Interesting story, but I am not sure why you posted it. Are you saying it was weakness to show mercy? Or to point out to people that the killing of defenseless people occurred on both sides in order to draw some kind of moral equivalence?
This story posted by lowbridge is not about US destroyers machine-gunning japanese sailors whose ships were sunk off of Guadalcanal, nor about soldiers whose prisoners he was tasked with guarding never made it to a drop-off point
The story was posted to show that even in the most brutal conflict in the history of man, the mask of necessary brutality occasionally came off to show the human face behind.
If someone can find it in themselves, under those conditions, to do that, then I admire them for it. I don’t know if I could do it in their position. I would like to think I could. Furthermore, most people who pay attention to this subject realize that, unless they have served in combat, it is best to leave judgements about what happens in combat to those who have, and even then.
This post isn’t meant as an attack on you, but I didn’t see why you posted what you did,
That was the way his squadron fought the war, that month, in that place. He was just a replacement FNG, just abiding squadron SOPs, doing what was expected, being a parachute ace.
And while the subject of chivalry (or not) and WW2 fighters was was on my mind, the story of the German refugee column popped into my head, no doubt because I also heard that other P-51 story first hand from an actual, living, WW2 refugee/survivor.
So the story is seen from multiple POVs: ground strafing survivior, American parachute ace, German fighter pilot saluting, and a crippled bomber getting home. All of these actual events happened in a couple of months, in a few hundred miles, among a group of men in roughly similar aircraft, a group of men separated by birth and language, but in person, almost indistinguishable from one another.
And look at the many faces of war seen in these related stories. Amazing, no?
If I had only read about the parachute ace, or the strafed refugee column, I never would have remembered them. But I spent over an hour with both of these two old men, so it left a deep mark. And I felt both of their perspectives related directly to the subject at hand: chivalry in the air war over Europe in late WW2. I didn't switch the Pacific looking for some similar or opposing morality tale, etc. It had nothing to do with that.
But, see, I met this old P-51 Mustang pilot, and this German who had been a 13 year old kid who had been strafed by P-51s (very recognizable bellies), and the Mustang pilot, for all I knew, might have been the parachute ace, who was also one of the strafers a few months later. Or another American like him. Very hard-hearted men by the spring of 1945. They had seen a lot of friends die, and bomber crews they were trying to defend, turn into fireballs. So they had little use for Germans. Very expansive rules of engagement for killing Germans, I should say.
War is hell. I'm glad we won it. What's the moral of the story? Not every German was a pitiless Nazi killer, every minute. And not every American fighter pilot was exactly a saint.
War is hell.