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

by Adam Makos

  Switching radio channels, Franz called the radio operator back at the air base. A female voice replied. Franz told the woman to alert Roedel’s flight that the heavies were approaching Graz from the south. A few minutes later, the female controller reported back that Roedel was near Graz and preparing to attack.

  Relieved and emboldened, Franz radioed his squadron, “Follow me!”

  In defiance of his leader, Franz throttled forward and engaged the superchargers hidden behind his fighter’s bulges.* His 109 surged. Franz felt the torque build through the stick. With his squadron behind him, Franz raced north to catch up to the heavies. Far ahead, Franz saw a swarm of 109s—Roedel and his pilots—diving and attacking the bombers. Franz wanted to cheer.

  Minutes later, Franz caught up to the B-24s. On the tops and sides of the bombers’ tails were two white circles, one containing a black number 1 and the other a black diamond, the markings of the 454th Bomb Group. Franz told his rookie wingmen to wait a few seconds then follow him. He radioed his men, “Let’s get them!” and unleashed his squadron. Breaking from flights into solo elements, they dove on their prey. Franz pulled up and over and dove toward the B-24s from an almost vertical angle.

  A screaming plummet from the heavens had become Franz’s attack method of choice against bombers. He aimed just ahead of the rearmost bomber. As his altimeter wound backward, Franz had no time to look back to see if his wingmen were there. He knew that of any attack, this eye-watering test of courage was their best chance at survival. Through his gun sight Franz saw his target from above and at its widest. He knew the bomber was also at its weakest. Only its top turret gunner could fire at him, but to shoot the gunner had to aim straight up into the sky.

  Franz’s cheeks sucked back against his oxygen mask. His fighter’s wings quivered. The 109 raced toward the earth like a bolt from the blue. Franz’s control yoke and rudder grew heavy from the terrifying speed. As Franz neared his target, time seemed to accelerate. As the bomber flew faster, its wings seemed to stretch and swell. The B-24 grew vivid in color, sharper in detail. Suddenly it filled Franz’s windscreen. Franz mashed his triggers, awakening his fighter’s machine guns and cannon. His guns belched their mechanical rage for a split second, stitching the bomber between its wings. Franz twisted his fighter and dove past the bomber’s double tail, barely missing it. He felt his fighter shake from the bomber’s wake. Franz did not know if the rookies had fired their guns, nor did he care.

  “You did it, now head for home!” Franz ordered Mellman and Sonntag as they pulled up behind him. In Franz’s mind, his purpose had been served, to get them through the first pass. Now he was fighting for the people of Graz. With his rookies disengaged, Franz used the speed from the dive to climb back up and dive again. In his second dive, another B-24 fell, and then another fell on his third pass. Each time as he dove through the formation, the bombers’ gunners stopped firing, afraid to hit other bombers.

  Of the two breeds of Four Motors, B-24s were easier to shoot down than B-17s. B-24s were faster due to their thin, high-mounted wing, but also more fragile. Their wings would fold if hit at the spot where they conjoined, and Liberators had fuel lines leading into the bomb bay that could be easily ignited. When they caught fire, they would quickly burn the plane from the center out.

  Roedel’s fighters kept pummeling the formation. Soon eight plumes of black smoke rose from crashed bombers in a path along the road to Graz. But Graz would not be unscathed. The first formation of bombers that the group leader let escape had dropped 105 tons of bombs on a factory in the city and across the south side of the town, as their after-action report would record.

  Only half the bombers of the second formation would bomb Graz. They would later report, “Formation was attacked by 40–50 Me 109s and Fw 190s. These made aggressive attacks. After attacking, they peeled under formation, reformed and attacked again.” Thirty minutes after Roedel had sparked the battle, Franz knocked down his fourth B-24 then turned for home. What bombers remained limped over the horizon. Of the first formation, all thirty-five B-24s would return home to Italy. Of the second formation, only nine out of nineteen would make it back to their base.

  Franz would never fully know the horror that he and his pilots had inflicted. The first B-24 they attacked, the one in the rear of the formation, was named Hot Rocks. It was one of the earliest bombers to fall. The men crewing Hot Rocks were superstitious and had expected bad luck before they got to Graz. They had borrowed Hot Rocks from another crew because their usual plane was under repair. Making matters worse, the crew had taken on a stranger, a replacement gunner named Sergeant Michael Buffalino, and the mission was their thirteenth. When Hot Rocks lost an engine for no reason on the run to Graz, the bomber straggled behind the others. The crew was convinced they were cursed. Then the fighters came. A gunner in a bomber alongside Hot Rocks reported seeing a 109 pour “a burst of cannon shells” into the plane at the start of the battle, lighting her on fire. Seconds later, a second 109 blasted Hot Rocks in the tail but she struggled onward.

  Inside Hot Rocks, the right waist gunner, Sergeant Lyle Taylor, saw the tail turret explode behind him from a fighter’s cannon shells. The explosion tossed the new gunner, Buffalino, into the plane’s waist. In pain, Buffalino pounded the bomber’s wooden floor with his fists. Blood poured from the seams of his oxygen mask. Taylor ran to Buffalino and hooked him up to an oxygen tank. Buffalino tore away his mask and revealed his badly mangled face.

  Taylor looked toward the bomb bay and saw the silhouettes of the other crewmen scrambling toward him. A fiery inferno followed them as flames spewed from the bomb bay. There was now only one way out of the Liberator, a hatch by the tail. The gunners ran for it while Taylor cared for Buffalino. The parachute of one of the gunners must have been on fire, because when he jumped it never opened. From lack of oxygen, Taylor passed out. The fire’s heat on his face woke him. Through stinging eyes he looked for Buffalino, but he was gone. Buffalino had chosen to jump without a chute rather than perish in the flames. Taylor looked around, found his chute, slipped it on, then rolled through the hatch and into the open sky.

  In the nose of Hot Rocks, the bombardier, Second Lieutenant William Reichle, was suffering through a personal hell. Twenty-two-year-old Reichle, a former Ohio State college baseball star, was holding his best buddy, Francis Zygmant, trying to plug his bleeding bullet wounds with his gloved fingers. Zygmant was a Polish-American kid from New Jersey. When Zygmant breathed his last, Reichle returned to his guns and called out fighters over the intercom, his dark eyes bulging wildly with shock.

  Reichle was not aware that the intercom was dead, nor had he heard the pilot and copilot ring the bail-out bell. Reichle only knew that he was in trouble when the flight engineer came into the bomber’s nose carrying a heavy box of ammo. He screamed to Reichle that they were riding in an empty plane and a fire had blocked the path to the rear escape hatch. The flight engineer thought quickly, then dragged the ammo box to the spot where the nose wheel retracted up into the plane. He lifted the box above his head and slammed it through the door that held the nosewheel up. The door fell away, leaving a hole. The flight engineer wiggled through his makeshift escape hatch. Reichle slipped his bulky parachute over his back and dove after him. Taylor and Reichle would survive and become P.O.W.s, but their crew lost three men that day, including Buffalino, whose mother would write to the survivors for years to ask what happened to her son. None could ever tell her the truth.

  Franz was already flying home for Graz when the group leader radioed, “Stigler! Return to base immediately!” His adrenaline flowing, Franz snapped back, “Yes, sir, it’s time to refuel anyway!” Franz knew the group leader had never attacked and instead had orbited above the whole battle. Only a few brave pilots from the other squadrons had broken orders and followed Franz’s lead.

  As he flew home toward the smoke that rose from Graz, Franz realized he could be tried for insubordination and possibly stripped of his command. His fears were
confirmed when his radio crackled to life. The group leader must have landed because the unit’s radio operator, a woman, called Franz and told him to report to the command center as soon as he had landed.

  The instant Franz’s boots hit the ground, he raced to the headquarters to plead his case. As Franz walked down the hallway to the group leader’s office, he heard a voice booming, angrily telling someone what Franz had done. At the entrance to the office, Franz saw Roedel leaning on the commander’s desk, his arms crossed. The group leader turned to Franz, his face red. Franz saluted Roedel, who saluted back with a thin smile. Roedel had landed with the pilots of his staff, to rearm and refuel in case more bombers came. He told Franz he had heard the claims against him and now he wanted to hear Franz’s defense. Franz told his story. Content, Roedel reminded the group leader that everyone was tired and urged him to get some rest. Roedel departed the office and told Franz to come with him. Franz took one look at the group leader and saw the man fuming, having been politely told by Roedel that he was in the wrong.

  Franz and Roedel lit up cigarettes outside. They watched the mountains turn colder—a snowstorm was brewing. Whenever possible Roedel smoked American cigarettes, which he obtained by trading food with captured bomber crews. He was going to leave to fly back to Vienna with his staff before they got stuck at Graz. Roedel had claimed two bombers of the twenty that JG-27’s pilots would claim to have shot down within thirty minutes. Roedel asked how many bombers Franz had downed. “Four, with help,” Franz said. Roedel smiled and nodded in approval. He knew four victories was incredible but not impossible. He had been flying on the September day in Africa when Marseille had claimed seventeen victories, several of which Roedel had himself witnessed.

  After Roedel departed, Franz found Mellman and Sonntag in the squadron lounge. He told them to come with him to claim victories. The young pilots assumed that Franz wanted them to sign off as witnesses to his victories. Instead of filling out forms himself, Franz pushed a pile of papers in front of each rookie. He said he was pretty sure they each had knocked down a B-24. The rookies looked at him with surprise. They admitted they had been too afraid to look back.

  “You fired, didn’t you?” Franz asked them.

  They both nodded.

  “I saw bombers fall,” Franz said. “They were yours.”

  With a swipe of his pen, he put his signature onto their papers.*

  In the local pub that night, Mellman and Sonntag would rehash the battle using their hands in place of planes while Franz watched quietly from a distance. Willi had told Franz he would never get a Knight’s Cross by not claiming victories. If only Willi could have seen him now, giving away victories. Franz knew the rookies would write home of their victories to their parents. Their parents would tell friends and neighbors. But looking at them, Franz felt a wave of sadness. He knew the odds, and the odds said they would not survive the war. He would be right. Four months later, Heinz Mellman and Gerhard Sonntag would both be dead.

  A WEEK LATER

  When Franz and his squadron entered the banquet hall in Graz, each man wore his dress uniform and had brought a date, gathered from the ample supply of the town’s lonely girls. The entire citizenry of Graz, it seemed, had turned out to honor the pilots. Because Franz and the others had knocked down so many B-24s, the townspeople overlooked the bombs that had fallen and threw a party instead.

  Beneath the banquet hall’s high ceiling, tables of hot food awaited the men while an oompah band played lively tunes, its members wearing tiny fedoras with feathers. Franz dismissed his squadron and told them to have a good time. The townspeople handed them glasses of hot red wine.

  Franz’s date hugged his arm. She was an eighteen-year-old girl who studied at the local university. Her name was Eva. Franz had met her through a friend who knew he needed a date for the dance. Eva was an aspiring actress and was as beautiful as a film starlet. Her curly hair was dark brown, her face was wide with prominent cheeks, and she wore a heavy dark jacket with a leopard-print collar. Beneath that was a fancy dress with real lace, probably a gift from a prior suitor.

  Eva asked Franz to dance, but he said he preferred to watch. The merriment around him troubled him. No one danced cheek to cheek. Hitler had called that “kitsch,” or distasteful, and had outlawed it along with music such as swing, jazz, and the blues. Yet still the people danced and smiled. Franz envied their optimism and knew it would change when the Allies’ invasion landed. But Eva’s personality was strong and charismatic; she would not give up. “It’s just a dance,” she laughed. Franz knew he was in trouble from the moment he drank his wine in a gulp and let the intoxicating girl lead him to the dance floor. The girl was charming and tenacious, with a personality that overwhelmed even Franz’s stubborn nature. When they parted that night, Franz knew he had met his match.

  A few days later, Franz gathered with Mellman, Sonntag, and the others around his fighter. Just ahead of the cockpit they looked at the new nose art that Franz had drunkenly asked a mechanic to paint during the night of the dance. The mechanic had painted a cartoon of a red apple with a green snake weaving through it, an allusion to the Garden of Eden. Alongside the cartoon were scrawled letters that spelled “Eva.” “What was I thinking?” Franz wondered aloud as the others grinned. They had seen their leader, like them, three sheets to the wind.

  In the days that followed, Franz would not have time to second-guess himself. An orderly greeted him one day with a telegram and tragic news. Franz’s father had been killed, kicked by a horse while shoeing it for the Army. At sixty-five years old, the aged veteran had paid a final price for his service. As Franz flew his fighter home for the funeral, he flew with a face of stone. The war had taken his brother and now his father. He mourned the most for his mother. He knew that for the rest of her days when she sat down to drink her nightly beer, she would be drinking alone.

  * * *

  * “I really worried about these kids and along with most responsible squadron commanders tried to bring them along slowly but the war would not always wait,” Franz would remember. “I can remember that terrible feeling I got when I was forced to have them fly combat before they were anywhere near ready, for I well recall how green I was during my first combat and I had several thousand hours of flying time.”1

  * “Finally, after repeated calls to my commander, and furious because we were allowing a prize opportunity to slip through our fingers, I initiated the attack,” Franz would remember.2

  * Franz would remember what he did with the victory claims: “I spread them all out. I know I had four but I couldn’t care less. We shot them down, that was the important thing. We were quite elated of course. The crashes were all in Austria, so no one could say you didn’t shoot them down, because the wreckages were there. The boys were on their first mission. That’s the reason why I did it.”

  19

  THE DOWNFALL

  SEVEN MONTHS LATER, LATE OCTOBER 1944, NEAR DRESDEN, GERMANY

  THE DAYS AND nights had blended into a blur to Franz as he led his squadron in taxiing along the edge of the pine forest to park. Beyond his right wingtip, he saw the ground crewmen congregating at the tree line. They waited for the 109s to shut down so they could push the fighters back under the trees to keep them safe from prowling Allied fighters. Franz’s 109 still wore the “Eva” nose art. He and Eva had continued dating ever since the party at Graz, but Franz had kept his distance so things would not become serious. In the months since his time at Graz, Roedel had shifted Franz around to lead Squadron 8, Squadron 11, and even all of III Group for a short time. Now, Franz led Squadron 11 at Grossenhain Airfield in Eastern Germany.

  Franz gunned his plane’s engine, kicked the rudder, and swung the plane’s nose toward the grass runway so his tail faced the pines to make the ground crew’s job easier. His 109 was a new G-14 model. Its spinner was black and had a swirling white streak painted through it that produced a hypnotic effect as it spun, a paint trick meant to fixate the eyes of a bomber’s gunn
ers. The plane’s rudder bore twenty-seven victory marks, three new white bars since Graz that represented victories over a P-38, a P-51, and a Spitfire. Franz knew Roedel disapproved of this, but he thought the marks would inspire his rookie pilots. These days they needed all the confidence they could get.

  Franz cut his engine and popped his canopy. A burly mechanic climbed the wing of the plane and helped him remove his straps. One by one the other planes’ engines wound to stillness. All of their canopies opened except for one fighter a few planes over from Franz. The mechanic helped lift Franz to his feet and steadied him on the wing. Franz looked pale and moved gingerly. He had flown three missions that day, as he had every day for months. He walked down the wing and was met by two other mechanics who helped him stand on solid ground. As they showed Franz to a waiting kubelwagen, Franz saw the 109 with the canopy still closed.

  “He’s asleep,” Franz told the mechanics. “Wake him gently.”

  THAT EVENING, FRANZ hunched over the table in his office to write a letter, as he did most nights. He was not writing to Eva—the frown on his face revealed that much. With a brown bottle of cognac and a glass at his side, he took sips of the golden liquid between dips of his pen in an ink vial. Every so often Franz looked at his door, anticipating the knock that he knew was coming.

  That summer and fall, Franz had witnessed the slaughter of the Air Force. Now, at their new station north of Dresden, where Franz had once trained cadets, the Air Force had grown weak and thin. He and his comrades were still flying the old 109 because Goering gave them nothing better. Rookies now came to his squadrons with only ten flights in 109s, not the seventy-five flights Franz had made before deploying to Africa. The novice pilots now outnumbered the veterans in his squadron by three to one.