Polar Opposites
USMC:
While the ferorcity of the aerial battles was the same in the Pacific and Europe, the similarities ended if you found yourself a POW.
While camp conditions were harsh, the Germans generally followed the Geneva Conventions for the "civilized" conduct of war. The chivalry displayed there allows former adversaries to become friends.
However, the Japanese hadn't yet embraced a Western-mindset. Forced labor, death marches, or just shooting POWs because jailing and feeding them were an inconvenience......commonplace, whether the prisoners were flyers or not.
The Germans only used that in the concentration camps.
Here's an excerpt from Ernest Hermmingway, based on his observations of fighter pilots in the Spanish civil war of the late 1930s:
From Colliers Magazine, Aug, 1944
You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman, and there isn't any horse, not any before, nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane. The men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. A man has one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely airplane he loses it to, there is where his heart will forever be.
Politics aside, fighter pilots are usually very similar, and the brotherhood can reach across borders, language, and even idiology.