#bf 109

Bf-109G

A German fighter ace pulled up behind a crippled American bomber, his finger on the trigger, an easy kill that could put him in line for his country's highest honor.

He could see the wounded crew through the holes in the fuselage.

What he did next was so unthinkable that both men hid it for almost 50 years.

Then, as old men, they found each other..🧵1/7

It was December 20, 1943, four days before Christmas.

Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a farm boy from West Virginia, was flying his very first combat mission as the pilot of a B-17 bomber named Ye Olde Pub. His target was a Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in the city of Bremen, one of the most heavily defended places in Europe.

The mission was a nightmare. Over the target, German flak shattered the bomber's nose and knocked out one engine, while a second was badly damaged and failing. Then the fighters came. Wave after wave tore into the lone, struggling bomber.

By the time Ye Olde Pub limped away, it was barely controllable. The controls were shredded. The tail gunner was dead at his post. Nearly every man aboard was wounded. The bomber was so badly torn open that the freezing wind howled straight through the fuselage.

Charlie Brown, bleeding and barely conscious, fought to keep the dying machine in the air.

Below, at a German airfield, a Luftwaffe ace named Franz Stigler was refueling and rearming his Messerschmitt fighter.

Stigler was one of Germany's finest pilots, with more than 20 victories to his name. He was closing in on the tally that could put him in line for the Knight's Cross, the highest honor his country could bestow on a pilot. One more bomber, perhaps, would do it.

When he saw the crippled American bomber stagger overhead, he leapt into his fighter and climbed after it. Within moments he was right behind Ye Olde Pub, in perfect position, his guns ready.

It was the easiest kill he would ever have.

But Stigler did not fire.

Through the gaping holes in the bomber, he could see the crew slumped and bleeding. Blood was frozen across the fuselage. The tail gunner would never move again.

And Franz Stigler could not bring himself to pull the trigger.

Stigler had been taught a code as a young pilot. One of his commanders had told him that if he ever shot at a man in a parachute, a defenseless man, he would shoot him himself. To Stigler, this shattered bomber full of dying boys was no different.

He would later say:

"It would have been like shooting at a parachute. I just couldn't do it."

So he made a decision that could have seen him court-martialed or even executed.

Instead of firing, he flew alongside Ye Olde Pub, forming up on its wing in full view of the stunned American crew. The German ace was not attacking them.

He was trying to help them.

Stigler tried to signal Charlie Brown to land and surrender, or to fly to neutral Sweden, where his crew could receive medical treatment and survive. Brown, dazed and unable to understand, simply kept flying.

So Stigler did the only thing left to do.

He escorted the bomber.

Flying on its wing through the rest of German airspace, he protected it from German anti-aircraft guns that might hesitate to fire for fear of hitting one of their own fighters.

He shepherded his enemy to safety.

All the way to the open sea.

At the edge of the North Sea, with the bomber finally clear of Germany, it was time for Franz Stigler to leave.

He looked across at Charlie Brown, the young American he had just chosen to save.

He gave him a nod.

Then he raised his hand in salute and peeled away toward Germany.

Charlie Brown could hardly believe what had happened. He somehow flew the shattered bomber across roughly 250 miles of the freezing North Sea and landed safely in England.

Of the ten men aboard, nine survived.

When Brown reported that a German fighter had spared them, he was ordered not to speak about it. The Army did not want American airmen thinking of the enemy as human.

"Someone decided," Brown later said, "you can't be human and be flying in a German cockpit."

Franz Stigler remained silent too.

If anyone had learned what he had done, the consequences could have been severe.

So both men buried the secret.

And the war went on.

But Charlie Brown never forgot.

For decades, the memory of the German pilot who had looked him in the eye and chosen mercy instead of victory stayed with him.

In retirement, he began searching for the man who had spared his crew.

Years passed with no answers.

Finally, Brown wrote to a newsletter for former combat pilots, describing the encounter and asking whether anyone knew the German fighter pilot from December 20, 1943.

In Canada, a retired pilot named Franz Stigler opened that newsletter.

After 47 years of wondering whether the bomber he had spared had ever made it home...

...he finally had his answer.

He sat down and wrote a reply.

"I was the one."

When the two old men finally spoke on the phone, and later met in person, something extraordinary happened.

They did not meet as former enemies.

They met as brothers.

Franz Stigler had lost his own brother, also a pilot, early in the war. In Charlie Brown, he found another.

The two became inseparable. They visited each other, spoke constantly, and attended reunions together. Brown would later say Franz was like a brother he had not seen in forty years.

For Stigler, the reunion healed a question he had carried for nearly half a century.

The risk he had taken had been worth it.

The boys he spared had gone home.

They had lived.

Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler remained close friends until 2008, when they died within months of one another.

The American bomber pilot.

The German fighter ace who refused to shoot him.

They left the world side by side.

As brothers.

SAAB J35 Draken (adore)

Bf 109 G-4 (hate with prejudice)

Messerschmitt Bf 109 E du I./Jagdgeschwader 27 (JG 27) et Junkers Ju 87 B du II./St G 2 – Début 1941

Photographe : Willi Billhardt