![]() Decades later, Brown began having nightmares about it, and finally he couldn’t take it anymore: He had to find that pilot and know why he saved his life. Yet the unusual incident from all those years ago stuck in their memories. Even worse, he put himself in significant danger: If anyone found out about the incident, he could be court-martialed, so he told no one about it for many years.Īfter the war, the two men moved on, both of them getting married and becoming fathers. An ace pilot, he only needed one more kill at that time to win The Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest award for valor. Stigler’s act of mercy came at the expense of promotion and safety. Then he saluted him, peeled his fighter away and returned to Germany. “Good luck,” Stigler said to himself. (The Luftwaffe had B-17s of its own, shot down and rebuilt for secret missions and training.) Stigler escorted the bomber over the North Sea and took one last look at the American pilot. He nodded at the American pilot and began flying in formation so German anti-aircraft gunners on the ground wouldn’t shoot down the slow-moving bomber. CNN explains how he did his best to save the men on the plane:Īlone with the crippled bomber, Stigler changed his mission. I saw them and I couldn’t shoot them down.”įingering the rosary he kept in his pocket, Stigler quickly came up with a new plan. Later, he said of the incident, “To me, it was just like they were in a parachute. Stigler saw that the men on the plane were utterly vulnerable and unable to defend themselves. He looked into the terrified eyes of young Charlie Brown and knew he could not gun down his plane.Īlthough he fought as a Nazi, Stigler believed deep down in a principle of wartime morality, which some call “the warrior’s code”: “There is something worse than death, and one of those things is to completely lose your humanity.” ![]() That day, however, something deeper welled up inside him. ![]() But after his beloved brother, August, also a pilot, died in the war, Stigler finally agreed to go to the front, anger and resentment driving him. Stigler had not wanted to join the Fighter Corps and initially signed up only to train other pilots. On top of that, Stigler was Catholic and had spent time studying to be a priest before the war. The situation seemed hopeless.īut the men had no way of knowing that the man flying that plane, Franz Stigler, came from a vocally anti-Nazi family. “My God, this is a nightmare,” gasped his co-pilot, Spencer “Pinky” Luke. ![]() A German Messerschmitt fighter plane was closing in on their crippled craft. Somewhere over Germany, trying to make it home against all odds, Brown spotted the one thing that could make the desperate situation worse. Severely damaged, the plane couldn’t keep up and soon fell behind to fly alone. The men on board were in even worse shape than the plane: Half his crew was severely wounded, while the tail gunner was dead, his blood frozen in icicles over the machine guns. Enemy fire had riddled his bomber with holes and nearly destroyed it. Just before Christmas 1943, Charles Brown, an American bomber pilot in World War II, was sure he was about to die.īrown was a 21-year-old West Virginia farm boy on his first combat mission, and it was going about as badly as you could imagine. A German pilot lived to be thankful for his act of chivalry 50 years earlier.
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