A Higher Call

by Adam Makos

Frenchy entered the cockpit and saw the pilots sitting in silence. He left them alone. It was nearly 3:30 P.M. The crew and The Pub had completed their first mission together.

The medic noticed the blood on Charlie’s shoulder from the bullet fragment. Charlie knew the rule that a wound meant he would be grounded for at least three days. Pinky and Frenchy knew it, too, and realized they might get stuck flying with a lesser pilot if Charlie acknowledged his wound. “It’s just a scratch,” Charlie told the medic.

Franz knew from the moment he had peeled away from the bomber that he had committed a dangerous act. He could not tell anyone the truth—he had helped the enemy escape. If anyone pinned him to that act, he knew he would face a firing squad. People in Germany had been killed for far less. The prior June, a woman had been executed for telling a joke during a break from work at a munitions factory.

Their inspection completed, Thompson told Charlie he was going to recommend medals for the entire crew, including Charlie. He said he had one last question. “Why didn’t you hit the silk over Germany?” “Sir, I had a man who was too injured to jump.” “So you and your crew stayed for just one man?” “Yes, sir,” Charlie said and nodded.

Charlie described their bizarre encounter with the German pilot who had escorted them out to sea and said good-bye with a salute. Harper cocked his head and stared at Charlie as if he was joking. “He flew with you?” Harper said, leaning across his desk, incredulous. “He was probably out of ammo,” Charlie said. “But he took us out of Germany.”

Harper rose to Charlie’s level. “I tried as hard as I could. I know what headquarters is thinking. If your men get medals, people will ask how they got them. Then if your men tell the story, they’ll mention the Kraut pilot.” Charlie shook his head in disbelief. “The brass wants you to forget this day ever happened,” Harper said. “Those are the orders.”

“What about Ecky? Would you at least help me nominate my tail gunner for a commendation? For his family’s sake.” “Write it up, and I’ll grease the wheels,” Harper said.

Author’s note: Decades later, when I talked with American bomber crewmen who had been taken prisoner, almost to a man they would admit, “I was never so glad to see the Luftwaffe” when a German pilot showed up to take them prisoner, as opposed to the alternative, who often wanted their heads. * “When I saw the condition of the airplane, it frightened me more than anything in the air did,” Charlie would remember. “It seemed as if a hand had been holding us up in the air, and it wasn’t mine.”

The Pub would sit at Seething until March, when the men of the 2nd Strategic Air Depot would repair her over twenty-three days. The Pub was then flown back to America and later scrapped.

Franz had never been closer to the Knight’s Cross. But to him, the Cross had taken on new meaning. He had seen the eyes of the wounded bomber crew, young men no different than the ones he had been killing for two years. He knew the Cross stood for bravery. But Franz now realized it also represented a man’s success at his most corrupted service to the world—his prowess at killing other men.

After two weeks away from the formation, Charlie had forgotten his pride. Looking at Dale’s photos, he remembered why he would not back out of the brotherhood he had volunteered for.

THAT DAY, CHARLIE flew the Quiet Ones to Ludwigshaven, Germany, and safely back. In the days that followed, the Quiet Ones would be issued a bomber of their own, a B-17G named Carol Dawn. They would fly their next twenty-six missions together. They would survive a mission to Brunswick when the bombers on their right and left wings would be shot from the sky, and the ride home from Berlin when they would lose two engines simultaneously over the sea.

When Franz looked at Mellman, he knew he was looking at Germany’s great tragedy—a generation of innocents too young to have seen the rise of Hitler or The Party who now were forced to pay for their leaders’ sins.

All Roedel could say was that he was sorry. Franz heard defeat in Roedel’s voice. When he hung up, Franz buried his face in his hands. For a few days he beat himself up over the thought that he could have saved Willi, because they had once handled a dozen P-38s—just the two of them.

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.

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.

On the ground, Franz slowly regained his senses and opened his eyes. The men were startled—they were certain that a bullet had pierced his brain. Franz opened the palm of his hand. In it was an inch-long copper bullet, its point mashed and coated with blood. The crewmen were in awe. Somehow Franz had managed to stay conscious long enough to land.

“You’re grounded,” he said, as if handing Franz a gift. But Franz begged him not to report his condition to the higher-ups.

Trautloft’s friends in that room had all fallen from favor with Goering long before that day. They had been heroes of the Air Force until Goering demoted them the prior November and December. Goering’s plan to “Restore the Air Force” through greater National Socialist spirit also meant purging opposition. Goering had sacked Galland, the general of fighters, and replaced him with Colonel Gordon Gollob, a Party member. Goering had booted Roedel from command of JG-27 and Steinhoff from his new wing, JG-7. Goering had demoted Luetzow and sent him to oversee a flying school. Goering had already relegated Neumann to obscurity, assigning him to lead Italian pilots in Verona, Italy.

Two years earlier, at a villa on Wannsee, SS general Reinhard Heydrich had gathered fourteen top Party and government officials to outlay his plan for the Holocaust. But the Holocaust was not only Heydrich’s brainchild. In 1941, Goering had ordered Heydrich to formulate a plan for, in his words, the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

Galland spent the rest of the day pondering how Goering and The Party’s propaganda machine would spin his death. When they forced “the Desert Fox,” Rommel, to kill himself, they said he died of an embolism. When Goering pushed General Ernst Udet, Germany’s top surviving WWI ace, to kill himself, they said he died in a plane crash. When General Hans Jeschonnek, Goering’s chief of staff, shot himself, they said it was from fatigue.

“Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and all of their friends are out on a boat at sea,” Hohagen said. “There’s a big storm and their boat sinks! Who’s saved?” Hohagen’s mouth remained agape as if he wanted to give the answer himself. Franz knew the joke. “Germany.”

Franz removed his cap and showed Hohagen the dent in his forehead. Hohagen removed his cap and showed Franz the massive scar in his. They compared their doctor’s certificates and instantly bonded.

“So sad about the bear, isn’t it?” Sinner said. Franz fell back in his seat. He knew Sinner was talking about Bobbi, the Squadron 6 mascot. Sinner told Franz that he had heard their old squadron had been so torn up in the fighting that during their retreat to central Germany they needed to leave the bear behind. They could not release the bear into the wild, because he had been raised by humans and did not know how to hunt. Since the bear had come to weigh four hundred pounds, he was too heavy to transport. When the zoo would not take the bear back, the squadron had no other options. The squadron pilots and ground crew could not bring themselves to do what had to be done. Franz looked away, afraid to hear the rest. “They handed the bear to a neighboring unit that led it into the woods and shot it,” Sinner said. Franz sat, unmoving and unblinking. Sinner saw this and put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Franz would later think how silly it must have looked, a grown man grieving over an animal. But to Franz, the killing of his bear was symbolic of so much more than just one death. As he had once told the pool manager in Wiesbaden, the bear never bit anyone.

Pilots began sneaking away from their units to join JV-44, and combat-proven instructors in Trautloft’s flying school asked to transfer to Galland. Trautloft obliged, secretly funneling them under Goering’s nose. Franz remarked to Galland that Marseille would have joined the unit. Galland agreed but reminded Franz of Marseille’s disregard for The Party and all things military. “He never would have lasted this long,” Galland said.

During the Battle of Britain, Hitler had considered ordering German pilots to shoot their enemies in parachutes. Hitler asked Goering how he thought the order would go over, and Goering sought out Galland’s opinion. “I should regard it as murder, Herr Reichsmarschall,” Galland told Goering, and he promised to disobey such an order if it was ever issued. Goering smiled and said, “That is just the reply I had expected from you, Galland.”2 Due to Galland’s steadfastness to his code, Hitler never issued the order.

In his calm professor-like voice, Steinhoff radioed: “Trouble above.” A 262 could normally escape the P-51 and outrun it with ease. But if a P-51 was high above a 262, it could dive and pick up enough speed to briefly run with the jet. Looking up while shielding his eyes, Franz removed his finger from the trigger when he saw the P-51s diving. Franz looked up again and saw three P-51s breaking from the diving gaggle, their noses pointed straight at him. He knew this was a battle he could not win, and the others knew this, too.

The speedometer’s needle quivered at the 625-mile-per-hour mark. He had flown past the plane’s limits. He had forgotten a rule of the 262, to never dive in a jet so fast it needed no help from gravity. Now, White 3 was frozen in a death dive. Franz struggled to pull the control stick, but it felt as unbending as an iron bar. Pinned to his seat, Franz knew he could not bail out. He felt himself grow cold as the thought struck him. I just killed myself. Franz began to pray feverishly. Kick the rudder! Franz thought he heard a voice.

Franz knew he had not pulled from that dive alone. Something had broken the evil spell, and it was a force more powerful than his muscles.

Across Germany, enemy fighters had declared open season on German airfields, continuing eight straight days of raids that would claim 1,697 German aircraft destroyed.

As the war wound down, American fighter pilots knew that any German pilot still flying had to be an expert. This awareness led some American pilots (a small, unknown percentage) to shoot German pilots in their parachutes or after landing. Their logic was pragmatic. They did not want a German expert returning to the skies to kill a ten-man bomber crew, a buddy, or them.

Franz turned and saw the famous steel-blue eyes of his former flight cadet, Gerd Barkhorn. But Barkhorn was no longer just a cadet. After three and a half years of fighting, mostly on the Eastern Front, Barkhorn stood before Franz as history’s second greatest ace.

Barkhorn’s best friend, Erich “Bubi” Hartmann, who would trump him by fifty-one victories as history’s top ace, had asked Barkhorn why he risked his life to fly alongside an enemy to convince him to bail out. Barkhorn had told Hartmann, “Bubi, you must remember that one day that Russian pilot was the baby son of a beautiful Russian girl. He has his right to life and love the same as we do.”

Lowering his voice to a whisper, Trautloft warned his comrades that every man in Germany would soon be branded for the crimes of a few. “It’s all true,” Trautloft said. “The whispers.”

Steinhoff clawed at his burning face and ran along the wing, his screams drowned out by the blast furnace around him. The rockets ignited beneath his feet and launched, skipping along the earth before exploding. Steinhoff jumped blindly off the wing. High above, Galland had heard the Count’s frantic radio calls. He turned his jet and saw Steinhoff burst from the blaze, “a human torch.” Galland wept, because he knew he was watching his friend die. Franz saw Steinhoff staggering, a “flaming figure.”6 Cannon shells ruptured behind him. Steinhoff fell to the ground and into a pool of burning jet fuel.

With his enemy Goering under arrest and Hitler surrounded by Soviet Red Stars, Luetzow felt a surge of optimism. All he wanted was to outlive the war, his honor intact. To him, this meant serving until the arrival of peace.

Franz had heard that the Man of Ice flew without emotion, and now believed it. Luetzow’s tone never changed.

The Count would later conclude that a P-47’s bullets had hit Luetzow’s jet, probably striking him and his radio behind him in the fuselage. When Luetzow was flying home alongside his comrades, he was probably bleeding to death.

After Luetzow’s death, Galland had called the pilots together on the airfield and addressed the men as they stood in a line. “For us the war is over,” he said. He would no longer order anyone to take off—they could only volunteer. “Whoever wants to go home may do so,” he added. A few men thanked him and left. One cited his fiancée, another his sick parents. But someone else said, “We fight until the end.” Galland’s eyes twinkled and he replied, “I am proud to belong to the last fighter pilots of the German Air Force.”

People from a nearby village found Barkhorn alive, pinned to his jet in silence. They took him to the hospital, where he would outlive the war and see his wife, Christl, again.

Franz saw White 3 sitting alone on the field as the fighters ripped overhead shooting everything but her. Over the noise of gunfire and explosions, Franz shouted to Galland that he would never lend him a plane again. “You don’t play well with borrowed toys!” Franz joked. Galland looked back sheepishly.

Pirchan’s head had slammed into the fighter’s gun sight, and his brain was exposed. Franz held him as he thrashed with pain. Pirchan asked Franz to tell his mother and sister good-bye for him. Franz promised he would. He gave the young fighter pilot a shot of pain reliever and the boy died in his arms.

Galland was certain the Americans would soon be fighting the Soviets and would want the 262s to study the jets or use them in combat. Galland planned to surrender JV-44’s aircraft, pilots, and operational knowledge to the Americans. He suggested that JV-44 could even fly for them.

Galland saluted up at Franz and Franz saluted down at the seated general, much like their first meeting in Sicily. They both knew that JV-44 had succeeded if they had stopped bombs from destroying one more house or maiming one more child or killing one more mother in a factory. The unit had not failed. It had simply arrived too late.

Two days later, on May 1, Galland sent a pilot, Major Willi Herget, in a light plane to find American General Eisenhower. In Eisenhower’s absence, General Pearson Menoher met with Herget. Herget delivered Galland’s letter seeking to surrender JV-44. Menoher sent Herget back to tell Galland where to deliver the jets and to offer an 8th Air Force fighter escort. Galland received the message and dispatched Herget back to Menoher to clarify the plan. Herget never made it. American ground forces shot down his plane. He was injured, captured, and all means of communication between Galland and Menoher were lost.

In 1948, Franz married Eva. They settled into their new postwar life together. As the years passed, Franz stayed in touch with some of his old comrades, including Roedel. In winter 1953, they met at a pub halfway between their homes and went drinking for the last time. Franz told Roedel that he was leaving soon for Canada, where he had secured the job of a lifetime—to work as an engineer on a new Canadian fighter plane.

One German fighter pilot spoke for the fighter forces when he wrote, “The atrocities committed under the sign of the Swastika deserve the most severe punishment. The Allies ought to leave the criminals to the German fighting soldiers to bring to justice.”

He quickly learned English and liked working with his hands and amid nature. He and Eva had a daughter named Jovita, but the couple’s relationship was not to last. Some would say that a good relationship requires “a sun and a moon,” and Franz and Eva were both suns—strong and stubborn. Their divorce, when it came in 1954, was amicable.

Franz had come to know Hiya’s beautiful personality, but he never guessed that the short little girl would one day grow up to be so gorgeous. Their plan had been an unspoken one. Within a year of meeting they headed to the city hall in Vancouver and were married.

In 1949, the Allies had given West Germany her sovereignty back. They needed an ally and knew that if the Cold War turned hot, Germany would be its battlefield. To block the “Red Tide” from invading Europe, the Americans were preparing to train German pilots to fly American jets to shoot down Soviet bombers before they dropped their nukes on Europe. With the Allies’ blessing, a group of German generals had quietly gathered in 1950 to plan the revival of the military that would be called the Federal Defense Force or Bundeswehr.