Thanks, David. The B-17 has a special place in my heart. Don't know if I shared before but one Easter morning I found (next to my basket of chocolate eggs) a Monogram 1:48 B-17G. I had the paint already (olive drab and neutral grey underside, rattle cans), and I marathoned it and built the entire thing in a day. Of course it was a piece of c**p, but for me I was so proud of it. There's something about the nose and cockpit configuration of the B-17 that is just beautiful--the lines, angles, proportions. It's an amazing bird, punctuated by that childhood memory. I've been inside one (SoCal--near Palm Springs, I think), and as Louis says, it is unbelievably cramped.
Perhaps someday I'll get around to one. (A Tamiya Lanc is also a bucket list item.) For now, I'll enjoy it vicariously through you.
The story itself is one of those that call to us: ad hoc truce and compassion--even (or better, particularlyto the point of defying orders--in the midst of war. The WW1 story of the Christmas Truce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce), the story of the Angel of Marye's Heights, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rowland_Kirkland) from the American Civil War, even Paul Barber's musings about Rommel (which are nothing less than existential), as well as others that lurk in my subconscious but I fail to summon at the moment--these things bring tears to the eyes because they give us hope. The world is a horrific place, and war is less an anomaly that the erupting rash of a fever that runs in humanities blood all the time. But in the midst of that bloody conflict, we have what are the exceptions to the infection that prove the rule: human beings displaying imago Dei at the very moment they should close in for the kill. It's the spark of the divine, not showing that "people are really not so bad after all," but that in spite of human evil, the image is not yet fully distorted, and God can still have a hand.
