Wichita ? They had been enemies once, a long time ago. But as Horst Petzschler talked about what it was like to be a pilot in Germany’s Luftwaffe during World War II, the gray-haired men in the Distinguished Flying Cross Society looked on recently with respect, not hatred.

Petzschler flew in 297 combat missions, shooting down 26 planes — four of them American, the rest Russian — before Germany surrendered in May 1945.

He remembered one mission late in the war when the sky seemed to be filled to the horizon with American bombers and fighter planes.

“That broke my spirit,” Petzschler told his captivated audience in heavily accented English. “I could have shot down more planes, but what difference would it have made?”

Opposite sides of the fight

As Petzschler spoke, one member of the society after another dug out their mission records to see if they had been on opposite sides of the same battles.

Michael Barbara flew 30 missions in a B-17. On almost half of them, Petzschler was attacking the formation in a Messerschmitt 109.

“Just think,” Barbara’s son, also named Michael, said quietly as he listened from the back of the room. “If he had shot down my dad’s plane, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Al Murphy pulled out a pen and a slip of paper and did some quick math. Each B-17 “Flying Fortress” had 13 .50-caliber machine guns, and they flew in formations of four squadrons of seven planes each. That meant a German fighter attacking a formation was taking on as many as 336 guns.

Irl Mitchell, left, swaps war stories with former German Luftwaffe pilot Horst Petzschler Sept. 22 in Wichita. Petzschler spoke to members of the Wichita chapter of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

“It took a lot of courage to go up against that,” Murphy said.

At the height of the air war over Europe, society members said, it was nothing for the Allies to lose 1,000 men a month.

Comparing tactics

New Luftwaffe pilots could measure their life expectancy in days, Petzschler said, and not need a second hand to do it.

In at least one respect, Petzschler said, the opposing sides shared a common threat: the Germans’ legendary 88 mm antiaircraft guns.

“They didn’t give a damn who was up there,” he said. “They just fired.”

The old warriors couldn’t resist comparing tactics.

Did the aluminum foil chaff that American bombers dumped to disrupt German radar and antiaircraft guns actually work?

For a couple of days, Petzschler said, until German engineers adjusted their equipment and rendered the chaff harmless. But that was long enough to allow the Americans to reduce Hamburg to rubble.

Did bombing airfields make a difference?

Not really, Petzschler said, because the Germans simply began hiding their planes in the forests and using the Autobahn to take off and land. That was particularly important for the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters that were developed late in the war and were most vulnerable on takeoffs and landings.

Despite routinely being out-numbered in the skies, and being downed 13 times, Petzschler said, he never reached the point where he thought Germany would lose the war.

“Never,” he insisted. “When I saw the 262, I had the hope to the last.”

Working in Wichita

As the Russians closed in, however, his missions would last as short as eight minutes. Only days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Petzschler was ordered to fly his fighter to Denmark so he could surrender to the Allies.

He made it to Sweden before he had to land his damaged plane. Soviet ruler Josef Stalin demanded and received the transfer of enemy soldiers, and Petzschler spent more than three years in a work camp. By the time he was released, he said, he was little more than a skeleton.

He emigrated to Canada, where he found work as an auto mechanic, then moved to California and later Wichita to work in the aircraft industry. He would eventually work on cargo planes, 747 commercial planes, even B-1 bombers.

Comparing his mission logs to Petzschler’s, B-17 crew member Bennie Jefferies concluded that they had faced off at least twice over Europe. But he bears no animosity toward his old German foe.

“He was shooting at airplanes, not people,” Jefferies said. “We were bombing their industry, not their people.”

Bonded by combat

Al Lopez said he and Petzschler were bonded by the common experience of war.

“Combat,” Lopez said, “is combat.”

Sixty years ago, Sgt. Horst Petzschler and Tech. Sgt. Mike Barbara were each doing their duty for their country, and Barbara was well aware of the irony.

“He was trying to shoot you down, and now he’s sitting here and you’re in awe,” Barbara said. “Looking back at what we went through, it’s amazing that we survived it.”