A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

by Adam Makos

  In reality, the Austrians and Czechs had no choice. Germany had been militarily rebuilt and seemed unstoppable. And the “Polish troops” who had raided the German radio station were actually German commandos wearing Polish uniforms. Hitler had ordered this. He wanted a war of expansion, and he lied to his own people to get it. What neither Franz nor any of the cadets could fathom was that Hitler had knowingly picked a fight with much of the rest of Europe, dragging Germany into a repeat of their fathers’ war. Britain and France had pledged that if Poland was ever attacked their empires would fight on the Polish side. Hitler attacked Poland anyway. His gamble would eventually cost the lives of more than 4 million German soldiers and more than a million civilians. World War II had officially begun.

  ONE YEAR LATER, MID-OCTOBER 1940

  Franz worked alone at his desk in an empty classroom. His instructors were out, each training students for war. German troops now occupied all of Europe from Poland to France and had beaten the English back to their island. The “Battle of Britain,” as the British called it, was over. The battle had taken place late that summer when the Germans had tried to destroy the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in the sky and to bomb their airfields on the ground. But before the German Air Force could succeed, a grievous mistake shook their focus. During a night raid, a German bomber mistakenly missed its target, an oil depot east of London, and bombed several homes on London’s East End neighborhood. Hitler had given orders that British cities were not to be bombed. But a week later, another German bomber hit homes again. In response, the British sent bombers to attack Berlin, a raid that also missed its military targets and bombed the city’s civilians. In a speech Hitler warned the British to stop their attacks on German cities, but it was too late—both sides had stepped over the line. Cities and civilians soon became fair game.

  From then on, both sides bombed each other’s cities at night and called one another “terror bombers.” Franz knew August was on the front lines, flying a Ju-88 bomber, a fast, twin-engine plane with a four man crew. August and his crew had been assigned to Squadron KG-806 and were based in Caen, France, from where they bombed England at night. At first their targets were airfields and docks. Then they were ordered to bomb cities. Franz knew August would not have liked this, but would have had no choice.

  Franz looked up in surprise when he heard the door to his classroom open slowly. The cadets usually kicked it open in glee after a mission. Franz saw Father Josef standing in the doorway. The priest was dressed in civilian attire but still wore his large wooden cross. Franz moved toward him, his heart racing. Then he stopped. Father Josef was not smiling.

  “Sit down, Franz,” he said.

  Franz stayed standing, his feet frozen. Father Josef was his father’s best friend. Franz assumed something must have happened to his father.

  The priest’s eyes welled with tears.

  Franz’s legs became wobbly, as if his body knew the answer even before his mind made the suggestion. Father Josef rushed to him and guided him into a seat among the many empty desks.

  “August is with God,” he said.

  FRANZ WOULD NOT allow Father Josef to provide him with any details until the following day, when he was able to control his emotions. Father Josef told Franz that August had crashed on takeoff for a night mission to London several days prior on October 10. August and his entire crew had been killed. The reason for the crash was unknown. It had happened at night and all witnesses saw was a flash.

  There would be no funeral. August was already buried in Caen, France. Father Josef gave Franz a letter written by August’s commanding officer that said that August had died “a hero.” Franz tossed the letter aside.

  Franz blamed himself for August’s crash. He had trained him. What could I have missed?

  He blamed the people who had built August’s plane. Had they made a mistake?

  He blamed the war. He had believed what Hitler said, that Germany had attacked Poland in self-defense. Franz blamed the British. In his mind, they had turned a war between two countries into a world war. August had been flying at night, from grass airfields, in dangerous conditions because of them. Franz’s grief chilled into hate.

  Before he could leave to go home and console his parents, Franz reported to the general. The general offered Franz his plane, but Franz refused so that he could ride back with Father Josef. Franz thanked the general for being good to him but said he was resigning. The general appeared shocked. Franz was his best instructor. The general reminded Franz that he could take as much time away as he needed. When he came back, he would always have an instructor job—far from the war.

  “Promise me you’ll think about it,” the general told Franz as he walked out the door.

  But the more Franz thought about it, the more he knew exactly what he wanted.

  * * *

  * “You didn’t decide when you became Air Force,” Franz would remember. “They decided for you.”

  * August had qualified for officer status, unlike Franz, who had not finished his university degree and would have to climb the ranks. The German Air Force was not as rank conscious as other air forces, so even low-ranking airmen and corporals could be fighter pilots.

  * “I had called his girlfriend, his fiancée, and told her, ‘We’re coming home,’” Franz would remember.

  * The German civilians weren’t the only ones misled about the camps. In a 1937 speech to the German Army, SS leader Heinrich Himmler told them how the prisoners were treated, “The training of men is carried out in these camps in an orderly way. They live in clean huts. Only Germans are capable of such an accomplishment. No other nation would be as humane. Clothes are changed frequently. The men are trained to wash twice a day and to use a toothbrush—something which the majority have never known before.”1 A later chapter will discuss when and how Franz would learn the truth about what was really happening in the camps.

  † Franz would remember, “Being Catholic and a well educated family, we just did not buy into the propaganda. My family was anti-Nazi from the early days. I must admit that I was also very indifferent, and thought it was all bullshit to be honest.”2

  4

  FIRE FREE

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER, APRIL 7, 1942, THE LIBYAN COASTLINE

  LOW AND FAST, the twelve tan Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighters blasted over the white beaches of Libya. Climbing over the sea cliffs, the fighters soared above the ruins and Hellenic columns of the ancient Greek city of Appolonia. One 109, far back in formation, flew at an odd angle, banking, one wingtip pointed to earth.

  “Stigler, straighten up!” barked the flight leader, Lieutenant Werner Schroer, across the radio. Franz righted his 109, the hottest German fighter of the day. The machine’s body was sleek except for an air filter that jutted from the side of the nose.

  Franz had not been so happy in ages. He watched over his shoulder as the ruins faded behind his tail. During his Lufthansa days, he had loved to explore the old world’s ancient cities.

  “Buy a postcard,” Schroer radioed Franz. The pilots were all rookies except for Schroer, who had flown in the desert already for a year. Schroer had four “kills,” or enemy aircraft destroyed, to his name.

  Franz was now a sergeant and a full-fledged fighter pilot, having graduated from boot camp and fighter school with a promotion. With more than four thousand hours of flight time under his belt, he could have flown transports or air sea rescue planes, or he could have stayed an instructor forever. But he had chosen fighters and asked to be transferred to a war theater. It was no secret why. He wanted revenge.

  A few days earlier, he had taken possession of his warhorse from the factory in Munich where it had been built. He found it there, waiting on a ramp, already painted in its desert camouflage color scheme, with its white spinner, tan body, and belly the color of a blue robin’s egg. The 109 was a new F-model, nicknamed the “Friedrich,” the fastest 109 to date. The fighter wore no identification numbers on its flanks—Franz was told they would be assi
gned when he reached his squadron. On its fuselage and wings it bore the large black cross with white outline, the mark of the German Air Force.

  Schroer had met Franz and the other rookies after they had flown to Sicily, the island at the toe of the Italian boot. From Sicily he had led them across the Mediterranean to Africa. From Tunisia, Schroer swung east, and the pilots flew along the coast.

  Having passed Appolonia, Franz saw the “Green Mountains,” the Al Jabal al Akhdar range, appear below him. The mountains were a lush anomaly in craggy northern Libya. The flight motored over the ancient Islamic city of Derna, where the sun lit the forty-two minarets of the city’s mosque. Turning south, Schroer steered the flight into the dry desert, with its rocks, scrub brush, and gullies.

  When Franz first saw the desert, he thought of the Christian knights on their crusades for the Holy Land. At fighter school the old instructors, themselves WWI aces, had told Franz and the other rookies that the black cross on their planes’ wings and fuselage was an homage to the German Teutonic Knights, whose white shields bore a black cross. “You are their descendants,” they told the students. The old WWI pilots were themselves called “the old knights” and they talked of their code. It was unwritten and unspoken. It could only be witnessed and embodied. It was a battle code of honor and chivalry. When Franz arrived in the desert, he thought their stories were just the whimsical ideals of old veterans. But there, above the sands, he would learn otherwise.

  AHEAD, ON THE white horizon, Franz saw the tan tent peaks of Martuba Airfield, his new home. Entering the traffic pattern to land, Franz was aghast—Martuba looked like a sprawling, isolated campsite. It had countless center-pitched tents in clusters, like villages, no hangars, and just a small whitewashed control tower. A handful of mud-brick blast pens housed fighters along the flight line, but most of the planes sat naked on the sand, baking in the sun.

  Following Schroer down, Franz landed on Martuba’s sun-bleached runway, with its scars visible from bombings. Taxiing, Franz found his canopy surrounded by blowing sand kicked up from his plane’s Daimler-Benz motor. He stopped when a shirtless ground crewman approached through the swirling whiteout. The crewman climbed up onto his right wing and sat on the wingtip. The crewman motioned and pointed for Franz to pull ahead. With hand signals, he guided Franz to park alongside the other new arrivals. Franz shut down his engine, unbuckled his seat belt, and hauled himself from the cockpit. He slid off the wing, his hands stinging from its hot metal. A darkly tanned crewman took Franz’s parachute. Franz stretched to work out the kinks. He removed his leather jacket and felt the blazing African sun. Around him, other fighters on the flight line had victory marks on their rudders, white, vertical bars, one for each aerial kill. Franz studied the hash marks. It took five to make an ace. Some of the planes around him had four times that.

  Schroer approached Franz. His face was V-shaped and serious, but his eyes were friendly and shy. When he removed his cap to wipe his brow, he revealed that he was balding and looked old for being a young man. He seemed unbothered by the sun, while Franz squinted. Schroer could see Franz’s wheels turning and told him it had once taken the “magic 20” victories to earn the Knight’s Cross, but now the benchmark was higher, at least thirty victories, thanks to the fighter pilots on the Eastern Front whose high scoring against easy opponents was spoiling everyone else’s dreams. Franz knew the Knight’s Cross was Germany’s preeminent award for valor, a medal worn around the neck, inspired by the ancient Teutonic Knights.

  Schroer told Franz it was time to check into the war. He walked to the control tower, where a few kubelwagens—the German equivalent of jeeps—were parked. Franz grabbed his duffel from the storage compartment in his plane’s fuselage and followed. The tower, Franz would learn, was only for administration. The real ground-to-air coordination happened in an underground bunker next door. Hidden by dirt and marked only by the hum of a generator, Franz saw aircrew and orderlies emerge from the bunker and shield their eyes against the sunlight. This was the headquarters of Fighter Wing 27 (Jagdgeschwader 27 or “JG-27”), the legendary “Desert Wing” romanticized in the newsreels. JG-27 had just 120 pilots at full strength. They were the primary fighter force in Africa and served a strategic mission. The Germans wanted to take the Suez Canal in Egypt away from the British. Whoever controlled the canal controlled one of only two waterways into the Mediterranean. The fighting in North Africa had already been raging for a year. It was a pushing contest. The Germans would push the British one or two hundred miles back toward the canal, into sandy Egypt, then the British would push the Germans back the same distance into craggy Libya. The mission facing JG-27 was daunting. They were to keep the skies clear over the German Army known as the Afrika Korps. Opposing JG-27 was the Desert Air Force, a mixed unit of English squadrons and those from all nations of the British crown. The Desert Air Force outnumbered the pilots of JG-27 five to one.

  Franz entered the tower. The narrow room was fitted with wooden benches. High ceilings were held in place by thick beams. Hanging on the wall was a panel of yellow metal cut from a downed British fighter. Painted on the metal was the plane’s nose art—a blue shield with a curved scimitar. Franz joined the other rookies in a line, at attention, when three officers entered and stood before them to announce the new pilots’ assignments. The officers wore loose tan shirts and baggy green pants. Under their arms they tucked their white crush caps, like those worn by U-boat captains. One officer, a captain, had groomed his black beard into a sharp goatee. He was Captain Ernst Maak. Franz had never seen facial hair on an officer in Germany. He saw only sternness in Maak’s face. The captain barked some names from his list, and the pilots called stepped forward. Maak told the pilots that they now belonged to Squadron 2. The room turned silent.

  Maak singled out one of his new pilots, an airman named Helmut Beckmann, and began to address him in a loud, sarcastic voice. “Did you manage to deliver your plane undamaged?”

  “Yes sir,” Beckmann said.

  “Did you land on your wheels or crash on your belly?”

  “We did not encounter the enemy,” Beckmann said wisely. Franz found himself hoping Maak did not call on him.

  “Are you politically inclined?”

  “I was in the air force HJ [Hitler Youth], sir!” Beckmann said.

  “I’m not interested in that,” Maak said. “I’m asking if you are a member of The Party?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Another big plus for you!” Maak smiled. “Keep it up and you’ll do just fine.”1

  “Stigler?” a first lieutenant said calmly, looking around. Shorter and slighter than Maak, the officer seemed serenely confident. He had thick black hair, slicked back, and a square, boyish face. His narrow eyes beamed a sensitive, concerned look. The Knight’s Cross dangled from his neck, over the open collar of his crumpled tan shirt. Franz took one look at the thick, black cross as it hung from a red-and-white ribbon and decided that he, too, would one day wear the Cross. Franz clicked his heels and began to salute but stopped when the lieutenant thrust forward an outstretched hand and said, “Welcome to Squadron 4. Follow me.”

  Franz grinned. He shouldered his bag, relieved that he was not stuck with Maak. Leaning against the door frame, Schroer wished Franz luck.

  Outside the shed, the officer flopped his faded white cap on his head. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Gustav Roedel. Franz would learn that Roedel was from Merseburg in Eastern Germany, near Poland. They were the same age. Franz joined Roedel in his kubelwagen for a tour of the base. An enlisted man drove while Roedel explained to Franz that three months earlier the airfield had been owned by the British, before the “Desert Fox” took it back for the Germans. Franz knew the “Desert Fox” was General Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Afrika Korps.

  “Can I ask a strange question, Lieutenant?” Franz said.

  Roedel nodded.

  “What was Maak getting at by asking that pilot if he was a Party member?”

  “Neve
r heard someone in uniform speak so brazenly, huh?” Roedel said.

  Franz nodded. Roedel explained the rumors that had floated since the Battle of Britain that The Party was going to send “political officers” to infiltrate Air Force squadrons to look for dissention. “Maak hates the thought of that, as we all do,” Roedel said. “Let me ask you this—are you a Party member, Stigler?”

  “No,” Franz said. “I don’t need a politician to make me go to war.”

  Roedel smiled and nodded.

  Roedel, Maak, and the others knew that any fighter pilot who was a Party member was a rarity and, most likely, a fanatic. To be a Nazi in the German Air Force, one needed to have joined The Party before enlisting or being drafted, usually at a very young age. Once a man joined the Air Force, the German Defense Law of 1938 forbid him from Party membership.* German civilians could join The Party at any time, as could the SS and the Gestapo. But in the German Air Force, a Nazi fighter pilot was a rarity. It was Roedel’s philosophy, like Maak’s, to spot such pilots right away, and to keep an eye on them.

  When Roedel’s driver passed a group of 109s whose cowlings sported leopard heads and the faces of spooked natives surrounded by the outline of Africa, Roedel indicated to Franz that the planes belonged to Squadron 3, home to Germany’s most famous pilot of the time—Lieutenant Hans-Joachim Marseille, the twenty-two-year-old ace known as the “virtuoso of all fighter pilots.” He had already destroyed more than fifty enemy planes.