I had the honour to record interviews with both men at length, for a radio documentary on the incident. Many others told the story after that, and it certainly deserves to be heard by as many people as possible. In the last few years, though, a couple of errors have crept in, particularly the notion that the bomber was headed in the wrong direction. I suspect that someone not terribly familiar with aviation misinterpreted what he heard: Neither Brown nor Stigler said anything like that. As they related to me on tape, Brown had reached the north sea, and Stigler tried, first, to get him to turn around and land in Germany (which, faced with a heavily armed German fighter, would be a reasonable thing for Brown to do). That wasn’t happening, so Stigler gestured north toward Sweden, which was the destination for many, many B-17s too damaged to reach England. Brown stayed on course, west, toward England, and Stigler saluted Brown and broke off.

The version that has Stigler turning around the B-17 surfaced in one of those anonymous emails.  It would be almost impossible for a pilot, even in Charlie Brown’s dazed condition, to not notice that the coast was on the wrong side of his aircraft.

A couple of other minor inaccuracies in that version…”Franz Stigler was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17″: He wasn’t ordered. He had already shot down two B-17s, landed, rearmed and refueled, and was about to take off again when Ye Olde Tub appeared at treetop height. All he had to do was close the canopy and hit the throttle.

“…all because Franz never fired his guns that day”: He had fired his guns, as you see above, claiming two B-17s…just not at Ye Olde Tub.

I hope you don’t mind my clarifying those points. It’s a great story that I’m glad you published here, and I feel privileged to have talked to both of those men.

Btw, Shane, that was an interesting point. Sounds cliche, but I think the old saying of ‘You’ve got to break an egg to make an omelet’ would apply here. Things may not change like the flick of a light switch and, thinking long-term for the good of humankind, a positive action of one person that still creates discussion, alternative thinking, and emotes a feeling of humbleness in a significant few 60, 70 years after when it happened may be worth the lives of some. It’s a tough call to make, tho I guess it is up to the people of the world to choose how they learn from this story:

Consider it an act of god and make no change as someone else will always take care of it or understand it as a personal decision by a man in control of his own life who was more interested in holding his morals than blindly following the word of others.