A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (33 page)

F
RANZ HAD SEEN
the third airman appear in the cockpit and look at him wide-eyed, then disappear. He knew the Americans were puzzled and scared and wasn’t surprised when he saw movement in the top turret. A crewman poked his head between the turret’s guns, confirmed that Franz was still there, and began to revolve the turret toward Franz’s fighter.

Franz knew what was coming. Taking one last look at the American pilot, he did the only thing that came to mind. He saluted him.

The American pilot stared back with a genuine look of surprise.

“Good luck, you’re in God’s hands,” Franz said. Banking his fighter, Franz peeled up and over the bomber then dove away, leveling out in the direction of Germany.

W
HEN BLACKIE REGAINED
his composure, he emerged from his turret and entered the cockpit to tell Charlie what he had seen. He found Doc already there, jabbering with Charlie and Pinky about their 109 escort.

“What do you think he was trying to say?” Pinky asked.

“He was looking for the string so he could cut us out of the sky,” Charlie quipped.

“I think he flew up to salute us,” Blackie said. “To say, ‘I gave you my best and you survived.’”

“What do you think, Doc?” Charlie asked.

“Pretty damn brazen,” Doc said. “Shades of Eddie Rickenbacker.” Doc was referring to Rickenbacker, America’s top WWI ace and most chivalrous pilot. The legend went that Rickenbacker was so overjoyed
when WWI ended that he flew over the trenches to watch the soldiers from both sides meet in no-man’s-land to celebrate their survival.

Charlie nodded in agreement. He and the German had flown side by side for fewer than ten minutes, never exchanging a word. But the image of the pilot’s salute was frozen in Charlie’s mind. Charlie did not know the German’s name or what he wanted, but he was certain of one thing: whoever he was, his enemy was a good man.

*
The Germans did claim the bomber as destroyed and gave credit for the victory to Lieutenant Ernst Suess, a sixty-seven-victory ace. That morning Suess had picked up his pregnant wife at the train station in Oldenburg so they could spend Christmas together. During his attack on
The Pub
, his plane was damaged and Suess bailed out. According to his comrade, Viktor Widmaier, Suess’s parachute failed to open and his comrades found him, dead, in a field west of Bremen.

*
Blackie would remember, “My guns were frozen up and I had my barrels pointed at him. He kept closing and I couldn’t shoot.”

*
Blackie would remember, “He came up on our right wing, so close that his wing actually overlapped ours. I kept my dead guns trained on him. We looked directly at each other.”

*
“I look out and there’s the world’s worst nightmare sitting on my wing,” Charlie would remember. “That little sucker looked like he owned me and belonged there.”

*
“He ignored my signals,” Franz would remember. “He and his crew needed doctors. I kept motioning to him but he kept going, both arms wrapped tightly around the controls. The bomber, I believed, was doomed to crash in the sea. All aboard would be killed.”
²

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, OVER THE NORTH SEA

W
ITH THEIR GERMAN
escort now departed, Charlie saw the murky North Sea below him, swirling with the promise of an icy death. The bomber’s slight but steady descent terrified him. The plane seemed to be swimming laboriously through the heavy air, falling a few feet every minute due to drag from the hole in her nose, a dead engine, and her frayed skin. She was overweight for the two and a half engines that were pushing her, and Charlie found the only way to keep her flying straight was to drop the left wing by a few degrees.

A quarter of the way home, engine four shook any confidence that had surged in Charlie. “It’s running away again!” Pinky shouted. By then Pinky knew the routine too well and launched the shut-down procedures, praying the troublesome engine would restart. It did, but the momentary loss of power cost the bomber two hundred feet of altitude. Charlie wondered if they had enough altitude to cross all three
hundred miles of ocean at the rate their height was bleeding away. He knew the answer:
No
way.

Charlie called for Frenchy, who stumbled in from his turret. “Spread the word, have the men toss everything that’s not nailed down,” Charlie said. Frenchy nodded. “My guns, too?” he asked. Charlie thought about it. They would be truly defenseless without Frenchy’s guns. But that German pilot’s strangely uneventful escort had given Charlie a sense of hope that they were going to make it home. “Dump ’em,” Charlie said.

The crew roamed the length of the plane, gathering anything they could expel. From the waist windows they tossed machine guns, flak vests, and oxygen bottles. Belts of bullets trailed through the sky. The men got on their hands and knees and scooped brass shell casings into helmets and shoveled them out to sea. Pechout amazed the others when he appeared at the waist, a bandage over his eye, his beloved radio set in his arms. He heaved out the black box. Frenchy suggested removing Ecky’s guns, but Blackie warned him not to go back there.

Frenchy returned to the cockpit and told Charlie it was done. “All we can do now is pray,” Charlie said. Frenchy draped his arms over the seat backs of Charlie and Pinky as if he was afraid to be alone. Although battered beyond the endurance of most aircraft,
The Pub
continued to claw at the stormy sky through scattered, misty clouds.

Halfway home, with the sea still spanning the horizon, the needle on the altimeter slowly ticked backward as the bomber slipped beneath one thousand feet of altitude. Blackie appeared in the cockpit, grinning like he always did. Charlie asked how his feet were feeling, and Blackie said he couldn’t feel a thing below his knees. Charlie asked if Russian was stable. “The morphine has him in la-la land,” Blackie said. Blackie stopped talking when he noticed the altimeter. Frantically he looked out both windows to see the altitude for himself. “Yup, we’re dropping,” Charlie said. Blackie suggested he was going back to go hit the morphine himself.

Thirty minutes later the bomber dipped below five hundred feet.
^*
They were three-fourths of the way home, but the ocean still filled the horizon. Pinky trembled, his arms shaking the yoke. Each time Charlie felt
The Pub
shudder and drop a few feet, he touched the Bible in his pocket like a transmitter on a microphone hoping it would beam his prayers up faster. He asked his “Third Pilot” to stay close.

A short time later, two green flashes streaked from behind the bomber and ripped past Charlie’s window with a roar. Startled, Charlie ducked his neck into his shoulders. “Fighters!” he shouted in alarm, assuming the worst. Pinky leaned forward, wide-eyed, to catch a glimpse. Frenchy turned to run for his turret, then stopped when he remembered he had tossed his guns. He returned to the pilots’ seatbacks and ducked behind them.

The fighters held their course, racing ahead of the bomber. Charlie could not tell whose side they were on because their markings were hidden from behind. Then Charlie saw the fighters crossing in front of the bomber, their olive-colored flanks and wings revealing big white stars set within the blue circles of the American Army Air Forces.

“Little friends!” Frenchy screamed into Charlie’s ear. Charlie turned, perturbed until he saw a wide grin on Frenchy’s tough face and his deep-set eyes alight like a kid’s. Charlie realized Frenchy was still deaf from his own gunfire.

The fighters were P-47 Thunderbolts of the 8th Air Force. They circled and disappeared from Charlie’s sight. The next time he saw them they had pulled up on his left wing, where they flew formation with him.

The planes had sharp spines that led from the cockpit to the tail and gave them another nickname, “Razorbacks.” Their white noses were dirty from oil that streaked their gray bellies and dotted the tall
white unit letters on their flanks. Silver metal peeked from weathered spots in the planes’ olive skin. Charlie had never seen such beautiful machines. Through the canopy, Charlie saw the closest pilot smiling. His goggles were tipped up on his forehead and his oxygen mask dangled below his chin. He waved confidently. Afraid to let go of the yoke, Charlie unlocked his left hand, finger by finger, and waved quickly, forcing a timid smile. Charlie grabbed the yoke again as fast as he had let go. Pinky waved, too, with two hands.

The P-47 pilot pointed to his headset, a signal to ask if Charlie had radio communications. Charlie shook his head. The P-47 pilot understood and flashed Charlie a thumbs-up. The fighter pilot looked forward. Turning back to Charlie, he pointed ahead. Charlie looked through the windshield and his jaw dropped. He squinted and leaned forward. There, in the center of the horizon, was a small swath of land catching sun through a break in the clouds. It looked like a small island. Slowly the island seemed to stretch wider and wider as the clouds above it spread open, allowing more sun to reveal the beautiful green pastures of England. Pinky grinned. Frenchy clutched Charlie’s and Pinky’s shoulders. Charlie tapped his Bible in thanks.

The P-47 pilot saluted Charlie and raced ahead with his wingman. Minutes later,
The Pub
passed over the rugged, stony English coastline at 250 feet, rumbling low enough over a fishing village to see sailors lowering their sails and men in the cobblestone streets headed for drinks after a day at sea.

Inside the bomber’s cockpit, Charlie began to breathe again. But the bomber was still sinking. As it passed through two hundred feet, Charlie told Frenchy to get Doc out of the nose and to tell the others to prepare to crash-land. Frenchy departed as Charlie looked for a soft field. Every field he saw seemed small and laced with stone fences. Frenchy emerged from the nose and said that Doc had refused to leave and was going to find them an airfield. Charlie told Frenchy there was no time for that. Then he saw them. The two P-47s were ahead and to his left, circling at one thousand feet.

“Are they trying to tell us something?” Charlie asked aloud. He did not wait for Frenchy’s or Pinky’s reply. Charlie muscled the sluggish controls and turned toward the fighters. Passing just above a thick grove of trees, he saw what the circling fighters were trying to show him. Below them, lay the smooth gray runway of an airfield.

“Flash them the landing lights!” he told Pinky. He knew the P-47 pilots were watching. Charlie focused on the two-thousand-foot runway, just three miles out to the southwest. Banking to line up his approach, Charlie reached forward and flipped the toggle for the landing gear. He looked to the instrument that showed the silhouette of the bomber and waited for three green lights to appear. But the bulbs remained clear. Charlie tried to lower the flaps, too, but they were frozen. Charlie knew the hydraulics had bled out. Frenchy saw what was happening. “I’m on it,” he said, and departed to crank the gear and flaps down by hand.