On his second combat mission, December 20, 1943, Charlie Brown desperately nursed his crippled B-17 homeward. Unfortunately, the shortest route to the North Sea coast took Charlie and his crew directly over an auxiliary German fighter base.
On the ground was a German fighter ace, Franz Stigler. Even after the crew chief warned him of a .50-cal. slug lodged in his Messerschmitt’s radiator, Stigler has his aircraft refueled and rearmed. He was only two points short of earning his Knight’s Cross; finishing off Brown’s B-17 would get him there, and Stigler was still flying to avenge his brother’s death.
One engine was dead, hit by flack; a second was not responding to its throttle; a third would “run away,” and have to be shut down, then re-started. The port horizontal stabilizer (the small “wing” at the bomber’s left rear) was gone; half the rudder was shot away. The tailgunner was dead in his shattered gun position; one waist gunner was unconscious, one leg nearly severed by a German cannon shell; the radio operator had taken shrapnel to his head. Just before unknowingly flying over Stigler, Charlie had managed to bring the bomber out of a spin. Charlie and his crew were out of the war. They just wanted to limp back to England.
When the tail guns didn’t track him as he caught the bomber, Stigler thought the gunner must be wounded or dead. He was amazed that the B-17 was still flying; he could see the crew through the holes his fighter comrades had blasted out of the B-17’s skin. He saw there were wounded men aboard. In that moment, Stigler heard and answered a higher call.
Taking a position off the bomber’s left wing, Stigler tried to tell Brown, “Go to Sweden,” gesturing to the northeast heading the bomber would need to take. Brown’s plane could have made it there, and he and his crew would have been interned for the rest of the war. Brown was petrified: he would tell Stigler years later, “I thought you were out of ammo, and were going to pull out your P38 and shoot us down.”
Sweden was much closer than England, but Brown would first have to cross the north German coast and its flak batteries. That’s when Stigler risked his life: he flew escort for the wounded bomber, hoping his German Air Force comrades at the flak guns would recognize his fighter, and hold their fire. The flak crews, astonished at the sight of Stigler’s ME-109 escorting a badly damaged B-17, stood at their weapons: “He must be following him out over the North Sea to shoot him down.”
Safely out of German airspace, Stigler saluted Brown, then peeled off for home. The two men would not find each other again for over fifty years, when Stigler finally learned if Brown and his crew had made it back to England. The Knight’s Cross no longer mattered to Stigler; when he commanded fighter squadrons, he gave his victories to his subordinates.
Adam Makos and Larry Alexander’s "A Higher Call" was a great find for me: eschewing the kind of murder mysteries my wife prefers, I read history texts while I laze on the beach during vacation. Makos and Alexander’s text connected with me on many levels.
Stigler’s life followed a trajectory guided by the whirlwind of German history. He crashed the flying club’s glider on his first flight; his father had failed to properly balance the machine for Franz, who was younger and smaller than the other boys. But Franz wasn’t deterred: he soared on his second flight. Like Franz, many young pilots who later flew for the German Air Force had learned to fly using gliders. Stigler developed a love for flying which eventually found him working for the German national airline, Lufthansa, piloting new routes. Of course, Stigler’s work was also useful for the Third Reich; Stigler especially loved Spain, and his flights laid the groundwork for the German airlift of Franco’s army from North Africa. Stigler was a civilian flight instructor who finally joined the Air Force after a haughty officer refused to take instructions from him.
Makos only refers to it as “The Party;” its presence, latent throughout the text, becomes more menacing the closer Germany comes to being defeated. At his first posting, with Fighter Group 27 in North Africa, Franz is grilled by a senior flight commander: “you’re not a Party member, are you?” A comrade later filled Franz in: after the Battle of Britain, The Party had been placing political officers in Air Force units to gauge their loyalty to the regime. The military professionals hated that. A Party member could not be trusted as a combat pilot.
His brother, August, was one of Stigler’s flying students, and died in 1940 when his bomber crashed after takeoff in northern France. Before the war, August’s wife had kept a copy of the Vatican’s letter to German Catholics, “With Burning Concern,” which Franz found in his brother’s room. Read from every Catholic pulpit in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937, its authors, Pope Pius XI and Munich Cardinal von Faulhaber, excoriated The Party as an evil, racist religion led by “an insane and arrogant prophet.” Possessing a copy of that letter was a criminal offense.
Even as an ace pilot, Stigler came under The Party’s gaze. Years later, after the White Rose group was imprisoned and its leaders executed, the Stigler name was connected to the Catholic opposition. Franz was visited at his base in Sicily by two Gestapo men, incongruous in their shirtsleeves, black ties, black pants, and P38 sidearms. Stigler’s CO stood with him, and succeeded in intimidating the Gestapo. However, Franz would end the war in Adolph Galland’s Fighter Band 44, the “Squadron of Experts.”
Galland had long been on The Party’s radar: when asked by Air Force chief Hermann Goering what his fighter pilots needed to win the Battle of Britain, Galland famously replied, “A squadron of Spitfires.” By mid-1944, the German Air Force was in shambles: the United States was producing aircraft of a quality and quantity which the Germans could not resist. Galland blamed Goering for the Air Force’s failures, and organized fellow officers who went to Goering to demand that he step down. Goering refused, but instead of court-martialing Galland and the others, or letting them commit suicide, Goering allowed Galland to organize his own fighter group to fly the ME-262 jet in combat.
Franz, having trained and flown multiengine aircraft, was a natural at introducing his fellow fighter pilots to the twin-engined ME-262. However, Franz let slip his perspective on the war to a Party plant, and was himself allowed to join Galland’s group. Goering hoped that Galland and his band of outcasts would all die flying combat.
Adam Makos was fascinated by World War Two at a young age, and began his own newsletter devoted to the stories of American combat veterans. That newsletter grew into "Valor" magazine, and "A Higher Call" shows an important change. Before, Makos had no interest in the stories of German or Japanese veterans of the war, disdaining those men as “the enemy.” Yet, "A Higher Call" is very much Franz Stigler’s story: in telling it, Makos shows he has learned from Franz Stigler that not all Germans were members of The Party. Over and over, he writes about how Stigler resented what the “44%” of Germans who voted for the Nazis in the last multiparty German elections had done to the country.
The “higher call” Stigler answered on that December day was one to our common humanity. Stigler’s first CO, ace pilot Gustav Roedel, told him, “You fight by rules to save your own humanity!” Roedel wanted his pilots to score “victories” by destroying enemy machines, not celebrate “kills” where they ended an enemy pilot’s life. Roedel did not display his victories on the rudder of his fighter. He made Franz one promise: “Stick close to me, and we’ll both get home.”
Much recent scholarship, e.g. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett’s majestic "A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War" or Richard J. Evans’s magnificent "The Third Reich at War" emphasize the importance of Nazi ideology and fanaticism in steeling German armed strength even after it was apparent the war was lost. One of the bitterest German jokes emerged from the last two years of the conflict: “Enjoy the war, for the peace will be dreadful.” Robert Gellately’s "Backing Hitler," as well as Evans’s prior two volumes, "The Coming of the Third Reich" and "The Third Reich in Power," all develop, support, and defend the proposition that the German people allowed the Nazis to take power, and many Germans who were not Party members willingly collaborated with the regime and its crimes.
Yet, there is so much ambiguity which we must admit. While the German Catholic Church did sign a concordat with the Nazis, and sympathized with the Party’s anticommunism and authoritarianism, opposition from German Catholics did stop the euthanasia program which killed thousands of Germans with physical and mental handicaps. Franz Stigler flew because he loved it, helped train German Air Force pilots because he was a professional aviator, and flew in combat out of duty to his country. Stigler betrayed that duty by answering a higher call when he led Charlie Brown and his crew to safety. If Stigler’s act had been discovered by the wrong people, he would have been executed.
Gerd Barkhorn was a young pilot with a bad case of nerves: Stigler’s solution was to buzz a nudist colony while Barkhorn copiloted. Barkhorn relaxed, and became what Stigler had seen in him, a natural pilot who became an ace flying against the Soviets. Barkhorn told Stigler the horrible story of shooting up a Soviet fighter. The Soviet pilot, frightened out of his mind, had frozen in his plane. Barkhorn saw that fear, and gestured to his enemy to bail out. The Soviet flier overcame his fear, popped his canopy, and hit the silk. Stories like that are a necessary antidote to the overwhelming brutality of that war.
Stigler saved his humanity. Yes, at the end, when Stigler and Brown met at a veterans’ reunion, when Stigler was introduced to the two surviving men of Brown’s crew and the families of all three, and realized his decision had made all of those lives possible, I cried. Out of the slaughter of World War II came one of the most vital, moving, and elemental stories I have ever heard.