WWII Angel of Mercy Pilot Reunion-German Ace Let Badly Damaged B-17 Fly Home-Pilots Meet Years Later
Pictured is a drawing of the incident: The English B-17 “Ye Olde Pub” in front, and the German BF-109 in back as escort. Notice the damage on the B-17: the nose is gone, one propellor is not working, the back turret is gone, the tail section is shredded and missing, holes in the hull. Artist is Ernie Boyett.
Found this story at a blog called Strive2Be…
Charlie Brown (a 21-year old) was a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot with the 379th Bomber Group at Kimbolton, England. His B-17 was called “Ye Olde Pub” and was in a terrible state, having been hit by flak and fighters while on a mission to bomb a factory in Bremen, Germany. The compass was damaged and they were flying deeper over enemy territory instead of heading home to Kimbolton.
B-17 pilot Charlie Brown.
After flying over an enemy airfield, Charlie Brown stated that his heart sank. A pilot named Franz Stigler was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17. When he got near the B-17, he could not believe his eyes. In his words, he “had never seen a plane in such a bad state.” The tail and rear section was severely damaged, and the tail gunner wounded. The top gunner was all over the top of the fuselage. The nose was smashed, and there were holes everywhere.
BF-109 pilot Franz Stigler.
Despite having ammunition, Franz flew to the side of the B-17 and looked at Charlie Brown, the pilot. Brown was scared and struggling to control his damaged and blood-stained plane.
Brown stated that he noticed Stigler’s plane flying alongside him: It seemed amazing that the heavily damaged B-17 remained in the air. But it did, and Brown hoped to keep it flying until he reached the shores of England 250 miles away.
Drawing of the English B-17 “Ye Olde Pub” in front, and the German BF-109 in back as escort. Notice the damage on the B-17: the nose is gone, one propellor is not working, the back turret is gone, the tail section is shredded and missing, holes in the hull.
Still partially dazed, Lt. Brown began a slow climb with only one engine at full power. With three seriously injured aboard, he rejected bailing out or a crash landing. The alternative was a thin chance of reaching the UK. While nursing the battered bomber toward England, Brown looked out the right window and saw a BF-109 flying on his wing.
Aware that they had no idea where they were going, Franz waved at Charlie to turn 180 degrees. Franz escorted and guided the stricken plane to and slightly over the North Sea towards England. He then saluted Charlie Brown and turned away, back to Europe.
When Franz landed he told the commanding officer that the plane had been shot down over the sea, and never told the truth to anybody. Charlie Brown and the remains of his crew told all at their briefing, but were ordered never to talk about it.
More than 40 years later, Charlie Brown wanted to find the Luftwaffe pilot who saved the crew. Franz had never talked about the incident, not even at post-war reunions.
They met in the USA at a 379th Bomber Group reunion in 1989, together with five people who are alive now—-all because Franz never fired his guns that day.
After the war, Brown remained in the Air Force, serving in many capacities until he retired in 1972 as a Lieutenant Colonel and settled in Miami as head of a combustion research company. But the episode of the German who refused to attack a beaten foe haunted him. He was determined to find the enemy pilot who spared him and his crew.
He wrote numerous letters of inquiry to German military sources, with little success. Finally, a notice in a newsletter for former Luftwaffe pilots elicited a response from Franz Stigler, a German fighter ace credited with destroying over two dozen Allied planes. He, it turned out, was the angel of mercy in the skies over Germany on that fateful day just before Christmas 1943.
It had taken 46 years, but in 1989 Brown found the mysterious man in the ME-109. Careful questioning of Stigler about details of the incident removed any doubt.
(L-R) German Ace Franz Stigler, artist Ernie Boyett, and B-17 pilot Charlie Brown.
Stigler, now 80 years old, had emigrated to Canada and was living near Vancouver, British Columbia. After an exchange of letters, Brown flew there for a reunion. The two men have visited each other frequently since that time and have appeared jointly before Canadian and American military audiences. The most recent appearance was at the annual Air Force Ball in Miami in September (1995), where the former foes were honored.
In his first letter to Brown, Stigler had written: “All these years, I wondered what happened to the B-17, did she make it or not?”
She made it, just barely. But why did the German not destroy his virtually defenseless enemy?
“I didn’t have the heart to finish off those brave men,” Stigler later said. I flew beside them for a long time. They were trying desperately to get home and I was going to let them do it. I could not have shot at them. It would have been the same as shooting at a man in a parachute.”
Franz Stigler passed away on March 22, 2008.
(s2Be)
Be respectful of others and their opinions. Inflammatory remarks and inane leftist drivel will be deleted. It ain’t about free speech, remember you’re in a private domain. My website, my prerogative.
If you can't handle using your real email address, don't bother posting a comment.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:04 amGod has his hand everywhere even in the middle of Hell. It wasn’t their time.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:06 amWhat a great story! There were many acts of chivalry and honor during the Africa campaign between the Germans and the British. Rommel was not a nazi and treated the English officers that were captured better than anyone expected. The treatment was reciprocated by the British.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:10 amThe Germans were also reportedly decent in their treatment of POWS.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:29 amThis is such a remarkable story. And Stigler was a remarkable man.
The ability to show compassion to your enemy is just one more thing that separates “us” from our current crop of Islamic enemies.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:30 amMarvellous.
All great people.
The German Navy and Air Force were very much like ours with respect to chivalry
May 28th, 2008 at 9:40 amOne more point.
It was no accident Hitler chose Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz as his successor.
He certainly wasn’t going to pick Himmler Goebbels or Bormann. Goering was a mess by then
May 28th, 2008 at 9:46 amIt’s an exception to a rule. God Bless Franz for being a gentleman and letting those guys live. Germans were known to shoot a airmen that bailed out as target practice.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:52 amEach and every man is different. I have watched video interviews of US WWII pilots that thought nothing of shooting down enemy planes and enjoyed killing those “nazi bastards”. Other airmen would speak of how their sleep would be haunted by the men in those planes that they surely killed.
Some pilots on both sides wouldn’t shoot a crippled plane making an emergency landing while others would hunt it to the ground and try desperatly to blow it from the skies before it could land.
Some men loose their humanity in war, others cling to it even tighter.
JS
May 28th, 2008 at 10:50 amcongratulations, pity that Stalin was messing around, all quiet on the east front !!!!
May 28th, 2008 at 10:55 amThanks for posting this story! Great men do great things…
May 28th, 2008 at 11:15 amFranchie.
I agree the US should have teamed with Germany and thrown Stalin back to the Don River!!
The remaining German Army Groups would have been ready in 3 months of rest and refit to team with Patton,Clark and Bradley!!!!
With the US Air Force in the sky it would have been great
May 28th, 2008 at 11:34 amQuincy, I was thinking that may-be Germany was the heart choice for the Anglo-saxons world, that only the threat that Stalin could have overcome the battlefield till the Atlantic, motived the westerny politicians to beat the Germans, and fire at their planes till they finally crashed either. The Russians wouldn’t have hesitate one second to crash an Allie plane.
Now, in that story, the pilot humanity is still admirable
May 28th, 2008 at 11:52 am“The remaining German Army Groups would have been ready in 3 months of rest and refit to team with Patton,Clark and Bradley!!!!”
Ahhh with the benefit of hindsight, can you imagine the better world we would live in today if the world had only gone through 20 years of communism instead of 75 years? We should have listened to Patton and MacArthur!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:53 pmFrenchie
The Soviets where by far the most dangerous of the WW2 participants.
By Sept 1941 Stalin was in a panick so he forced the Asiatic members of the Soviet Union at gunpoint onto trucks and trains. He shipped them to Russia trained them for 2 months then sent them in wave after wave after wave at the exhausted German soldiers.
(This bought time to bring his Russian divisions in Manchuria to defend Moscow for his counterattack in Dec 1941)
These Asiatics were men as close to animals as you could get and unfortunatly the British and US press called THEM the “saviors of Europan culture” from the “barbaric German”
Thank the Germans and particularly the first European army(WaffenSS) that these Bolshevic animals did not reach Paris by June 1944. It could have easily happened.
Unfortunately FDR had many many Communists in his administration who hated Germans and loved the “workers paradise” called USSR
Millions of German woman were raped and killed by these beastly monsters.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:55 pmTedders
Right on!!!!!!!!!!!
May 28th, 2008 at 12:56 pmI was watching the World at War series on DVD.
The Barbarossa episode indicated that the Germans destroyed 6000 tanks!!! in two engagements at Minsk and Smolensk in July of 1941. Unheard of!!! Even today that would be remarkable!
They quoted a Whermacht soldier
“We were never in war before. We had no fear. Because all of our battles ended in victories for Germany” It sounds better in the German accent
May 28th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
, 
Salute!!!!!
May 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pmI have hard time to follow, im moderated
all I can say, that we, the Frenchs, the Belgians, the Hollanders… we were a light argument for the big issue, insignifiant pions on the chess-board, that could be thrown away if the big bear wa asleep
May 28th, 2008 at 1:48 pmwow that is an incredible story.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:49 pmFor the purposes of comparison, compare the way the Japanese treated American and British POW’s to way the Germans treated them. My memory is fuzzy but something like 50 - 70% of American POW’s died while in Japanese custody but less than 10% of American POW’s died in German custody. The German stat my be low but the point is the Japanese were absolutely heartless, ruthless and inhuman in the way they treated our troops but yet there was not the massive tribunals to hold them accountable the way the Germans were held accountable for their war crimes. I wish there had beens organisations set up to hunt down Japanese war criminals the way the Nazis were hunted.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:54 pmWell, a lot of the Japanese war criminals killed themselves rather than be captured, and executed.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:28 pmGreat story Bash
A wider audience should hear of this, maybe the History Channel’s “Dogfight” producers will pick up on this great story and do an episode on it.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:54 pmInteresting I posted we should have listened to Patton in the brezinski article.
Truly should have. In the same light we should have not listened to colin powell in 1991.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:40 pmGreat story.
I heard some WWII vets talk about this at a fly-in this past weekend.
Careful in that hindsight. Hitler still was the leader of Germany back then. Most leaders at the time were concerned about both Nazism and Communism as Churchill so aptly demonstrated. However, the Germans were more technologically advanced and given more time, quite capable of not just nuclear bombing, but possibly even a rocket delivery system.
Another group of Germans was the Blowtorch Brigade and their practices at Malmedy as well as in Russia.
Both Nazi Germany and Japan were drifting from moral absolutes either biblically inspired or in the noble warrior code of Bushido that didn’t condone murdering prisoners or civilians. Japan still gets a pass historically speaking for it’s treatment of civilans during campaigns throughout Se Asia in WWII.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:48 pmmike3481
…”A wider audience should hear of this, maybe the History Channel’s “Dogfight” producers will pick up on this great story and do an episode on it”.
Mike - I second that, great idea (great series).
This is a great story. I read a similar one about a P-47 pilot that was trying to nurse his badly shot up Thunderbolt home and couldn’t shake an German fighter that had parked on his six. The german, fired a couple of bursts, then pulled up alongside, and looked him over, then slid back behind, again fired several more bursts riddling the Thunderbolt, but failing to bring it down. The german once again pulls up alongside, then shook his head, saluted and broke off. The P-47 limps back over the channel, and makes a successful (crash) landing. As I remember it, they counted over 200+ holes in the airframe. The plane never flew again.
May 28th, 2008 at 4:19 pmsome of the germans did have a gentlemanly way of war.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:06 pmWar without hate
May 28th, 2008 at 6:38 pmheart-warming story, thanks for the find Bash
May 28th, 2008 at 7:15 pmMen of Honor know no borders.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:37 pmOutstanding story.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:58 pm