Pilots Bond Across Enemy Lines Wwii German Flier Cements Future Friendship By Choosing To Spare Crippled U.S. Bomber

It’s the stuff of legend.

The American crew of the B-17, crippled in a dogfight after a bombing run on a German aircraft factory, struggles to make it back to England.

The Luftwaffe pilot, closing in for the kill in his Messerschmitt 109, is somehow unable to finish them off and instead escorts them to the North Sea and safety.

And then, in a gesture immortalized by B movies of the period, he salutes the enemy and lets them go.

“It’s one of the best documented stories of pure chivalry in the history of air combat,” said the American pilot, Charles Brown, now 75 and living in Miami.

Brown recalled the December 1943 incident in a telephone interview Tuesday from the home of the German pilot, Franz Stigler, 82. Stigler emigrated to Canada in 1953 and lives in Surrey, British Columbia, just outside Vancouver.

Brown calls Stigler his “older brother” and they visit regularly since finding each other in 1990. Both were in Seattle last weekend for a special program at Boeing’s Museum of Flight called “An Act of Honor,” which celebrated their moment of combat brotherhood.

Brown says he didn’t talk about the incident for years.

“The story is so farfetched,” he said, musing that it was the kind of war story that would “really discredit your credibility.”

“And Franz couldn’t tell it,” Brown said. “It made him look like a braggart.”

But in 1986, at a Las Vegas gathering of his pilot group, he was prompted to offer the tale when a friend asked if something unusual had happened “in one of your wars.”

“I said, ‘I think one time I was saluted by a German fighter pilot,”’ Brown recalled.

But then he wondered: “Was this a figment of my imagination? Or did it actually happen?”

He’d never even told Jackie, his wife of 49 years.

A year earlier, in 1985, Stigler attended Boeing’s 50th anniversary for the B-17 and told the story in a television interview.

His wife of 46 years, Hija, says her husband often wondered aloud what had become of the men aboard that plane.

Someone showed Brown the taped interview, and he knew Stigler was talking about his plane. He spent several years researching and in 1989 the story of his quest was published in a German newsletter for World War II pilots.

Then he got a letter from Stigler - from Canada.

“Just his being alive was quite a surprise,” Brown said. “And to find he was on the same continent!”

“For some reason, we really hit it off with each other,” Brown said of their 1990 reunion.

The first time they met, five days before Christmas 1943, Brown said his B-17 - called “Ye Old Pub” - had “rather miraculously” survived an attack by 15 German fighters after a 60-plane Allied bombing raid on Bremen.

“We were pretty badly beaten up,” he said. “We only had full control of one engine. … Most of the tail had been shot off. … We had one dead and four additional casualties.”

The oxygen system was shot out and Brown blacked out after the dogfight.

“My last memory was being inverted,” he says. When he revived, he was at 2,500 feet and pulling up over trees.

When Stigler’s plane pulled alongside, “I had given up several times in the battle. He could have pulled out a handgun and finished us off. That actually went through my mind.”

For his part, Stigler told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“I was amazed the aircraft could fly. The B-17 is the most respected airplane. I flew within 12 yards of Charlie’s. It was a wreck. The tail gunner was lying in blood. Holes all over. I saw Charlie (wounded in the shoulder) by himself flying the plane and his crew running all up and down tending the wounded.”

Stigler signaled Brown to land in Germany.

“My mind just would not accept that,” Brown says.

Stigler then tried to nudge them toward neutral Sweden, where the crew would have been interned for the rest of the war, but Brown resisted that, too.

“It was not one of my better days for brilliance,” he said. “It wasn’t a matter of bravery. It’s just how the mind works.”

Stigler’s choice then was “he could either kill us or let us go.” He escorted them to the North Sea, and then came the moment etched in Brown’s memory.

“He saluted, rolled his plane and flew away.”

Brown knew Stigler’s job “was to shoot us down. Had he said anything to anyone about it, he could have been court-martialed and could well have been shot.”

A Lufthansa Airline pilot before the war, Stigler flew nearly 500 missions in the war and was shot down 17 times, twice by B-17 tail gunners. After moving to Canada, he had a career with Hertz truck rentals.

Brown went on to a career in Air Force intelligence, retiring as a colonel and then working for the State Department. He now is president of an environmental and energy company he founded, Mobile Energy Research Center.

“They’re really closer than brothers,” Jackie Brown told the Post-Intelligencer. “They talk on the phone about once a week.

“In one way they are both the same, they both share a code of honor.”