A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (41 page)

Franz gunned his plane’s engine, kicked the rudder, and swung the plane’s nose toward the grass runway so his tail faced the pines to make the ground crew’s job easier. His 109 was a new G-14 model. Its spinner was black and had a swirling white streak painted through it that produced a hypnotic effect as it spun, a paint trick meant to fixate
the eyes of a bomber’s gunners. The plane’s rudder bore twenty-seven victory marks, three new white bars since Graz that represented victories over a P-38, a P-51, and a Spitfire. Franz knew Roedel disapproved of this, but he thought the marks would inspire his rookie pilots. These days they needed all the confidence they could get.

Franz cut his engine and popped his canopy. A burly mechanic climbed the wing of the plane and helped him remove his straps. One by one the other planes’ engines wound to stillness. All of their canopies opened except for one fighter a few planes over from Franz. The mechanic helped lift Franz to his feet and steadied him on the wing. Franz looked pale and moved gingerly. He had flown three missions that day, as he had every day for months. He walked down the wing and was met by two other mechanics who helped him stand on solid ground. As they showed Franz to a waiting
kubelwagen
, Franz saw the 109 with the canopy still closed.

“He’s asleep,” Franz told the mechanics. “Wake him gently.”

T
HAT EVENING
, F
RANZ
hunched over the table in his office to write a letter, as he did most nights. He was not writing to Eva—the frown on his face revealed that much. With a brown bottle of cognac and a glass at his side, he took sips of the golden liquid between dips of his pen in an ink vial. Every so often Franz looked at his door, anticipating the knock that he knew was coming.

That summer and fall, Franz had witnessed the slaughter of the Air Force. Now, at their new station north of Dresden, where Franz had once trained cadets, the Air Force had grown weak and thin. He and his comrades were still flying the old 109 because Goering gave them nothing better. Rookies now came to his squadrons with only ten flights in 109s, not the seventy-five flights Franz had made before deploying to Africa. The novice pilots now outnumbered the veterans in his squadron by three to one.

In an attempt to reverse the tide of the war after four years of his
bad decisions, Goering had decided to drive the tired veterans like Franz harder. Now, on Goering’s orders, pilots had to attack until out of ammo, land, rearm, refuel, and go up to attack again and again, until the bombers had all departed German airspace. Goering’s new rule succeeded best in breaking men, causing them to lose their nerve and pass out in their cockpits to the hum of their engines. Pilots began to fly drunk. In Fighter Wing 26, a squadron leader even shot himself in his cockpit with a handgun.
^*

That night at the base, like most nights late in the war, Franz wrote to the parents of a young pilot who had been killed in action. He always told the parents that their son had died a hero, because the truth was too terrible to tell. The best the rookie knew was to “target fly”—straight and level—until an Allied fighter came along to claim him as a victory. “What can you do with kids like that?” Franz often lamented to his fellow veterans when they got drunk at night. By the time he finished the letter his bottle of cognac would be half-empty. When Franz splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror, he realized that he was penning the same kind of hollow letter that his brother’s squadron leader had written to him when August died.

The knock always came in the evening. Franz knew it was coming that night; his group of forty pilots had lost nine of their men the week before. And so it happened. A light rapping on his heavy door. Then a heavier knocking. When Franz opened the door, he wanted to throw up his arms. He saw a new pilot standing there, a teenager, maybe seventeen years old. The new rookies these days were always lowly corporals. The boy reported for duty and gave Franz his name, but Franz tried to forget it just as quickly, to keep his own sanity. The boy’s face was white and devoid of lines. He made Franz’s rookies from Graz look like grown men.

The rookie clicked his heels and tried to look brave as he gave The
Party’s stiff-armed salute. Franz returned the salute the old way, with a hand to his eyebrow. So much had changed since July 20, when a former Afrika Korps officer, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, had tried to assassinate Hitler. Stauffenberg was a Bavarian Catholic opposed to Hitler and had tried to kill him with a briefcase bomb that only wounded the dictator. In the aftermath, Hitler and The Party arrested five thousand suspected “conspirators” and executed two hundred of them. The Party turned paranoid. Suddenly they viewed the “old military” style of salute as a form of resistance, so they made their stiff arm salute mandatory. But Franz was too tired to adapt. The new salute was like the new award Berlin had given Franz on October 1. It was called “the German Cross,” although it was not even a cross. It was Hitler’s invention—a black swastika wrapped in a circular laurel wreath. It was worn on the tunic, below the right breast. The German Cross fell below the Knight’s Cross in prestige and was awarded for six or more acts of bravery. Franz found it insulting and amusing that after four hundred combat missions someone thought he had finally managed six brave acts. He had to wear this “cross,” no questions allowed.

Franz ushered the rookie into his office, sat him down, and welcomed him to Squadron 11 with a drink. He faked a smile and told the boy that he was lucky; he had joined “the best squadron in the Air Force.” Franz told every new pilot this to bolster his spirits. He knew that no squadron in the Air Force was half of what he had known in the desert. There, he had served in a squadron of experts. Those days now seemed a mirage.

A
S DAWN CRACKED
across the frozen horizon, Franz found himself suited up and watching the sky. He always prayed that the weather would be foul—preferably sleet or blinding snow—anything to keep his squadron from flying. He knew the rookies had to fly that day, possibly two, three, or four missions. He wanted them to have another day of life. More often than not, snow did not fall.

Franz and his pilots waited in chairs beneath the trees behind their planes. Mechanics had camouflaged the planes with black tarps that ran from the cockpit to the wings and with pine branches layered across the wings. A nearby radio speaker broadcast the air defense channel that announced when Allied fighters had entered German airspace. These days the Allied fighters were always spotted before the bombers. They would fly ahead of the bombers in a new strategy to kill the German fighters as they formed up, before they could attack the bombers. The strategy was devastatingly successful.

Franz looked at his nervous pilots around him and saw the rawest form of bravery. They were to go up against impossible odds. His enemies saw the same bravery. A B-17 pilot, Joseph Deichl, remembered, “When we did see the German fighters queuing up and start making their passes at us, we always thought they must have been on drugs or something because they were absolutely fearless, coming through the formation.”
²
Goering, however, attributed his pilots’ inability to stop the bombing raids as “cowardice.” Their grievous losses did not matter to him. He accused his own pilots of sabotaging fuel depots so they wouldn’t have fuel to fly. He told the general of fighters, Galland, that his wing and group commanders would rather “play with themselves on the ground” than fight. Goering told JG-77’s leader, Steinhoff, “The fighter force is going to give battle to the last man. If it does not, it can go and join the infantry.”
³
Goering even transmitted a message to group commanders authorizing them to court-martial pilots who had been seen to “run from a fight.” If any pilots were found guilty, Goering wanted them shot in front of their comrades.

The fighter pilots’ “problem,” Goering decided, stemmed from their lack of National Socialist spirit, so he sent political agents into the squadrons. Some agents arrived undercover as typists or clerks whose job was to listen for anti-Party rhetoric. Other political officers were announced to the units as “inspirational officers,” who led the squadrons in daily readings from Hitler’s book,
Mein Kampf
. The
pilots’ reactions to the political officers were similar. “Nobody took kindly to being spied upon,” one pilot wrote. “We all loathed these Commissar types and considered their presence among us to be an insult.”
⁴

When the radio blared out a warning that Allied fighters had crossed into German skies, Franz and his comrades turned toward the speaker. This alert served to warn student pilots and transport pilots to return to earth immediately. Franz’s young pilots looked to him. They knew this was also their signal to launch—the announcement of Allied bombers would follow shortly. Franz looked back at the young men in his care. They were barely able to fly by instruments and only capable of simple aerobatics. Fuel shortages from Allied bombings had cut short their training. 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.
^*

Franz stood. “Stick close to me,” he reminded his boys, then walked to his fighter. He no longer told them, “… and you’ll come home alive,” because he knew it was no longer true. He had seen too many veterans die when trying to rescue rookies from hopeless predicaments. Since Graz, Franz himself had been shot down more times than he could count. In seven months, he had bailed out four times and belly-landed his fighter just as much. Franz still checked his rosary before every flight. The beads were now more purple than black. They were getting worn out, too. Still, off Franz went with the men and boys of Squadron 11 into the skies that others fled.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, OCTOBER 26, 1944

Franz’s 109 taxied slowly to a halt along the trees. Its engine shut down, but the canopy did not open. The ground crewmen saw this and ran to the plane. The first to climb the wing popped the canopy open and saw that the windshield’s glass had cracked like a white web. In the center was a hole the diameter of a man’s pinky finger.

Grabbing Franz’s shoulders, the crewman pulled his body toward him. Franz fell limply to the canopy rail, his head flopping like a ragdoll. The crewman gasped. Red blood surrounded a black hole of dried blood in Franz’s forehead. A bullet had pierced the windscreen’s supposedly bulletproof glass. The crewman looked at the back of Franz’s head and checked for an exit wound, but there was none. He saw that Franz was still breathing. The crewmen lifted Franz from the fighter. 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. They remembered to call for the medics only when Franz’s eyes closed and he passed out again.

That evening the flight doctor cleaned and placed a bandadge on Franz’s wound. The .50-caliber slug, which had come from a B-17’s gun, had not pierced Franz’s skull, although it had caused a nasty dent in his head. Franz stood to leave, but the doctor stopped him. The doctor knew Franz’s skull was weakened, maybe fragmented.

Franz tried to pretend that he had not seen flashes of light. He denied having headaches. But the doctor knew better. Franz insisted he was not going to leave his young pilots, but the doctor told him otherwise. The doctor explained to Franz that he probably had brain trauma from the impact, problems that would be compounded by high altitude and stress. “You’re grounded,” he said, as if handing Franz a gift. But Franz begged him not to report his condition to the
higher-ups. The doctor shook his head. He had to. He handed Franz a medical waiver that recorded that he had suffered brain damage, which could trigger “adverse behavior.” The form said Franz “should not be held responsible for his actions.” Franz reluctantly took the waiver and walked away, steadying himself against the wall.