RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS, COURTESY AND HONOR IN THE WORST OF TIMES!

LITTLE KNOWN MILITARY HISTORY!

In 1943, Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown was piloting his B-17 Flying Fortress, Ye Olde Pub, back to England after bombing industrial centers in Bremen, Germany.

During its run, the nose was torn apart by flak fire, causing the plane to drop out of formation and come under attack from fifteen enemy fighter planes.

The plane lost sixty percent of its electric capacity, lost its oxygen, and half its rudder.

Of the ten crewmen on board, the tail gunner had been killed, the rest wounded. 2Lt Brown himself was hit in his right shoulder. He then passed out from oxygen deprivation and woke up to find the bomber in a 4,000-foot dive.

He pulled the plane up and headed home, having been left for dead by the pursuit fighters.

On the way back to England, Germans on the ground spotted the bomber.

The Luftwaffe dispatched ace fighter pilot Oberleutnant (Lt) Franz Stigler to finish it off.

He had already shot down two B-17s that day and needed one more kill to earn the Knight’s Cross, the highest Iron Cross award for bravery and leadership.

Lt. Stigler easily caught up to the Allied plane in his Messerschmitt 109, but wondered why the Flying Fortress hadn’t started shooting at him.

From his cockpit, he could see how badly damaged the plane was, how the crew struggled to care for the wounded, and even 2Lt Brown’s face as he struggled to bring Ye Olde Pub and its crew back home alive with one good engine.

He’d never seen a plane so badly damaged and still flying.

“You are fighter pilots first, last, always,” A commander had told Lt. Stigler’s unit when he was stationed in North Africa.

“If I ever hear of any of you shooting at someone in a parachute, I’ll shoot you myself.” He looked to the man struggling at the bomber controls.

2Lt Brown looked back. To Lt Stigler, these men were like men in parachutes. Even though getting caught letting the bomber go would mean execution, he just couldn’t shoot them down.

Lt Stigler moved to fly in a formation on 2Lt Brown’s left, a formation German ground spotters would recognize as friendly.

He escorted 2Lt Brown’s bomber halfway over the North Sea and departed with a salute.

After the war, Lt Stigler moved to Canada. 2Lt Brown returned to the US.

Over forty years later, Lt Stigler responded to an ad 2Lt Brown placed as he searched newsletters of former Luftwaffe pilots for the German ace who spared his crew.

One day, Lt Stigler responded:

“Dear Charles, All these years I wondered what happened to the B-17; did she make it or not?”

The two became close friends after meeting in 1990.

The story of Stigler and Brown is told in detail in the 2012 book A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II.

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