A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (38 page)

Charlie wanted to tell her so much. He wanted to tell her about watching Dale Killion’s hand shaking as he shaved that morning. He wanted to tell her about how Ecky’s chubby little boots pointed up from the stretcher. He wanted to tell her that he had just watched thirty young men die an hour prior. Their lives ended in a series of flashes. They were young men who had spent twenty or twenty-two years on earth, growing and learning and living, just to die fewer than three lousy miles from their base, planted into an English field. Charlie crumpled Marjorie’s letter. He wanted to ask her,
Would you have wanted to be the copilot on any of those planes?

Charlie was angry at Marjorie only because he was angry with himself. He had realized that morning that his fate rested not in the hands of his enemy. The enemy had not killed the thirty men that morning. The odds had killed them. Charlie had decided that the odds were going to get him, too—if he kept flying.

Shuffling toward his barracks, Charlie passed the squadron operations
hut. He knew all he had to do was walk into the hut, fill out a form, and his flying days could be over. The clerk who worked there had once been a waist gunner. Rather than resign from combat duties, the man had taken his gloves off at high altitude and held his hands out in the slipstream until his fingers were severely frostbitten. Charlie knew he didn’t have to freeze his fingers to achieve the same result. He could do it with the swipe of a pen. He knew shame. He had grown up a poor farm kid unable to afford a comic book at the local drugstore. He could live with it.

Then, Charlie saw him. A man was walking toward Charlie’s hut with a brown box between his arms. Charlie knew the man, the orderly who gutted men’s footlockers when they went missing. The man opened the hut’s door and slipped inside. Charlie’s eyes bulged with alarm. He ran across the field after him.

Charlie entered the hut and found the orderly walking from bunk to bunk looking for someone’s footlocker.

“Can I help you?” Charlie asked, defensively.

“No, sir, I don’t mean to be a bother,” the orderly said as he opened a footlocker, sorted through some papers, and shut it. Charlie folded his arms.

Turning to Charlie, he asked, “Sir, maybe you can help me. Do you know which locker is Lieutenant Killion’s?”

Charlie’s face turned white. He dropped his arms.

“Why?” Charlie asked.

“Lieutenant Dale Killion and his crew were killed this morning,” the orderly said, shaking his head. “The midair.” Charlie sat heavily on the edge of a nearby cot as the orderly gave him the details.

Dale’s plane had collided with a B-17 from the 303rd Bomb Group. Charlie knew the 303rd was based just six miles to the northwest, at Molesworth—the flash he had seen in the clouds had been Dale’s death.
^*

Seeing Charlie’s face twist with emotion, the orderly apologized for bearing such news. Without a word, Charlie pointed to the bunk opposite his. The orderly knelt and opened the footlocker. He told Charlie he had to empty the lieutenant’s locker of his belongings. “It’s a shitty job, sir,” he said. “And I’ve got nine more to go.”

Charlie nodded, afraid to speak for fear of breaking down. The orderly gave Charlie permission to sort through Lieutenant Killion’s belongings first, if he wished.

Charlie thanked him. He knelt and sifted through the box as the orderly stood back. Charlie held Dale’s
Guide to Understanding England
book, and Dale’s postcards of California, where he said he planned to live after the war. Stuck to the lid of the box with tape, Charlie saw photos of Dale with his farm family and a photo of him standing proudly in front of his B-17, his hands on his hips. Charlie’s frown lifted slightly as the thought struck him. He and Dale had gone from being farmhands to captains of B-17s.

Charlie suddenly remembered the pride of flying a B-17. He remembered how the gunners waved when he formed up on another bomber’s wing. He remembered seeing white American stars on the flanks of bombers that stacked up to the heavens. He remembered looking across the frozen gap between cockpits and seeing a pilot like Dale or Walt look back at him and nod. The other pilots were just as scared to die as he was, but up there, Charlie knew they had mastered their fears by keeping the formation tight and sticking together. After two weeks away from the formation, Charlie had forgotten his pride. Looking at Dale’s photos, he remembered why he would not back out of the brotherhood he had volunteered for.

Charlie stepped from the footlocker and backed toward his bunk. The orderly scooped Dale’s belongings into his cardboard box, nodded to Charlie, and departed, the box between his arms. Charlie sat on his bunk in the empty barracks and looked across the aisle to where Dale’s footlocker sat empty. He suddenly knew what he had to do.

THAT SAME NIGHT

Charlie opened his footlocker and removed his leather jacket. With the jacket folded over his arm he entered the enlisted gunner’s hut. The gunners stood to salute, but Charlie told them to relax. Charlie approached a group of gunners huddled in the hut’s center around one man who was striking something with a clanging noise. When they saw Charlie, the gunners stood and backed away.

The man at the center turned and looked up at Charlie with a grin. Charlie could not help but smile when he saw that the rumors were true—Sam Blackford had returned. Charlie squatted next to Blackie and discovered he had laid a small sheet of metal on the floor over which he had piled wood shavings and sticks. Blackie held a flint clip in one hand and a square of steel in the other. With a smirk he explained that he was giving a Boy Scout lesson to his buddies.

“Back home, they call me Sour Dough Sam on the trail,” he said proudly. Charlie told Blackie he was not a bit surprised. Blackie noticed that Charlie carried his jacket.

“Do you still want to paint your jacket?” Charlie asked Blackie.

Blackie nodded, his grin growing.

“Will you paint mine, too?” Charlie asked.

“Sure,” Blackie said. “What do you want on there?”

“Two bombs,” Charlie said. “One for each mission and leave room for more.”

“How about I paint all the guys’ jackets?” Blackie asked.

“Good idea,” Charlie told him. “Paint ’em up.”

On his way out the door, Charlie stopped, having forgotten something.

“Blackie, can you paint the word ‘Bremen’ on the bombs?” he asked. “When we get home,” Charlie said, “we’ll want to tell everyone where we’ve been.”

TWO DAYS LATER, JANUARY 7, 1944

In the dimness of the hut Charlie dropped Marjorie’s letter into his footlocker and shut the locker’s lid. He had decided to write to her only after he had completed his tour, when he had something worth saying.
^*

On the airfield, a truck pulled up alongside the B-17
The Celestial Siren
. Charlie and his crew—Pinky, Doc, Andy, Frenchy, Jennings, and Blackie—jumped from the lift gate along with three replacement crewmembers named Liddle, Miller, and Paige. War paint covered all of their jackets. Blackie had painted the squadron patch, a skull and crossed bombs, on the front breast of some and “The Quiet Ones” across the upper backs of others. On the jackets of the men who had flown on December 20, he had painted two swastikas, one for each fighter that the crew had shot down, and a bomb with the word “Bremen” written across it. On each man’s jacket read the words “379th Bomb Group.”

Charlie looked at his watch and declared, “All right, let’s get on with it.” The gunners sauntered around the plane to enter from the rear door. Charlie waited while Doc, Andy, and Pinky swung up through the hatch beneath the nose. The tired old crew chief, Shack, and his ground crew stood watching. Charlie tossed his kit bag through the hatch. He reached up and with an underhand grip seized the bar that ran across the hatch. In one smooth motion he curled his legs and swung up and into the bomber. His hand reached back down and slammed the hatch shut.

T
HAT DAY
, C
HARLIE
flew the Quiet Ones to Ludwigshaven, Germany, and safely back. In the days that followed, the Quiet Ones would be
issued a bomber of their own, a B-17G named
Carol Dawn
. They would fly their next twenty-six missions together. They would survive a mission to Brunswick when the bombers on their right and left wings would be shot from the sky, and the ride home from Berlin when they would lose two engines simultaneously over the sea. They would return from Frankfurt when a massive headwind slowed them to a crawl over a flak zone. During those moments of terror, Charlie would have flashbacks and glance at the bomber’s right wing tip expecting to see the German pilot there, flying with him.

On April 11, 1944, Charlie and his original crew would complete their twenty-eighth and final mission after an eleven-hour flight to Sorau, Germany. Beneath their bomber’s nose, Charlie would smoke a cigar and drink from a bottle of whiskey that he would pass between Pinky, Doc, Andy, Frenchy, and Blackie. Even Jennings would break his rule and take a sip. They had survived their tour and more. By the war’s end, they and other young men like them would have helped the 379th earn the title “the Grand Slam Group” for flying more missions, dropping more bombs, achieving higher bombing accuracy, and suffering fewer losses than any other group in the 8th Air Force. By war’s end, the 379th would be the best in the bombing business.

On that day when Charlie would watch his men toast their survival, in the back of his mind he would wonder about the German pilot who had escorted them out of hell.
Who was he and why did he let us go?
Charlie would look to the eastern horizon and secretly hope that his enemy would survive the war.

*
“I told him that I was combat certified—war weary—and could get away with it,” Charlie would remember.

*
Franz would remember, “At that time religion wasn’t the highest thing in Germany, but that did not stop us.”

*
“There was no way that you could express that you made a mistake in volunteering,” Charlie would remember. “There was nobody that I could talk to. I couldn’t tell my copilot, any of my crew, or even the other pilots. I could not do anything that indicated any weakness.”

*
“For combat people, self-medicating is a big part of their reason for drinking,” Charlie would remember. “I only had two men on my crew who were not heavy drinkers, and both men ended up with psychological problems.”

*
The official accident report would declare that no one was responsible because “it is impossible to avoid such accidents with so many aircraft in the same vicinity.”

*
Charlie would write to Marjorie, months later. When he did write, his letter would come back: “Undeliverable.”

THAT SAME WINTER, MARCH 19, 1944, SOUTHERN AUSTRIA

L
IGHT FLURRIES FELL
from the gray clouds across the grass airfield as Franz knelt on the wing of the 109. Behind him, the wind blew across the city of Graz from the snowy blue mountains to the north. It was 1:00
P.M.,
but the winter weather made the day feel later. Franz leaned in close to the rookie pilot who sat strapped into the plane, his face long, pale, and harmless.