There is a bond, a brotherhood, among those who fly, spanning many years and accommodating many circumstances. That bond received a severe test in the events remembered in this memoir by Keith Conley, a World War II pilot. Mr. Conley passed away several years ago.
In a small railway station in wartime Nazi Germany, faced with imminent and obviously violent death from an enraged mob, I experienced a phenomenon that is unique in the modern age: the camaraderie of men who fly. This feeling of kinship among men of the same profession, regardless of race or nationality, has not been seen since the days of chivalry when knighthood was in flower. I do not know what causes the affinity. It may be the sense of sharing in the exploration of the limitless frontiers of the sky, or the sharing of a constant adventure with its ever present hazard of violent death. However, I do know that it does exist, even in a world of educated and nurtured hate, and its appearance in a moment of desperate need, can be welcome beyond belief.
This affinity of airmen has been documented in many chronicles of flight. The stories of Word War I aces tell of the air duels that highly resemble the gentlemanly tournaments of the Knights of King Arthur. Charles Lindberg tells of the years between the wars when airmen could cast aside all pretenses when they met, and talk in a friendly and common manner. Heinz Knoke, the German war ace, tells of World War II in which he treats the international kinship as something well known and understood.
My experience with the camaraderie of airmen began the morning of the 29th of July, 1943.
Our Fortress was one of a group of high flying planes on a bombing mission over northern Germany. Our bombs had been dropped and we were heading west toward England with that happy feeling of having another mission under the belt, when we received a particularly vicious fighter attack. An ME-109 appeared from nowhere and flew straight through the formation with all guns firing. After he completed his pass, my B-17 was a mass of flames and the left wing was practically shot away. I knew that the airplane could not last very long so there was no choice but to bail out. I was the last one to leave and made it just before the plane exploded. I pulled my ripcord almost immediately and hardly felt the opening shock and the bitter cold as I cursed my fate and sadly watched the Fortress formation disappear into the west.
My thoughts at this time were rather mixed. I was happy at having escaped from the burning airplane and at the same time both angry and apprehensive at the prospect of capture by an enemy, of whom I had heard so much bad and so little good. With this in mind, I began to hurriedly plan my steps of evasion: hide in the woods until dark, travel at night, keep a course south toward Switzerland, eat off the land, and eventually escape. I was beginning to actually feel optimistic about my chances when my planning was interrupted by the sound of an approaching airplane. It was a German fighter and the approach looked much like the head-on attacks I had experienced so often in the past few months.
The stories of airmen shot in their parachutes flashed through my mind. I tried desperately to think of an idea to escape this new danger. Before I could react the fighter was circling me and much to my surprise lowered his landing gear and flaps. He was then able to come by me slowly and as he did so, an amazing thing happened. The plot waved a friendly salute and then flew away letting down and out of sight.
I could hardly believe what I had seen. Nazi pilots just didn’t do things like that. The stories I had read and heard had described an enemy that was cold, implacable and brutal. The same stories had told of a people who had no warm human feelings as we knew them. This was my first close contact with the enemy and one friendly act could not blot from my mind all the stories of brutality. I decided that I could expect the worst if I were captured and that I would try my best to escape.
The new hope was short lived. As I hit the ground I was met by an elderly man with a swastika armband, a Lugar pistol and a determined air. After assuring himself that I was not armed, he nervously escorted me about a mile through wooded country to a local tavern that seemed to be a gathering place for captured American airmen. My crew had all shared the ignominy of immediate capture and had been brought here. We were all happy to be alive but quite unhappy at the prospects of our immediate future.
Although the tavern was a civilian place and may local people, excited and inquisitive, peered through the windows, the military took charge. We were searched, stripped of possessions and then forced to stand against the wall in an attitude of attention while what valuables we had were distributed amid jeering and laughter. We were then taken by truck to a nearby military camp where we received our first taste of the dark bread and potato soup diet that we were to exist on for the indeterminate future. After our meal we were locked in solitary confinement. Here we spent our first night in Germany lonely and full of self-pity.
The next morning we received a preliminary interrogation in a building and in an atmosphere which were almost exact replicas of Hollywood’s Nazi pictures. I had chuckled only a few days before at a movie presentation of Germany that I had considered grossly exaggerated. Now I was subjected to a view of heel clicking, pushing, kicking, guttural commands and general military behavior that could have been lifted from one of Warner Brothers’ most melodramatic scenes. It was all extremely tiring and depressing and it helped convince me that the fighter pilot’s gallant action of yesterday had been a mistake or hallucination.
The interrogation lasted about three hours. After it was over we were loaded into a truck and taken a short distance to a railway station in a small town near Hamburg. Here we were handed over to five guards and told that they would accompany us to Frankfurt in southwestern Germany. We received a briefing about the futility of escape and ominous threats of what would happen if we tried.
The railway station was a typical European shelter for travelers, concrete [with] high ceilings and dark. Its grey coldness and our disheveled and unkempt appearance perhaps contributed somewhat to the events that transpired. For certainly we were a nondescript, rough looking group, not having been able to wash or shave or clean up at all since our capture. We had no hats and our clothing ranged from the familiar pale blue heated flying suit to leather jacket and olive drab trousers; our shoes varied from the co-pilot’s high combat boots to the waist gunner’s bare feet. He had lost his shoes when his parachute opened and the Germans had not replaced them. Indeed we looked the living proof of the Nazi propaganda description of the American air gangster.
The station was literally filled with civilians, many of whom wore white conspicuous bandages, and most of them seemed to be carrying their earthly possessions. There were some military men and quite a few uniformed youngsters from the Hitler Youth organization. Most of the crowd consisted of ordinary middle aged and older people, many with babes in arms. They were refugees from fire bombed Hamburg. They had lived through the nightmare of three days and nights of merciless bombing and now they were homeless, frightened, shocked and vengeful.
Our appearance among these angry war victims was as a red flag to a bull. With the first cry of “Americanische Luft-gangster,” we could actually feel the rising emotion. The crowd had no leaders. None were needed. They all wanted to exact their personal revenge for the misery our bombing had caused them. They all wanted our blood and the only question was the method of getting it. Some of them wanted to hang us; some burn us; some beat us to death; and some even wanted to behead us. Our guards were naturally averse to using their guns on their own people and they themselves were badly frightened and ready to desert us at any moment.
The guards’ fright was nothing compared with mine. It is impossible to describe my fear at that moment. I had known fear in combat but that was fear that could partially be dispelled by the physical action that accompanied it. This was paralyzing fear, the kind that cannot be dispelled or reasoned away. It was certain that the crowd could not be reasoned with because by now their anger had increased to a point where they had become a lynch mob. The situation had reached the point where the overt action of any person there toward us would have been the final signal for the lynching. There seemed no way out and I planned to sell my life as dearly as possible.
But the action never came. At that moment, a most magnificent figure appeared between us and the crowd. The figure was in the person of a German Air Force Captain, tall, be-ribboned and superbly uniformed. He acted swiftly, with confident certainty and with authority that no one seemed to doubt his right to issue orders or dared to disobey them. He quickly formed the guards into a protective circle with bayonets bared. He ordered the military men, including the Hitler Youth, from the crowd and formed them into a further protective element. Within this circle he moved us quickly through a door into the street and then into a small building. The whole action had taken place so quickly that no one had time to stop it. I doubt whether the refugees really knew what had happened or where we had gone.
After our benefactor had dismissed the extra uniformed men and had issued our guard further orders, he turned to me and in a pleasant, relaxed manner and in American accented English asked what he could do to help us further. I was still unnerved from the events in the station and as a result was not prepared for this friendly gesture. I was so suspicious of the motives of any German that it took a moment or two before I could do more than grunt an unresponsive answer. However, after I had remembered the pilot’s action the day before and since I was so grateful to this one, I soon warmed to his obvious sincere friendliness. We talked of air combat and flying and even discussed the Milwaukee area and the ten years he had lived there. I told him we had been shot down the day before and mentioned the incident of the fighter pilot while I was in my parachute. He seemed quite affected by this story and soon after said he had to leave. I thanked him gratefully, on behalf of my crew, for what he had done in the railway station. He turned at the door as he was about to leave and made a parting remark that I shall never forget. He said, “I feel as though I owed it to you. You are flyers and so am I. But there is another reason. I am the pilot that shot you down.”
In a small railway station in wartime Nazi Germany, faced with imminent and obviously violent death from an enraged mob, I experienced a phenomenon that is unique in the modern age: the camaraderie of men who fly. This feeling of kinship among men of the same profession, regardless of race or nationality, has not been seen since the days of chivalry when knighthood was in flower. I do not know what causes the affinity. It may be the sense of sharing in the exploration of the limitless frontiers of the sky, or the sharing of a constant adventure with its ever present hazard of violent death. However, I do know that it does exist, even in a world of educated and nurtured hate, and its appearance in a moment of desperate need, can be welcome beyond belief.
This affinity of airmen has been documented in many chronicles of flight. The stories of Word War I aces tell of the air duels that highly resemble the gentlemanly tournaments of the Knights of King Arthur. Charles Lindberg tells of the years between the wars when airmen could cast aside all pretenses when they met, and talk in a friendly and common manner. Heinz Knoke, the German war ace, tells of World War II in which he treats the international kinship as something well known and understood.
My experience with the camaraderie of airmen began the morning of the 29th of July, 1943.
Our Fortress was one of a group of high flying planes on a bombing mission over northern Germany. Our bombs had been dropped and we were heading west toward England with that happy feeling of having another mission under the belt, when we received a particularly vicious fighter attack. An ME-109 appeared from nowhere and flew straight through the formation with all guns firing. After he completed his pass, my B-17 was a mass of flames and the left wing was practically shot away. I knew that the airplane could not last very long so there was no choice but to bail out. I was the last one to leave and made it just before the plane exploded. I pulled my ripcord almost immediately and hardly felt the opening shock and the bitter cold as I cursed my fate and sadly watched the Fortress formation disappear into the west.
My thoughts at this time were rather mixed. I was happy at having escaped from the burning airplane and at the same time both angry and apprehensive at the prospect of capture by an enemy, of whom I had heard so much bad and so little good. With this in mind, I began to hurriedly plan my steps of evasion: hide in the woods until dark, travel at night, keep a course south toward Switzerland, eat off the land, and eventually escape. I was beginning to actually feel optimistic about my chances when my planning was interrupted by the sound of an approaching airplane. It was a German fighter and the approach looked much like the head-on attacks I had experienced so often in the past few months.
The stories of airmen shot in their parachutes flashed through my mind. I tried desperately to think of an idea to escape this new danger. Before I could react the fighter was circling me and much to my surprise lowered his landing gear and flaps. He was then able to come by me slowly and as he did so, an amazing thing happened. The plot waved a friendly salute and then flew away letting down and out of sight.
I could hardly believe what I had seen. Nazi pilots just didn’t do things like that. The stories I had read and heard had described an enemy that was cold, implacable and brutal. The same stories had told of a people who had no warm human feelings as we knew them. This was my first close contact with the enemy and one friendly act could not blot from my mind all the stories of brutality. I decided that I could expect the worst if I were captured and that I would try my best to escape.
The new hope was short lived. As I hit the ground I was met by an elderly man with a swastika armband, a Lugar pistol and a determined air. After assuring himself that I was not armed, he nervously escorted me about a mile through wooded country to a local tavern that seemed to be a gathering place for captured American airmen. My crew had all shared the ignominy of immediate capture and had been brought here. We were all happy to be alive but quite unhappy at the prospects of our immediate future.
Although the tavern was a civilian place and may local people, excited and inquisitive, peered through the windows, the military took charge. We were searched, stripped of possessions and then forced to stand against the wall in an attitude of attention while what valuables we had were distributed amid jeering and laughter. We were then taken by truck to a nearby military camp where we received our first taste of the dark bread and potato soup diet that we were to exist on for the indeterminate future. After our meal we were locked in solitary confinement. Here we spent our first night in Germany lonely and full of self-pity.
The next morning we received a preliminary interrogation in a building and in an atmosphere which were almost exact replicas of Hollywood’s Nazi pictures. I had chuckled only a few days before at a movie presentation of Germany that I had considered grossly exaggerated. Now I was subjected to a view of heel clicking, pushing, kicking, guttural commands and general military behavior that could have been lifted from one of Warner Brothers’ most melodramatic scenes. It was all extremely tiring and depressing and it helped convince me that the fighter pilot’s gallant action of yesterday had been a mistake or hallucination.
The interrogation lasted about three hours. After it was over we were loaded into a truck and taken a short distance to a railway station in a small town near Hamburg. Here we were handed over to five guards and told that they would accompany us to Frankfurt in southwestern Germany. We received a briefing about the futility of escape and ominous threats of what would happen if we tried.
The railway station was a typical European shelter for travelers, concrete [with] high ceilings and dark. Its grey coldness and our disheveled and unkempt appearance perhaps contributed somewhat to the events that transpired. For certainly we were a nondescript, rough looking group, not having been able to wash or shave or clean up at all since our capture. We had no hats and our clothing ranged from the familiar pale blue heated flying suit to leather jacket and olive drab trousers; our shoes varied from the co-pilot’s high combat boots to the waist gunner’s bare feet. He had lost his shoes when his parachute opened and the Germans had not replaced them. Indeed we looked the living proof of the Nazi propaganda description of the American air gangster.
The station was literally filled with civilians, many of whom wore white conspicuous bandages, and most of them seemed to be carrying their earthly possessions. There were some military men and quite a few uniformed youngsters from the Hitler Youth organization. Most of the crowd consisted of ordinary middle aged and older people, many with babes in arms. They were refugees from fire bombed Hamburg. They had lived through the nightmare of three days and nights of merciless bombing and now they were homeless, frightened, shocked and vengeful.
Our appearance among these angry war victims was as a red flag to a bull. With the first cry of “Americanische Luft-gangster,” we could actually feel the rising emotion. The crowd had no leaders. None were needed. They all wanted to exact their personal revenge for the misery our bombing had caused them. They all wanted our blood and the only question was the method of getting it. Some of them wanted to hang us; some burn us; some beat us to death; and some even wanted to behead us. Our guards were naturally averse to using their guns on their own people and they themselves were badly frightened and ready to desert us at any moment.
The guards’ fright was nothing compared with mine. It is impossible to describe my fear at that moment. I had known fear in combat but that was fear that could partially be dispelled by the physical action that accompanied it. This was paralyzing fear, the kind that cannot be dispelled or reasoned away. It was certain that the crowd could not be reasoned with because by now their anger had increased to a point where they had become a lynch mob. The situation had reached the point where the overt action of any person there toward us would have been the final signal for the lynching. There seemed no way out and I planned to sell my life as dearly as possible.
But the action never came. At that moment, a most magnificent figure appeared between us and the crowd. The figure was in the person of a German Air Force Captain, tall, be-ribboned and superbly uniformed. He acted swiftly, with confident certainty and with authority that no one seemed to doubt his right to issue orders or dared to disobey them. He quickly formed the guards into a protective circle with bayonets bared. He ordered the military men, including the Hitler Youth, from the crowd and formed them into a further protective element. Within this circle he moved us quickly through a door into the street and then into a small building. The whole action had taken place so quickly that no one had time to stop it. I doubt whether the refugees really knew what had happened or where we had gone.
After our benefactor had dismissed the extra uniformed men and had issued our guard further orders, he turned to me and in a pleasant, relaxed manner and in American accented English asked what he could do to help us further. I was still unnerved from the events in the station and as a result was not prepared for this friendly gesture. I was so suspicious of the motives of any German that it took a moment or two before I could do more than grunt an unresponsive answer. However, after I had remembered the pilot’s action the day before and since I was so grateful to this one, I soon warmed to his obvious sincere friendliness. We talked of air combat and flying and even discussed the Milwaukee area and the ten years he had lived there. I told him we had been shot down the day before and mentioned the incident of the fighter pilot while I was in my parachute. He seemed quite affected by this story and soon after said he had to leave. I thanked him gratefully, on behalf of my crew, for what he had done in the railway station. He turned at the door as he was about to leave and made a parting remark that I shall never forget. He said, “I feel as though I owed it to you. You are flyers and so am I. But there is another reason. I am the pilot that shot you down.”
