A Higher Call

Adam Makos, “A Higher Call: True Story of Combat and Chivalry In WWII”, Penguin Group (2012) 382 pp.

(This below summary taken from Amazon book section—I’m too lazy to do my own this time).  This book is a good read for WWII fanatics.  It is especially good at giving the German perspective of the air battles.  Both Charlie , the American, and Franz, the German, have now died).  

Four days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail—a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber in the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.

 This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day—the American—2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the German—2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.

 A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies’ planes, flak bursts so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of 1,000 bombers each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack.

 Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one another. What happened between them, the American 8th Air Force would later classify as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could never mention or else face a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for one another, a last mission that could change. 

 My Notes:

Pg. 16:  Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.  (I believe the submariner survival statistics are even worse)

Pg. 50:  To be a Nazi in the German Air Force, one needed to have joined The Nazi Party veofre enlisting or being drafted.  Once a man joined the Air Force, the German Defense Law of 1938 forbid him from Party membership.  Therefore a Nazi fighter pilot was a rarity.  Franz was not a Nazi.

Pg. 153:  On October 14, 1943 the 8^th Air Force had lost sixty bombers—six hundred men—in one raid over Schweinfurt, Germany.