Сабж. Как, впрочем, и в подавляющем большинстве других случаев. Риббентоп тогда ехал на "Фольксвагене". Вот как он сам описал, что с ним произошло:
On 3 June the division held a radio communications exercise. As I had been assigned to the 2nd Battalion as an umpire, I set out to drive to the battalion. The exercise began in the evening and lasted throughout the night.
The exercise ended late in the afternoon the next day. I drove home from Evreux along the Route National. As I was dead tired, I placed my driver Schulz behind the wheel and settled in next to him in the small Volkswagen to take a nap.
I sat up suddenly when I heard the unmistakable crack of machine-gun fire. I turned around. A Spitfire raced towards us, all guns firing. He was out to get us! Instinctively, I ducked down as far as possible and shouted to Schulz: "Stop! It's a fighter-bomber!"
Just then I felt a light blow in my back and, from that moment on, I could feel nothing below my shoulder blades. 1 realized immediately that I must have suffered a spinal injury, resulting in partial paralysis. The fighter flew past and began to turn for another attack to finish us off.
I called to Schulz: "Pull me into the ditch!"
But before he could do so, the fighter was on us again. It was not only most impressive to lay on the asphalt road and see and hear the enemy's machine-gun fire pass about a meter from my head and spatter into the car and the road, but it was also a helpless feeling to face the attack while totally defenseless.
Fortunately, we were not hit again. The Volkswagen had been riddled but did not catch fire. The Spitfire turned to make a third attack. Schulz summoned all his strength and managed to drag me into the ditch just in time, and we survived the fighter's third pass.
I was bleeding from a gaping wound in my upper torso. As a hunter, I knew that I had suffered a lung wound and thought to myself: "Now it's all over!" With my entire body paralyzed and a lung wound besides, there was probably little that could be done.
After some time, however, I began to feel a prickling sensation in my toes and, after a few more minutes of suspense, full feeling and movement returned to my limbs. These were typical symptoms of a wound where the spinal column is only grazed, paralyzing the nerves for a time.
When the fighter had disappeared, we drove as fast as we could in the riddled Volkswagen to the dressing station in Le Neubourg.
