War in Europe At the beginning of World War II, there was a strong sense of chivalry between the British
RAF and German
Luftwaffe pilots. They regarded themselves as "knights of the air" and shooting parachuting enemy aircrew was contrary to their code of honour. The question of shooting an enemy pilot parachuting over his own territory aroused bitter debate on both sides. On 31 August 1940, during the
Battle of Britain, RAF
Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding dined with Prime Minister
Winston Churchill at
Chequers. After dinner, they discussed the morality of shooting parachuting Luftwaffe pilots. Dowding suggested that German pilots were perfectly entitled to shoot RAF pilots parachuting over Britain as they were still potential
combatants (i.e., piloting new aircraft to conduct another military mission) while RAF pilots should refrain from firing at German pilots as they were
out of combat and would eventually become prisoners of war once they landed on British soil. Churchill was appalled by this suggestion, arguing that shooting a parachuting pilot "was like drowning a sailor". On the German side, Luftwaffe commander-in-chief
Hermann Göring asked Luftwaffe
fighter ace Adolf Galland about what he thought about shooting enemy pilots while in their parachutes, even over their own territory. Galland replied that, "I should regard it as murder, Herr Reichsmarschall. I should do everything in my power to disobey such an order." Despite such sentiments, there were a number of incidents where the shooting of parachuting enemy aviators occurred. On 1 September 1939, in the Modlin area, during the German
invasion of Poland, pilots of the Polish
Pursuit Brigade encountered a group of 40 German bombers escorted by 20
Bf 109 and
Bf 110 fighters. During combat, Lt.
Aleksander Gabszewicz was forced to bail out of his aircraft. While in his parachute, Gabszewicz was shot at by a Bf 110. Second Lt. Tadeusz Sawicz, flying nearby, attacked the German plane and another Polish pilot, Wladyslaw Kiedrzynski, spiraled around the defenseless Gabszewicz until he reached the ground. On 2 September, Sec. Lt. Jan Dzwonek, along with eight other Polish pilots, attacked a couple of German fighters approaching their direction. In the battle, Dzwonek's plane was shot down and he was forced to bail out. Hanging in his parachute, he was attacked twice by a Bf 110. Apparently, the Luftwaffe pilot was so busy attacking the defenseless Dzwonek that Corporal Jan Malinowski, flying an obsolete
P.7 fighter, downed the German plane. Dzwonek later recounted the story: During the Battle of Britain,
Polish and Czech pilots serving in the RAF sometimes shot at Luftwaffe pilots parachuting over Britain. Many Germans charged that this was regular practice by the Poles and the Czechs, but there was little hard evidence of it. The leading historian of the Polish Air Force, Adam Zamoyski, conceded that "it is true that some pilots still finished off parachuting Germans by flying directly over them; the
slipstream would cause the parachute to collapse and the man would fall into the ground like a stone." On 8 March 1944,
USAAF Lt.
Virgil K. Meroney and his Blue Flight were at the rear of
352d Fighter Group as it reached the end of its escort leg. The group turned to leave as they crossed the Dutch border into Germany near
Meppen. "Three
Me 109s came out of the sun with a lot of speed and made a 90-degree attack on the rear bombers, breaking away in rolls," Meroney recalled. "I called them in and went after the lead two as they stayed together, the third having broken in a different direction." Meroney drove his
P-47 along with his squadron to attack the Germans who were trying to shoot down the USAAF
B-17 heavy bombers and fired at the German planes. When the German pilot realized that his Bf 109 was badly in flames, he jumped out of his plane and opened his parachute. Meroney and his squadron did not fire at the German pilot who was parachuting safely back to earth. This might have been because he and his flight were low on fuel and there was no knowing if there were other enemy aircraft in the area. Indeed, that more pilots and aircrew were not shot in their parachutes was probably due at least in part to the nature of aerial combat. The fights were a confusing whirl and a pilot who concentrated too long and hard on killing a man in a parachute could easily fall prey himself and end up in the position of being shot up while in his parachute. Not shooting enemy pilots in their parachutes was a practical matter as well as a chivalrous one. Still, both German and American pilots did shoot enemy airmen in their parachutes, albeit infrequently.
Richard "Bud" Peterson, a
P-51 pilot with the
357th Fighter Group, based in
Leiston, agreed that "normally,
nobody, including the Germans, would be shooting anybody in a parachute. It just wasn't done. I mean, there's no challenge with shooting a guy in a parachute, for God's sake." However, on one mission he saw a Bf 109 systematically firing at American B-17 bomber crews as they descended in their parachutes. After Peterson forced the offending German pilot to bail out, he killed him as he was descending. He recalled that some of his unit were nervous that this would invite a retaliatory response from the Luftwaffe. "But they had to be there to know what I was seeing," Peterson said. "Those guys were helpless, the bomber crews going down". Several German sources (examples below) claim that American pilots frequently practised shooting at parachutes, especially closer to the end of the war when Germany had more planes than pilots: Thaen Kwock Lee was a B-17 waist gunner with the 483rd Bomb Group, a
15th Air Force unit, when his aircraft was shot down by German
Me 262s on 22 March 1945. He recalled that he and his crew bailed out in their parachutes and while descending back to earth, they were attacked by Me 262s: USAAF pilot Stanley Miles shared his experience on 13 May 1944, when the 352nd encountered a massive formation of enemy fighters. After getting involved in a
dogfight with one of the German planes for a while, Miles shot down the plane, which caused the German pilot to bail out in his parachute. "I had my gun camera running," he recalled, "so I got some good shots of the tracers hitting the plane and the pilot jumping out. My wing-man was still with me, so I eased around, came back and got some nice film footage of the German pilot in his chute." Miles considered shooting the enemy pilot as he drifted helplessly back to earth. It was a topic that he and his squadron units had considered in earnest. "One school of thought was that if you didn't shoot the guy, he'd land and be right back up fighting you the next day. I couldn't do it, however, and just took the film footage of him." Most American pilots used
gun cameras to ensure they had adequate proof of their victories. Robert O' Nan of the 487th Fighter Squadron did this on 10 April 1944, after forcing a
Focke-Wulf Fw 190 pilot to abandon his aircraft: "I followed the plane down where it crashed, exploded, and burned up, in the middle of a plowed field. I took pictures of this. I also got pictures of the pilot dangling in his chute." None of them were considering shooting German pilots hanging in their parachutes.
U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Supreme Commander of the
Allied Forces in Europe, felt compelled to specifically forbid the practice. In the directive issued to
U.S. Major General Carl Spaatz, commander of the
United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and British Air Chief Marshal
Arthur Tedder (or
Sir Arthur Harris according to ''D-Day Bombers: The Veterans' Story: RAF Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force Support to the Normandy Invasion 1944'' by Stephen Darlow) on 2 June 1944, in a preparation for
Operation Overlord, he wrote: There were episodes of shooting parachuting aircrew in the Mediterranean theater: on 2 October 1942, Captain Livio Ceccotti of the
Regia Aeronautica was engaged by five Allied fighters, reportedly
Spitfires, and after a dogfight in which two Spitfires were reportedly downed by him he was hit and forced to bail out from his
Macchi C.202 fighter; as he was descending, he was reportedly shot at and killed by the surviving three fighters.
War in Asia and the Pacific While World War II began in Asia with the start of the
full-scale war between China and the
Empire of Japan, the Japanese gained a bad reputation among the
Allies in the
war in Asia and the
Pacific for shooting enemy airmen dangling in their parachutes. The first confirmed case was over the Chinese city of
Battle of Nanjing on 19 September 1937, during the
Second Sino-Japanese War, when Chinese pilot Lt. Liu Lanqing (劉蘭清) of the
17th Pursuit Squadron, 3rd Pursuit Group flying
P-26 Model 281 fighters, bailed out in his parachute after being shot down by
IJNAS aircraft. Hanging in his parachute, he was killed after being shot by Japanese pilots; Lt. Liu's squadron leader Capt.
John Huang Xinrui tried fighting off the Japanese pilots taking turns shooting at Lt. Liu, but was shot down and had to bail out himself; he waited until the last possible moment to tug his parachute cord. Pilots from both the IJNAS and
IJAAS did this routinely throughout the war. As a result, Chinese and Russian volunteer pilots delayed opening their parachutes to avoid being shot at. Even after a safe parachute descent, the Japanese still went after them. In July 1938, one Russian volunteer, Valentin Dudonov, bailed out in his parachute and landed on a sand bank in Lake Poyang after a collision with an IJNAS
A5M aircraft. Another A5M aircraft came and strafed him on the sand bank. Dudonov had to jump and hide under water in the lake to avoid being attacked. One of Japan's top fighter aces,
Tetsuzō Iwamoto, was summoned twice to
Douglas MacArthur's Allied GHQ office in Tokyo for questioning about attacks on pilots who have bailed out of their aircraft in China and the Pacific War, but was cleared of war crime charges. On 23 December 1941, 12
P-40 pilots of the
American Volunteer Group (AVG)
Flying Tigers intercepted 54 Japanese bombers escorted by 20 pursuit planes, who were
bombing the city of Rangoon in
Burma. During the battle, the AVG downed five Japanese bombers with the loss of two P-40 pilots. P-40 pilot Paul J. Greene's plane was badly damaged, which forced him to bail out. He was shot at by Japanese fighters while descending to earth in his parachute, but survived. "You want to see my 'chute," he told
Daily Express war correspondent O.D. Gallagher. "It's got more holes in it than the nose of a watering-can." On 23 January 1942, the AVG attacked Japanese bombers and fighters which had resumed carrying out bombing raids on Rangoon. The AVG shot down 21, suffering only a single loss of a pilot named
Bert Christman. During the dogfight, Christman's plane was damaged and he was forced to bail out. While parachuting over the
rice paddies south of Rangoon, he was killed by three IJAAS
Nakajima aircraft. On 20th February 1942, an American navy fighter pilot engaged in strafing the survivors of a ditched Japanese bomber during the
action off-Bougainville. In June 1942, as part of the Japanese
Midway operation, the Japanese
attacked the Aleutian islands, off the south coast of
Alaska. Tadayoshi Koga, a 19-year-old flight
petty officer first class, was launched from the
Japanese aircraft carrier Ryūjō as part of the 4 June raid. Koga was part of a three-plane section. His
wingmen were Chief Petty Officer Makoto Endo and Petty Officer Tsuguo Shikada. Koga and his comrades attacked Dutch Harbor, shooting down an American
PBY-5A Catalina flying boat piloted by Bud Mitchell and
strafing its survivors in the water. Three successive attacks killed the PBY's crew.
Koga was then killed when his damaged aircraft crash-landed on the island of
Akutan. During the
Malayan Campaign in 1942, Japanese pilots often shot British, Commonwealth, and Dutch airmen hanging in their parachutes. Australian pilot Herb Plenty witnessed a Dutch
Brewster aircraft being shot down by Japanese fighters and the pilot bailed out in his parachute on 17 January 1942, near Bilton Island, some miles of
Singapore. He also said that while most Japanese fighters were heading back to their own bases, two of them came back and shot the parachuting Dutch pilot: During the
Battle of the Bismarck Sea, where Allied planes attacked a Japanese convoy of destroyers and troop transports, one Allied sortie on 3 March 1943 consisting of B-17 bombers escorted by P-38 fighters was intercepted by Japanese
Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters. The A6M Zeros fatally crippled one of the B-17s, forcing its crew to bail out, then Japanese fighter pilots machine-gunned some of the crew as they descended and attacked others in the water after they landed. Five of the Japanese fighters strafing the B-17 aircrew were promptly engaged and shot down by three P-38s which were also lost. On the evenings of 3–5 March, PT boats and planes attacked Japanese rescue vessels, as well as the survivors from the sunken vessels on life rafts and swimming or floating in the sea. This was later justified on the grounds that rescued servicemen would have been rapidly landed at their military destination and promptly returned to active service, as well as being retaliation for the Japanese fighter planes attacking survivors of the downed B-17 bomber. While many of the Allied aircrew accepted these attacks as being necessary, others were sickened. On 31 March 1943, a
squadron of USAAF
B-24 bombers sent to destroy a bridge at
Pyinmana, Burma, were attacked by Japanese
Zero fighters. One B-24 aircraft was shot down and its occupants, including 2nd Lt
Owen J. Baggett, bailed out. While the downed B-24 crew members were descending, they were machine gunned by Japanese fighters. Two of the crewmen were killed and Baggett was wounded in the arm. He then played dead in his harness, hoping the Japanese would leave him alone. One Japanese plane, however, circled and approached very close to Baggett to make sure he was dead. Baggett raised his
M1911 pistol and fired four shots into the cockpit, hitting the pilot; the Zero stalled and crashed. Baggett became legendary as the only person to have downed a Japanese aircraft with a M1911 pistol. The aircraft engaged were Ki 43 Hayabusa, a smaller aircraft that was often mistaken as the Zero due to its similar shape. On 15 September 1943, seven B-24s of the
373d Bombardment Squadron,
308th Bombardment Group, based at
Yangkai Airfield were dispatched to attack a
Vichy French cement plant in
Haiphong, a major port on the
Gulf of Tonkin, that had just been turned over to the Japanese though not without resistance from
Governor-General of French Indochina,
Jean Decoux. Two B-24s, however, broke down while attempting to take off from Yangkai Airfield so the five remaining planes continued the mission. When the five B-24s reached Haiphong, they were attacked by Japanese fighters. One plane went down, forcing the other planes to abandon the mission as they were continuously attacked. Two more planes went down and forced the aircrew to bail out. The Japanese pilots then went after one of the B-24 plane's parachutists and fired at them while they were descending to the ground, killing three and wounding three others. The other two B-24 planes escaped severe damage and returned to Yangkai Airfield (one plane, however, crashed at the airfield, killing the entire crew). On 5 May 1945, an American
Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber was flying with a dozen other aircraft after bombing Tachiarai Air Base in southwestern Japan, beginning the return flight to
Guam. Kinzou Kasuya, a 19-year-old Japanese pilot flying one of the Japanese fighters in pursuit of the Americans, rammed his aircraft into the fuselage of the B-29, destroying both planes. No one knows for certain how many Americans were in the B-29 as its crew had been hastily assembled on Guam. Villagers in Japan who witnessed the collision in the air saw about a dozen parachutes blossom. One of the Americans died when the cords of his parachute were severed by another Japanese plane. A second was alive when he reached the ground. He shot all but his last bullet at the villagers coming toward him, then used the last on himself. The other nine B-29 airmen who were captured by the Japanese after landing were subjected to
vivisection at the
Kyushu Imperial University. Professor
Ishiyama Fukujirō and other doctors conducted four such sessions throughout May and early-June. The Western Military Command assisted in arranging these operations. Many of the Japanese personnel responsible for the deaths of Allied airmen were prosecuted in the
Yokohama War Crimes Trials following World War II. Several of those found guilty were executed and the remainder were imprisoned. ==Cold War==