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[old man emu]

Can good men be found on both sides of a bad war? A Higher Call by Adam Makos, 2012; ISBN 9781782392569 identifies one such good man, Franz STIGLER, who was a Luftwaffe Bf109 pilot during WWII.

 

Stigler's exemplary good deed was carried out on 20 December 1943 when he caught up with a B-17G, Ye Olde Pub, piloted by 20-year-old Charles Brown.

 

 

The B-17 had earlier been mauled as it was returning from an attack on the city of Bremen. Flack had ripped off half the plexiglass nose canopy; machine gun fire from other 109s had reduced the port tailplane to a 3-ft long stump; one of the 4 Wright-Cyclone engines was inoperable, and another functioned, but its controls had been severed. The tailgunner sat dead at his post. One of the waist gunners lay on the floor, unconscious from administered morphine which eased the pain of his wounded legs. The ball-turret guns were frozen; only one upper turret gun worked. Flak fragments, machine gun bullets and cannon shells had made the fuselage a sieve.

 

Stigler, fresh from downing another B-17 not long before, formatted with the right wing tip as he surveyed to damaged plane. As he did so, he could see the crew members looking at him. He was amazed that the B-17 could still fly. Stigler was only one or two more victories away from being eligible for the Knights Cross. Here was a sitter he could claim to move closer to that prestigious award.

 

As the two aircraft flew towards the Atlantic coast, where coastal anti-aircraft batteries were thick on the ground to take a final shot at surviving bombers, Stigler took a momentous decision whose repercussions still echo today.

 

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This book is more than the story of eleven lives moving towards that fateful encounter. It is mainly the story of Stigler's life in aviation. There is more of interest than what happened on that day. The author reincarnates the lives of the protagonists during those war years, focusing on Stigler.

 

This book is a better recounting of the wartime experiences of a Luftwaffe pilot than the much earlier, well-received memoir I Flew for the Fuehrer, by Heinz Knocke.

 

Old Man Emu

 

 

[Litespeed]

I think there is also a video doc about this- somewhere on the web.

 

Chivalry is not lost