Charlie Brown Research Paper

Mercy is showing respect, compassion, love and kindness towards others, no matter how they act towards us. A German pilot showed mercy and spared an American B-17 pilot and his crew. In 1943, five days before Christmas, a German fighter was flying over the wing of a badly damaged B-17 bomber full of injured people. The B-17 pilot was twenty-one year old Charlie Brown. His bomber had been shot by German fighters, and was struggling to stay in the sky above Germany. Half the crew was injured and his tail gunman was dead. When Brown and his co-pilot, Spencer Luke, looked at the fighter pilot, a strange thing happened. The German didn’t pull the trigger. He stared back in amazement and respect. He did not attack. What happened next was one of the most amazing acts of mercy in World War II. Charles Brown was on his first combat mission when he met an enemy unlike all the rest. Revenge, not Honor, is what drove 2nd Lt. Franz Stigler to jump into his fighter

He took his index finger off the trigger. He couldn’t shoot, it would be murder. Stigler wasn’t just motivated by revenge that day, he lived by a code. German pilots who spared their enemies, could be killed. If somebody reported them, they would be executed. But Stigler heard the voice of his commanding officer, who once said to him, “You follow the rules of war for you – not your enemy. You fight by these rules to keep your humanity.” Alone with the crippled bomber, Stigler changed his mission. He nodded at the American pilot and started flying in a formation so German gunners on the ground wouldn’t shoot down the bomber. Stigler escorted the bomber to the North Sea. He took one last look at the American pilot, saluted him, and returned to Germany. “Good luck,” Stigler said to himself. “You’re in God’s hands now…” Franz Stigler didn’t think the big B-17 could get back to England, and wondered for years what happened to