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Blogs by Robert A. Mills
THE REST OF THE STORY 4/10/2009
4/10/2009 6:04:49 AM
B-17s in World War II were called “Flying Fortresses,” and in many ways they were the Stealth Bombers of their day, except they carried a crew of at least nine airmen, sometimes more. My boss, back in the halcyon days of TV, had been the pilot of a B-17, and he told me a story about a guy he once knew.
“There was this major I knew named Charlie Brown,” he relayed over lunch one day. “That was his real name, but I don’t know if he was ever a friend of Charles Shulz’s or not. Anyway, Charlie, like me, flew a B-17 over Germany back in ‘44.”
One day, it seemed, Major Brown was sent to bomb a certain Nazi factory, and during the mission, he was attacked by a score of enemy planes and was battered by anti-aircraft fire. The result was catastrophic: one engine was crippled and worthless, the nose of the ship had taken a direct hit, the rudder and one stabilizer was blown away, the top and tail gunners were smashed and strewn everywhere—the entire plane was battered ragged and perforated with bullets and shrapnel from stem to stern. (Had it been a movie, the bombardier would have reached for his harmonica and improvised “On a Wing and a Prayer.”)
Miraculously, Brown was not wounded, but his cockpit and instrument panel were a mess; his co-pilot, radioman, and three gunners were dead. Even hs compass was shattered, and he not only had no clue where he was, he had no idea where he was going.
On the ground, at a nearby Nazi airfield, the commandant instructed Captain Franz Steigler, “Gehen Sie Schuss dass dummer Amerikaner aus dem Himmel!”
Captain Steigler cried, “Heil Hitler!” and jumped into his ME-109 fighter; with a full complement of ammo, he took off after Major Brown’s limping, gasping B-17.
But, pulling alongside the Flying Fortress, Steigler stared in amazement. “Mein Gott!” he thought, “was Sie in der Luft behält!” Why don’t you fall out of the sky and crash!
Brown saw the German fighter off his starboard fluttering wing and wondered what he was waiting for? If there was ever a sitting duck, the B-17 was ripe for the picking. Brown, for some reason, pointed to his broken compass and gave the international shrug of hopelessness—both palms up and open and his shoulders raised above his jowls. Steigler understood, as only another well-trained pilot would. Using hand signals, the Nazi indicated Brown should turn around 180 degrees and fly in the opposite direction, which the American quickly and obediently did.
The 379th Bomber Group was stationed at Kimbolton, England, and as Major Brown struggled to control his badly damaged plane, Captain Steigler escorted him to the western edge of the North Sea and pointed him toward Great Britain. Back at his own base, the commandant asked, “Bekamen Sie ihn?”
“Ja,” Steigler said, “er ist an der Unterseite von der Nordsee!” Yeah, he’s at the bottom of the North Sea.
Many years later, Charlie Brown, living since the war in Seattle, Washington, attended, as he often did, a reunion of the 379 Bomber Group. The guest speaker that night was a former Luftwaffe pilot named Franz Steigler, an ex-Nazi fighter captain who was now a Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia. That night, Captain Steigler told the story of the crippled Flying Fortress he had not shot down, and afterward he and Major Brown shared two pints of dark lager and reminisced about that day a lifetime ago.
“Why didn’t you finish me off?” he asked Steigler. “I was completely helpless.”
“Why bother? The war was almost over, there was no way we could win—and besides, I never thought you’d make it, anyway.”
And since Paul Harvey is gone:
After the war, Major Brown became a commercial airline pilot. Captain Steigler was separated from the defeated Luftwaffe and emigrated with his wife and infant son to Canada, where he became an engineer for TWA—in fact, he left Germany with his family aboard a TWA flight Charlie Brown piloted between Munich and North America.
Unbeknownst to either of them, they lived less than 200 miles apart—and Brown’s daughter, Amy, met Steigler’ son, Gus, at Lewis and Clark University in Portland. They married after college and raised two sons: Charles and Francis.
Now, you know the rest of the story. Ziemlich verrückt, wie . . . ?
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