Author’s note: Decades later, when I talked with American bomber crewmen who had been taken prisoner, almost to a man they would admit, “I was never so glad to see the Luftwaffe” when a German pilot showed up to take them prisoner, as opposed to the alternative, who often wanted their heads. * “When I saw the condition of the airplane, it frightened me more than anything in the air did,” Charlie would remember. “It seemed as if a hand had been holding us up in the air, and it wasn’t mine.”
