On the morning of December 20, 1943, a young American pilot named Charlie Brown climbed into the cockpit of a B-17F Flying Fortress for what would be his first combat mission as aircraft commander. Like most other bomber pilots in World War II, Brown young: he was twenty-one, from Weston, West Virginia, and had only recently joined the 379th Bomb Group of the US Army Air Force , stationed at Kimbolton Airfield in England. The target for that day was the Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in Bremen, Germany—a city ringed with anti-aircraft batteries and defended by scores of seasoned Luftwaffe pilots.
The 379th was no tertiary outfit on the edge of the war: they flew more sorties than any other Bomb Group in the Eighth Air Force and dropped a greater bomb tonnage than any other Group. The B-17 Flying Fortress Group was awarded two Distinguished Unit Citations, the first for operations across the period beginning 28 May 1943 to 31 July 1944. The second was awarded to the 1st Bomb Division as a whole for flying without fighter protection to bomb aircraft factories at Oschersleben on January 11, 1944.
The Mission
As he took off, Brown didn’t know that this mission, more than any other in his life, would leave him haunted for decades—not by death, but by mercy.
Ye Olde Pub, the name painted on the nose of his bomber, was part of a formation of hundreds of heavy bombers streaking toward the German coast. The mission was brutal from the outset. As the formation neared Bremen, heavy flak tore through the sky. Brown’s aircraft took a direct hit. The Plexiglas nose shattered. One engine was knocked out. Oxygen systems failed. Parts of the tail were shredded, including the rudder of the aircraft — a critical part of the aircraft needed to fly. The tail gunner, Hugh Eckenrode, was killed instantly. Most of the other crewmen were wounded. As the bomber fell behind the formation, Brown struggled to keep it level, dragging the crippled Fortress through the snow-laced sky.
Then came the fighters.
German Fw 190s and Bf 109s began to circle. Brown and his crew did all they could possibly do to keep the plane in the sky and—returning fire, nursing the engines—but the bomber was already hanging by a thread. Two more engines were hit. One was exhibiting mechanical issues that the crew was barely to manage. Guns froze or jammed. Radio equipment failed. Bleeding and barely conscious, Brown somehow kept Ye Olde Pub in the skies and pointed west, toward the North Sea. The crew, for its part, was in no shape to bail out. If they were going to die, it would be together.
The Fighters
Thirty thousand feet below, at a Luftwaffe base near Oldenburg, a pilot named Franz Stigler had just landed after shooting down two bombers. He was an ace, just shy of the threshold for the Knight’s Cross—Germany’s highest military honor. He could have stayed on the ground that day. No one would’ve blamed him. But word had come of a straggler Fortress flying solo, low and slow, an easy kill.
Stigler refueled his Bf 109G, armed it, and took off.
He was no ordinary German pilot.
Franz Stigler had grown up in Bavaria, the son of a World War I aviator. His father had taught him to fly gliders as a boy. He’d trained as an airline pilot before the war and joined the Luftwaffe not out of ideology, but duty to his country. Critically, Franz was not a member of the Nazi Party. In fact, his younger brother, August, had openly opposed the regime and died under mysterious circumstances after resisting pressure to enlist. Franz never forgot this. In his heart, he carried a quiet disdain for the Nazi hierarchy and the political currents that had corrupted the honor of German service.
Stigler had trained under Gustav Rödel, a respected Luftwaffe commander who drilled into his pilots an unusual code of ethics. Rödel told him once: “If I ever hear of you shooting at someone in a parachute, I’ll shoot you myself.” Stigler never forgot that, either.
During the early part of the war, Stigler had flown in North Africa as part of Jagdgeschwader 27 (J-27 for short) fighting under famed German ace Hans-Joachim Marseille. He later joined an elite Luftwaffe unit known as the “Squadron of Experts,” a group comprised of some of the best fighter pilots in the war, flying in the first combat jet aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me 262. His skills in the air were exceptional—he was a crack pilot, a tactician, a marksman, and a survivor. By the time he scrambled to intercept Brown’s bomber that December morning, he had already survived more than 400 combat missions.
Spotting Ye Olde Pub flying just above the tree line, Stigler closed in. His finger moved to the trigger. Then he saw it.
The tail gunner wasn’t moving. The tail was chewed to splinters. Through a jagged hole in the fuselage, he could see crewmen inside—injured, slumped, barely conscious. No one was firing back.
Stigler pulled his thumb away from the trigger. In his mind, shooting down the defenseless B-17 would be akin to shooting crewmen under parachutes — dishonorable and without valor.
An Act of Human Decency
He moved alongside the bomber, close enough to see Brown’s face through the cockpit window. The two men locked eyes. Stigler pointed down, trying to signal: land your plane. Brown shook his head. The Americans didn’t realize what he was trying to do.
For ten agonizing minutes, Stigler flew alongside the Fortress, just off its wingtip, shielding it from German flak gunners below. He broke formation only once—to wave off anti-aircraft fire as they passed over coastal defenses. Had anyone on the ground realized what he was doing, he might have been shot out of the sky by his own side. Fortunately, for Stigler and the crew of Ye Olde Pub, German flak gunners were accustomed to seeing German fighter aircraft flying alongside captured B-17s, and they held their fire.
As they neared the North Sea, Stigler frantically signaled Brown and his crew to fly to Sweden, a neutral country far closer than England. Brown failed to understand Stigler’s gesticulations and kept flying home — towards England.
Stigler knew it was time to part and head home.
He saluted the bomber and banked away, disappearing into the clouds. Brown, stunned and barely believing what he had seen, managed to guide Ye Olde Pub back to England. The plane crash-landed, but still, most of the crew was miraculously still alive.
“Good luck,” Stigler said to himself. “You’re in God’s hands now.”
Tell No One
During debriefing, Brown told the truth.
He was immediately ordered not to speak of it again.
Military officials feared the story would humanize the enemy or worse—encourage pilots to expect mercy where none should be expected. In the rules of total war, there was no room for compassion.
Stigler never spoke of it either. Had he told anyone, he would have been court-martialed. Maybe shot for dereliction of duty. To avoid that, he kept the story to himself, but it was one he never forgot.
The war dragged on. Both men returned to their respective countries, and eventually, World War II came to close in Europe in May, 1945.
Insatiable Curiosity
Both men survived World War II. Stigler became one of Germany’s top aces, eventually flying 487 combat missions in a distinguished career.
In the decades after the war, Brown tried to make sense of what happened that day. The image of the German fighter escorting them home stayed with him. Who was that man? Why had he spared them? What was his name?
In 1986, Brown, now living in Miami, began actively searching. He attended veteran reunions. He wrote to historical societies. In 1990, he placed an ad in a German Luftwaffe newsletter for veterans.
Thousands of miles away in Canada, a retired businessman named Franz Stigler read the ad when he received his copy of the newsletter. He had moved to Vancouver after the war, started a business, and lived a quiet life. For nearly 50 years, he had carried the same memory in silence—the wounded bomber, the young pilot, the eyes through the window. Now, he realized, he wasn’t the only one who remembered.
“I Was The One.”
He wrote Brown a letter with some details that only the two men shared from their memories of the event. Essentially, it came down to Stigler telling Brown, “I was the one.”
They met in 1991 in Seattle. The moment they saw each other, they embraced like long-lost family. Both men wept. They talked for hours. Stigler filled in the missing details of the encounter. Brown confirmed what he had seen. They hugged again. That day, an unlikely friendship was born.
Over the next decade, the two men traveled together, spoke to schools, airmen, and veterans’ groups. They told their story not for fame or glory, but because it meant something. Because they knew that even in the darkest moments of war, there are flashes of light.
In 2008, they died within months of each other—Stigler at 92, Brown at 87. They were close until the end, more like brothers than former enemies. Brown once said, “Franz was the kind of man we should all be.”
Their story might have remained a footnote in history if not for Adam Makos, a military historian and writer who spent years interviewing both men and their families. His book, A Higher Call, published in 2012, brought the story to a new generation. It told not just of a dramatic encounter in the sky, but of the moral choice at the heart of it. It showed a German fighter pilot who refused to sacrifice his humanity, even when war gave him every excuse.
Today, the story is celebrated in songs, paintings, documentaries, and military history classes. The painting “A Higher Call” by artist John D. Shaw shows Ye Olde Pub limping through the clouds, flanked by a protective Bf 109. Sabaton, a Swedish metal band known for its historical songs, immortalized the story in “No Bullets Fly,” released in 2014. Their lyrics carry the same quiet reverence as the men themselves.
In a world where war is often measured by victories and losses, Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown remind us that the most powerful act on the battlefield might not be pulling the trigger—but choosing not to.
Their meeting in the skies over Germany did not change the course of the war.
But it changed the lives of everyone on that bomber. Lives were led, marriages and families for the men on Ye Olde Pub were possible. Children who would have not been born had Stigler squeezed the trigger were born, and grandchildren followed later. All because of one simple act of honorable mercy.
And it left behind a story that says, even in the worst of times, doing the right thing is still possible.
Learn More: “A Higher Call” by Adam Makos
