Here’s something strange about war.

You can spend your entire life wondering about a man you met for 48 hours.

A man who was supposed to be your enemy.

A man you tried to kill.

A man who saved your life without meaning to.

And then one day, decades later, that man calls you.

This is the story of what happened in those 48 hours and why it took 37 years for them to speak again.

It was April 27th, 1940.

And although it was spring in Norway, you’d never know it from the heavy snow that buried the mountains above Grotley and the temperature well below freezing.

Captain Richard Partridge was leading his squadron on a patrol north of Oslo in his Blackburn Skuwa.

A rugged dive bomber and fighter rolled into one with Lieutenant RS Bosstock sitting behind him as his radio operator and gunner.

Their mission was simple.

Find German bombers and take them down.

when they spotted a flight of German Heankl H111 bombers flying without fighter escort.

Most of the bombers scattered, but one kept flying straight ahead.

Lieutenant Horse Chopis, the German pilot, refused to run.

Partridge led three skewers in a diving attack on the Hankl, and their machine guns tore into the bombers’s port engine, sending flames erupting from the wing as shoppers struggled to control his aircraft while it spiraled down toward the mountains below.

Partridge watched the German bomber disappear into the snow-covered peaks, believing they’d won.

But then, Partridge felt his own plane shudder as returned fire from the German gunners damaged his engine.

The oil pressure was dropping, and the engine sputtered, coughed, and then died completely.

Suddenly, Partridge’s skewer was no longer a fighter plane, but an overweight, unwieldy glider falling toward the frozen wilderness below.

Partridge scanned the ground desperately looking for anywhere to land, and through the snow and wind he spotted a frozen lake that would have to do.

He brought the skewer down as gently as he could, and the plane hit the ice hard, skidding across the frozen surface before finally grinding to a halt.

Partridge and Bostock climbed out, shaken, but alive, though their relief didn’t last long.

They were in the middle of nowhere with no radio, no food, and the temperature was plummeting as night approached.

Then Partridge spotted something through the snow.

A small structure, a reindeer hunter’s cabin.

They made their way through the deep snow, pushed open the door, shook off the frost, and started trying to warm themselves when they heard it.

A piercing whistle outside.

Someone else was out there.

The German bomber had crashed a few miles away, high in the mountains, and the landing had been brutal.

Private Hansh the tail gunner was killed on impact but the three survivors Lieutenant Horse Chopis Sergeant Carl heights Shrunk and Lance Corporal Yusf Alor were all injured but alive.

They struggled through the snow following the same instinct as the British pilots to find shelter and they found the same cabin.

When the Germans approached the door, Partridge and Bosto were already inside and the two British airmen heard voices outside speaking German.

Partridge later wrote about what happened next.

We met at the door and shook hands in a continental manner.

There was no shooting, no fighting, just two groups of men who were enemies by circumstance, but were both trying to survive the same frozen wilderness.

The Germans spent that first night in the small hunter’s cabin, while Partridge and Bostock found a larger building nearby, the Grotley Hotel, which was closed for winter, but offered better shelter.

When the sun came up the next morning, the Germans spotted the hotel and made their way there.

And inside both crews searched through the cupboards and found enough food for a decent meal.

And so on April 28th, 1940, five men who had been trying to kill each other just hours earlier sat down together around a dining table and shared breakfast.

Shoppies and Partridge tried to communicate through broken German and English, and neither wanted to admit they were enemies.

Partridge convinced the Germans he was from a different bomber crew, not the fighter that had shot them down.

But there was an unspoken understanding between them that the war was out there and in here they were just men trying to survive.

After 2 days, both crews knew they needed to find help.

So they set out together through the snow, Germans and British walking side by side.

That’s when they ran into a Norwegian ski patrol and Sergeant Strunk, the German crew chief, panicked and reached for his pistol.

The Norwegians shot him dead before he could draw it.

Lieutenant Shopis and Ysef Alor surrendered immediately and were captured and eventually shipped to P camps in Canada where they spent the rest of the war.

Partridge and Bostock convinced the Norwegians they were British officers and after hiking through the mountains and commandering a car, they made it to a British held port just in time to escape Norway.

But their freedom didn’t last long.

On June 13th, 1940, Partridge and Bosto flew another mission, an attack on the German battleship Shanho.

and both planes were shot down.

Lieutenant Bosto was killed and Captain Partridge was captured.

He spent the next 5 years as a prisoner of war in a German P camp.

The war ended and both men went home.

Partridge became one of the first Royal Navy pilots qualified to fly jet aircraft while Shopis became a businessman in Canada.

For 37 years, they didn’t see each other, but they never forgot that morning in the Grotley Hotel.

In 1977, Horse Choppers picked up the phone and called Richard Partridge, and the two enemy pilots who had met at a cabin door in the snow were reunited, this time as friends.

They met in London, then in Munich, visiting each other’s homes, swapping stories, and laughing about the absurdity of what they’d been through.

They talked about Strunk killed by a Norwegian patrol, about Bostock killed in combat, and about the five men who shared breakfast while the war raged around them.

Partridge wrote books about his experiences and so did Chopis and both told the same story about the morning they stopped being enemies.

In 1974, the British government recovered Partridg’s Blackburn skewer from the frozen Norwegian lake where it had crashed 34 years earlier and today that plane sits in the Fleet Air Museum in Somerset, England.

Shopis’ Hankl still rests in the mountains above Grotley, too remote to recover.

In 2004, at age 92, Horse Chopis returned to Grotley one more time, and although Partridge had passed away in 1990, his son Simon made the journey with Shopis.

They stood together at the crash site looking out over the frozen mountains where their fathers had once been enemies, and Shopis met with the Norwegian families who had helped them.

“Some of my best friends are here in Norway,” he said.

When asked about that morning in the cabin, Shopis became emotional and said, “For me, this is not just a story.

I went from being a respected officer to a prisoner, but what happened in that cabin was different.

That was humanity.

” Horse shop died in 2011 at age 99.

And in 2012, their story was turned into a major motion picture called Into the White.

Two pilots, one German and one British, shot each other down over the mountains of Norway.

And then by pure chance they met at the same door, both just trying to survive.

For a brief moment in 1940, the war stopped and two enemies shared breakfast as men.

37 years later they would meet again, not as enemies, but as brothers, because sometimes the line between friend and foe is as thin as a cabin door in the snow.