There is (or was around 1998) a big oil painting depicting this story in the Air Force officer’s club at the Charleston SC AFB. I was there for a friend’s retirement ceremony. So was a crusty old P-51 Mustang pilot that I knew from the Navy base marina. I pointed out the picture, he studied it, and said it had to be BS. (Yes, I know, it really happened, this was just the Mustang pilot’s take on it.)
He said, the German had to be out of ammo or his guns were jammed. You didn’t let air crews escape to come back at you another day. Trained air crews (even just the pilot) were more valuable than the airplanes they flew.
This set the old fighter pilot off onto a story. He said when he arrived in Europe in late 1944, he was assigned to be the wingman to an ace. My old friend said that he was not an ace himself, but that he was a “parachute ace.”
What the hell is that, I asked?
When his lead plane shot down a German, and the German bailed out over German territory, he executed a standard maneuver to circle back and machine gun the German pilot under his parachte. Hence, “parachute ace,” not a ticket to glory in the history books, but harsh reality.
The old pilot said that it was paradoxically MORE dangerous to parachute over your own territory. Your enemies knew that if you made it to the ground safe and sound, you would be in a new fighter plane tomorrow. If you were a German parachuting over England, or a Brit or Yank parachuting over Germany, you would wind up in a POW camp, out of the war. No point to shoot that guy. But a German pilot parachuting down to German territory?
Kill him. It was war. A trained German fighter pilot would kill more Americans or Brits tomorrow if you let him live.
“Parachute ace.” That was a new one to me.
Also, I met a German on a sailboat in Hilo Hawaii. He was in a refugee column at the end of WW2, mostly schoos-age children being evacuated west along a road near the Baltic. He said that American P-51 flew up and down the road strafing them until they were out of ammo, back and forth. He remembered it vividly, and said the planes were low enough to see the pilot’s faces as they rolled and looped around.
He told me this story only to make the point that not only Germans did war crimes in WW2. He said the refugee column was nothing but civilians, moslty kids and teachers, no military, and the Mustangs strafed and strafed them again and again, up and down the road. This made an extremely vivid memory for the 13 year old German refugee boy. I heard him tell the story in detail, and I have zero doubt about his truthfulness.
I heard this strafing story a few years after the Mustang pilot told me how he had become a “parachute ace” killing German pilots under silk.
War is hell. There are damned few salutes made by enemies, and many more atrocities of varying types and degrees.
But there are no fancy oil paintings in officer’s clubs showing a “parachute ace” in action.
That's the whole moral of this story.
I think the sides tend to get more hard nosed the longer they are in combat.
I read a story by an American Infantry Officer, that occurred during the early days of the Italian Campaign (1943). His unit and a German unit ran into each other, had a vicious fire fight, and both sides retreated, leaving their wounded behind. The German CO sent out a messenger under a white flag, and offered a brief truce, so that the wounded could be recovered. The American CO agreed, and for an hour or two the German and American medics worked together in no man's land, between the opposing units, to find and stabilize the wounded from both sides, and see to it that they were evacuated to their own lines. The American Officer said that guys whose first experience of the was the vicious fighting in the Winter of 44-45, or later, refused to believe that such a thing had happened.
I had a female professor - a german expatriate - in JC who told us the same sort of story.