From the book A Higher Calling about Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown, Franz recalls a conversation between Herman Goring and Adolph Galland (Luftwaffe general). It was late in the war and Goring and Hitler had discussed ordering pilots to shoot downed allied airmen in their chutes.
When Goring floated the idea to Galland and asked what he thought of the idea he replied that he would consider it murder and would do everything in his power to disobey such an order.
Given the notion of alleged chivalry (not that chivalry itself during the age of knights was all its been made out to be) between pilots, that is rather interesting. For everything else he was, Goering was a fellow fighter pilot and an ace at that. He was credited with 22 kills in WWI and awarded the ‘Blue Max’ (Pour le Mérite).
It may have been gentlemanly on the Western front, and US and British POWs were generally treated decently, but the Nazis murdered several million Soviet POWs. Plus they murdered Polish POWs held by the Soviets whom they invaded Russia and then “found” a mass grave in the Katyn forest and created an international propaganda campaign which lives to this day, even though the grave site was full of brass from German weapons dated AFTER the Nazis had occupied the territory.
What did the Nazis do with American and British POWs who were Jewish or Black, though? I imagine they fared worse than the rest and were not treated in a gentlemanly fashion.
True, but it’s well known that the Nazis treated American POW’s better than the Japanese did, and I suspect that “being white” played a part, and that sentiment would bleed over into the “chivalry in the air” between fighter pilots of the RAF, USA and Germany. With Japan, it seemed all bets were off. They were a brutal foe in WWII.
The prevailing Japanese view was that military men had a duty to fight to the death where capture was the only alternative, always. Western military forces did not hold that belief. There wasn’t anything really ‘two way’ about that: it was a pretty stark and basic difference.
Of course some individual Japanese surrendered even early in the Pacific War. One of the crewmen in the midget sub attack on PH became a prisoner, though he remained alone in US custody for awhile, not counting an IJN bomber crew taken prisoner the same month in the Philippines who were later liberated by the Japanese…and induced to fly a suicide mission in New Guinea to atone. The British took a Korean pilot of the Japanese Army prisoner in December 1941 who likewise was alone for awhile. And while there’s some similarly between cases where Japanese early in the war might have tried to genuinely surrender but were killed, with cases where Western soldiers did that to each other (which they sometimes did), there were also real cases where apparently surrendering Japanese tried to kill Western soldiers. Those stories are not fabrications, but again were founded in the sense of duty most Japanese soldiers felt in this regard.
The desire to represent everything as ‘racism’ and ‘both sides’ can sometimes turn IMO into disregarding a willingness for self sacrifice for country which from the Japanese POV was (and still is to some degree looking back, though not expected now) laudable.
This ethos showed signs of breaking down very late in the war. On Okinawa around 10% of the Japanese military force surrendered (not counting civilians) which was unprecedented. Previously the % of IJA island garrisons which survived, if they could not be evacuated by friendly forces, was minuscule especially if excluding Korean labor units. The rate seems to have somewhat higher all along for IJN survivors in the water, though they also often or usually refused help and sometimes tried to kill would be rescuers… to do their duty as they saw it. There’s no reason to believe the change on Okinawa was much a function of increased US willingness to accept Japanese surrender.
I don’t think the fact that the Katyn massacre was in fact carried out by the Soviets, not by the Nazis, is really in any serious question. Both the late-stage Soviet government and the post-Soviet Russian government have admitted Soviet guilt in the massacre at Katyn.
Nazi Germany undoubtedly also committed horrific crimes against the Polish people, and Nazi Germany’s ultimate plans for Poland (and Russia) were fundamentally genocidal in nature. The attempts by the Nazi regime to use the facts of the Katyn massacre for propaganda purposes were thus profoundly hypocritical. But that hypocrisy doesn’t alter the facts themselves.
There seems to be a comraderie among the pilots in the European theater. I wonder if that comraderie started from WW1 when pilots on both sides fought like gentleman. I remember reading something many years ago (as a kid) that during WW1 when a pilot ran out of bullets, he’d signal his opponent that he’s out and they would wave and end the fight. Was this true of of WW1 fighter pilots?
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