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

by Adam Makos

  “You’ve heard stories of him?” Roedel said.

  Franz nodded. He had read everything he could about “The Star of Africa,” as the newspapers called Marseille.

  Roedel told Franz the whispers of Marseille’s free-spirited rebelliousness were true. Once, as a joke, Marseille ran over Schroer’s tent with his kubelwagen. Another time, when passed up for a promotion, he strafed the tent area of his squadron leader. And he had crashed more than one plane into the desert by flying on the edge.

  “But despite all the trouble he creates for his commanders,” Roedel said, “he is simply too good to ground.”

  The driver slowed the vehicle to a stop in front of a 109 marked like those around it, with a red and white crest on its cowling. Roedel told Franz that these were the planes of their unit, II Group. The crest on each plane was the logo of the city of Berlin, the unit’s home city. The crest was white with a red outline and in the center was a painted black bear, standing, with its tongue lapping. Roedel explained that there were three squadrons in II Group. There was his squadron—Squadron 4—as well as Squadron 5 and Squadron 6. Behind the planes, Franz saw their squadron’s headquarters—a wooden shack, several large tents, and a flagpole where a flag hung limply.

  Roedel opened a small door and exited the car, indicating for Franz to remain seated. He told the driver to help Franz get situated in his new home. Roedel walked to his 109, a fighter with a yellow number 4 painted on its flanks. Franz noticed that Roedel’s fighter wore no victory marks on its tail. With Roedel strapping in and out of earshot, Franz asked the driver, incredulous, how Roedel could wear the Knight’s Cross but not be an ace. The driver grinned at the chance to put another rookie in his place. He told Franz that Roedel had thirty-seven victories, some gained in Spain during their civil war, some in Poland, some in Greece, some over the Soviet Union, and the rest in the desert, including one the day before.

  “He’s one of our best,” the driver said. “He just chooses not to flaunt it.”

  The driver clunked the kubelwagen into gear and pulled away. In the backseat, Franz suddenly felt very stupid.

  TWO DAYS LATER, APRIL 9, 1942

  The sand-caked tent rustled under a blast of frigid night air. Inside the tent, Franz lay on his cot, awakened by the flapping canvas. He fished for his cigarette lighter, flicked it to life, and read his wristwatch by the dull glow of the flame. It was 4 A.M. He huddled back under his blanket, shivering.

  The desert was bitterly cold until the sun arose. Franz remembered that he was due on the flight line at 6 A.M. for his first mission, having flown an orientation flight at the same time the day before. The aces of JG-27 liked to break in the rookies quickly, and Franz preferred this to sitting around.

  Quickly he rose and donned his tan desert regulation shirt and black leather flying jacket. Showers were only permitted every few days, as water was precious, so Franz knew not to bother. He stepped into heavy, pale blue flying trousers with on each thigh a large map pocket that extended below his kneecap. He shook out his thick, black leather flying boots to check for scorpions, but only sand poured out. He zipped up his boots and grabbed his rosary from a wooden crate that served as his nightstand. His mother had given Franz the rosary after his confirmation. A silver crucifix dangled from the necklace of small, rectangular black beads. Franz slid his rosary into his jacket’s pocket, over his heart, and slipped out of his tent.

  In the predawn darkness he wandered through the spartan tent city that was JG-27’s desert home. All the tents looked alike. Locating the mess tent at last, Franz ducked inside the flaps and felt the immediate warmth of oil stoves and lively conversation as a handful of pilots ate oatmeal and drank hot coffee. Roedel sipped his coffee in the tent corner while reviewing a battle map. Each squadron sat together like a team. At full strength, a squadron mustered sixteen pilots and planes, but quantities of each were always short due to losses. The pilots’ morale remained high, however—they thought they could still win the war.

  After slopping his plate full of oatmeal and toast on the chow line, Franz sat down, his mess tin before him. After one bite he was taken aback. His oatmeal tasted like dirt. His coffee tasted like sulfur. The cooks had used the usual brown water to make both.

  JG-27 had many Bavarians and Austrians among its pilots, so, like citizens of the same state, Franz found he could make small talk with them. Many of them had been in Africa for a year already. One of the veterans told Franz the standing joke.

  “A captured Tommy pilot asked his German captor, ‘What do you want with Africa, anyway?’ The German replied, ‘The same thing you do!’ Upon further thought, both men shrugged, not knowing what that was.”

  The veterans roared in laughter. Franz faked a laugh. He did not understand where they were coming from, at least not yet.

  Franz had barely begun to eat when Roedel stood and announced a phrase Franz would learn to dread: “Fire Free.” It meant the men could smoke now and that the mealtime was over. Everybody left the mess hall at once. Franz was the last to pick up his dishes. He went to the buffet, where a cook was cleaning up. “Listen,” he said. “Save something for me. Otherwise I’ll starve to death here!”

  Roedel waited outside for Franz. “What are you doing suited up? You don’t fly until afternoon.”

  Franz groaned. Nervousness had made him forget that the night before Roedel had pulled him from a dawn flight and assigned him to a 2 P.M. mission. Afternoon missions were quieter and safer because it was the hottest part of the day, when few wanted to fly.

  Franz paced around the base for several hours. By mid-morning it was already a hundred degrees, but he couldn’t handle the thought of going back to his tent and simply sitting around. He kept pacing, pausing only to put a T-shirt over his face to ward off swarms of black flies. After lunch he reported to Roedel at the squadron shack and found him suited up to fly. Roedel said he would personally be taking Franz on his first mission, a “free hunt,” where the two of them would fly into enemy territory and look for trouble. Together they walked toward the flight line. In the west, the Green Mountains looked yellow under the blazing sun. Upon reaching his fighter, Franz saw that a white number 12 had been painted on its flank. Suddenly “his girl” had a name—White 12.

  Roedel sat on the tire of Franz’s plane, just in front of the wing, and told Franz to take a seat. Roedel looked at Franz as a father might look at a son. “Every single time you go up, you’ll be outnumbered,” he said.

  Franz nodded, wishing Roedel was exaggerating but knowing better.

  “Those odds may make a man want to fight dirty to survive,” Roedel said, squeezing the bunched-up leather gloves in his hands. “But let what I’m about to say to you act as a warning. Honor is everything here.”

  Franz shrugged, unsure where Roedel was going with the talk. “What will you do, Stigler, for instance, if you find your enemy floating in a parachute?”

  “I guess I’ve never thought that far ahead yet,” Franz said.

  “If I ever see or hear of you shooting at a man in a parachute,” Roedel said, “I will shoot you down myself.”

  The words stung.*

  “You follow the rules of war for you, not for your enemy,” Roedel said. “You fight by rules to keep your humanity.” Roedel slapped a glove against his palm. “Stick close and we’ll come home together.” He hopped from the tire. The lesson was over.

  A ground crewman helped Franz strap into his parachute that sat on his seat in the cockpit. Shutting the square, glass canopy hood, Franz felt a new sense of dread, as if he had shut his own coffin. Franz pushed the throttle forward and fired a thumbs-up to two ground crewmen, who spun the engine crank. The engine sputtered. The plane belched a snort of white smoke. The propeller began spinning.

  HEIGHT MEANT EVERYTHING to a fighter pilot in the desert. There were few clouds to block the sun, so anytime his opponent looked up, he was blinded. Franz wore sunglasses but still held a hand over his eyes, against his flight helmet, a
s he flew off Roedel’s left wing.

  Roedel’s plane bumped in turbulence. The Berlin Bear on its nose seeming to dance. Franz looked out over the desert beneath his wings. The ground alternated in shades of brown and tan that indicated gullies and rocky promontories. To the north lay the scrubby green coastal hills and beyond that the pale blue Mediterranean Sea.

  The Desert Air Force’s American-built Curtiss P-40 fighters usually motored along at eighteen thousand feet, so Roedel led Franz higher, to twenty-five thousand feet, meandering between favorite hunting spots. Franz followed Roedel. Both pilots scanned the brown earth for the enemy aircraft’s reddish-tan wings. They flew over the main battlefront, marked only by smoke wisps from exploding artillery shells. The line ran southward from the ocean into the desert.

  As they motored east, Roedel’s voice crackled over the radio. He pointed out the British port of Tobruk to the north. Franz saw the flat, white city nestled around the ocean in the hazy distance. Tobruk was the strategic prize of North Africa, a door from which supplies and fuel could flow from the sea to the front lines.

  “Indians, twelve o’clock low,” Roedel said, the code words for having spotted the enemy. Franz saw four Curtiss fighters below, gently weaving left and right in lazy S patterns as they flew on a reconnaissance mission toward the German lines. Desert Air Force planes were most likely flown by English or South African pilots, but the force also contained Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Scots, Irishmen, Free Poles, Free French, and even American volunteers. From far above, Franz could see the P-40s’ sharp red spinners and painted shark teeth with beady eyes, a frightening war paint the American “Flying Tigers” in China had borrowed from the Desert Air Force. Franz saw the red, yellow, and blue concentric circles on their wings that brazenly marked them as his foe.

  Roedel radioed Franz and told him he was attacking and to “stay close.” He peeled off and dove toward the enemy. Franz followed, his heart racing. His task was “dive, hit, climb, repeat.” This was the fighting style of the 109, a plane that could not turn with its enemies in spiral dogfights, but could outrun and outclimb most of them.

  Seven thousand feet below, the P-40 pilots spotted the diving 109s. Franz saw the pack of P-40s break formation and peel wildly upward, aiming their shark mouths directly at him and Roedel. One thousand feet passed by in a split second. The needle in Franz’s altimeter whipped counterclockwise, 22,000 feet, 20,000, 18,000.

  Roedel’s plane obscured half of Franz’s windshield as he flew just ahead of him. The P-40s seemed to swell as they climbed on their collision course. Franz had been told that going nose-to-nose with a P-40 was a fatal mistake because each carried six, heavy .50-caliber machine guns, more potent firepower than the 109’s two machine guns and single heavy cannon that fired from its nose. But Roedel seemed to know otherwise.

  Roedel fired first. Flames spit from the nose of his fighter. His cannon’s roar startled Franz. The P-40s’ wings twinkled in reply. Franz knew that a combined twenty-four guns were now firing at him. He squeezed off a terrified, blind burst. In training, he had shot at fabric targets towed by biplanes but never while diving toward the earth with the target racing up at him. Roedel’s shell casings whipped by his windshield like a rain of brass nails. A P-40 burst into flames. Flaming tracers from the P-40s whipped around Franz’s canopy. He swore they were about to collide.

  Franz could take it no more. He panicked. Hauling back on the stick, he pulled his fighter into a screaming climb, up and away from the onrushing enemy.

  Aiming his plane’s nose toward the blue, he ran for the heavens. Franz tucked his neck into his shoulders, bracing for the thud of lead on his armored headrest, but no bullets followed. “Horrido!” Roedel shouted over the radio. Franz knew this battle cry meant he had shot down an enemy plane and wanted Franz to visually verify its destruction. But Franz was too far away and unable to see a thing.

  Franz felt sick. His shoulder straps, the 109’s cramped cockpit, his heavy leather jacket, and the sun’s blazing rays all seemed to squeeze him. Lifting his neck from his shoulders to look backward, he saw a sight that allowed him to breathe again. The P-40s had not followed him. Instead, they orbited in a defensive circle a mile beneath him, covering one another’s tails, expecting a dogfight that was not to be.

  As Franz leveled off, a new wave of sickness struck his stomach. He realized he had abandoned his wingman. Worse, his wingman was his leader. Even worse, now he was alone and disoriented, easy prey should the enemy come across him. The fight had ended in mere minutes, as they did in the desert. Franz turned White 12 in the direction of Martuba. Relying on the ocean as his northern compass point and the sun as his southern point, Franz reasoned that his base lay somewhere in the middle of the horizon.

  The sun cooked him through the cockpit glass. He strained his eyes and felt his head grow heavy from shame. Franz shifted his weight over his parachute. He felt something wet in his seat. His first thought was that his plane had been hit and he was feeling its engine coolant. Then he touched a warm, dark patch in his crotch. He had lost control of his bladder. Franz flew until he saw the Green Mountains. Somewhere below, he knew, was home. Navigating in a land without forests or railroads or streets was a challenge Franz had never anticipated when he was teaching cadets to fly.

  “There you are,” Roedel’s voice squawked across the radio. Franz scanned the skies and grimaced when he looked over his shoulder toward the sun. That’s where Roedel came from—by habit. A pilot could live longer by always approaching from the sun.

  Roedel pulled up on Franz’s left wing, the wingman’s spot. Roedel could tell that Franz was scared by the way he flew, his plane bobbing and jittering.

  “You lead,” Roedel told Franz and gave him a heading.

  Franz preferred to follow but obeyed orders and flew onward until glints of light blinked below from the arid earth. Squinting, Franz saw small planes lined up along a desert airfield. They were home. Franz landed first and Roedel second.

  Franz shut his own engine down and remained in his cockpit, the canopy flipped open. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head against the sweat-covered leather seatback. Lifting himself from his plane, Franz saw ground crewmen approaching so he hurried away, scurrying for his tent, hoping to dodge any embarrassment at the sight of his wet pants.

  “Stigler!” Roedel shouted from behind. Franz stopped and approached Roedel, head hung, bracing for a verbal lashing. But instead, Franz was met by a grin.

  “Today was a success,” Roedel said. “You survived. You brought yourself home. And if you think about it—you’ll never be that scared again for the rest of your life.”

  “I’ll confirm your victory, sir,” Franz said, “but first I need to change my pants.”*

  Roedel laughed and slapped Franz on the shoulder “You aren’t the first one that’s happened to!”

  Franz opened the flap to his tent. A blast of heat hit his face. He flopped onto his cot, closed his eyes, and fell into an instant sleep. In the evening he went to the mess tent. He passed through the line and saw that dinner was the same as lunch—a tin of Italian beef his comrades called “Mussolini’s Ass.” Back home Franz had been picky and would tell his mother, “I’ll pass on anything that flies or swims.” Little did he know how he would come to regret those words.

  Franz sheepishly sat apart from Roedel and the others. Before every bite, he tried to swat the flies from his food. Sneaking a glimpse at the other pilots, he saw that they ate without brushing away the flies, swallowing a few with each gulp of the tough, sticky meat.

  Franz was only a few clean bites into his meal when Roedel stood and announced, “Fire Free!”

  Franz looked at Roedel, aghast, his fork frozen in midair.

  Roedel saw Franz’s wide eyes and full plate, then shouted a line he would use at every meal after that, needed or not: “Fire free—except for Stigler!”

  The other pilots laughed. A few whacked Franz on the back with friendly slaps as they depa
rted. With relief, Franz finished his dinner in solitude but knowing he was no longer alone.

  The P-40 that Roedel had downed was the only German victory in Africa that day, but the rudder of Roedel’s 109 remained unmarked.

  * * *

  * This was due to a German tradition called Überparteilichkeit, or “impartiality,” the separation of military from politics.

  * There was logic behind Roedel’s warning. When a pilot spared a defenseless enemy in a parachute, as was the unspoken practice in the Battle of Britain, if the enemy pilot returned to combat he would be more apt to repeat the gesture. It was for this same reason that the British tried to treat captured German airmen well, housing them in P.O.W. castles and manors. The Germans would write home and tell of their good treatment and hopefully the treatment of British P.O.W.s would improve in turn.

  * “Many times pilots came home, myself included, and we had to change our pants,” Franz would remember, “and not just when we were new to combat.”

  5

  THE DESERT

  AMUSEMENT PARK

  NINE DAYS LATER, APRIL 18, 1942

  THE SUN BLAZED through the canvas of Franz’s tent. His watch read just after 4 P.M. Franz lay on his cot trying to read the only book he had brought to the desert besides his Bible. It was about the lives of the Catholic saints, the heroes of the church. Sweat fell from his forehead and onto the pages. Franz mopped his brow frequently. The flies bothered him more than the heat. They buzzed around his head no matter how hard he swatted them. The more he read, the more Franz was bothered by the hypocrisy of the war he had joined, of people who believed in the same God fighting one another.

  A persistent sound outside his tent distracted Franz. I Group’s squadrons 1, 2, and 3 were throwing a party in their tent cities to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their time in the desert. Franz had no intention of going to the party, although I Group had invited all the other squadrons and anyone who served at Martuba.