Look carefully at the B-17 and note how shot up it is - one engine dead, tail, horizontal stabilizer and nose shot up. It was ready to fall out of the sky (this is a painting done by an artist from the description of both pilots many years later). Then realize that there is a German ME-109 fighter flying next to it. Now read the story below. I think you'll be surprised...
Charlie Brown was a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot with the 379th Bomber Group at Kimbolton, England. His B-17 was called 'Ye Old Pub' and was in a terrible state, having been hit by flak and fighters. The compass was damaged and they were flying deeper over enemy territory instead of heading home to Kimbolton.
After flying the B-17 over an enemy airfield, a German pilot named Franz Stigler was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17. When he got near the B-17, he could not believe his eyes. In his words, he "had never seen a plane in such a bad state". The tail and rear section was severely damaged, and the tail gunner wounded. The top gunner was all over the top of the fuselage. The nose was smashed and there were holes everywhere.
Despite having ammunition, Franz flew to the side of the B-17 and looked at Charlie Brown, the pilot. Brown was scared and struggling to control his damaged and blood-stained plane.
Aware that they had no idea where they were going, Franz waved at Charlie to turn 180 degrees. Franz escorted and guided the stricken plane to, and slightly over, the North Sea towards England. He then saluted Charlie Brown and turned away, back to Europe. When Franz landed he told the CO that the plane had been shot down over the sea, and never told the truth to anybody. Charlie Brown and the remaining members of his crew told their commanding officers all about the German pilot at their mission debriefing, but were ordered never to talk about it.
More than 40 years later, Charlie Brown wanted to find the Luftwaffe pilot who saved the crew. After years of research, Franz Stigler was found. He had never talked about the incident, not even at post-war reunions.
They met in the USA at a 379th Bomber Group reunion, together with 25 people who are alive now - all because Franz never fired his guns that day.
When asked why he didn't shoot them down, Stigler later said, "I didn't have the heart to finish those brave men. I flew beside them for a long time. They were trying desperately to get home and I was going to let them do that. I could not have shot at them. It would have been the same as shooting at a man in a parachute."
Both Brown and Stigler died in 2008.
While there are many hoaxes and false tales circulating in email and on the web, this story is true: http://www.snopes.com/military/charliebrown.asp
Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the NASDAQ Peaking at 5,048.62.
An entire decade has passed and we are nowhere near the numbers when the tech bubble burst in 2000. Right now, the NASDAQ is at 2,431. Some things have changed since then, though. Fast Company has given us the following to reflect upon:
World's Richest Man Then: Bill Gates
World's Richest Man Now: Bill Gates
U.S. Cell Phone Penetration Then: 34%
U.S. Cell Phone Penetration Now: 89%
Number Of Daily Newspapers In The U.S. Then: 1,480
Number Of Daily Newspapers In The U.S. Now: 1,422
No. 1 Web Site Then: AOL
No. 1 Web Site Now: Google
Internet Users Worldwide Then: 360 Million
Internet Users Worldwide Now: 1.7 Billion
No. 1 Auto Manufacturer In The World Then: General Motors
No. 1 Auto Manufacturer In The World Now: Toyota
Why are we dragging our feet on increasing troop levels in Afghanistan? Maybe the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize wants to put some distance between his prize win and increasing the size of a war.
There are a lot of items circulating on the internet right now about how the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its way, and I would like to share one of them with you now. You can look this up and will find the story to be based on facts, at least, according to the World Wide Web, although a lot of the emails circulating right now are a little dodgy on the true details of the story...
Irena Sendler passed away on May 12, 2008, sadly, not as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Also known as Irena Sendlerowa, she was a Polish social worker who secretly was a member of the Polish Underground, Zegota.
Immediately following the Nazi push into Poland on September 1, 1939, Irena joined with a group of people that created over 3,000 false documents to help smuggle Jews out of Poland.
In 1942, the Zegota appointed Irena as the head of its children's section. As a social worker, Irena had been granted permission to enter the Warsaw ghetto to monitor typhus, charged with ensuring that the disease did not go beyond the ghetto walls.
This afforded Irena the perfect opportunity to head the group's efforts to help Jewish children. Working with as many as 24 other members of Zegota, Irena developed an elaborate scheme by which 2,500 Jewish children were smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto.
Under the guise of ensuring that a typhoid outbreak did not occur, Irena and her fellow conspirators did everything from carrying out children in false bottoms of supply boxes, to hiding them in ambulances and trams, disguised as packages.
Once freed by the efforts of Irena and the Zegota, these children were placed with Polish families, orphanages and churches with Irena maintaining records of their original identity and their new identity so that once the occupation was over, they could be reunited with surviving relatives.
Irena hid the records in jars that she buried. In 1943, however, the Nazis had caught on to Irena's involvement in Zegota. She was captured, tortured, and sentence to death. Zegota was able to spare her life by bribing Nazi prison guards, and Irena went into hiding for the remainder of the war.
As soon as the occupation ended, Irena returned to Warsaw, dug up her jars, and began working to reunite the children she had saved with surviving family members. Later, Irena would go on to work with the Polish government in exile during the Soviet occupation. Sadly, this landed her in a Soviet prison where she miscarried her second child. Due to her imprisonment, even upon her release, Irena and her children lost many of the rights afforded to the Polish Soviet citizenry, such as the ability to attend state-run universities.
As early as 1965, Irena began receiving awards from the world community, even though she could not venture out of Soviet Poland to accept these awards until 1983 when she was honored by the Isreali Supreme Court.
In 2003, Pope John Paul II recognized Irena's efforts with a personal letter, and Irena was awarded Poland's highest civilian honor, the Order of the White Eagle.
In 2007, at the age of 97, Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but her life-risking efforts to free Jewish children from the Nazis, reunite them with their families after the war, and her fight against the Soviets in Poland, just all paled in comparison to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's efforts to alert the world about Global Warming. Yes, you read that right. If Al Gore is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Irena Sandler, then the prize itself no longer carries the meaning that it once did. Couple that with the award going to President Obama this year, quite literally just for being elected President, and I am done with it all together.
As of December 1, 2004, California residents are entitled to view their credit report from each of the 3 big credit bureaus, free of charge, once every 12 months.
I recommend that you get one of the three reports every four months so that over the course of the year, you see all three reports, but are monitoring your information once every four months.
You can begin the process at www.annualcreditreport.com.
Be fair-warned, though, while the reports are free, you’ll have to pay about $6 to actually see your credit score.
The good news is, though, you can dispute the inaccuracies that you find right then and there online.
Be sure to call your creditor yourself to dispute as well...don’t rely on the credit reporting bureau to do it all on their own.
