Conflict and Compassion

"What gets to me, what really gets to me is when people go on about the German people and how awful they were. Yes, there were the real Nazis and the Gestapo, and they were nasty pieces of work, but the ordinary Germans in the countryside were just like you and me -- and I don't think they really knew what the hell the war was about.
"I was freezing the night I got shot down, see, and the German soldier guarding me hands me a bottle of Schnapps -- and brother, I wasn't cold after that. Ernst was his name. He wrapped me in his greatcoat. He gave me his own bedroll. The next morning they take me to a farmhouse."

Peter J. Thompson/National Post   World War Two Hawker Typhoon fighter pilot Frank Johnson, 

now 91 years old, Thursday November 7, 2013

"And this woman, she pulls back an eiderdown bed cover and there are these beautiful white linen sheets, on a beautiful bed, and the [soldiers] just threw me on it. I was bloody. I had muddy boots on. And this lady, she took my boots off, undressed me and she kept talking to me, and she gets a big bowl of hot water and cleans all this mess off. She bandages my hip and then, if you can believe it, she washed my face, my arms, my chest -- everywhere -- and left me lying there on that beautiful bed.
"Now, why would she do that? I was the enemy. And to this day, sitting here talking to you, I still can't get over it. Then she goes downstairs and comes up with a big bowl of stew and every time I have chunky soup for lunch I picture that nice German lady. I picture her clear as day. Jesus. She was a wonderful person."
Second World War fighter pilot Frank Johnson, 91

There was a reunion, only one of many over the years, of the man's flying comrades in 2012, and six were there. They are dying; the war ended, after all, 68 years ago. Mr. Johnson married a young British woman and returned with her to Canada. They settled in Mississauga, Ontario, in a small white bungalow on a quiet, tree-lined street. They had no children, as a result of his war-time injuries. Mr. Johnson lives there still, in that white bungalow, by himself. His wife lives in a nursing home nearby; she has dementia.

At 91 years of age he takes no medications for any kind of condition related to the rigors of old age. He is energetic and lively. Although his driver's licence was suspended because of a diagnosed faulty heart valve, he has a friend who owns his own airplane. And occasionally he flies with that friend, who hands Mr. Johnson the controls. "Can you believe it? I could fly a plane at 18 and now they tell me I can't drive a car at 91? I always tell my doctor I'm going to live to 105", he enthused.

He tried to find the German woman who had looked after him so compassionately, once he was released from the German POW camp where he had been taken six weeks after the farm woman had tended to his wounds. He was unable to make contact with her. But he obviously thinks of her often. His experience was perhaps unusual. He had the good fortune to be cared for by ordinary people, pressed into a war by a fascist juggernaut.

"I am only really proud of one thing I did during the war", he related to a journalist. "I was up about 4,000 feet and I look down and I see this guy. Anybody who was an experienced fighter pilot would never be flying over an enemy airstrip and would never be flying in a straight line. But this guy was. He was obviously a rookie. Maybe it was his first flight in that goddamn aircraft and maybe he had gotten lost, and so I pulled out from behind him and came alongside and I looked over at him.
He was just a boy. A kid. And I thought to myself, why the hell would I kill this kid? The war is almost over. He doesn't know what the hell he is doing. So I [waved at him] and flew off. Back at the base they were all, 'Did you get him? Did you get him" I said I let him go.
"It is the only thing that I did in that whole goddamn war that I am really pleased about. We had to kill, see? I remember destroying a ferry where I must have killed 50 or 60 people. And it is human life, and you could say, 'Well, what the hell, it is war'. But it just shows you how stupid war is when a guy like me looks back at things and feels the way I do."

This, needless to say, was Mr. Johnson's experience. He witnessed and took part in an entirely different element of the war. The official war as it were, and his personal experience. And he survived to tell his story. It is a story of exemplary service to his country and to humanity because he and others like him managed to turn back the tide of seemingly-inevitable success for the Axis forces intent on enslaving into their fascist ideology of racial superiority and power the whole of humankind.

There are other stories, not, in the final analysis as illuminating of the best in human nature as is Mr. Johnson's tale. But his is an important one; it reminds us that humanity is fallible, and that there is always hope that our humanity will outweigh our nasty, brutish fascination with and proclivity toward bullying, intimidating, threatening and menacing others who think differently than we do. The German WWII war-machine that did all of that, did a lot more than that.

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and other death camps set up by the meticulous other arm of the German war machine, that one bred on the vicious psychopathy of atrociously viral hatred breeding a compulsion to slaughter the hated, resulted in an organized machine -- mass murder the likes of which has never yet been seen -- directed toward annihilating what their leader construed as an inferior race of sub-humans.

Fighter command did their best to turn back the tide of conquest of the world, and the liberation of the death camps and the Nuremberg trials that were to follow, and the examination of the exhaustive German files and documents detailing the careful manner in which mass death was delivered and slavery aided the German juggernaut is yet another part of a complex story of humankind's failure and its attempt to restore itself to sanity.