“Normally nobody, including the Germans; would shoot anyone in a parachute. It just wasn’t done. There’s no challenge in shooting a guy in a parachute for Gods sake. You can’t miss!

I came across this 109, and the sky was full of bomber chutes. Flak had gotten the bombers. It was a target area. And this son of a b*tch was going from parachute…to parachute…shooting up guys in parachutes!

Oh I got just…this was too much as far as I was concerned.

I didn’t want to blow him up. I wanted him to bail. So I was pecking away at him. Just hitting him. I was getting strikes on him. He finally pulled the canopy.

So I said, ‘Ha! You’ve met your maker, Buster!’

I damn near emptied my guns on this guy. He was minced meat by the time I got through with him. I shot him in his parachute. The other guys who weren’t there were nervous about me shooting a guy in a chute.

You just had to be there to see what I was seeing and what this guy was doing. Those guys in the chutes were helpless! A couple of bomber crews goin’ down and I uh, I just tore him up.

With 800 rounds a minute you can do a lot of damage with .50 caliber shells…from SIX guns. So that was the end of that.”
– Lieutenant Richard Peterson. US Army Air Corps. World War Two. Western Front.
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As we always say here at Battles and Beers (TM) Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told.