At 11:47 on the morning of December 20, 1943, Oelotant France Stigler sat in the cockpit of his Messid BF109 at a forward airfield near Braymond, Germany.
His ground crew was patching a bullet hole in his radiator from an earlier engagement that morning.
He had already shot down two American bombers.
One more kill would earn him the Knights Cross, the most coveted decoration in the Luftvafer.
Then he saw it.
A B17 flying fortress barely 200 f feet off the ground, limping directly over his airfield.
The bomber was shattered.
The tail section hung in ribbons.
The nose cone was gone entirely.
One engine was dead, another trailing smoke through the gaping holes in the fuselage.
Stigler could see wounded crewmen struggling to keep their aircraft in the sky.
This was the easiest kill of his career.
The American bomber could not fight back.
Its gunners were dead or incapacitated.
France Stigler was 28 years old, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, one of the finest pilots in the Luftvafer.
He knew exactly what to do.
What he did next would remain a secret for 46 years.
And the reason he did it reveals a truth about the air war over Europe that neither side fully understood at the time.
German pilots did not think about American airmen the way most people assume.
The reality was far more complicated, far more human, and ultimately far more devastating for the Luftvafer than simple hatred could ever have been.
To understand what German pilots thought about Americans, we first need to understand what American bomber crews faced when they flew into the heart of Nazi Germany.
Because the Germans were watching, they were paying attention.
And what they saw shaped their opinions in ways that surprise most people today.
The American bomber crews who flew into Germany in 1943 had no idea what their enemy thought of them.
They knew only that they were dying at rates that made survival statistically impossible.
In the summer and fall of that year, the 8th Air Force was hemorrhaging men.
The theory behind American strategic bombing seemed sound.
Heavy bombers flying in tight defensive formations would generate overlapping fields of fire from their machine guns.
They would protect each other.
The Boeing B7 flying fortress carried 1350 caliber machine guns and 10 crewmen.
A formation of several hundred bombers would create a lethal crossfire that enemy fighters could not penetrate.
That was the theory.
The reality was slaughter.
The statistics were horrifying.
Bomber crews were required to fly 25 missions before rotating home.
Most never made it past their fifth.
In October 1943 alone, during what became known as Black Week, the Eighth Air Force lost 148 bombers and approximately 1,500 airmen in just 7 days.
That was nearly 13% of the attacking force, gone in a single week.
The men who climbed into those B17s and B-24s each morning understood the mathematics of their situation.
They could do the arithmetic.
25 missions required.
Average loss rate around 4% per mission.
The numbers did not lie.
Completing a tour of duty was mathematically improbable.
A popular saying circulated through the barracks.
To fly in the eighth air force was like holding a ticket to a funeral.
Your own.
By the end of 1943, the eighth air force had suffered over 26,000 casualties.
More than 21,000 men would be killed or captured by wars end.
The casualty rate for eighth air force air crews exceeded 7% compared to 3.29% for the Marine Corps and 2.25% for the Army overall.
Flying heavy bombers over Germany was the most dangerous job in the American military.
John Luckadoo, a pilot with the 100th Bomb Group, later recalled that he calculated a 400% turnover in personnel during his first 90 days of combat.
The crews called his unit the bloody hundth for good reason.
The mental toll was visible everywhere.
Flight surgeons documented the symptoms.
Insomnia, tremors, weight loss, blurred vision, sudden outbursts of temper, followed by withdrawn silence.
Men who had been confident and eager on their first missions became holloweyed and jumpy by their tenth.
What made it worse was the feeling that they were being sent to die for nothing.
The bombing accuracy was poor.
At high altitude through clouds and anti-aircraft fire, hitting a specific factory or railard was extremely difficult.
The targets often remained standing and the Luftvafer seemed invincible.
The German fighters would wait until the American escort fighters reached the limit of their fuel range and turned back.
Then the attacks would begin.
Waves of BF109s and FW190s would slash through the bomber formations.
They attacked from the front where the B7’s defenses were weakest.
They attacked from below where the ball turret gunner could not depress his guns far enough.
They attacked in pairs, in groups, in swarms.
The bomber crews had a name for the journey into Germany.
They called it the gauntlet.
From the moment they crossed the German border until they dropped their bombs and turned for home, they were under constant attack.
The German pilots rotated.
Fresh fighters replaced those that ran low on fuel or ammunition.
The bombers had no such relief.
They flew straight on through the fire, watching aircraft around them explode and fall.
John Kea, also of the 390th Bomb Group, remembered the German fighters with a mixture of fear and grudging respect.
No matter the target they were defending, he said they were balls to the wall.
They were brave.
They did not hesitate.
What KMA and his fellow Americans did not fully grasp was that the German pilots attacking them were not faceless machines.
They were men with their own fears, their own doubts, and increasingly their own complicated feelings about the enemy they were killing.
The Luftvafa pilots who rose to intercept American bombers in 1943 were in many ways the finest fighter pilots in the world.
Some had been flying combat since the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Many had scores of aerial victories.
A few had over 100.
These men had fought against the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain.
They had destroyed thousands of Soviet aircraft on the Eastern Front.
They had developed tactics and techniques honed through years of continuous combat.
The greatest of them, men like Eric Hartman, Ghard Barhorn, and Ga R would accumulate victory counts that no American or British pilot could approach.
Hartman alone claimed 352 aerial victories, more than any pilot in history.
But even among these veterans, the sight of American bomber formations inspired something unexpected.
Not contempt, not dismissal, something closer to astonishment.
The first time many German pilots saw an American combat box, they were struck by its size and discipline.
Hundreds of heavy bombers flying in precise formation, bristling with machine guns, pressing forward despite losses that would have turned back lesser men.
The Germans had expected the Americans to be soft, unprepared for war.
What they found was something different.
Oberlot Johannes Steinhoff was one of the Luftvafer’s most experienced pilots.
By 1943, he had flown over 500 combat missions and shot down more than 150 aircraft.
He had fought against the British over the English Channel, against the Soviets over the Eastern Front, and now against the Americans over Germany.
In interviews after the war, Steinhoff spoke candidly about the differences between his various enemies.
The British pilots, he said, were the most aggressive and capable he had faced.
This was nothing against the Americans, he added, because they came in late and in such large numbers that direct comparison was difficult.
But when pressed about what he thought of American airmen, Steinhoff’s answer revealed something important.
“The Americans and British treated us as gentlemen,” he said, “As we did, our enemy pilots when they were captured.
This was not propaganda.
It was an acknowledgement of something the German pilots recognized almost immediately.” The Americans who climbed into those bombers each morning, knowing the odds, knowing they would probably die, were not cowards.
They were not fools.
They were remarkably brave men doing a job that required steady nerves and extraordinary courage.
Major Egon Mayer was the Luftwaffer pilot who developed the head-on attack against American bomber formations.
He recognized that the B17’s defenses were weakest at the nose.
By diving straight at the bombers from 12:00 high, German fighters could concentrate their fire on the cockpit before the American gunners could bring their weapons to bear.
The tactic was devastatingly effective, but Mayor himself acknowledged what it required.
A head-on attack meant closing on a formation of heavy bombers at a combined speed approaching 600 mph.
The German pilot had perhaps 2 seconds to aim, fire, and break away before colliding with his target.
It took, in Mayor’s own assessment, great skill and courage, and he was describing what his own pilots had to do.
The implication was clear.
The American crews who held formation while fighters screamed directly at their cockpits were demonstrating equal courage.
This mutual recognition of bravery created a strange dynamic in the air war.
German pilots began to notice something about the Americans that surprised them.
The bomber crews did not break.
They did not scatter.
They held their formations even as aircraft around them exploded and fell.
They continued their bomb runs even when every instinct screamed at them to turn back.
Consider what this required.
AB17 bomber flying in formation was essentially a fixed target.
The pilot could not or weave or take evasive action.
Doing so would break up the carefully maintained defensive box and expose the aircraft to even greater danger.
The crew had to fly straight and level through anti-aircraft fire, through fighter attacks, through hell itself, knowing that the mathematics of random chance would kill some of them no matter how perfectly they flew.
The flack over German cities was terrifying.
Hundreds of anti-aircraft guns would fill the sky with explosions.
The shells were fused to detonate at specific altitudes, creating lethal clouds of shrapnel.
A direct hit would destroy an aircraft instantly.
A near miss could shred control surfaces, kill crewmen, start fires in fuel tanks.
The bombers flew through this curtain of steel as if it were a summer thunderstorm, steady and unwavering.
Then came the fighters.
German pilots developed increasingly aggressive tactics as the war progressed.
The head-on attack pioneered by Egon Mayor was designed to be psychologically devastating as well as tactically effective.
Imagine watching a fighter aircraft diving straight at your cockpit, guns blazing, knowing that the closing speed is nearly 600 mph, knowing that in seconds you will either be dead or watching the German aircraft flash past, knowing that another attacker is probably right behind the first.
The American crews endured this mission after mission, day after day.
They watched their friends die.
They saw aircraft break apart in flames.
They smelled the burning flesh when wounded crewmen were hit, and they came back the next morning and did it again.
German pilots noticed this.
They could not help but notice it.
And while they were professional soldiers doing their job, many of them felt something like admiration for an enemy that would not quit.
Major General Adolf Galand, who commanded all Luftvafa fighter forces from 1941 until January 1945, later admitted that German intelligence had badly underestimated what the Americans would endure.
The expectation had been that sustained losses would break American morale.
Instead, the bombers kept coming.
more of them each month, and the crews inside them kept fighting.
Galland himself was a remarkable figure.
He had scored over 100 victories and wore the Knights Cross with oak leaves, swords, and diamonds, one of Germany’s highest decorations.
He smoked cigars in the cockpit and had an ashtray installed in his BF-109.
He was brave, outspoken, and increasingly frustrated with the leadership of Herman Guring and the Nazi High Command.
But Galland was honest about what he saw in the American airmen.
They would not quit.
They absorbed losses that would have shattered any European air force.
They refined their tactics.
They improved their aircraft.
And they learned from their mistakes.
This was not the soft enemy German propaganda had promised.
This was a formidable opponent that grew stronger with each passing month.
In March 1945, American intelligence officers interrogated 22 captured German fighter pilots.
These were experienced men, many of them aces, and their honest assessments were revealing.
They spoke of American aircraft with grudging respect.
The P-51 Mustang, they said, was fast with excellent climbing ability.
The P-47 Thunderbolt was devastatingly effective in the dive.
But what struck the interrogators was the German pilots assessment of American airmen themselves.
They did not speak of them with contempt.
They spoke of them as dangerous opponents who had earned respect through their willingness to fight and die.
What the German pilots did not know, could not know, was that their growing respect for American courage would soon be matched by a growing fear of American capability.
The change was coming, and when it arrived, it would transform everything.
The morning of December 20, 1943, Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown was flying his first combat mission.
He was 21 years old, a farm boy from West Virginia, and he was piloting a B17 named Ya Old Pub over the most heavily defended airspace in Europe.
The target was the Fauler Wolf aircraft factory in Bremen.
This was not an easy assignment for a first mission.
Breman was nicknamed Flack City by American air crews because of its murderous anti-aircraft defenses.
Brown’s bomber was assigned to fly Purple Heart Corner, the position on the edge of the formation that German fighters typically attacked first.
Breman was protected by more than 250 anti-aircraft guns.
The mission began badly and got worse.
Brown’s B7 was hit by flack before reaching the target.
One engine was damaged immediately.
The aircraft began losing altitude, falling behind the protective formation.
German ground controllers noted the straggler.
Fighters were vetored to intercept.
Before Brown could even release his bombs, additional flack shattered the nose of his aircraft.
Another engine was knocked out.
The plexiglass nose cone was destroyed, exposing the bombardier to the freezing air at altitude.
Then the fighters came.
For more than 10 minutes, between 12 and 15 German fighters tore into Yel Pub.
The attacks were relentless.
Brown’s tail gunner, Sergeant Hugh Echenro, was killed.
Several other crewmen were wounded.
Brown himself took a fragment in his shoulder.
By the time the fighters broke off, ye old Pub was barely flying.
The tail section was shredded.
The controls were partially responsive at best.
The oxygen system was destroyed.
Brown, weakened from blood loss and hypoxia.
Briefly lost consciousness.
When he came to his aircraft was in a dive, heading straight for the German countryside.
He pulled out at treetop level.
And that was when France Stigler saw him.
Stigler scrambled his repaired fighter and climbed to intercept.
This was the kill that would earn him the Knights Cross.
In the German system, destroying a heavy bomber counted as three victories toward the Knights cross requirement of 30.
With two B17 kills already that morning, shooting down this crippled fortress would complete his requirement.
The medal was within reach.
The crippled bomber could not defend itself.
Stigler positioned himself behind the B7’s tail, finger on the trigger.
He had made this approach dozens of times before.
He knew exactly where to aim.
A burst into the engines, another into the cockpit.
The American aircraft would fall in flames.
Then he looked into the aircraft.
Through the holes torn in the fuselage, Stigler could see the dead tail gunner slumped in his position.
He could see wounded men struggling to tend to their crew mates.
He could see the blood frozen on the metal.
He could see the ball turret gunner, unconscious from cold and lack of oxygen, still strapped in his position.
He could see that these were not enemies in any meaningful sense.
They were helpless men trying to survive.
The bombers defensive guns were either destroyed or unmanned.
The crew could not fight back.
Stigler could hear no gunfire, see no movement in the turrets.
These men were completely at his mercy.
Stigler’s commanding officer in North Africa, a man named Gustav Rodel, had once told his pilots something that stayed with Stigler throughout the war.
You are fighter pilots first, last, always, Rodel had said.
If I ever hear of any of you shooting at someone in a parachute, I will shoot you myself.
Looking at the shattered B7, Stigler realized something.
These men were not in parachutes, but they might as well have been.
They were defenseless.
They were wounded.
They were dying.
To shoot them now would be murder.
It would be the action of a butcher, not a warrior.
He did not fire.
Instead, France Stigler did something that could have gotten him caught, marshaled, and executed.
He flew his fighter alongside the crippled American bomber.
When Brown looked out his cockpit window, he saw a German BF109 flying formation on his wing.
The German pilot was not firing.
He was flying peacefully beside them.
Brown was terrified.
Was this some kind of trick? Was the German pilot toying with them before the kill? He ordered his top turret gunner to train his guns on the German fighter, ready to fire if Stigler made any aggressive move.
Stigler motioned for Brown to land.
He pointed down toward German territory, gesturing that they should descend and surrender.
Brown refused.
He had come too far.
He would not give up his crew to become prisoners of war.
Stigler tried again.
This time he motioned for Brown to fly north toward Sweden.
If they could reach neutral territory, the crew could be interned safely.
They would survive the war.
But Brown did not understand the gestures.
He could not hear Stigler through the shattered plexiglass.
He did not know what the German wanted.
So Stigler made a decision that defied everything the war demanded.
He would escort the American bomber to safety.
He flew his fighter close alongside the B7’s left wing.
At this distance, German anti-aircraft batteries on the coast would recognize the silhouette of his meashes.
They would see a German fighter flying in formation with the American bomber and hold their fire.
Stigler stayed with Y old Pub across the German coast.
He flew beside them over the cold waters of the North Sea, watching for any other German aircraft that might try to intercept.
Only when he was certain the American bomber was safely out of German airspace did he give Brown a final salute.
Then he turned and flew back toward Germany, back toward a war he knew was already lost.
Charlie Brown flew 250 mi across stormtossed seas and managed to land his shattered aircraft in England.
He told his commanding officers what had happened.
They ordered him never to speak of it again.
They did not want anyone thinking there could be humanity in a German cockpit.
France Stigler told no one.
If his superiors had learned what he had done, sparing an enemy while in combat, he would have faced execution.
The incident remained buried for nearly half a century.
What happened between Stigler and Brown that December morning was not unique.
It was simply one example of a pattern that both sides tried to ignore.
German pilots, for all their training and indoctrination, could not entirely suppress their recognition that the Americans they were killing were men like themselves.
But this humanity came at a cost.
The air war over Europe was about to change in ways that would make mercy increasingly impossible.
The Americans were about to receive something that would turn them from victims into victors.
And the Luftwaffer was about to discover that respecting an enemy’s courage means nothing when that enemy can finally fight back.
In late 1943, a new aircraft began appearing over Germany.
The P-51 Mustang was not the first American longrange fighter.
The P47 Thunderbolt and P38 Lightning had been providing escort when their range allowed.
But the Mustang was different.
It was a gamecher that would revolutionize the air war entirely.
The Mustang story was remarkable.
North American aviation had designed the airframe in just 117 days in 1940.
Originally for the British, the aircraft was aerodynamically superb with a lamina flow wing that reduced drag and a clean fuselage that sliced through the air.
But the original Allison engine struggled at high altitude, limiting the aircraft’s usefulness as a fighter escort.
The transformation came when British engineers suggested fitting the Mustang with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.
The combination was extraordinary.
Powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine built under license by Packard, the P-51 could fly to Berlin and back, it could stay with the bombers all the way to their targets and all the way home.
And unlike the heavily armed but less maneuverable P-47, the Mustang could dogfight with anything the Luftvafer put in the air.
The Merlin powered P-51B reached speeds exceeding 440 mph at 30,000 ft, nearly 100 mph faster than the Allison powered version at that altitude.
It could climb faster than a BF109.
It could turn inside an FW190.
And with external drop tanks, it could fly over 1,600 m, enough range to escort bombers to targets deep in the heart of Germany.
Reich’s marshal Herman Guring, commander of the Luftvafer, later admitted that the Mustangs arrival marked the turning point of the air war.
He reportedly said that when he saw Mustangs over Berlin, he knew the war was lost.
This was the same man who had once boasted that if enemy bombs ever fell on Berlin, people could call him Mer.
Now he was watching American fighters circle the German capital with impunity.
This was not an exaggeration.
For months, the German strategy had been simple.
Wait for the American escort fighters to reach the limit of their range.
Let them turn back, then attack the bombers with everything available.
Against unescorted formations, the Luftvafers experienced pilots were devastating.
The Mustang made that strategy obsolete overnight.
Now the American fighters could stay with the bombers deep into Germany.
Now they could fight at altitudes where the Luftvafers BF109s and FW190s had previously ruled unchallenged and the Americans were about to change how they used their new advantage in a way that would bleed the Luftvafa White.
In January 1944, Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle took command of the 8th Air Force.
Doolittle had led the famous raid on Tokyo in 1942.
He understood air power and he understood that the way to defeat the Luftwaffer was not to protect the bombers.
It was to destroy German fighters wherever they could be found.
Under Doolittle’s orders, American fighter pilots were freed from close escort duty.
Their new mission was to hunt.
Mustang groups flew ahead of the bomber formations seeking combat.
After the bombers hit their targets, the fighters dropped to low altitude and strafed German airfields, destroying aircraft on the ground.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic.
German pilots who had grown accustomed to choosing when and where to fight suddenly found themselves under attack constantly.
There was no safe airspace anymore.
The Americans were everywhere.
In February 1944, the Allies launched Operation Argument, a week-long assault on German aircraft production that became known as Big Week.
The operation began on February 20th with combined forces of nearly 1,000 bombers and over 800 fighters striking targets across Germany.
Over the next 6 days, more than 3,000 heavy bomber sorties dropped approximately 10,000 tons of bombs on Luftvafa factories.
The American forces struck targets in Brunswick, Leipzig, Gothur, Reaganburg, Stoutgart, Augsburg, and other manufacturing centers.
RAF Bomber Command joined the assault at night, hitting the same targets the Americans attacked by day.
The Germans could not rest.
They could not repair.
They could barely breathe.
The damage to German production was significant, but ultimately recoverable.
German industry had already begun dispersing aircraft manufacturing to smaller facilities and underground bunkers.
Production would actually increase through 1944, peaking later in the year.
But this was irrelevant.
What was not recoverable was the loss of pilots.
During big week, the Luftvafa lost approximately 17% of its fighter pilots.
Not aircraft pilots, the men who knew how to fly, how to fight, how to survive.
Many of them were veterans with years of experience.
These were the backbone of German air defense, and they were being killed faster than they could be replaced.
The Eighth Air Force lost approximately 200 bombers during big week with around 2600 casualties.
These were significant losses, but the Americans could replace them.
The training pipeline in the United States was producing pilots and crews at rates the Germans could not imagine.
New aircraft rolled off production lines at Ford’s Willowrun plant at the rate of 1 B24 every hour.
Germany had no such luxury.
Every experienced pilot killed was a loss that rippled through the entire Luftvafer.
Every veteran shot down took with him years of combat knowledge that no training school could replicate.
By April 1944, the Luftvafa had lost over 1,000 fighter pilots, killed, wounded, or captured.
These were not replaceable.
The training pipeline that had produced Germany’s elite pre-war pilots had been compressed by fuel shortages and the constant demand for replacements.
The numbers tell a stark story of decline.
At the start of the war, German fighter pilots received over 250 hours of flight training before joining combat units.
They learned formation flying, aerobatics, gunnery, navigation, and tactics.
By early 1944, that number had dropped to approximately 160 hours.
By the summer of 1944, new pilots were arriving at frontline squadrons with as little as 112 hours.
By late 1944, some pilots reached combat units with only 80 hours of flight time.
A few had even less.
The training accident rate soared.
Sometimes a third of each intake was lost before they even qualified.
Instructors who should have been teaching new pilots were pulled from training schools and sent to the front to fill gaps in combat units.
Aircraft that should have been used for training were diverted to combat squadrons.
Fuel that should have kept students flying was consumed by operational missions.
American pilots, by contrast, were receiving around 400 hours of training, nearly half of it on their operational aircraft type.
They practiced gunnery until they could hit targets consistently.
They flew formation until it became instinctive.
They learned their aircraft inside and out before ever seeing an enemy.
RAF pilots received approximately 350 hours with 100 hours on operational types.
The gap in quality was becoming a chasm that German courage alone could not bridge.
Gunter Ral, the third highest scoring ace in aviation history with 275 victories, explained the situation bluntly after the war.
German pilots had to fly until they died or were wounded.
There was no rotation home.
No limit on missions, no rest tours where a veteran could pass on his knowledge to new pilots.
This was the German policy and it had profound consequences.
The fly until you die policy allowed aces like Raw to accumulate enormous scores.
He flew over 600 combat missions and was shot down eight times.
He survived only through extraordinary skill and considerable luck.
But this same policy meant that hard one skills were constantly drained from the Luftvafer as veterans were killed.
When Ral was shot down and wounded, his knowledge went with him.
When other veterans were killed, their experience was lost forever.
The vicious cycle accelerated through 1944.
Experienced pilots died.
They were replaced by poorly trained newcomers.
The newcomers died even faster because they lacked the instincts that kept veterans alive.
This created more vacancies, more demand for replacements, more pressure to shorten training even further.
American practice was the opposite.
After completing their tour of duty, typically 25 missions, the most effective pilots were sent home.
But they did not simply return to civilian life.
Many were assigned to train new aviators, passing on everything they had learned over Germany.
Their experience was multiplied across the entire force.
One veteran who survived could help create dozens of competent pilots.
This American system was not perfect.
Sometimes the best pilots resented being pulled from combat.
Some volunteered for additional tours because they wanted to keep fighting.
But the fundamental logic was sound.
Preserve expertise.
Spread knowledge.
Build a force that gets better over time rather than worse.
German aces kept fighting until luck ran out.
American aces went home and created more aces.
The mathematics of this difference were brutal.
And by late 1944, the results were undeniable.
The German pilots, who had respected American courage in 1943, now faced a different reality in 1944.
The Americans were no longer just brave.
They were winning, and there was nothing individual German skill could do to change it.
Veteran Luftvafa fighters watched their inexperienced replacements die in job lots.
The scene repeated itself endlessly across German airfields.
A new pilot would arrive from training school, pale-faced and eager, his uniform still creased from the warehouse.
He would be assigned an aircraft and a mission.
He would take off, join formation with the veterans, and fly toward the American bomber streams.
The veterans knew what would happen next.
They had seen it too many times.
The new pilot would not know when to break.
He would not see the Mustang diving from the sun until it was too late.
He would not understand how to read the combat, when to attack, and when to run.
He would die, often on his first or second mission, often without firing a shot.
The new pilots did not have the skills to survive against well-trained American opponents, flying superior aircraft in overwhelming numbers.
The P-51 Mustang could outclimb, outrun, and outturn the BF109 at most altitudes.
It could certainly outfight any replacement pilot with 80 hours of training.
Major General Galland later estimated that most of the poorly trained replacement pilots were lost during their first five combat missions.
They never had a chance to learn.
The Americans shot them down before they could develop the instincts that kept veterans alive.
It was slaughter and there was nothing the Luftvafa could do to stop it.
By the time of the D-Day invasion on June 6th, 1944, the Luftvafer was a shadow of what it had been.
German fighters flew just over 300 sorties that day against nearly 15,000 Allied sorties in the largest amphibious operation in history, a ratio of nearly 50 to1.
The skies over Normandy belonged completely to the Allies.
The German air force that had conquered Poland, France, and the skies over Britain was effectively broken.
The psychological transformation among German pilots was dramatic.
In 1943, they had been hunters, confident, aggressive, certain of their superiority.
They would rise to intercept American formations, knowing they would inflict heavy casualties.
The Americans were brave, yes, but they were also vulnerable.
German tactics were working.
German pilots were winning.
By late 1944, everything had changed.
They were prey.
The mustangs were everywhere.
Every mission could be a pilot’s last.
The confidence that had characterized the Luftvafa in its glory days was gone, replaced by a grim fatalism.
Pilots who had once looked forward to combat now dreaded it.
They knew the odds had shifted.
They knew that skill and courage might not be enough anymore.
The fuel shortage made everything worse.
By late 1944, German pilots were so short of aviation fuel that they could not train properly.
They could not practice the tactics that might keep them alive.
They sat on the ground while American fighters roamed freely overhead, strafing airfields, destroying aircraft before they could even take off.
When fuel was available, German pilots were sometimes ordered to conserve it by switching off their engines the moment they touched down after a mission.
Ground crews would then push the aircraft to shelter.
This was not a fighting force at the height of its power.
This was an air force in its death throws, strangling on lack of fuel, while superior American aircraft hunted them without mercy.
The Japanese pilots facing American forces in the Pacific sometimes spoke of the Americans with contempt.
They were soft, the Japanese believed.
Corrupted by comfort, incapable of sacrifice.
The German pilots of the Luftvafer never made that mistake.
From the beginning of their encounter with American air power, they recognized something in their enemy that demanded acknowledgement.
The Americans could absorb punishment.
They could take losses that would have broken other air forces, and they kept coming back.
Johannes Steinhoff, who survived the war despite being shot down 12 times, spent his final years as a senior NATO commander.
He rose to the rank of full general in the rebuilt West German Luftvafer.
From 1971 to 1974, he served as chairman of the NATO military committee, one of the highest positions in the alliance.
In that role, he worked closely with American military officers.
He found that the men who had been his enemies shared something with the German pilots he had known.
A certain professionalism, a mutual recognition of what combat demanded, a respect that transcended the killing.
Steinhoff was badly burned in April 1945 when his Mess262 jet crashed on takeoff.
His face was disfigured.
He required more than 70 operations to reconstruct his features.
Yet he returned to aviation, returned to military service, and returned to working alongside the Americans he had fought against.
“The Americans and British treated us as gentlemen,” Steinhoff had said.
This was not universal.
There were atrocities on all sides.
Prisoners were sometimes murdered.
Pilots were sometimes shot in their parachutes despite the codes against it.
But in the air war over Europe, a strange courtesy often prevailed between pilots who were trying to kill each other.
American ace Clarence Anderson, known as Bud, met Steinhoff after the war and was struck by his professionalism.
Anderson later became close friends with Gunter R, who wrote the forward to Anderson’s memoir.
These were men who had tried to kill each other over the skies of Germany.
They became friends.
R later reflected on what struck him about the shared experience of fighter pilots on both sides.
It always unsettles me, he wrote.
when I realize how closely the lives, passions, attitudes, thinking, and actions of fighter pilots of World War II resemble each other.
We were young, we were eager, we flew and fought with everything we had.
And when it was over, many of us found that our enemies were not so different from ourselves.
This recognition of shared humanity did not prevent the killing.
It could not.
The war had to be fought.
The Luftwaffer had to be destroyed.
but it colored how the survivors remembered their enemies.
In 1986, Charlie Brown was asked to speak at a reunion of combat pilots called Gathering of the Eagles.
Someone asked if he had any memorable experiences from the war.
Brown thought for a moment, then he told the story he had kept secret for over 40 years.
The German pilot who had spared his life, the salute over the North Sea, the mystery that had haunted him ever since.
After the speech, Brown decided to find the man who had let him live.
It seemed impossible.
He had no name.
He had only a brief glimpse of a face through a cockpit canopy nearly half a century earlier.
He did not even know if the German pilot had survived the war.
Brown wrote to German military archives.
He searched through veterans organizations.
He placed notices in newsletters for former Luftvafer pilots.
Years passed with no answer.
Many people told him to give up.
The German pilot was probably dead.
Even if he had survived the war, finding him after so long was hopeless.
It took four years of searching.
Finally, in 1990, Brown received a letter from a man living in Canada.
I was the one, the letter said.
My name is France Stigler.
Stigler had immigrated to Canada after the war.
He had never spoken of the incident, not even to his wife.
He had been afraid that someone might think him a traitor for sparing an enemy in combat.
For 46 years, he had carried the secret alone.
When Brown called Stigler on the telephone, the German pilot described everything.
The damage to the bomber, the dead tail gunner, the escort across the coast, the salute.
Every detail matched Brown’s memories perfectly.
There was no doubt this was the man.
When Brown and Stigler finally met in person, they embraced like brothers.
They were both old men now, in their 70s, near the end of their lives.
But the connection forged over the North Sea in December 1943 was as strong as ever.
I love you, Charlie, Stigler said when they met.
The video of that moment shows him fighting back tears.
These were not enemies anymore.
They were friends.
They were family.
Between 1990 and 2008, Charlie Brown and France Stigler remained close.
They appeared together at military reunions across the United States and Canada.
They collaborated on a book about their experience, working with author Adam Marcos to tell their story.
They demonstrated to audiences everywhere that the men who fought the air war over Europe were not abstractions.
They were human beings capable of both killing and mercy.
Stigler spoke at these events about why he had made his choice that December morning.
I could not shoot them, he said.
I thought to myself, what god abandoned these defended? They were defenseless.
They had fought their battle.
To shoot them was not war.
It would have been murder.
The story gained wider attention when Maros published it in a book called A Higher Call.
It became a bestseller.
It was discussed on television programs and in newspapers.
People who had never thought much about the air war over Germany suddenly learned that it had been fought by real men with real consciences.
Stigler died in March 2008.
Brown followed him 8 months later.
They were buried in the same year.
The former enemies who had recognized each other’s humanity when it would have been easier to look away.
Their families remained connected.
The bond that Stigler and Brown had formed extended to the next generation.
Historians estimate that the decision France Stigler made on December 20, 1943 saved the lives of nine American airmen.
Charlie Brown survived.
His co-pilot Spencer Luke survived.
The navigator, the radio operator, the gunners, who had not been killed in the attacks, all survived.
These nine men had children and grandchildren.
At a reunion decades later, Stigler met them all.
He saw the generations that existed because he had chosen not to pull the trigger.
He saw children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, dozens of people who owed their existence to a moment of mercy over the North Sea.
What did it feel like? Someone asked him to see all those people.
Stigler thought about it.
Then he smiled.
It felt, he said, like doing the right thing.
What did German pilots really think about American airmen in World War II? The answer is not simple.
It evolved over time, shaped by experience and circumstance.
In 1942 and early 1943, many German pilots viewed the Americans with a mixture of curiosity and confidence.
The Luftvafer had defeated every air force it had faced.
Poland, France, the initial campaigns in the Soviet Union.
The Americans were new to the war, flying missions with limited experience against a battleh hardened enemy.
German pilots expected them to break.
They thought the Americans were brave.
This became undeniable almost immediately.
Men who flew into the most heavily defended airspace in the world day after day.
Knowing the odds, knowing most of them would die, were not cowards.
The B7 crews who held formation while fighters screamed directly at their cockpits demonstrated courage that German pilots recognized and acknowledged.
These were not soft civilians playing at war.
These were determined warriors who refused to break.
They thought the Americans were dangerous.
As the war progressed and American numbers and technology improved, respect became fear.
The P-51 Mustang changed everything.
Suddenly, the Germans were the ones being hunted.
Suddenly, their airfields were not safe.
Suddenly, a German pilot could be attacked anywhere over the Reich at any altitude by fighters that could match or exceed his own aircraft.
They thought the Americans were relentless.
No matter how many bombers the Luftvafa shot down, more came.
No matter how many fighters were destroyed, replacements appeared.
The production capacity of American industry was staggering.
German pilots understood this.
They understood that they were fighting an enemy with effectively unlimited resources.
They understood the mathematics of attrition and they understood that courage alone could not win against such odds.
They thought the Americans were skilled.
This was perhaps the most surprising conclusion for pilots who had been told the Americans were lazy and undisiplined.
The reality was different.
American pilots were well-trained.
Their formations were precise.
Their tactics improved constantly.
By 1944, American fighter pilots were among the best in the world, flying superb aircraft in overwhelming numbers.
German pilots who survived encounters with them came back with stories of aggressive opponents who flew with confidence and skill, and some of them at least thought the Americans were fellow human beings.
Men like France Stigler looked into shattered bombers and saw not enemies but wounded soldiers who had already given everything.
Men like Johannes Steinhoff and Gar recognized in their opponents the same qualities they valued in themselves.
Professionalism, courage, determination, a willingness to fight and die for their nation.
This did not end the war.
It could not.
The Luftvafer had to be destroyed for the Allies to win.
The strategic bombing campaign was essential to victory.
The losses on both sides were enormous, measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.
By April 1945, German fighter production continued, but pilots and fuel were nearly exhausted.
New aircraft sat on runways without anyone qualified to fly them.
The fuel shortage was so severe that some aircraft could not even be moved to shelter.
The training schools had closed.
The Luftvafa, which had once seemed invincible, was finished.
But the humanity that sometimes flickered between enemies, reminds us that the air war over Europe was fought by people, not machines.
The statistics of loss, the thousands of aircraft destroyed, the tens of thousands of men killed represent individual stories, moments of terror and courage, decisions that saved lives or ended them.
Each casualty was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend.
When German pilots spoke about American airmen after the war, they rarely spoke with hatred.
More often they spoke with the respect that soldiers sometimes feel for worthy opponents.
They had tried to kill each other.
They had succeeded more often than either side wanted to remember, but they had recognized something in the enemy that transcended the killing.
The Americans and British treated us as gentlemen, Steinhoff said as we did them.
That statement from a man who fought through the entire war and rose to command Nat forces says something important about what actually happened over the skies of Germany.
The air war was brutal.
It was devastating.
It killed hundreds of thousands of people and burned cities to ash.
There was nothing romantic about it.
The men who flew those missions on both sides saw things that haunted them for the rest of their lives.
But within that brutality, there were moments of recognition.
German pilots who saw American courage.
American pilots who acknowledged German skill.
Men like Stigler and Brown who met as enemies and died as friends.
These moments do not redeem the war.
Nothing could.
But they remind us that even in the worst of circumstances, humanity can survive.
The Luftvafa lost the air war over Europe.
By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, its fighter force had been effectively annihilated.
The pilots who survived carried memories of a conflict that had demanded everything from them and taken everything from their comrades.
They had watched friends die.
They had killed enemies who might, in other circumstances, have become friends.
What they remembered about the Americans was not weakness.
It was strength, not cowardice.
courage, not an enemy to be despised, an opponent worthy of respect, and sometimes in moments that defied all the logic of war, they remembered mercy, a salute over the North Sea, a choice not to fire, a recognition that even enemies can be human.
That is what German pilots really thought about American airmen in World War II.
It was complicated.
It was human.
It was shaped by circumstances that neither side fully controlled.
and it changed both sides in ways that neither fully understood until the killing finally stopped.
The survivors carried these memories for the rest of their lives.
Some, like Stigler, kept them secret for decades.
Others, like R and Steinhoff, spoke openly about their experiences, trying to help later generations understand what the war had really been like.
They were not trying to glorify combat.
They were trying to tell the truth.
The truth was this.
The men who flew and fought over Germany in World War II were not monsters or saints.
They were human beings caught in circumstances beyond their control, doing the best they could with the choices available to them.
Some made choices that saved lives.
Others made choices that ended them.
All of them lived with the consequences.
When we remember the air war over Europe, we should remember this.
The statistics are important.
The strategies matter.
The aircraft and tactics and logistics all deserve study.
But in the end, wars are fought by people, and people are capable of extraordinary things, both terrible and beautiful, often within the same moment.
France Stigler chose mercy when killing would have been easier.
Charlie Brown chose to search for his enemy when forgetting would have been simpler.
They found each other across the decades and the miles, and in doing so, they proved that the bonds forged in war can outlast the conflict itself.
That is the truth about what German pilots thought of American airmen.
It is messier than propaganda, more complicated than hatred, more human than either side wanted to admit at the time.
But it is the truth, and the truth in the end is what matters most.
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