Childress

From the Daily Mail: As Stigler drew closer he saw the gunner covered in blood, and how part of the plane's outside had been ripped off. And he saw the wounded, terrified US airmen inside, trying to help one another tend to their injuries. It was then he remembered the words of his commanding officer Lt Gustav Roedel. 'Honour is everything here,' he had told a young Stigler before his first mission. The senior airman added: 'If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute, I will shoot you down myself. 'You follow the rules of war for you - not for your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity. 'For me it would have been the same as shooting at a parachute, I just couldn't do it,' Stigler later said. Florida Governor Bush honours Brown and Stigler in 2001:

Glad you brought this up, Wodin. Wiki: Kurt Knispel (20 September 1921 – 28 April 1945) was a Sudeten German Heer panzer loader, gunner and later commander, and was the highest scoring tank ace of World War II with a total of 168 confirmed tank kills; the actual number, although unconfirmed, may be as high as 195. He is counted with Johannes Bölter, Ernst Barkmann, Otto Carius and Michael Wittmann as being one of the, if not the, greatest tank ace of all time. Though he was recommended for it four times, Knispel never received the coveted Knight's Cross, a standard award for most other World War II German tank aces. Unlike some other commanders, Knispel was not consumed by the pursuit of decorations and did not suffer from a "sore throat", Heer slang for those who lusted after the Knight's Cross. When there were conflicting claims for a destroyed enemy tank, Knispel always stepped back, always willing to credit success to someone else. Knispel's slow promotion is attributed to several conflicts with higher Nazi authorities (for instance, he assaulted an Einsatzgruppen officer whom he saw mistreating Soviet POWs) and general lack of military bearing, sporting a goatee and hair longer than regulations. Only his impressive track-record saved him from ending up in a military prison.

This keeps getting better and better! The story would be even cooler if the commander followed the bailed pilot down and turned him over to the Gestapo.

Maybe the AI's smarter than we realize! Graebner's attack was an ill-conceived fiasco. And in CM it would be even more doomed to failure if the allegations about HT gunners' vulnerability are true.

One of the B-17's crew was severely wounded. The others refused to jump without him.

Cute and touching, Wodin.

Your 90% there, John. That explains, I believe, the enduring friction with Jon. You're both near perfect beings.

I find the War in the Pacific fascinating. But not as an ideal base for a CM type, ground tactical, treatment. Voila tout. There were suitable battles, yes, but the most famous ones, those with box office appeal to an American audience, not so much. I'm with JonS on that score. Moderators, I guess we can close this thread. I win, right?

I trust JK implicitly. I even pardon him for giving away, via a video link, the plot of the book in the thread's 3rd post. Gotta run. Someone on Ebay just outbid me for an authentic Luftwaffe crush cap with 12 minutes left. Apparently they're super popular. Who knew?

Atta boy, John.

He did more than act: (Clark) Gable flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts. During one of the missions, Gable's aircraft was damaged by flak and attacked by fighters, which knocked out one of the engines and shot up the stabilizer. In the raid on Germany, one crewman was killed and two others were wounded, and flak went through Gable's boot and narrowly missed his head. When word of this reached MGM, studio executives began to badger the U.S. Army Air Corps to reassign their most valuable screen property to non-combat duty. In November 1943, he returned to the United States to edit the film, only to find that the personnel shortage of aerial gunners had already been rectified. He was allowed to complete the film anyway, joining the 1st Motion Picture Unit in Hollywood.

The 160,000 casualty figure is from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II Their tally of destroyed planes is higher. The other stats are from various sources.

Wow, that book got great reviews! But it's not available for Kindle...

Some of us were expecting 'sticky wicket', Womble...

It appears you culled some interesting battles from the herd, sburke. The problem is: (emphasis added) Sadly, there's no getting around this. And guess what the cover art will be on the cd box of CM:War in the Pacific? Yep. Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi. On Iwo Jima. General Kuribayashi, who despised the Banzai concept, eventually succumbed to demand and ordered the final charge which killed him and 300 fanatics. Fifty Marines perished.

There were no doubt some interesting engagements featuring maneuver- mostly early war. The Battles of Khalkhyn Gol? Unfortunately the beach invasions were the most iconic, the subject of many popular films, and utterly tedious from a gaming standpoint. For Iwo Jima tunnels would have to be modeled. And you'd never see a Jap. And there were suicidal charges toward the end. Etc.

Like the Battle for Henderson Field where the Japanese lost 2-3,000 and the U.S 80? The disparity being due to incessant and unproductive frontal assaults by the Japanese.

JonS: just to demonstrate my impartiality... There were experiments testing the effects of hypothermia performed on prisoners. Luftwaffe equipment was used. But it's unclear whether Luftwaffe personnel was involved. At any rate, no one from the service was prosecuted apres-guerre.

Yep. A burned-out bomber pilot was the head of the 379th field kitchen: Brown's unit.

You're just gainsaying my comments, throwing out assertions. Is this a Monty Python routine?

No, I simply find most (not all) of the ground operations in the Pacific lacking in tactical interest. It's a matter of taste, Sublime. Pace...

Be nice, Jon! Or I'll bring on the big guns. How do Cantorian diagonalizations, aleph nul sets, and countable uncounted infinities strike you? A bit out of your depth, perhaps?

Finished. Here are my impressions: 75% percent of the book concerns the life of Franz Stigler, the German ace. Which is fine. The Luftwaffe, among the various services, was the least politicized. The lived by a strong code of ethics. No member, apart from Goering, was ever indicted for war crimes. Opening fire on enemy parachutes, a vice to which American and British pilots succumbed, was a strict no-no. German pilots were known to follow their 'kills' to the ground to ensure that POWs were handed over to Luftwaffe ground units, not the Gestapo or the SS. The Allied bomber forces suffered extreme casualties: 5,000 of 17,000 bombers built were destroyed. They lost 160,000 men. Out of 30,000 German fighter pilots around 1500 survived the war; an occupation nearly as hazardous as crewing a U-Boat. Charlie Brown, the B-17 pilot, continued zestfully bombing German cities after Stigler's noble gesture. I have a bit of a problem with that. His was a voluntary assignment, transferring out incurred no stigma. In his place, well, who knows... Stigler flew close enough to the wounded bomber to determine there were wounded aboard and the guns not functioning. A devout Catholic, he found himself incapable of squeezing the trigger. He remained close friends with his boss, Adolf Galland, until the latter's death in 1996. Yet Galland, despite their retaionship, always considered Stigler's behavior treasonous. It's hard to argue with him, given Brown's subsequent career. Certainly Stigler would have found himeself before a firing squad had the truth got out. My hunch is that if the event had not occurred relatively early in the bombing campaign- late 1943- he would not have shown as much forbearance.

wrong thread...

You're right, sburke. 'Banzai!' was the yell the screaming banshees used.