After My Capture - Orpha T. Ziegler

After I was captured, I met a fighter pilot who had crash landed a P-51. He was flying low trying to get out of range of 2 German ME109’s, when he saw two large trees that he thought he could fly between; as his 51 had a shorter wingspan than the ME’s. Wrong; the trees clipped his wings.

A bunch of Germans came out to see if this pilot had been killed and when no one could find the pilot (as he had been thrown clear as the plane hit the ground and then crawled into bushes at the edge of the apple orchard) he heard the Germans talking about the plane being pilot-less. The pilot thought he was going to come out of the crash and back to the American lines as soon as the Germans left. Not so.

When he turned his head to look behind him, a German soldier said, “Kommen Se Here”…and he did.