Mercy in WWII

I read this wonderful account of mercy shown in the midst of war on Snopes.com and had to share it with you. An email is circulating with a story about a German pilot who refused to shoot down a badly damaged B-17, saving the lives of the men on board. The email is embellished but doesn't need to be--the true story is quite remarkable.

In December 1943, the Ye Olde Pub — a B-17 commanded by 21-year-old Lt. Charles L. "Charlie" Brown — took heavy damage while on a mission to bomb a factory in Bremen, Germany. While attempting to head back to England with a crippled plane and an injured crew, Lt. Brown encountered a German who, rather than shooting down the B-17, instead saluted its crew and disappeared.

For years, Brown wondered about this pilot who had shown such mercy. He wrote 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 more than 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.

When asked why he chose not to shoot down the defenseless enemy plane, he responded, "I didn't have the heart to finish off those brave men. 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."

Brown and Stigler met in 1989. Franz Stigler passed away a little over a month ago, on 22 March 2008.