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Once, fighter pilots had been the nation’s heroes. Now the hostile eyes of the men around Franz confirmed a new reality. Fighter pilots had become the nation’s villains. Franz turned from the glares of the men.
Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.
“There’s glue in places that didn’t need it,” Franz’s father elaborated. “It doesn’t bother me,” Franz said, “the fabric will cover it.” Franz’s father gave him a lesson. “Always do the right thing, even if no one sees it.” Franz admitted it was sloppy, but he promised, “No one will know it’s there.” “Fix it,” his father advised, “because you’ll know it’s there.”
Lufthansa stewardesses, immaculately coiffed in navy skirts, blouses with flowery collars, and chic headwear, crossed paths in the flux, some leaving the terminal, others heading for their gates. Pilots from every European nationality darted to and fro. Among them was Lufthansa pilot Franz Stigler, now twenty-two years old. Clad in his navy suit with its yellow cuff bands, a crimson tie, and shimmering gold wings on his chest, Franz was a poster pilot for the airlines. He had come a long way since his life-altering talk with Father Josef.
Franz sought to return to the airlines but no longer had a choice—the airlines had given him to the Air Force. In his new role, the Air Force made Franz a head instructor at their pilot school for officers in Dresden.
As a teenager, Franz had paid little attention to the 1933 election. He was apathetic about politics and not initially alarmed by the National Socialists’ victory.† But now, as a twenty-four-year-old man in spring 1939, Franz had come to think of The Party differently than he had as a boy in 1933. He had come to realize that The Party had turned Germany itself into a concentration camp. There were no elections. No freedom of press. No freedom of speech. No freedom to travel. No freedom to choose to serve in the military. No freedom to change things. In the days when possessing an outlawed
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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.
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
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Once a man joined the Air Force, the German Defense Law of 1938 forbid him from Party membership.*
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.
“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 fired first. Flames spit from the nose of his fighter. His cannon’s roar startled Franz.
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.
Rommel had ordered JG-27 to this awful place. He had pushed the British back but not far enough to win the war in North Africa.
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
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THERE WERE FEW options to escape the desert’s misery, among them death, wounds, insanity, and the passing of time. But one man had revealed the only other avenue of escape: victories.
jump and leave their mechanics. Only 40 of JG-77’s 120 planes made it out of Africa.*
The paper tried to put a heroic spin on the tragic news, calling a one-sided catastrophe “the Battle of Hamburg.” They refused to mention that the bombs had produced a thousand-foot-high tornado of fire that had swirled and swallowed eight square miles of the city. They neglected to describe that the tornado had melted the city’s streets and sucked the air from bomb shelters, killing, in one week, forty-two thousand men, women, and children.*
On July 13, 1941, from the pulpit of St. Lambert’s Church in Münster, von Galen had said: “None of us is safe—and may he know that he [who] is the most loyal and conscientious of citizens… cannot be sure that he will not some day be deported from his home, deprived of his freedom and locked up in the cellars and concentration camps of the Gestapo.”
* Sir Arthur Harris, the leader of the British Bomber Command, considered the bombing of Hamburg as payback for the German “Blitz” bombing of British cities that had cost the lives of forty thousand Britons.
When Charlie reported to the 8th, he had landed himself in a unit that would lose more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps.
Turning the plane onto the taxiway, Charlie saw endless upright tails ahead, each rudder waving the group’s mark, a black K inside a white triangle. He glanced out his side window and saw the bomber’s wings draped over the narrow taxiway. Because The Pub had been slotted for Purple Heart Corner, Charlie found himself twentieth in line to take off, one position away from last in line. Preston’s bomber swung onto the runway and set itself for launch.
Charlie knew that when he pulled back on the yoke, the lives of nine men would be in his hands.
Christmas itself was on a Saturday, just four days distant.
Charlie told his crew. “Keep your eyes peeled for fighters.”
had thirty miles to go before the turn toward Bremen followed by a thirty-mile bomb run.
Doc told Charlie and the crew what they already knew, that they were turning onto the Initial Point, the start of the bomb run.
“Bandits!” Ecky cried from the tail. He reported five 109s leaping from below and behind The Pub, the same clouds where Walt had disappeared and where Blackie had seen the flash.
Charlie looked up and above the instrument panel. There he saw a flock of eight German fighters climbing far ahead in trail formation.
Blackie slapped the back of Ecky’s jacket, but Ecky did not raise his head. Crawling closer, Blackie saw that the tail gun position had been destroyed; the glass was gone, and the metal walls had been hacked open to the sky. A cold breeze blew from one side to the other. Only direct hits from several cannon shells could have done this. Blackie turned Ecky by a shoulder then reeled back in fright. Ecky’s head had been nearly severed and dangled onto his chest. His guns pointed silently earthward.
The room resembled “the inside of a cheese grater” to Blackie after the destruction from several 20mm shells.
Then he, too, closed his eyes as The Pub spiraled toward the patchwork earth.
Franz was impatient to get back into the fight. He needed one more bomber victory.
Franz had shot down three bombers, raising the score on his rudder to twenty-two victories. However, his rudder did not reflect the bonus points for victories over bombers. With bonus points added, his score was 27.* One more bomber victory would push him through “magic 30” and qualify him for the Knight’s Cross.
The sergeant returned to his men and shook his head, unable to understand Franz’s obsession. But to Franz, the Knight’s Cross was more than a bragging right. It was a sign of honor that he had done something good for his people. Franz had seen things the sergeant had not. Franz had seen Hamburg from above—eight blackened miles of city where people had once lived. He had seen small villages flattened as if they had mistakenly fallen in the footsteps of a giant. To Franz, his duty was to the people below whom he could never see but who were looking up to him. If he stopped a heavy bomber from
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Some twenty seconds later the bomber spun through ten thousand feet, where its spiral broke into a nosedive. The plane plunged straight down. At low altitude, the cockpit began to flow with oxygen-rich air. Charlie regained consciousness. Shaking his head he saw the German landscape through his windscreen, rushing closer by the second. The ground was barely a mile below. Pressed back into his seat, Charlie strained for the controls. He gripped them and hauled back.
Ahead, Charlie saw that he was diving straight toward a German city.
At three thousand feet, The Pub did something that no B-17 missing a stabilizer should have done. She stopped diving. For reasons inexplicable, her wings began to flutter. The plane flirted with the idea of lift.
Just when Charlie was sure The Pub was going to scrape the houses below, her nose lifted to the horizon and she leveled out, blowing leaves from trees and shingles from homes. Charlie had not flown so low over a town since buzzing Weston.
The fastest way out of Germany, he explained, was to fly north thirty-five miles to the sea.
“Is there any gap through the guns?” Charlie asked. “Nope, they overlap,” Doc said. “It’s one of the heaviest-defended flak zones in all of Germany.”
Without stopping for clearance from the tower, Franz fast-taxied to the runway and blasted off toward the bomber, in pursuit of his Knight’s Cross.
Charlie knew his odds had been better down along the treetops. At least there the flak gunners would have had a tougher time aiming at him. But he had made his choice, to sacrifice himself and Russian if need be, to allow seven men to jump. Charlie held the bomber steady and waited for his men to hit the silk. To Charlie his decision was not heroic—it was his job as their leader. In his mind, the rest of his men still had a chance to live.
Franz had seen planes come back from battle shot to pieces. But he had never seen anything like this. Every foot of the bomber’s metal had silver holes where the bullets had entered and flaked away the paint. Franz became entranced with wonder. Pushing the rudder pedal and nudging the throttle forward a bit, Franz swung his 109 past the tail and flew along the bomber’s right side, parallel to the fuselage.
From his turret, Blackie looked in shock at the 109 pilot. A minute before, Blackie had prepared to die, expecting the 109 pilot to shoot him from the sky after disappearing behind the tail. But the pilot had never fired. Now, instead, the German fighter pilot flew formation with the American bomber.* Blackie abandoned his efforts to clear his guns. Instead, he folded his hands. “What are you waiting for?” Blackie said quietly as the German’s eyes met his.
The Franz Stigler who went to Africa to avenge his brother’s death would have had an answer. He would have destroyed the bomber and killed its crew. But there, in the desert, and over ancient Sicily, the last of Europe’s Knights had taught Franz Stigler a new code. Their code said to fight with fearlessness and restraint, to celebrate victories not death, and to know when it was time to answer a higher call.
Franz had chosen to spare the bomber’s crew from his own guns, a gesture that would have been enough for most men. But Franz decided he would try something more.
Kicking the rudder, Franz moved a few feet away from the bomber’s wing so his silhouette could be seen from above and below. He knew that if another German fighter came along it would not interfere with him there. He reasoned the same for the boys on the ground. Germany’s flak gunners were the best in the world and would know the silhouette of a 109 by heart. If they spotted him they would know he was one of theirs. But when they saw the bomber on his wing, would they hold their fire?
battery commander knew there could be any number of explanations, but one thing was certain: there was a Messerschmitt 109 about to fly over him and he could not fire on one of his own. “Hold your fire!” he shouted.
But now, with the German 109 stuck on his wing, he had no idea what to do next.
