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

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

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 their lives forever.