Nungesser appears to have been quite a "geezer"! Un sacré mec! He was obviously unpopular enough for one of the opposing German squadrons to challenge him to single combat and then ambush him mob-handed when he took off to meet his challenger. That, as the British would say, was not exactly cricket. And to cap it all, it seems, Nungesser shot two of them down that day. He doesn't seem to have been squeamish about killing. I just read about the episode that earned him a Médaille Militaire. Stops a German staff car when in a French mounted unit on a patrol or something and shoots the occupants. Note the wording. They have presumably been stopped by the French cavalrymen and are then shot, before Nungesser & Co appropriate the motorcar and escape back to French territory. Maybe I am reading too much into it but was Nungesser the sort of fellow to strafe a downed pilot? Was he one of war's instinctive realists, immune to romantic notions of chivalry? Was he, basically, a bit of an oik who didn't play the game? If so, that would get Fat Hermann's goat, Hermann being a paid-up member of "The Club".
Maybe this merits a thread of its own? Social attitudes of the era and how they bore on events...
PK
Allied war cemetaries in france in WWII
Taken from Wikipedia this just mentions the memorial at Vimy. OK, we all know what Wiki is worth 
but at least there is something out there about WWI memorials being protected by Germans. Wonder if this also applied to other memorials than Vimy?
Also wondering if the defacement (if it happened at all!) was something ordered by (junior?) officers or just a bunch of enlisted twenty yearolds getting over enthusiastic in their victoryrush?
but at least there is something out there about WWI memorials being protected by Germans. Wonder if this also applied to other memorials than Vimy?Also wondering if the defacement (if it happened at all!) was something ordered by (junior?) officers or just a bunch of enlisted twenty yearolds getting over enthusiastic in their victoryrush?
And.......since Hitler visited the memorial on june 2 1940 ,three weeks before the armistice, would those "special units of the Waffen-SS" beenassigned to protect the memorial from that day on or were they only there after the fighting ended?On June 2, 1940, as his armies were conquering France, Hitler personally toured the Vimy Memorial and its preserved trenches. Hitler had been twice decorated for bravery as an infantryman during the Great War and saw combat in the general vicinity of Vimy, often against Commonwealth soldiers in similar trenches. While the German leader had no qualms about destroying culturally significant locations in France including many French war monuments which were torn down by the Nazis, the Vimy memorial carried no messages of Allied triumph over Germany. So it was protected by Hitler, who assigned special units of the Waffen SS to guard the monument from defacement by regular German Wehrmacht soldiers.[8] University of Ottawa historian Serge Durflinger[1] notes that "Hitler admires it immensely, he says so at the time. As a result, the Germans respect[ed] the memorial all through the war."[9]
The Germans certainly did deface and/or destroy Allied memorials from WWI but, as i have said, it was usually due to what they perceived as insulting inscriptions (how would you like to have your fallen comrades called brutes or a barbarians?). I'm not making this up. Many guide books to WWI battlefields do mention 'destroyed by German forces in 1940 and re-built after the war.' One intriguing example...The memorial of the 1918 raid at Zeebrugge was dynamited in 1942 and damaged parts of the original can still be seen on the rebuilt version. But why destroy it in 1942?
Hitler...there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in ONE afternoon! TWO coats!! Mel Brooks, The Producers