In May 1943 my father was flight crew on an allied bomber that was shot out of the sky in Germany by a Nazi fighter plane while returning from a raid on Hamburg. The Luftwaffe fighter pilot did not shoot the parachuting “enemies of the Reich” as my father and other survivors slowly floated to the fields below after their bomber was hit. Nor did he loop back to strafe these enemies after they hit ground, even though an hour earlier these very enemies had been dropping bombs on the German homeland.
Within hours of parachuting into a farmers field, my P.O.W. father was in the hands of the German Air Force, who actually protected him from angry locals who would have been happy to run him through with a pitchfork in revenge for German deaths cause by Allied bombers.
He spent the next two years at Stalag Luft III, a prisoner of war camp he shared with 11,000 other allied airmen who had similarly been spared by the Nazis when they survived a similar shoot-down over Nazi Europe or North Africa.
I’m not trying to pretend the murderous, psychopathic Nazi regime wasn’t the most brutal in the modern era, but the fact remains that I wouldn’t be alive today to write this diary if Hitler’s Germany had treated my father the same way Trump’s America treated those two speedboat survivors in the Caribbean.
POSTSCRIPT:
1974: The association that organized reunions of former Royal Canadian Air Force WWII POWs invited the pilot of the Messerschmidt who shot down my father’s plane to a POW reunion in Toronto. My father met him and shook his hand… explaining to me “That’s how you get rid of the demons.”
He never forgave the Gestapo crew that shot 50 prisoners in the back of their heads after a 1944 escape attempt, but he did forgive the fighter pilot. He told me the gunners on his bomber were trying to shoot down the German the same time the German was trying to shoot down the bomber — and the German pilot got lucky first. “That’s what war is...”
POSTSCRIPT TO THE POSTSCRIPT
As my father tells it, every single Gestapo officer involved in the murder of the 50 prisoners — including chain of command — was tracked down after the war (Thank you, obsessively-meticulous Nazi record-keeping) and tried for war crimes. In my fathers words “every one of the bastards...” died at the end of a rope on British Gallows.
QUESTION AFTER THE POSTSCRIPT TO THE POSTSCRIPT
Is murder on the high seas a hanging offence in 2026 America?
How about 2029 America?
Should it be?
