A Higher Call

by Adam Makos

When his advance had petered out, the Germans found themselves staring at the British from across trenches that ran from a coastal train station called El Alamein, deep into the desert. Rommel’s great progress would be his undoing. He had stretched his forces far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs. As British ships steamed into their port at Alexandria, carrying fresh pilots and planes to regenerate the Desert Air Force, the Germans flogged the same pilots and planes harder, sending them on Stuka escorts, often three times a day. The tiresome missions wore JG-27’s pilots to the bone. The turning point in the desert air war had arrived. In

When Roedel came to say his good-byes, he told Franz and his comrades that he was not going home with them. Instead, he was heading to Greece to oversee the formation of JG-27 with its new IV Group. Roedel must have thrown Goering’s angry memo in the trash, because he never issued it to his men. Roedel knew Goering, the leader who wore a red toga at his home in the Alps and smoked from a huge porcelain pipe that touched the ground. Goering, the violent morphine addict who painted his fingernails. Goering, who recorded his rants against his pilots on records that he shipped to his men on the front lines so they could hear his rage. In Roedel’s eyes, the Allies weren’t “the enemy.” They were merely “the opponent.” On that day, Roedel knew who “the enemy” was. He resided in Berlin and something had to be done about him.

Fuel shortages from Allied bombings had cut short their training. Since the spring, Germany’s aviation fuel production was down from 175,000 tons per month to just 5,000 tons, and combat units, not training units, took every drop. At this point in the war, the average British pilot began combat after 450 flight hours of training. An American went into combat with 600 hours. Franz’s rookies came to him with fewer than 150 hours of flying time.*

The people who sat in front of and behind Franz were silent and depressed. Their clothes were worn and tattered. Everyone wore the same weary frown. Franz had heard how the British had sent a few speedy Mosquito bombers over Berlin every night, just enough to trigger the air raid sirens and send people stumbling outside to the bomb shelters, a form of psychological warfare to deny the populace sleep. It worked.