A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (16 page)

A red flare arced through the sky across the airfield, the signal for everyone to hide in a bomb shelter. From a slit trench behind the blast pens, a mechanic shouted for Franz to take cover. Franz could see the trench was full already with mechanics who watched the sky.

Franz kept running. The next 109 that Franz reached had taxied out before he could commandeer it. Farther down the line, another 109 taxied away. Beyond that, one pilot cut his motor, hopped from his plane, and ran, his self-preservation instincts kicking in. Another pilot saw this and followed, then another.

Franz looked up—the B-17s were now large white crosses in a line. He counted twenty-six bombers. Slowly they turned to make a run over the airfield. They were almost overhead. Franz swore he could see little black holes in their bellies, their bomb bays open. Willi and his wingman took off down the runway past Franz, adding insult to injury.

It was too late to get to a plane. Franz knew he needed to get as far from the airfield as possible. He spotted a distant patch of trees where he had seen men digging a shelter the day before, and he ran in its direction. He spotted the slit trench and slid in, knocking away a round wooden pole that spanned its length. When his boots squished into the earth, Franz knew why the trench was unoccupied—it was not a shelter. It was a latrine. The pole had been there for the men to steady their rears upon. Luckily, the latrine was new and only looked to have been used a few times. Repulsed, Franz tried to climb from the latrine, but the sound of bombs whining from above chased him back in. He scurried to the end of the trench and peered over the edge.

The earth shook as the first plane dropped its bombs on the runway. A second barrage followed. A third. A fourth. Franz buried his face into the island’s sandy dirt and clutched the rosary in his shirt pocket. Explosion after explosion detonated, each a brilliant five-hundred-pound flash. Fighters along the flight line evaporated in
bursts of flame that erupted from the revetments. The earth upheaved, spitting dirt. Steel fragments flew in all directions, chopping trees in ragged halves.

Franz clutched his ears, but this only made the concussions hurt worse. He grabbed his throat as each blast sucked the air out of his lungs. He closed his eyes from the painful flashes of light. He wanted to vomit as his equilibrium spun. The bombs cracked, time and again, each a supersonic wave that pounded Franz like a lightning storm slapping the earth.

Then, just as suddenly, the earth stopped shaking. Silence arrived. The B-17s had dumped their payloads and droned away. 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.

Franz’s ears rang. As he pulled himself from the trench, he lost his balance and fell facedown. Through his orbiting vision, he saw fires on the flight line. In the blast pens, cracked wings and upturned tails protruded where 109s had once perched. Squinting through the spins, Franz peered toward the mechanics’ grotto. There through the smoke Franz saw
Yellow 2
. His Gustav still sat, proudly intact and on its gear, while others all around the field burned. Franz slapped the earth with joy.

THAT SAME EVENING

Franz and Willi drove the Squadron 6
kubelwagen
up the winding road that climbed the side of Mount Erice. The road was rough and full of hairpins. Franz kept the car in low gear, its tires kicking up yellow dust. Below the summit, the mountain became smooth. Franz pulled into a small roundabout where other
kubelwagens
sat at the mouth of a cave,
with camouflaged netting draped over them. Rock piles spewed from the cave, a sign of “home improvements” to the unit’s mountainside headquarters. Franz and Willi walked to the cliff to soak in the majestic view. On many nights the pilots congregated there to smoke. They felt more at home above the earth than on its face.

At their feet lay Milo. Farther south sat the airfield, with its runway shaped like a bone and a circular turnabout at each end, where planes could warm their engines before takeoff. Above them loomed the stark walls of Venus Castle. To the east lay clusters of Mediterranean farms and olive groves that vented from the day’s heat. Beyond the farms lay brownish-gold fields of durum wheat, still golden in the fading sunlight. To the west lay the ancient coastal city of Trapani. It was built around a half-moon bay, and the city came alive at sunset as Mediterranean villages did when their oil lamps were lit. Willi always acted unimpressed by the scenery and instead bragged about the skiing near his hometown, Kisslegg, where he had been a master skier before the war. When he wasn’t bragging about the mountains, Willi boasted about his small town’s domed church. It was built along a lake where people would stroll after Mass. Franz sensed the innocence of Willi’s hometown pride as he looked at the young pilot, whose white officer’s crush cap always looked like he had borrowed it from his father.

“Welcome to Olympus,” Roedel shouted as he sauntered from the cave that doubled as his headquarters. Franz had known he would be there. The airfield below was Roedel’s kingdom and the mountain and its castle, his estate. His squadrons—4, 5, and 6—were now the “Knights of Sicily.” Outfitted with new planes and refilled with new pilots, the squadrons’ new mission was to defend the island and the supply convoys to Africa. With only forty-two planes, II Group was shouldering a mission meant for all of JG-27. Due to the broadening war front, the wing had splintered and would never operate as one again. Instead, Neumann, who operated from an airfield in the center of Sicily, was dispatching some of his squadrons to France and others to Greece. For support, Roedel had the Italians, whose pilots were
brave but known for their outstanding aerobatic flying rather than their fighting prowess. He also had the three ghost squadrons of Fighter Wing 53 (JG-53), whose battered planes sat derelict at the northern end of the airfield, their pilots at home, resting from African duty.

Relaxing around the
kubelwagen
, Franz, Willi, and Roedel lit up and swapped stories. Franz pulled out his pipe and bag of tobacco, a new habit. He tamped the tobacco into the pipe with the brass of a spent machine gun shell. Roedel and Willi lit cigarettes. They talked about the raid that day and lamented the loss of eight fighters, bombed on the ground. Willi had caught up to the Four Motors north of the island and knocked one down, a significant accomplishment. A bomber victory carried bonus points that brought a pilot much closer to “magic 30” and the Knight’s Cross. A fighter victory was worth one point, but a bomber victory was worth three points because a bomber was a more challenging adversary.

Invariably, their conversation steered back to the old days in Africa. Willi had barely known Franz there, but he knew of the “Voegl Flight.” Roedel explained that he, himself, had been dragged into the controversy. Just days after his return, Roedel had scored his fifty-third victory, when someone started a rumor that he, too, had inflated his victories.

Secretly, Roedel had taken action. When Voegl and Bendert claimed new victories, he sent out the unit’s camera-equipped 109 and Fiesler Storch reconnaissance planes to the spots where they said their vanquished foes had crashed. When the searches found nothing, Roedel confronted Voegl and Bendert. He knew they had entered combat; there were witnesses to that much. But both claimed victories that could not be verified.
^*

Roedel could have hung Voegl and Bendert out to dry. But he knew that exposing them could have turned JG-27 into the laughing stock of the Air Force. So Roedel dealt with them privately. He kept them on the flight roster and gave them a second chance to repair the damage they had done. He allowed Voegl to retain his leadership of Squadron 4, and he did not interfere with Bendert’s Knight’s Cross nomination. But as punishment, Roedel kept both men in the desert as long as he could. 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.

Without fail, Franz’s evening talks with Roedel took on a negative tone. It seemed that the longer Roedel looked at the horizon, the more haunted he became by the vision of the horrors still happening in Africa.

“We’re next,” he said between drags on his cigarette. “It’s impossible to succeed here.” Franz drew deeply from his pipe, its embers glowing. They all had heard the rumor that the enemy now had five thousand planes in Africa. In silence, the men looked past the beautiful Sicilian sunset and to the southern horizon, where darkness overtook the skies.

THREE DAYS LATER, APRIL 16, 1942

Spiraling upward in their 109s through scattered clouds above the airfield, Franz and Willi saw smoke rising on the other side of Olympus. The gray plumes bellowed from the port of Palermo on the island’s north coast. The Four Motors had bombed the docks and power station there, sinking two ships. Franz, Willi, and twenty-one of their comrades had scrambled too late. The skies were otherwise empty. It
was 4:30
P.M.,
and the Four Motors had just spoiled the dinner dates Franz had lined up for him and Willi in Trapani.

From Olympus, the controllers radioed the flight to alert them that P-38 fighters had been sighted above the Gulf of Palermo. Franz had never seen a P-38, but he had heard the name the boys in Africa gave the new American fighter—“the Fork-Tailed Devil.” The P-38 was rumored to spit a hose of fire from five machine guns and a cannon, all packed in its nose. Supposedly it could snap from level flight into a loop in a blink.

From his fighter,
Yellow 3
, Willi radioed Franz and said he had a hunch where the bombers were. Two days before, after the B-17s had obliterated the airfield, Willi had caught them north of Sicily, turning west to reverse course and skirt the island on their way home to North Africa. Willi wagered that now the Four Motors would be flying the same route. He told Franz they could intercept the bombers west of the island if they hurried.

Franz liked the idea of pursuing “the herd,” as the bombers were called, instead of “the Fork-Tailed Devils.” The call was Willi’s—he was leading the flights because their squadron commander, Sinner, had been banged up several weeks earlier after a crash landing on the airfield. Despite the fact that Willi was younger than him, Franz respected Willi’s rank and courage.

Willi steered the flights west and poured on the coals. Their G models seemed to surge with joy at the chance to run open-throttle. As the flights motored across the island and over the sea, the clouds revealed their speed. The G’s new motor had 120 more horsepower than the F, its propeller blades were broader, and it was faster, capable of four hundred miles per hour at altitude. The G was still poor for dogfighting. Its faster speed made its turning radius even wider. And the G was a killer on takeoff. If a pilot applied too much power too quickly it would torque roll, flipping onto its back and into the runway.

“There’s the herd!” someone shouted across the radio. Willi was right. Ahead, Franz saw them: the Four Motors. Like a black cloud
they flew at twenty-four thousand feet over a tiny fishermen’s island called Marettimo. They were B-17s of the 97th Bomb Group. Willi led the squadron in a gentle turn behind the bombers until they were flying in the same direction at the same altitude. The pack of 109s spread out into a trail formation, each flight of four following the one ahead of it, as they gained ground on the heavies.

Franz squinted through the illuminated ring of his gun sight. The Four Motors were several miles ahead, flying toward the late-afternoon sun. He could make out their mustard-brown bodies and white bellies. They flew in a box formation, an arrangement of twenty-one planes that stacked diagonally like steps toward the heavens. This allowed the bombers’ gunners to lend fire support to one another.

Franz’s heart pounded. He found his plane rising and dipping with the shaking of his hand, and he noted the irony that he was flying like a rookie again. Through his bulletproof windshield, a welcomed improvement of the G model, Franz watched Willi lead the 109s ahead of him into their attack run. Franz’s flight was next in line.

Although the bombers were lighter and faster without their bombs, the fighters slowly crept up on them from behind using their one-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour speed advantage. As Willi’s flight approached the bombers at six hundred yards’ distance, gunners on all twenty-one bombers opened fire. A stream of tracers converged around and in front of the tiny fighters. Willi’s flight panicked and returned fire too soon, leaving a dirty gun smoke trail in their wake. They broke away and dove for safety, all too eager to let Franz’s flight try.

Suddenly there were no 109s in front of Franz, just smoke-stained air between him and the bombers. He had no experience in attacking bombers and was unsure of the right way to go about it. Franz radioed his flight, instructing them to fall behind him. They would simply attack one after the other. He was too scared to think of any last advice or words of bravado. “Let’s go,” he simply said. One of his pilots confirmed his transmission. The other two said nothing, too scared to speak.

Starting at one thousand yards from the bombers, Franz turned onto his gun run. He was alarmed to discover that attacking from tail was agonizingly slow. He knew to fire at a hundred yards then break away. But flying the first nine hundred yards to reach that point would take eighteen long seconds.

Franz aimed for the lowest bombers so he and his flight could make the quickest getaway possible. He passed nine hundred yards in two seconds. Then eight hundred. Then seven hundred. At six hundred yards he could see that the bombers’ flanks displayed white American stars surrounded by yellow circles. The bomber crews could see him, too, and their tail and ball turret gunners opened fire, eighty-four guns, tracking him in the lead like a spotlight on a stage actor.