background info on the B-17s and how they were used in WW2 at this time. This will become an important point later when we get back to the narrative.
The B-17s were the workhorses of the American 8th Air Force. The plane had an 8,000 pound bomb capacity, with four engines and 11 machines guns placed all around it for protection. It had a cruising altitude of 27,000 feet but was unpressurized, which meant that the crew had to wear special breathing apparatus and flight suits to keep them warm in the upper atmosphere where the temperatures could get as low as 60 degrees below zero.
The bombers were called Flying Fortresses for all the defensive guns it had, and it was strategically armored to be able to take a serious pounding. But for all that the laws of physics dictated that for every pound of armor placed to protect the plane meant added weight and thus loss of air speed. And in an air fight, speed is king.
This story took place before the advent of the famous P-51 Mustangs to serve as escorts for the American bombers. Those came towards the end of the war in Germany. This meant that the German air force, the Luftwaffe, could send up their fighters and interceptors to attack the bombers with no fighter opposition. And although the Flying Fortresses blistered with machine guns, it couldn’t cover every square foot of the space around itself. To combat both problems the Army Air Corps flew the B-17s in a 3D staggered formation that allowed the bombs to be dropped while providing overlapping fields of fire to cover any defensive gaps that might exist on an individual plane.
This worked well enough – in theory. In practice this meant that the bombers couldn’t break formation or take evasive maneuvers on its own. Breaking formation would mean that it would lose the protection of its buddies in the formation and once that happened, the straggler was toast. Think of a herd of wildebeest being chased by lions. In the herd the wildebeests are safe, but once one zigs instead of zagging like the others in the herd, the lions will pounce on the straggler and it’s game over.
So now, back to the tale.
Lt.Brown and the Ye Olde Pub was approaching Bremen when antiaircraft artillery fire opened up underneath them. These are called flak and it threw up exploding shells in the sky that blew up and threw shrapnel all over the air with the goal of either actually hitting the planes directly with the shells, or having the shrapnel punch holes through them. Well, luck was bad for Ye Olde Pub that night because just as they were approaching Bremen, a flak shell exploded directly in front of the plane destroying the number two engine and damaging number four. With only two good engines (and one damaged one), the bombed could no longer keep up with the formation and straggled back. Then the lions pounced.
15 German fighters attacked and although they were able to down one of them and fight off the rest with their own machine guns, Lt. Brown’s Flying Fortress sustained a tremendous amount of damage. The tail gunner had been killed and four other crewmembers were injured and Brown himself had taken a bullet fragment in his right shoulder. The only guns still functioning were in the nose and top turret and the hydraulics and the oxygen systems were inoperative. The plane was full of holes, and it went into a spiral towards the earth.
Somehow, Brown and his co-pilot pulled the plane out of the uncontrolled dive and leveled it out at about 1,000 feet above the ground. So they didn’t crash, and that was great. But they now had a plane with more holes than rivets, only two good engines and almost every single crewmember either injured, incapacitated, or dead. Oh, and they were over enemy territory that they had just tried to bomb back to the Stone Age. So Brown did his best to point his plane in an England-like direction and pray that everything stayed together until they got over the English Channel.
Meanwhile…
At about the same time, one Lt. Franz Stigler had just come back from a scramble after shooting down 2 B-17s. He was resting, taking a smoke break while his Me-109 was being refueled and rearmed when a badly beat up American bomber flew over his base in Oldenburg, Germany. He and his ground crew looked at each other for a split second, and Luftwaffe pilot jumped into his plane to give chase.
Stigler was an ace with 29 victories. He was one kill away from the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest military honor in WW2 and one that symbolized exceptional bravery. He was on the American bomber in minutes, finger on the trigger and his eyes looking through his targeting reticles, ready to shoot. Then he realized that he wasn’t seeing what he was expecting. The tail gun wasn’t blinking. Hell, there was no tail gun compartment. There was also no left stabilizer and no nose cone. The other guns were unmanned and he could see through some parts of the plane. At other parts, he saw the crew giving first aid to each other, or sitting in their posts limp, with their blood forming red icicles on the outside of the plane.
Stigler thought back to something that he had been told as a rookie when he first joined the Luftwaffe. His commanding officer was Gustav Rodel. He had told the young Stigler that:
“Honor is everything here…. If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute, I will shoot you down myself. You follow the rules of war for you — not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity.”
Now, staring at the crippled B-17, he realized he wasn’t looking at a bomber. He was looking at a bloody parachute with wings. So he decided to take his finger off the trigger and instead flew right up against the plane so he could make eye-contact with the American pilot.
At first, Brown thought he was seeing things. But pretty soon he realized the German pilot was pointing to the ground to tell them to land. His crew said no way. They would fly home or die trying.
Stigler shook his head. Were these Americans crazy? One stiff wind and the bomber would be history. He was exasperated. At this point in the war, it was punishable by death to even tell a negative joke about the Third Reich. If he kept flying next to the bomber, essentially escorting it back to the edges of German airspace and anyone saw this and reported his tail number, well, he would be a dead man. But still, he couldn’t just let them fly to their doom. He was a soldier, one who valued honor as much as victory.
He stayed with Ye Olde Pub all the way back to the sea. He stayed 20 feet of the bomber at all times, waving off other fighters that may have given it chase. He finally peeled off and returned to base after they flew over open water. To Brown, who had been expecting the German plane to eventually shoot him down, the anticipation ate away at his nerves. Just as they got to the Channel he ordered one of his crew to start warming up a working machine gun. But by then, the crazy German actually saluted Brown and flew away.
Ye Olde Pub barely made it to England. Brown would go on to fly additional missions in the war, and his debrief of the mission would be classified lest any tales of an honorable German lead the Allied airmen to lower their guard. Stigler himself never spoke of what happened that day to anyone. For him, a tale of mercy and humanity would’ve mean instant court martial and execution by firing squad.
Brown finished his service in the war and went on to have a full life. He got married, had kids, went to college and returned to the Air Force in 1949, retiring in 1965. He later became a State Department Foreign Service Officer, but retired completely in 1972 from government service to move to Miami and become an inventor.
Stigler had a rougher time, initially. After the war, he subsisted on food stamps and worked as a bricklayer’s assistant. The new government was uninterested in his exemplary military service for the Third Reich. Eventually in 1953, he moved to Canada and had success as a businessman.
Neither had really thought about the incident for many decades, until Brown went to give a speech in 1986 at a combat pilots’ reunion event called the Gathering of Eagles. When asked about any memorable missions from his time in the war, he recalled that incident on December 1943 and told it to the crowd. This made him curious as to whatever happened to the German pilot, and he went on a mission to find him. He tried unsuccessfully for 4 years, until January 1990 when he took out an ad in a newsletter for former German fighter pilots. He said he was looking for the “one who saved my life on December 20, 1943” and withheld the location where the two planes parted as a test.
Stigler saw the newsletter and the ad, and immediately knew who it was. He wrote a letter to Brown. And Brown, upon receiving it, didn’t even read it but instead immediately called Stigler.
“When I let you go over the sea,” Stigler said, “I thought you’d never make it.”
“My God,” Brown said. “It’s you.”
Tears were streaming down both faces.
Stigler and Brown became close friends. Their families became close friends as well. They would drive cross country to visit each other and worry about each other’s health. They became as close as brothers. For Brown, meeting Stigler put a lot of nightmares and trauma from the war to ease. For Stigler, it was even more. He had lost his only brother during the war, and after it, he was shunned by a country that wanted to part ways with its Nazi past. Even though he hadn’t been political, his life had been tainted by his very service to his country’s regime. He had lost everything in the war, and Charlie Brown and the lives of the crew of the Ye Olde Pub was the only good that came out of WW2 for him, the only thing he could be proud of.
Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown would remain friends as close as brothers until the very end. They died months of each other. Stigler and Brown both passes away in 2008 of heart attacks, 6 months apart. Stigler was 92. Brown was 87.
Stigler and Brown’s incredible story has been written about in a book called “A Higher Call” by Adam Makos.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown_and_Franz_Stigler_incident
http://www.snopes.com/military/charliebrown.asp
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/09/living/higher-call-military-chivalry/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8EkmyoG83Q