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“A Higher Call exemplifies beautifully the brotherhood of warriors, and will forever change how you look at World War II.” – Eric Blehm,
In a church graveyard in Garmisch, Germany, a headstone stands against the backdrop of the Alps. Mounted to the stone is a photo etched on a porcelain circle, an image of a farm boy hugging a cow. He was killed while serving in World War II. This book is dedicated to him and all the young men who answered their countries’ calls but never wanted war.
But something began to puzzle me. I noticed that the aging American WWII pilots talked about their counterparts—the old German WWII pilots—with a strange kind of respect. They spoke of the German pilots’ bravery, decency, and this code of honor that they supposedly shared. Some American veterans even went back to Germany, to the places where they’d been shot down, to meet their old foes and shake hands.
“If you really want to learn the whole story, learn about Franz Stigler first,” Charlie said. “He’s still alive. Find out how he was raised and how he became the man he was when we met over Europe. Better yet, go visit him. He and his wife are living up in Vancouver, Canada. When you have his story, come visit me and I’ll tell you mine.” I was about to make excuses and tell Charlie I had little interest in a German fighter pilot’s perspective, when he said something that shut me up. “In this story,” Charlie said, “I’m just a character—Franz Stigler is the real hero.”
I ended up spending a week with Franz. He was kind and decent. I admitted to him that I thought he was a “Nazi” before I met him. He told me what a Nazi really was. A Nazi was someone who chose to be a Nazi.
I interviewed Franz and Charlie at their homes, at air shows, over the phone, and by mail. Charlie and Franz were always gracious and patient. If I had been them, I would have kicked me out and said “That’s enough.” But Charlie and Franz kept talking, remembering things that made them laugh and cry. I must stress that I simply compiled this story. They lived it. Through the stories they told me, they relived a painful time in their lives—World War II—because they knew that you would someday read this book, even if they were not around to read the final copy themselves. This book is their gift
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The story has plenty of questions about the prudence of war and the person we call the enemy. But mostly it begs a question of goodness. Can good men be found on both sides of a bad war?
The Allies called their effort “the reconstruction of Germany.” The reconstruction was mostly a humanitarian undertaking but also a strategic one. The Western Allies needed Germany to be the front for the Cold War against the Soviet Union. So the Americans, who occupied Southern Germany and Bavaria, decided to fix what was broken—in Germany’s interest, as well as their own.
The girls were cold and starving like everyone else, but they faced a choice: date a German man and go hungry, or date an American who could give them coffee, butter, cigarettes, and chocolate. Next to the boyish conquerors from the richest nation in the world, Franz and the German men in their work lines looked emasculated. “He fell for the fatherland, she for cigarettes,” the bitter German men would quip.
“You have no idea what we did!” Franz said, clenching his fists. He had watched his fellow fighter pilots fight bravely until they died, one by one, while The Party’s leadership called them “cowards,” deflecting the blame for the destruction of Germany’s cities onto them. In reality, Franz and his fellow fighter pilots never stood a chance against the Allies’ industrial might and endless warplanes. Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.
Both adults had a habit of downplaying their service in the war. From the bird’s-eye perspective of pilots, they had seen the stacks of muddy corpses between the battle lines. When Germany lost the first war, the two men lost their jobs. In the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious French, British, and Americans stipulated that the German Air Force was to dissolve and the Army and Navy were to disarm. Germany also needed to hand over its overseas colonies, allow foreign troops to occupy its western borderlands, and pay 132 billion Deutsche Marks in damages (about $400 billion today).
“It’s a little sloppy, don’t you think?” Franz’s father observed. “I didn’t miss a spot,” Franz promised. “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.”
“A man thinks and acts for himself,” Father Josef said. “Because he knows he only must answer to God.”
What Franz did not know was that the Catholic Church had an edict outlawing dueling. When the club was discovered, he was caught. Church officials excommunicated him. He wasn’t bothered by the edict—it was just part of church policy, he reasoned. His faith remained intact.
There on August’s desk, Franz found a stack of letters. Franz picked one up and read it. His hands began to tremble. The letter was a copy of “With Burning Concern,” the Vatican’s secretly composed message to all of Germany’s Catholics. On Palm Sunday, 1937, the letter had been read by every priest, bishop, and cardinal across Germany to their congregations and three hundred thousand copies had been disseminated. Drafted by Munich’s Cardinal von Faulhaber and Pope Pius XI, it told German Catholics in carefully veiled terms that National Socialism was an evil religion based on racism that stood
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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 reality, the Austrians and Czechs had no choice. Germany had been militarily rebuilt and seemed unstoppable. And the “Polish troops” who had raided the German radio station were actually German commandos wearing Polish uniforms. Hitler had ordered this. He wanted a war of expansion, and he lied to his own people to get it.
During a night raid, a German bomber mistakenly missed its target, an oil depot east of London, and bombed several homes on London’s East End neighborhood. Hitler had given orders that British cities were not to be bombed, a far cry from the indiscriminate warfare he ordered against Poland's civilians. But a few days later, another German bomber hit British homes again. In response, the British sent bombers to attack Berlin, a raid that also missed its military targets and bombed the city’s civilians. In a speech Hitler warned the British to stop their attacks on German cities, but it was too
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Roedel, Maak, and the others knew that any fighter pilot who was a Party member was a rarity and, most likely, a fanatic. To be a Nazi in the German Air Force, one needed to have joined The Party before enlisting or being drafted, usually at a very young age. Once a man joined the Air Force, the German Defense Law of 1938 forbid him from Party membership.
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.”
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,”
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“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.”
A screeching sound from the speakers suddenly drowned out the sound of laughter. Schroer’s music turned to static and he pulled the headphones from his ears. The British must have heard their show, he announced to the crowd. They were jamming his transmissions. The mood grew somber. The men remembered what the games, costumes, food, and drink had tried to make them forget—that they were still at war.
“Have you scored a victory yet?” Marseille asked. “Not yet,” Franz said, embarrassed. Everyone knew it was JG-27’s policy to try to get a new pilot his first victory within ten missions. But for Franz, ten had come and gone. “There’s no reason to apologize for never having killed a man,” Marseille said. He poured Franz a tall glass of cognac. “As soldiers, we must kill or be killed, but once a person enjoys killing, he is lost. After my first victory I felt terrible.”
Franz had read and heard the story but never had it corroborated. The legend went that Marseille had shot down a British pilot named Byers, who had been badly burned when captured. Marseille personally took Byers to the field hospital, where hospital staff told Marseille the prisoner’s name and unit. That evening, Marseille flew through British flak to drop a note over Byers’s airfield, addressed to his comrades. The note said that Byers was badly wounded but was being cared for. Two weeks later, when Byers died of his wounds, Marseille felt so badly that he flew back through the flak to the
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During one such mission, Franz lost his first airplane of the war. While attacking a desert fort, Franz’s plane had been hit from ground fire. He had belly-landed within friendly lines and returned to his unit on a camel after a Bedouin tribesman rescued him. Franz’s squadron mates had laughed when they saw him ambling the day after, still bowlegged from the bumpy camel ride.
To avoid British strafing, Franz and the others slept in “graves,” six- by six-foot holes hacked into the earth, with a sheet of canvas overhead.
The next day a rumor ran rampant throughout the pilot camps. The Voegl Flight was going to be stripped of their victories. Franz and Swallisch could not believe it. They asked around and learned that Stahlschmitt had reported seeing the Voegl Flight in mock dogfights, “emptying their guns into the sand.” Stahlschmitt believed that this was the secret behind the Voegl Flight’s victories—they would pretend to fight and come home with their ammo exhausted to lie about what they had done.
Swallisch never came back from his maintenance flight. Neumann canceled the meeting. The next day, on the shores north of Quotaifiya, German sentries found Swallisch’s body, carried to land by the tide. Some said his plane had malfunctioned. But Franz knew otherwise. Swallisch had wanted to disappear—that’s why he had flown out over the sea. There he had committed suicide, diving into the water rather than live to see his victories and honor wrongly stripped from him. On the day Swallisch died, Voegl and Bendert landed from their scramble. Voegl claimed one victory and Bendert another two.
Every morning when he rustled open his newspaper, the headlines revealed bad news from the African front. JG-27 lost forty-victory ace Sergeant Gunther Steinhausen, and a day later, fifty-nine-victory ace Stahlschmitt, both killed. Three weeks later, the headlines screamed in big black letters that Squadron 3’s hero of the desert, Marseille, was dead.
Africa had become a lost cause for the Germans. The British had launched an attack from El Alamein, a push that Rommel was unable to stop. In early November, as the Germans retreated, a new foe landed behind them in Casablanca: the Americans.
“What do I do now?” Franz asked his elders. “You’re a German fighter pilot,” Franz’s father said. “That’s all there is to it.” Father Josef nodded, having been a fighter pilot himself. Although he never spoke of his war stories, he told Franz something he would never forget. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We fight our best when we’re losing.”
Franz had learned the story of Marseille’s death when he reunited with the unit. When JG-27 had been issued the new G models, Marseille had refused to fly his and had barred his pilots from doing so because the plane’s new, more powerful Daimler-Benz engine was prone to failure. After General Albert Kesselring heard that Marseille was casting doubt on the G, he ordered Marseille to fly the new plane anyway.
The attack was part of the Allies’ new offensive, Operation Flax. The Americans and British knew that Hitler had refused to evacuate the Afrika Korps from the desert and that the only thing keeping Rommel from collapse was his supply line from Sicily. Operation Flax was the Allied plan to slice that umbilical cord of bullets, fuel, and food.
After Roedel confronted them, Voegl scored only once more and Bendert stopped scoring altogether. But Voegl and Bendert became team players once again, flying mission after mission without victory claims. They fought harder than before, as if driven to make amends for what they had done to Swallisch. By the time JG-27 left the desert, their month of bad judgment had been forgotten.
The massive, 104-foot wingspan of a B-17 was far different than the 40-foot wings of a fighter—it filled the gun sight faster although it was farther away. That day all of the 109 pilots’ shots fell short. They had yet to learn that a bomber’s wingspan needed to extend beyond the ring of the gun sight before it was time to shoot.
“Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps. Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial
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Conrad Bentzlin had a younger brother, Carl, who would become a navigator on a B-24 that would be shot down over Vienna. Like Conrad, he became “missing in action” and never would return. When Conrad was shot down, his sister, Betty, was sixteen. For years after the war, Betty always looked for him in crowds.
They had seen the Allies’ aerial blockade and had watched as the seas grew covered with the burning wreckage of German transports and floating men. Allied fighters were shooting down thirty Ju-52s per week, and the Germans had begun naming days after big losses, such as “the Palm Sunday Massacre” followed by “the Holy Thursday Massacre.”*
Luetzow wrote in his diary, “The omnipresent, primitive anti-Semitism in the Reich pisses me off.”3 Luetzow became conflicted. He had been raised in a Prussian military family. His father was an admiral and had taught him that a professional soldier should separate himself from politics. So Luetzow continued to fly and fight until June 1942, when a dark event on the Eastern Front led to the end of his combat career.
Luetzow told them what the SS had asked of him and said he would remove his Knight’s Cross and resign from the Air Force if any of his men complied with the SS’s request.4 When The Party learned of Luetzow’s speech, rumors circulated that he would be court-martialed and perhaps even shot. Galland heard this and was worried for his friend. He removed Luetzow from command of the wing, probably saving his life.
During the battle for Britain in spring 1940, Goering had discovered that the wife of JG-53’s commander was Jewish. So Goering made the commander and his staff strip the spade crests from their planes. In its place, Goering made them paint a red stripe, a mark of shame. To get back at Goering, the commander and his staff painted over the swastikas on their tails and flew that way all summer. Finally Goering could stand it no longer. He sacked the commander and replaced him. But he allowed the commander’s men to repaint the spades on their planes. Only then did they agree to put Goering’s
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Steinhoff’s pilots had left their tools, bullets, and spare parts in Africa, but they had not abandoned their mechanics. Instead, the pilots had helped the mechanics crawl into the dark, claustrophobic confines of the fighters’ bellies. There they rode out a forty-five-minute flight from hell. No room to wiggle. No parachutes. No hope of escape.
Only 40 of JG-77’s 120 planes made it out of Africa.*
Steinhoff was leading their group and had shot down two Yaks and damaged a third, blasting it from nose to tail. As it burned, the Yak flew straight and level. Steinhoff and the Count pulled up alongside the plane and saw its pilot banging against the canopy glass. He was trying to escape, wanting to jump, but his canopy was jammed. Flames spat from the engine like a blowtorch, and gray smoke billowed into his cockpit. The Soviet pilot’s plane had become an oven. The pilot pressed his face against the canopy glass and looked at Steinhoff in terror. Steinhoff decided he needed to do something.
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Schroer said that an Italian seaplane was taking off any minute from Marsala, just down the coast, to rescue any survivors. Franz joked that they should send two seaplanes, one to rescue the Italians and another to rescue their seaplane. Willi agreed—the mission was suicidal. The Allies had been bombing and strafing Pantelleria for five days, sending so many planes that they were seen circling, waiting in line for a chance to attack.
Franz had reason to be more careful, too. Three weeks earlier his G model had caught fire during a practice flight over Sicily. Franz had bailed out of the plane, slightly burned, and lost his second fighter of the war. For three weeks he was grounded to heal.
“We should be with them,” Franz said. Begrudgingly Willi stood and reached for his life preserver. Franz grabbed his. Together, they ran for their planes.
The Germans and Italians would call the next ten minutes a “slaughter.” The Americans would call the same event “one of the most spectacular air victories of the North African campaign.”8 The P-40s dove. Burning Italian fighters hit the water first. The 109s splashed into the sea, one by one. The seaplane joined them, hit by a trigger-happy P-40 driver. Franz’s fighting ability was useless. Bullet after bullet hit his plane. Only his flying skill kept him alive.
On Pantelleria, another pilot’s corpse rolled onto the island that day, but the Italians would not report this for several days. They were busy laying out white sheets across the island to surrender to the Allied bombers above.
