rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2017-08-05 11:44 am
rachelmanija) wrote2017-08-05 11:44 am
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A Higher Call, by Adam Makos
Nonfiction about a brief but fateful encounter between a German ace fighter pilot and an American bomber crew, in mid-air; forty years later, the two pilots met up again. The book started out as a magazine article, and I bet it was a terrific one. It’s a great story and unlike many WWII stories, this one is about people’s best behavior rather than their worst.
As you may guess from the summary, the actual incident, though amazing, lasted about twenty minutes and is recounted in about ten pages. So most of the book is the story of the German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, plus a much smaller amount about the American crew. (Stigler was not a Nazi and in fact came from an anti-Nazi family. I know that it would have been convenient for him to claim to have been secretly anti-Nazi after the fact, but given what he was witnessed to have done, I believe it.)
The book is is interesting if you have an interest in the subject matter, but doesn't really rise above that. The best parts, apart from the encounter itself, were the early sections on the culture and training of the German pilots. One detail that struck me (not just that it happened, but that Stigler actually told someone about it), which was that dogfighting was so terrifying that pilots regularly landed with wet pants. I'd heard that about the first time, but not that it wasn't just the first time. Just imagine doing that for months on end. And knowing that you're not likely to do it for years on end because the lifespan of a fighter pilot is probably not that long.
If you just want to know what happened in mid-air over Germany, in December, 1943, click on the cut.
The American bomber was hit over Germany, killing two and wounding several of its 12-man crew. As it began to flee, Franz Stigler was sent to dispatch it. But when he got close, he saw that its guns had been destroyed and enough of its structure had been ripped away that he could actually see the men inside, some tending to the wounded and others trying to bluff him by aiming the wrecked guns at him. He couldn't bring himself to kill defenseless men in cold blood, especially when he could see their faces, so he decided to let them go.
Here's where he goes way beyond the call. He tried to signal to the pilot, Charlie Brown, to fly to Sweden, but couldn't manage to communicate it. (Brown only figured out that was what he meant when they met 40 years later and Stigler told him!) But what Stigler knew, and the Americans didn't, was that if they kept their course, they would fly right over a German anti-aircraft battery that would shoot them out of the sky. So Stigler flew below them, knowing that the gunners below wouldn't shoot down one of their own planes. He escorted them for twenty minutes, until they were safe, then saluted them and flew back, knowing that if he didn't come up with a convincing story to explain what he was doing, he'd be taken out and shot.
Luckily for Stigler, things were so chaotic and desperate at the time that no one really looked into it. Luckily for the bomber crew, they managed to get safely home. After the war, Stigler moved to Canada. Forty years later, he read an article about that encounter in a magazine, and wrote to Charlie Brown with details that no one could have known unless they were there.
Does anyone have any recommendations for other books on pilots, fighters or otherwise, historical or otherwise? I've read Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and really enjoyed the combination of desperate survival narrative with odes to the joy of flight. I think I'd be more interested in memoirs by pilots than biographies about them.
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II
As you may guess from the summary, the actual incident, though amazing, lasted about twenty minutes and is recounted in about ten pages. So most of the book is the story of the German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, plus a much smaller amount about the American crew. (Stigler was not a Nazi and in fact came from an anti-Nazi family. I know that it would have been convenient for him to claim to have been secretly anti-Nazi after the fact, but given what he was witnessed to have done, I believe it.)
The book is is interesting if you have an interest in the subject matter, but doesn't really rise above that. The best parts, apart from the encounter itself, were the early sections on the culture and training of the German pilots. One detail that struck me (not just that it happened, but that Stigler actually told someone about it), which was that dogfighting was so terrifying that pilots regularly landed with wet pants. I'd heard that about the first time, but not that it wasn't just the first time. Just imagine doing that for months on end. And knowing that you're not likely to do it for years on end because the lifespan of a fighter pilot is probably not that long.
If you just want to know what happened in mid-air over Germany, in December, 1943, click on the cut.
The American bomber was hit over Germany, killing two and wounding several of its 12-man crew. As it began to flee, Franz Stigler was sent to dispatch it. But when he got close, he saw that its guns had been destroyed and enough of its structure had been ripped away that he could actually see the men inside, some tending to the wounded and others trying to bluff him by aiming the wrecked guns at him. He couldn't bring himself to kill defenseless men in cold blood, especially when he could see their faces, so he decided to let them go.
Here's where he goes way beyond the call. He tried to signal to the pilot, Charlie Brown, to fly to Sweden, but couldn't manage to communicate it. (Brown only figured out that was what he meant when they met 40 years later and Stigler told him!) But what Stigler knew, and the Americans didn't, was that if they kept their course, they would fly right over a German anti-aircraft battery that would shoot them out of the sky. So Stigler flew below them, knowing that the gunners below wouldn't shoot down one of their own planes. He escorted them for twenty minutes, until they were safe, then saluted them and flew back, knowing that if he didn't come up with a convincing story to explain what he was doing, he'd be taken out and shot.
Luckily for Stigler, things were so chaotic and desperate at the time that no one really looked into it. Luckily for the bomber crew, they managed to get safely home. After the war, Stigler moved to Canada. Forty years later, he read an article about that encounter in a magazine, and wrote to Charlie Brown with details that no one could have known unless they were there.
Does anyone have any recommendations for other books on pilots, fighters or otherwise, historical or otherwise? I've read Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and really enjoyed the combination of desperate survival narrative with odes to the joy of flight. I think I'd be more interested in memoirs by pilots than biographies about them.
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II
no subject
Fraser describes one of many battles in which an officer shouted at his men, "Get that bugger, he's nobbut wounded!" and pointed at an enemy soldier who'd been shot and was trying to crawl away to cover. There is then a lengthy justification of how you can't just wound someone on the field of battle, you have to shoot him again and finish him off, or he'll be back in action a month from now, and shoot you. "If you think that sounds barbaric, well, think away," he says, and the subtext is: and who are YOU, reader, to question Fraser's morality? Have YOU been there? Huh?
Anyway, I tried to accept this from Fraser without either compromising my own sense of right and wrong, but it was hard to handle the cognitive dissonance. Likewise, his descriptions of his own bloodlust. He doesn't quite say, "Shooting that one Japanese guy on the field of battle was an adrenaline-packed thrill ride and I sometimes wish I could do it all over again," but I got that impression, and I felt filthy just reading it.
It was all very convincing at the time, but I don't think I have to buy into Fraser's worldview just because he was a combatant and I'm not. Nice to know not every combatant thinks it's automatically wrong to make a generous gesture in a battle or to refuse to finish killing people you wounded.
no subject
The Pacific theatre was very different, though, and from what I've heard, for various reasons (racism obviously being one of them) the behavior of the Allied troops towards the opposition troops was more brutal.
no subject
no subject
The thing about combatant world views is not just that you don't know what you'd do in the same situation, it's that they didn't know what they were doing to do, and a great many of them don't know why they did what they did afterwards. Fraser's very unusual in talking about it. (There are some really harrowing Eastern Front memoirs that talk frankly about events, but like ... six? seven? out of millions upon millions of people involved.) Fraser's also unusual in also writing the -- genuinely humorous -- McAuslan stories about serving with the Gordon Highlanders (well away from Burma in North Africa), The Steel Bonnets, a scholarly work on the Scots border reivers, the frankly morally ambiguous The Candlemass Road, and the -- most popular of all Fraser's writings -- Flashman stories, whose protagonist isn't morally defensible and clearly knows it. Fraser's views on conflict and combat and the utility of force aren't facile ones. I think they're interesting in large part because Fraser is willing to acknowledge that people really are like that and really do those things.
So I don't think Fraser's subtext there is "who are you to question"; I think Fraser's subtext there is "you don't think enough".
no subject
Did you assume I was unfamiliar with everything else Fraser ever wrote, or are you giving this list of his works for the benefit of other folks in this thread?
Any fans of Fraser in the house should note that I wasn't playing fair with that quotation. It's not from QSOH, it's from the short story "Captain Errol," and the real quote should be "By today's standards, you may think that atrocious. Well, think away." The protagonist, totally-not-Fraser, is justifying the decision he's about to have to make, to order soldiers to fire into an unarmed crowd. Your call whether that's the same as saying, "Who are you to question my morality?" but I think it is.
Then there are other things in QSOH, like this one nighttime massacre of wounded Japanese POWs in a hospital, murdered by their guards, men who were never punished for it. Fraser still seems to feel guilt about it, after the lapse of decades, but he makes the point that... what were he and his guys supposed to do, turn in their comrades for murdering enemies? (To paraphrase a line from Fraser's own The Pyrates, the answer to that is "yes," but it's not the kind of thing I can say to him and still be a decent person myself.
no subject
I had no idea whether or not you were familiar with Fraser's other works, but needed to reference them to make the argument I was trying to make, that Fraser had complicated (and maybe ultimately unresolved) views about force and violence and war and that QSOH is maybe more explicable in the context of those other works.
I am not a Fraser fan; I could not get very far into the first Flashman book, and my view that Harry Flashman the character isn't a defensible literary choice colours my views of everything else Fraser wrote. It's a bit like Mowat; I try to be sympathetic to Farley despite a career built on lying his ass off about real people and real things, and I try to be sympathetic to Fraser despite a career filled with never quite managing to move to the "axiomatic" part of "axiomatic necessity" no matter how much energy and research and struggle got expended on the "necessity" part.
no subject
A good reason to be anti war is that it is inherently full of situations where all choices will have terrible outcomes.
no subject
It occurs to me to realize that I think it's better, or more righteous, or something, to value "having mercy in the moment" over "being ruthless in the moment to prevent a potential future bad thing," since the future is uncertain but the fact that you can make decisions in the moment is powerful.