Quote:
Originally Posted by kaki3152
While re-reading "The Enemy is Listening", the history of the Y service by Aileen Clayton, I came across the passage: "We had even heard on the intercepted R/T reference to British airmen being shot at as they hung helplessly from their parachutes, and this had hardened our hearts."
While all LW history I've read tend to disclaim that LW fighter pilots were wont to machine gun parachutists, it appears that the Y service knew of specific examples. I have read a report by a Spitfire pilot of 152 Sq who saw a fellow squadron mate who parachuted gunned down by a couple of Bf-109s. Currently,there is an article in the Daily Mail about historians Soenke Neitzel and Harald Welzer who have used the interrogations of 13,000 German military prisoners as the basis of "Soldiers: Diaries Of Fighting, Killing and Dying – or Soldaten in German."
The exchanges were covertly recorded by British intelligence at a Trent Park detention centre north of London in an attempt to find out whether they held strategic information useful to the Allies.Some of these POW were LW fighter pilots including one such who boasted: ‘In our squadron I was known as the “professional sadist”. I knocked off everything: buses, a civilian train in Folkestone. I gunned down every cyclist.’
From this, it stands to reason that British Intelligence knew of these German proclivities. Of course, this was common in the Far East where both sides did this without a second thought. One example was the crew of a shot down B-25 in Burma where 5 parachutist were machine gunned in air with one survivor. USAF fighter pilots did the same for Japanese fighter pilots.. Thougts?
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It depends on your definition of prevalent. Whether legal or not, one can question the wisdom of a pilot who is distracted by parachutes and his own personal feelings, when he should be watching for enemy fighters that might suddenly appear to kill him. Major Gilbert O'Brien of the 357th Fighter Group gave eyewitness testimony:
" … Many B-17 crewmen had bailed out, and at least three 109s were gunning our crewmen while they were hanging in their parachutes. This angered me beyond words. I got behind one of these Germans, pulled up to extremely close range and fired a short burst. The German pilot, hit and bleeding profusely, bailed out almost instantly and whipped past a few feet under my starboard wing. The 109 blew up in my face. I executed a wingover, fully intending to shoot the German pilot in his parachute, but instead I spiraled his falling body to the ground. His chute never opened. After seeing this guy actually shooting our people while hanging in parachutes, I felt this was my most satisfying victory …"
On another occasion, Lieutenant Glennon Moran and Lieutenant Jule Conard of the 352nd Fighter Group said that a Messerschmitt 109 pilot had strafed downed U.S. flyers who were floating in their parachutes during a May 1944 mission.
I haven't looked into this subject long enough to know how often this stuff was reported, but it is probably safe to say that Allied parachutists had more to fear from trigger-happy enemy soldiers and angry mobs of German civilians.
(By the way O'Brien was cited from Fighter Aces of the U.S.A., editors Trevor & Constable, and the comments about Moran and Conard were from a 352nd unit history by Tom Ivie).