The ability to show compassion to your enemy is just one more thing that separates “us” from our current crop of Islamic enemies.

All great people.

The German Navy and Air Force were very much like ours with respect to chivalry

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

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

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

Now, in that story, the pilot humanity is still admirable

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!

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.

Right on!!!!!!!!!!!

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

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

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.

Truly should have. In the same light we should have not listened to colin powell in 1991.

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.

…”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.