This sort of thing happened a lot in WWI since the pilots were voracious trophy collectors. When Manfred von Richtofen shot down an enemy over German held territory he would often take a car to the crash site to collect guns and markings from the plane. If the Allied pilot survived and was captured, Richtoven would often invite him back to his airfield for dinner before shipping him off to a POW camp.
Many Japanese airmen (some who attacked) have visited Pearl Harbor and crossed paths with U.S. soldiers who had defended it.
That’s just putting your guard down and going about life. Seems like a better option that finding a reason to hate people every day forever.
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There is a story in Lou Camer on’s 1967 book on air war in WWI “Iron Men in Wooden Wings”. Before the Allies figured out how to fire a machine gun in the area where the propeller was/wasn’t, they would sometimes place them on the top wing to fire over a propeller. A British pilot named Strange was in a dogfight (the euphemism used by newspapers, pilots referred to it with a more earthy word) with a German observation plane. Lewis ran out of ammunition, stood up to change the drum and the
plane rolled over. Terrified of both letting go (no parachute back then) and of the German plane shooting at him, Strange managed to get his feet in the cockpit, kick the stick and the plane rolled back to its proper position. Strange quickly searched the skies for his opponent but the German plane was gone.
Y ears later Strange got a letter from the German pilot who said he saw his story in a magazine. The pilot thanked him since he had never been able to convince his children the story was true. The German said the reason he and his observer didn’t fire at Strange when he was hanging from the upside plane was neither of them had the heart to fire at an enemy who just went through what he had.
Although there was a certain amount of chivalry (the British drop a wreath when German ace Oswald Boelcke was killed in a mid air collision with a squadron mate and two years later had a military funeral when they buried von Richtofen (the message to the Germans was less effusive, though), it wasn’t universal. There was a French ace named Jean Navarre who would tell people such as the members of the Lafayette Escadrille that it wasn’t enough to shoot down a German. You
had to make sure you killed him and Navarre bragged on how good a shot he was shooting Germans running away from a crash site. Most allied pilots, including British ace Mick Mannock who detested Germans, thought this was too much. Navarre did end up spending time in a sanitarium.
What’s the reference?