Intent to Kill

Alrighty then.

I saw an article about it several years ago.

Meanwhile, at the risk of being incredibly rude--

By the time we had arrived at the crash site in High Salvington, the swastikas on the upright of the Heinkel’s tail had already been hacked away, and the contrast of these comparatively clean cuts against the surface punctured by sweeping perforations of machine-gun spray made them appear tidy; almost surgically precise. Throughout the two-hour drive, I had imagined myself counting the bullet holes. That there could be over four hundred of them seemed incredible. Now that I saw those holes, I realized that four hundred was actually a very conservative estimate. I had expected the downed German bomber to look like swiss cheese, but it was more like a cheese grater. There were not a few random holes distributed casually, but repeated maniacal patterns of countless shots fired from all directions. A Home Guard volunteer, with a sidelong swing of his arm, indicated where the lorry was to be parked. With that same arm in a continued flow of motion, he summoned workers, busy nearby, to the Heinkel. I would have only a few minutes to examine it before its decimation, savagely begun, would be properly and rationally finished. German bombers are surprisingly small. I was able to jump onto a wing, then lean over the edge of the upper gun canopy mount. The canopy and gun had already been taken away. Between a structural member and the sheet metal of the outer surface, I saw the corner of a torn away photograph, still wedged in place. Penciled in German script, I could read the words, “Wiedersehen. Muti.” Pushing with my toes and stretching to reach this, I saw the rest of the photograph, still in shadow, on the floor. What I saw in the darkness beside it was puzzling. I seemed to be looking at a pan of chocolate-covered peanuts poured into a single slab. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I noticed a dirty Hitler Youth knife on the floor, and saw the sparkling claw of an open-end wrench wrapped in a filthy scarf. In another moment, confusion succumbed to stark clarity. This was a tourniquet. Averting my eyes, wishing to avoid the obvious inference, I saw the chocolate-covered peanuts again, more clearly than I had before, and understood that I was looking at spent shell casings partially submerged in dried blood, which had pooled in the small, rectangular recess beneath the gunner’s position, where he stood while firing his gun. The blood had been deep enough to cover, for more than half their length, any of these thirty-caliber shell casings that had fallen upright into that recess. I could now see that the shadow covering the photograph of the gunner’s mother was dried blood that had soaked through it, and glued it in place at the edge of a large, distended smear that marked where the gunner had fallen after losing his first three pints. I could see smaller hardened rivulets streaming out from the larger stains, where his filled, dripping boots had gushed as they dragged along behind him for the short distance he had crawled before another man, also wounded, had attempted to help him. The Hitler Youth knife wasn’t dirty, but encrusted, and that scarf was a torn strip of a trouser leg, hastily cut at one end and saturated with the blood it had been too late to stop. There were dried trails of brown in crazed rings silently testifying to the frenzied efforts of a few desperate seconds and encircling the silhouettes of two flight jackets at rest, etched in a wet fresco on the floor of the Heinkel. In these splashed drippings and blotted spatters of their own blood, I could see where two cold and frightened “Eagles over England” had died in one another’s arms.

If you're an actual German,
and don't mind my asking,
is "Wiedersehen, Muti" the sort of thing his mother would have written?

I am an American student of German and German history, but I do speak German. It is close, but "Mutti" has two t's. And yes a mother could write that. "(Auf) Wiedersehen, Mutti" means "Until I see you again, Mommy."

That aside, at this point I really don't understand what it is we're discussing and its relevance to the OT, so I'm going to bow out of this one. However, thank you for the reminder of the subject of WWII German POWs. I've read a bit on the subject but mostly from the German POV and not from the American.

Thank you. I guessed right, but spelled wrong.
(I flunked German twice before giving up on it.)

We weren't discussing it, actually,
and it was entirely off topic.
I was being rude.

That's a passage from a novel I've been writing for, umm,
two years now, I guess. A war correspondant from Nebraska
in London 1940-5. It comes just before the blitz begins,
and I added it because I had written so much about bombs and mayhem
and life and death in London,
and I thought it would be good for a reader to first have that image
--a guy holding a photograph of his mom and bleeding to death--
fixed clearly in their mind.

So, yeah, if not off topic,
then rather oblique and tangential.