Picture of the day

RAF-ammolinking.jpg
 
@ PURPLE:

What a lot of people don't understand is the dedication which was at the inner core of the Canadian Militia back in the '60s.

Your Basic Pay was $220 a YEAR, but there was a $75 HOLDBACK for your uniform. Equipment lost, destroyed, damaged OTHER than in action against an enemy, you PAID for: lose a cap badge, it was 12 cents off your pay, wreck a pair of boots it was 5 or 6 dollars.

If you were in a small-town unit with only one Militia night a week and no opportunity for weekend schemes or training, or you were too far from a Base, your pay was knocked down farther to compensate.

Politics at that time were hairy, too.

What it boils down to is this: a LOT of guys were putting their necks on the line and being rewarded with, perhaps $40 a year. SMC was very popular for many reasons, among them that you got PAID to take the vacation you otherwise could not afford.... if you counted a couple of weeks of Tank training or running around in the bushes ambushing The Other Guys as a vacation.

And the final insult: when you left, you turned in your kit...... but very few guys around here ever saw their $75 holdback!

And you were subject to Recall "at Her Majesty's pleasure" until you hit 55.

It was National Defence on the cheap but the Government got away with it because so many people still saw it as one of the DUTIES of a Citizen.
 
Higgs602 said:
I really doubt that many ruskie conscripts who grew up under Stalin's regime were die-hard communists, what with the constant famines and mass executions. Maybe they were brainwashed by propaganda to some extend, idk. I would be more inclined to believe they were fighting primarily for their families and fellow soldiers. Defeat meant certain death for themselves and their families at the hands of the SS, Hitler was in the bussiness of colonizing eastern europe. If that wasn't enough motivation, those NKVD pricks were always ready to shoot them in the back...
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a guy i know just spent 18 years in russia, he says alot of the older folks would return to soviet days in a heart beat if they could
 
Oh man do I remember that. Pay parade, march up to the pay master smash down your right foot, state your rank, name and SIN. All for the huge sum of $17. Then off to the mess for 25 cent beer out of an old style pop machine. I was 16.
 
DaveM said:
Oh man do I remember that. Pay parade, march up to the pay master smash down your right foot, state your rank, name and SIN. All for the huge sum of $17. Then off to the mess for 25 cent beer out of an old style pop machine. I was 16.
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25 cent beer! Anyone remember "nickel night" at HMCS Naden? 5 cents a beer!! No wonder our RCE rifle team had a slight problem at the following days shoot.
 
DaveM said:
Oh man do I remember that. Pay parade, march up to the pay master smash down your right foot, state your rank, name and SIN. All for the huge sum of $17. Then off to the mess for 25 cent beer out of an old style pop machine. I was 16.
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Totally remember that scenario.

After receiving the cash from the Paymaster, step back, salute, right turn, march to next table.

QM deductions...next table.

Mess dues...next table.

"Voluntary" donation to Regimental fund...next table.

Assessed levy for barrack damages during an exercise.

Wasn't a lot of money left for .25 cent beer.
 
DaveM said:
Oh man do I remember that. Pay parade, march up to the pay master smash down your right foot, state your rank, name and SIN. All for the huge sum of $17. Then off to the mess for 25 cent beer out of an old style pop machine. I was 16.
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SIN!! Why, you are a young whippersnapper. It's the regimental number that really counts. :p
 
Pilots and bomber airgunners all had their favourite ammo load out. They chose more or less tracers and more or less AP rounds. Pilots often had a burst of tracers to warn them they were almost out of ammo.

One Lanc tailgunner told me he used no tracers and 100% AP and Incendiary. I also got the impression that some gunners loaded their own belts.
 
I recently interviewed a former Halifax rear gunner, and later pilot, who survived a full tour of duty in 1943/44. While serving as a rear gunner his main effort was to watch for enemy night fighters and instruct the pilot when to take evasive action. He only fired his guns on one occasion after being engaged by an enemy fighter. Basically the idea was to avoid firing unless fired at because in doing so your tracer lit you up for any night fighter in the vicinity. He described his eyes aching from the effort to remain constantly vigilant throughout a night mission. His bomber went unscathed except for one time when it was hit by AA fire and he was wounded. He described the stress and fear levels as very high and remarked that he had watched a lot of young men grow old in a short period of time.
 
A buddy of mine's father was ground crew on a RCAF bomber base during WW2. Told me he hated the Germans because he would have to hose out the remains of unfortunate tail gunners that had been literally shot to pieces.
 
In light of the recent discussion, I thought this article might interest some of you. It really highlights the difference between the animals we fight today and the warriors of the past.

h ttp://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured-article/instead-of-firing-stigler-gave-a-salute-amazing-tale-of-a-desperate-wwii-pilots-encounter-with-a-german-flying-ace.html?fb_action_ids=10200130021150294&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210200130021150294%22%3A376537555773604%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210200130021150294%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map

On Dec. 20, 1943, a young American bomber pilot named Charlie Brown found himself somewhere over Germany, struggling to keep his plane aloft with just one of its four engines still working. They were returning from their first mission as a unit, the successful bombing of a German munitions factory. Of his crew members, one was dead and six wounded, and 2nd Lt. Brown was alone in his cockpit, the three unharmed men tending to the others. Brown’s B-17 had been attacked by 15 German planes and left for dead, and Brown himself had been knocked out in the assault, regaining consciousness in just enough time to pull the plane out of a near-fatal nose dive.



None of that was as shocking as the German pilot now suddenly to his right.
Brown thought he was hallucinating. He did that thing you see people do in movies: He closed his eyes and shook his head no. He looked, again, out the co-pilot’s window. Again, the lone German was still there, and now it was worse. He’d flown over to Brown’s left and was frantic: pointing, mouthing things that Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend, making these wild gestures, exaggerating his expressions like a cartoon character.

Brown, already in shock, was freshly shot through with fear. What was this guy up to?

He craned his neck and yelled back for his top gunner, screamed at him to get up in his turret and shoot this guy out of the sky. Before Brown’s gunner could squeeze off his first round, the German did something even weirder: He looked Brown in the eye and gave him a salute. Then he peeled away.

What just happened? That question would haunt Brown for more than 40 years, long after he married and left the service and resettled in Miami, long after he had expected the nightmares about the German to stop and just learned to live with them.

‘A HIGHER Call,” the new book by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander, tells the incredible true story of these two pilots. Franz Stigler was 26 when he was conscripted into Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1942, a former commercial airline pilot whose father and brother had both died while serving their country. Stigler had been assigned to Squadron 4 of the German air force, and was initially stationed in Libya.

On his first day on base, he was taken aside by his commanding officer, Lt. Gustav Roedel, who would have a profound impact on his life during and after the war.

On the afternoon of his first mission, Roedel decided he’d join the young pilot. Before takeoff, they talked. “Let what I’m about to say to you act as a warning,” Roedel said. “Honor is everything here. “Every single time you go up, you’ll be outnumbered,” Roedel said.

Stigler nodded, but said nothing.

What did Roedel mean by that? Stigler was overwhelmed. There never seemed to be a right way to respond, and the irony that he couldn’t, above all, trust his fellow soldiers was not lost on him.

Roedel kept on: “What will you do, for instance, if you find your enemy floating in a parachute?”

How to answer? How to answer? A hedge.

“I guess I’ve never thought that far ahead,” Stigler said.

“If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute,” Roedel said, “I will shoot you down myself. You follow the rules of war for you — not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity.”

Roedel was not alone in this philosophy, and not just among the Germans. Most of these young men now at war — American, British, German — had grown up on the stories of the great World War I fighter pilots: the American Eddie Rickenbacker and Manfred von Richthofen, the German Red Baron.

These were men who fought by a code, who would look each other in the eye mid-air, who would never strafe an enemy plane that was already going down. They had been taught that they very well might survive the war and, if they did, they needed to know that they had fought with honor and as much humanity as possible. It would be the only way they would ever be able to live with themselves.

Franz Stigler had been on the ground in Oldenburg, Germany, smoking a cigarette while his plane, a Messerschmitt 109, was getting re-armed and refueled. At first it sounded like a high pitch, off in the distance, and then it was crushing, like a multitude of drums, a low-flying aircraft.

Here it came, just a few miles out, this American bomber that dropped no bombs. Then, suddenly, it was over them and gone. No one said a word. The crew unhooked the hoses, Franz flicked away his cigarette, saluted his sergeant and was gone, off in pursuit of the American plane.

If he could down this one, Stigler would have his 23rd victory, and he’d be awarded the Knight’s Cross, the highest honor for a German soldier in World War II and one that symbolized exceptional bravery.

Within minutes, Stigler, alone, was on the B-17’s tail. He had his finger on the trigger, one eye closed and the other squinting through his gunsight. He took aim and was about to fire when he realized what he wasn’t seeing: This plane had no tail guns blinking. This plane had no left stabilizer. This plane had no tail-gun compartment left, and as he got closer, Stigler saw the terrified tail gunner himself, his fleece collar soaked red, the guns themselves streaked with it, icicles of blood hanging from the barrels.

Stigler was no longer energized. He was alarmed. He pulled alongside the plane and saw clean through the middle, where the skin had been blown apart by shells. He saw these terrified young men attempting to tend to their wounded. He drew equal to the B-17 and saw that the nose of the plane, too, had been blown away. How was this thing still in the air? At first, Charlie Brown didn’t notice the small German plane to his right. He was thinking, thinking, thinking. He had six wounded men in the back. Some were strong enough to jump out, but the critically injured would never survive the German forest. He’d have to keep flying, try to make it to England, but the others should jump — the chances that this plane would make it much farther were minuscule.

Brown’s co-pilot, Pinky, re-entered the cockpit. “We’re staying,” he said. “The guys all decided — you’re gonna need help to fly this girl home.”Brown wasn’t listening. He was looking past Pinky, frozen. Pinky turned to his right, and saw the German. Brown finally spoke. “He’s going to destroy us,” he said.
Stigler, too, was panicked. This plane was going down, and its crew was paralyzed. Stigler pointed to the ground, and, finally, a reaction: The Americans shook their heads. They’d rather die in flames than be taken prisoner by the Nazis. Stigler was exasperated. As it was, he was risking his own life: Everyone knew the story of the German woman who, just one year before, had been gunned down by the Nazis for telling a joke against the Third Reich. If Stigler’s plane were to be spotted by a civilian alongside a B-17, and if that civilian wrote down the number on his tail and reported him, he was as good as dead.

Then Stigler remembered what Roedel had told him, that to shoot the enemy when vulnerable went against the code of chivalry and honor. Stigler felt he had to do what was right. Near the Atlantic wall, flak gunners spotted the two planes approaching, the American and the German. They were stunned — they’d never seen anything like this, the enemy flying alongside a German plane, both seeming to be in sync, neither one firing or in pursuit or dodging or spiraling.

Stigler had thought of this and pulled away right before he was spotted — he knew that if his compatriots could identify his 109, they’d never shoot one of their own. How would they ever know what was really going on in his mind? To the Americans, though, Stigler was death. Brown couldn’t take it anymore, and that was when he snapped out of it, yelling at his gunner to get in the turret and take aim.

That’s when the German saluted and finally disappeared.

Against all odds, Brown landed his B-17 in England. He served right up until the beginning of the Vietnam War and eventually settled with his wife in Miami. Stigler — who spent months after Dec. 20, 1943, living in fear that he’d be found out — served through the end of World War II and, unable to ever feel at home in Germany, relocated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1953.

Aside from telling their wives, both men had rarely spoken of that encounter: In Stigler’s case, it was an act of treason, punishable by death. Brown had actually told his commanding officer but was instructed to treat the event as classified: No one wanted to humanize the enemy. Brown, who was still deeply traumatized by the incident, thought about searching for the German until finally, in January 1990, knowing the odds were against him, he took out an ad in a newsletter for fighter pilots, looking for the one “who saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943.” He held back one key piece of information: Where the German pilot had abandoned his B-17.

At home in Vancouver, Stigler saw the ad. He yelled to his wife: “This is him! This is the one I didn’t shoot down!” Franz had always wondered if the great risk he’d taken had been worth it, if the American had made it home. Brown had always wondered what the German had been planning to do to him, and why he had let him go.

He immediately wrote a letter to Brown. Brown was too impatient to actually read it. He called the operator and had her look up Franz Stigler’s number, then place the call immediately.

“When I let you go over the sea,” Stigler said, “I thought you’d never make it.”

“My God,” Brown said. “It’s you.”

Tears were streaming down his face. Stigler had answered Brown’s secret question without Brown having to ask it.

“What were you pointing for?” Brown asked.

Stigler, too, was crying. He explained everything: that he could tell that Brown had no idea how bad the plane was, that he was pointing first to the ground, to Germany, and then pointing away, mouthing “Sweden,” that he was trying to escort them to safety and that he abandoned them only when he saw the gun swing from the turret.

“Good luck,” he’d said to Brown from his cockpit. “You’re in God’s hands.”

The two men, in many ways, had parallel lives. Stigler had one daughter; Brown, two. Both were Christians, and in combat, Stigler kept rosary beads in his left pocket, the paint stripped bare from terror. Brown flew with a Bible in his pocket, and in moments of extreme fear he’d pat it “so that my prayers would beam up faster.”

Both felt that they should tell their story to as many people as would hear it, not for money but to make people realize that there’s always another way, that the world could be infinitely better than it was.

Stigler and Brown both had heart attacks and died in 2008, six months apart. Stigler was 92; Brown, 87.

In their obituaries, each was listed to the other as “a special brother.”
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Recce21 said:
In light of the recent discussion, I thought this article might interest some of you. It really highlights the difference between the animals we fight today and the warriors of the past.

h ttp://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured-article/instead-of-firing-stigler-gave-a-salute-amazing-tale-of-a-desperate-wwii-pilots-encounter-with-a-german-flying-ace.html?fb_action_ids=10200130021150294&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210200130021150294%22%3A376537555773604%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210200130021150294%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map
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My Dad who is now 82, among other things, does aviation art. He personally knew Stigler and corresponded with Brown. He painted the flight where Brown's crippled B-17 was encountered by Stigler's ME-109. The details in his painting, including correct markings & battle damage, are recreated from info obtained directly from the participants:

b17.jpg


Single of Stigler's ME-109:

me1096.jpg


Portait of Stigler:

pilot.jpg


The portrait he gave to Stigler & it is now with his family.

:canadaFlag:
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NAA.
 
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