A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (30 page)

The 109’s white spinner had barely stopped whirling when the ground men swarmed the plane, connecting a hose from it to a fitting in the concrete that led to an underground fuel tank. Others pulled up with a
kettenkrad
, a small vehicle that was half-motorcycle in the front and half-tank in the back. Wooden ammo boxes filled the
kettenkrad
’s rear bed. The crewmen could see that they were dealing with an ace, because the plane’s rudder wore twenty-two white victory marks and a low number on its flanks,
Yellow
2
.

As he slid from the wing in his black leather flight gear, Franz’s thick black boots stomped the earth. He knew Jever from his flight instructor days, when the field had been a training school for bomber pilots. It lay on a peninsula northwest of Bremen, just ten miles from the North Sea. The lead ground crewman, a portly sergeant with his hood pulled over his cap, approached Franz and saluted. Franz had been promoted a month earlier and now wore the rank of a lieutenant on the shoulders of his jacket.

“Any luck, sir?” the sergeant asked. Franz shook his head and explained that he thought he had knocked down a B-17 just northwest of Bremen, but he had lost sight of it before it crashed. The sergeant asked Franz how he had attacked it, but instead of answering Franz just smiled and pointed to the man’s clipboard. Remembering his duty, the sergeant handed Franz the clipboard and Franz signed off
with his hand still shaking, authorizing the ground crewmen to start the fuel and ammo flowing into the 109. The time was 12:30
P.M.
With wounded bombers limping across Germany, Franz was impatient to get back into the fight.

He needed one more bomber victory. Since arriving at Wiesbaden, Franz had shot down three bombers, raising the score on his rudder to twenty-two victories. However, his rudder did not reflect the bonus points for victories over bombers. With bonus points added, his score was 27.
^*
One more bomber victory would push him through “magic 30” and qualify him for the Knight’s Cross.

Willi had scored a bomber that day, a B-24, but did not need the points. A month before, Schroer had hung the Knight’s Cross around Willi’s neck. When Willi told Franz he was leading the squadron home, Franz said to proceed without him. Willi was miffed. He knew it was unlike Franz to push his luck. Franz had always been the cautious one in their duo. Alone, Franz landed to rearm, refuel, and keep fighting.

Meandering from his plane, Franz lit a cigarette in a nearby blast pen to steady his hand. It was bitterly cold although no snow had fallen. Over the speaker system, the Air Defense radio channel blared across the field, announcing the location of bombers over Germany, along with the packs of American fighters that were trying to shepherd them home. Every time the rumble of an engine or the sound of a diving plane echoed from behind the treetops, Franz and the ground crewmen scanned the skies.

Alarmed, the portly sergeant ran to Franz and reported that they had found an American .50-caliber slug in his plane’s radiator. The sergeant suggested they wheel the fighter in for repair, but Franz forbid him to, insisting he was going back up. The sergeant looked at Franz
as if he was crazy. He had just given the pilot an “out,” a reason to stay on the ground and a guarantee that he could live to see another day—but instead, the pilot wanted to go back up into the shooting gallery of a cold hell. The sergeant returned to his men and shook his head, unable to understand Franz’s obsession. But to Franz, the Knight’s Cross was more than a bragging right. It was a sign of honor that he had done something good for his people. Franz had seen things the sergeant had not. Franz had seen Hamburg from above—eight blackened miles of city where people had once lived. He had seen small villages flattened as if they had mistakenly fallen in the footsteps of a giant. To Franz, his duty was to the people below whom he could never see but who were looking up to him. If he stopped a heavy bomber from reaching England and coming back to bomb his people, it would be a personal triumph. If they gave him the Knight’s Cross for doing so, the victory would be all the sweeter. As the ground crewmen topped off his fighter, Franz watched the skies and listened to the radio, knowing he needed just three more points, one more bomber.

*
His B-17 on fire and under fighter attack, Walt held the plane steady so his crew could attempt to bail out. His radio operator and both waist gunners escaped before the bomber fell into a spin then exploded. Walt and six of his crewmen were killed.

*
Doc would remember, “I felt like a one-armed paper hanger trying to figure out the safest heading home which would not take us over many flak areas.”

†
“When the first two fighters came at me and opened fire and I saw the twinkling lights, I knew I had made a mistake by volunteering,” Charlie would remember.

*
The problem of the frozen guns, Charlie believed, was due to the guns being too lightly oiled before the mission or because they had been given a coating of contaminated oil that the crew, on their first mission, had not noticed.

*
Charlie would remember, “I became angry and forgot that many of the crew were not held in place by belts and, in the case of the waist gunners, they could be thrown or could fall from the aircraft through the open windows.”

†
“The silence on the intercom was more terrifying than the sounds of the exploding shells,” Doc would remember.

*
One of Franz’s three bomber victories had counted as only two points, instead of the usual three points because another pilot had wounded the plane before Franz destroyed it. This is why he had the equivalent of 27 victories, not 28.

MEANWHILE, ABOVE OLDENBURG, GERMANY

THE PUB
DROPPED
from the sky in a spin, accelerating as she passed through twenty-two thousand feet… twenty thousand… eighteen thousand….

In the cockpit, gravity pulled Pinky’s limp body against the wall and Charlie across the gap between their seats.

The fall continued to sixteen thousand feet… fourteen thousand… twelve thousand….

Some twenty seconds later the bomber spun through ten thousand feet, where its spiral broke into a nosedive. The plane plunged straight down. At low altitude, the cockpit began to flow with oxygen-rich air. Charlie regained consciousness. Shaking his head he saw the German landscape through his windscreen, rushing closer by the second. The ground was barely a mile below. Pressed back into his seat, Charlie strained for the controls. He gripped them and hauled back.

“Pinky!” Charlie yelled to his unconscious copilot. Pinky still wore his oxygen mask, one that ironically now prevented him from breathing. Charlie reached over and tore the mask from Pinky’s face.

“Damn it, wake up!” Charlie shouted. Pinky began to breathe but remained unconscious.

Charlie toggled the bomber’s flaps to create drag and slow the plunge. Vibrations rattled the bomber, threatening to shake it to pieces. Ahead, Charlie saw that he was diving straight toward a German city.

The altimeter wound backward: 7,000 feet… 6,000… 5,000… Charlie strained with all his might. The trees and homes of the suburbs of Oldenburg came into focus. At three thousand feet,
The Pub
did something that no B-17 missing a stabilizer should have done. She stopped diving. For reasons inexplicable, her wings began to flutter. The plane flirted with the idea of lift.

Charlie dug his heels into the rudder pedals and pulled back on the yoke with his whole body. The bomber’s wings took bigger bites of the air and surged at the taste. Passing beneath two thousand feet, after falling nearly five miles, the bomber’s wings began flying again. But the plane was still dropping. Charlie’s arms shook.

Just when Charlie was sure
The Pub
was going to scrape the houses below, her nose lifted to the horizon and she leveled out, blowing leaves from trees and shingles from homes. Charlie had not flown so low over a town since buzzing Weston. The German people below him gazed up in awe, forgetting to run from the green bomber that thundered overhead, rattling their windows.

Charlie took a deep breath and looked over at Pinky. Pinky held his head and glanced out the window at the treetops passing beneath him. “Are we in England?” he asked, groggily.

“Germany,” Charlie said, uninterested in explaining what Pinky had missed. Charlie scanned the skies around the bomber for enemy fighters, expecting them to have followed him down. He saw only emptiness.
They’re probably at the bar lifting steins of beer and singing
,
Charlie thought.
^*
With trepidation, Charlie raised the flaps, afraid the bomber would drop out of the sky without their lift. But she surprised him and kept flying.

Charlie called into his throat mic, “Pilot to navigator.” Then he remembered the mics were out. “Get Doc,” Charlie told Pinky. Pinky unstrapped himself, leaned into the tunnel that ran under the cockpit floor, and shouted for Doc.

Doc emerged in the cockpit. Charlie told him to figure out where they were and establish a course for home. As Doc departed, Charlie shouted behind him, telling him to fetch Andy. Charlie shouted for Frenchy.

Frenchy slowly dropped from his turret and poked his head into the cockpit. He moved shakily and held a gloved hand over his temple where he had smashed his head against his gun butts. Because Frenchy was the plane’s fix-it guy, Charlie had a job for him. “I need a damage report,” Charlie told him.

Frenchy disappeared to check on the plane as Andy climbed into the cockpit. Charlie told Andy to check on the crew.

Frenchy returned shortly. “We’re chewed to pieces,” he said. “The left stabilizer is all but gone. The hydraulics are bleeding from the wings. There’s holes in the fuselage big enough to climb through, and up front the nose is open to the sky. I don’t know how Doc can work with his charts whipping all over the place.” Charlie saw Frenchy wincing and barely able to stand, so he told him to go lie down in the waist with the others. Frenchy insisted on staying near his guns. He sat down against a bulkhead beneath his turret.

Doc came up from below and handed Charlie a map. Pointing, Doc showed Charlie that they were northwest of Oldenburg. The fastest way out of Germany, he explained, was to fly north thirty-five miles to the sea. Charlie looked up and saw turbulent, billowing clouds rising ahead, where Doc’s map said the coast should lie. Doc had drawn the course in red pencil. The route was fine by Charlie, but he saw a new problem. Along the coastline, the map showed countless concentric red rings, each identifying a flak battery. They were strung along the entire coast.

“Is there any gap through the guns?” Charlie asked.

“Nope, they overlap,” Doc said. “It’s one of the heaviest-defended flak zones in all of Germany.”

The Germans had given a name to their fortified coastline that stretched from France to Germany then up to Norway: “the Atlantic Wall.” Its defenses were especially strong where they guarded the homeland, to prevent an amphibious assault. Charlie shook his head. On one good engine, two rough ones, and a nose full of drag, the bomber was lucky to be pulling 135 miles per hour, just above its stall speed.

As Doc departed, Charlie stopped him. “Tighten your chute,” Charlie said. Doc nodded.

Andy found Jennings seated against the fuselage wall by the left waist gun, cradling Russian in his lap with Pechout at his side. Russian’s eyes were closed. His mangled lower leg jutted at a right angle to his thigh. Blood was everywhere on the walls and covering the floor.

“Is he dead?” Andy asked.

“No, the freezing air stopped the bleeding,” Jennings said. “But I need help putting a tourniquet on him.”

Andy saw the pine trees of northern Germany through holes in the right fuselage wall, where the shells had entered that hit Russian.

Andy knelt by Pechout, who muttered an incoherent greeting.