The code of the warrior Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw was Chief of Army Staff of Indian Army during 1971 war while Ahsan Malik was a captain in the Pakistan army. Ahsan was deployed to defend a hamlet in Kamalpur, on the East Pakistan border with his 140 soldiers from 31 Baluch. He and his men fought with such bravery that after the war Manekshaw asked his Pakistani counterpart to award Ahsan Malik a gallantry award for his courage and valor. He was thus awarded a Sitara-e-Jurrat. He retired from the Pakistan army in 2005 as a full colonel. Naja Aboud was an Iraqi soldier during the Iran –Iraq war. He was badly wounded during the battle for Khurramshehr when he took shelter in a bunker full of the dead and dying. An Iranian soldier, a medic by the name of Zahed Haftlang found him, while Iranian forces were killing all prisoners on sight. Zahed decided to save the man’s life – even though it meant risking his own. Then against all odds he took the wounded Iraqi to a hospital where he was operated upon and he survived. The two men separated and 18 years later the two men found themselves in a waiting room in Canada. They laughed and shouted and cried embracing each other. It was the beginning of a new relationship between the two. On 20 December 1943, when, after a successful bomb run on Bremen, Germany, pilot Charles Brown’s B-17 Flying Fortress was severely damaged by German fighters and was flying back, when Luftwaffe pilot and ace Franz Stigler spotted it and came close to the bomber to shoot it down. As the German aircraft came closer to the cockpit of the bomber, the pilot 2nd Lieutenant Charlie looked helplessly towards the German Pilot. Oberleutnant Stigler, flying the Messerschmitt could down the crippled aircraft by simply pressing a trigger but instead, Stigler decided to allow the enemy crew to fly back to their airfield in England. Although his job and even his life were at risk; he remembered the words of one of his commanding officers from the Jagdgeschwader 27, Gustav Rödel, during his time fighting in North Africa – “You are fighter pilots first, last, always. If I ever hear of any of you shooting at someone in a parachute, Ill shoot you myself. Stigler later commented, To me, it was just like they were in a parachute. I saw them and I couldnt shoot them down. The two pilots met each other 40 years later after an extensive search by Charlie Brown and the close friendship that the two developed lasted until their deaths. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel defied Hitlers order to execute captured commandos. After the capture of commandos Lt. Roy Woodridge and Lt. George Lane following Operation Fortitude, he placed them in a POW camp. When British Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Keyes was killed during a failed commando raid to kill or capture Rommel behind German lines, Rommel ordered him buried with full military honors. During Rommels time in France, Hitler ordered him to deport the countrys Jewish population; Rommel disobeyed. Several times he wrote letters protesting against the treatment of the Jews. He also refused to comply with Hitlers order to execute Jewish POWs. Waseem Altaf
Posted on: Mon, 19 May 2014 14:52:57 +0000
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