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Though the majority of the book covered Franz and the German pilots he worked with, Makos was able to capture in a very short time a feeling of what the bomber crews went through. It is also over Sicily where Franz has his first encounter with the American Boeing B-17 heavy bomber and realizes how difficult it is to shoot down and a change in tactics is needed. In it, Franz Stigler, a German Luftwaffe fighter ace flying a Messerschmitt Bf 109, guided a severely damaged American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress out of German airspace after failing to persuade it to surrender, an act of chivalry. This tainted Franz Steigler's image for a while as his comrades thought he had a case of " throat ache" in that he was anxious to be awarded the coveted " Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
Still, I read it through because somewhere in all this, I learnt a lot more about what life was like for German airmen supporting the Africa Corps in WW2. But Charlie did not understand, not did he realize that the German gunners on the North Sea shore did not fire because they saw one of their own with the American plane and figured he was going to take them down over the water. It made it so much easier to understand the German pilot, Frank Stigler, who amidst the cruelty, violence and war surrounding the WW2, would do an act of pure chivalry and humane that it shows to everyone that ‘enemies are better off as friends’. This is an incredible book to read and experience from a personal and historical point of view; plus the story it weaves about two pilots from opposing sides is truly incredible! Starting with an encounter between a badly shot up B-17 and an ace German fighter pilot on Christmas Eve of 1943, the author tells the story of the pilots of the 2 airplanes.
Stigler as a pilot stayed clear of politics and “out of the line of fire” of the Nazis so that he wouldn’t “end up in Dachau. In the summer of 1878, refugees from the Memphis epidemic came to Chattanooga to escape the ravages of yellow fever. It is followed by the story of Stigler's early life, training in flying and Stigler's account of post-war Germany. When the war was over, both men went on with their lives, sometimes thinking about each other and the odds that the other might had survived.
Franz Stigler was shot down a total of 17 times crash landing or ditching 11 times and taking to his parachute the other 6. Franz Stigler, a veteran German pilot known for his exploits in the air and one kill away from becoming an ace, sees a badly damaged B-17 and makes a heroic choice. Thank God that Charley Brown knew where the real story was and pushed for it to be told from that point of view. He probably killed more than a hundred enemy airmen and continued to fly missions up until the very end of the war. I found the part about Franz's service in LuftWaffe including the conflict between LuftWaffe's aces and it's Nazi high commander Hermann Goring especially interesting.I was deeply moved while reading many parts of this book-several times to tears, such that I closed it up for a while to let the visual pictures in my head reside there, quietly.
It recounts the story of the Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident of 1943, which took place in the skies of Germany during the Second World War.After campaigns in Africa and Sicily in which they “fought for nothing, for meaningless sand and sea,” Stigler and his pilots went back to Germany to “fight for everything.
None of them were all that familiar with it, and the Me 262’s engine (made with inferior materials because better ones weren’t available in Germany that late in the war) had a habit of stalling, exploding, and otherwise causing death to pilots. His story of the last days of the war is heart rending, esp when he gives in to the pleas of one of his young pilots, who really has no business flying such a high performance aircraft, and lets the young man fly a combat sortie.
I found the sequence involving Charlie’s mission and Franz’s mercy the most compelling part of the book.
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