A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (48 page)

Sirens wailed as the field’s flak guns came to life and threw up rapid black clouds. The P-51s seemed to fly faster than their engine noise, a guttural growl that echoed after they had cleared the field. The P-51 pilots kept running east after each strike, staying low, not climbing or banking. Franz could tell they knew their craft. The first wave had barely departed when a second wave of P-51s burst through the smoke at the field’s southern edge. They ripped north across the field at 320 miles per hour and strafed the planes parked in front of the terminal. Each time, the P-51s came from a new direction to confuse the flak gunners.

For a moment, Franz stood still, his body frozen with alarm. The P-51s had hit everywhere except the flight line where he was standing. Men around Franz had jumped into their holes, ducked into blast pens, and sprinted for a bombed-out barn behind the alert shack. Franz found his feet, tossed his shovel aside, and jumped into his foxhole. Peering up at the sky, he saw ribbons of fire rip overhead. A shower of dirt told him he had moved just in time. A split second later Franz looked up and saw a flight of P-51s fly directly over his head. Their prop blast blew off his hat. He could smell their exhaust.

After the flak guns had chased the P-51s away, Franz slowly climbed out of his hole. Three of the unit’s jets lay burning around him, and others had caught bullets. Franz ran to check on his comrades,
but miraculously, none had been hit. When Galland came by, inspecting the damage, he lamented, “They would strafe a stray dog if they could.”
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Franz climbed onto
White 3
’s wings and walked from side to side. He smiled when he saw that she was unscathed.

A siren stopped Franz. He jumped from his plane and into his hole, certain the P-51s were back. The other men along the flight line hid in their holes. Only their heads showed as they nervously glanced skyward. Franz waited for an order to take off, but none came. He waited in his hole next to
White 3
until he heard a low rumble that he recognized from his time in Sicily—the droning of steel wasps. Franz saw them emerge from the clouds high above. Box after box of silver bombers motored from south to north. They were B-17s, two hundred planes strong.

The flak guns of the airfield and the city of Munich blasted out, rocketing shells thirty thousand feet up. Some of his comrades ran from their holes, but Franz stayed. He expected Galland to come running to tell him to evacuate
White 3
. When Franz heard the high-pitched whine of bombs, he knew that no such order was coming. Franz put his thumbs in his ears and opened his mouth just as the little girl had demonstrated in Potsdam. He squeezed his chest to his knees and huddled belowground as the earth shook. The pressure from each blast ripped over his hole and flung dirt down his back. His ears rang. His eyes watered. Each shock wave of pressure hit like an invisible foot on his back. Each blast sucked the breath from his lungs and stomped him deeper. Franz knew from the direction of the fury that the bombers were pounding the terminal and hangars where they expected JV-44 to live and operate. He heard glass shattering, fire sizzling, and walls slamming down. A bomber whined and spun toward the earth, but Franz never heard its crash over the chaos.
^*

When the earth stopped shaking, Franz looked up from under his arm and saw the bombers turning west for home. He climbed from his hole and wiped his eyes. His comrades emerged, shaking the cobwebs from their heads. Across the airstrip, gray smoke rose from the terminal. The side of the tower had been chopped away and now it teetered. The bombers had dropped firebombs that had burned through the roofs of the hangars, from which black smoke poured. High explosive bombs had pitted the terminal’s concrete parking area and the grass runway, leaving deep, white craters with a perfect dirt ring around each. Along the field’s southern blast pens, jets were burning. When the air raid sirens stopped wailing, others cries could be heard—faint, muted sobs of pain from the south end of the field. There, fifty men and Fighter Dolls had been wounded. Six men had been killed. Franz saw the survivors limping among the burning jets. As he joined his comrades in a sprint to lend aid, Franz knew that without some glimmer of hope, JV-44 was going to fold before doing any good.

*
As the war wound down, American fighter pilots knew that any German pilot still flying had to be an expert. This awareness led some American pilots (a small, unknown percentage) to shoot German pilots in their parachutes or after landing. Their logic was pragmatic. They did not want a German expert returning to the skies to kill a ten-man bomber crew, a buddy, or them.

*
Franz would remember, “Later the next day we actually had a briefing on my experience. Remember that we were all still learning about these planes. This was a valuable lesson.”
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*
A JV-44 officer, Major Werner Roell, was in Munich and saw an airman parachute from the B-17. Roell found the airman in the hands of civilians and an SS officer. Before the SS officer could execute the airman, Roell chased the officer away and took the American to a hospital. “The man might have worn a different uniform but he was still a fellow human-being,” Roell would remember.
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A WEEK LATER, MID-APRIL 1945

F
RANZ AND HIS
comrades stood around the alert shack, eating sandwiches of bread and jam, as they did every day at noon. They ate in silence, tired from the British Mosquito bombers that had flown over Munich, triggering air raid sirens to deny them sleep. They were weary from cleaning up after the bombing and strafing raids that had not let up. They hardly noticed the pilot who entered their midst, the one with the shoulder boards of a major and the Knight’s Cross around his neck. One of the pilots saw the stranger and did a double take. He recognized the man with the strong, simple face, who happened to have 301 victories, three and a half times the victory count of the Red Baron. The pilot asked: “Barkhorn?” The stranger chuckled and nodded.

Franz turned and saw the famous steel-blue eyes of his former flight cadet, Gerd Barkhorn. But Barkhorn was no longer just a cadet. After three and a half years of fighting, mostly on the Eastern Front, Barkhorn stood before Franz as history’s second greatest ace. He was
reporting to JV-44. Franz and Barkhorn embraced as the others crowded around them. Barkhorn bragged to everyone that Franz had not only saved his career but had shown him his first naked woman on the shores of Dresden’s nudist colony.

Barkhorn said he had come from Florida to join the unit. He had seen the names on JV-44’s roster and had wanted to visit but reasoned that if he came to visit, he might as well stay. He told Franz he had never flown the 262. Franz promised to teach his old student once again.

S
OON AFTER BARKHORN’S
arrival, Galland kept a seat empty on his side of JV-44’s dinner table. Dinner at the orphanage was a formal affair served by waiters. Galland wanted to maintain the unit’s professional spirit. He and his staff—Steinhoff, Hohagen, and a non-flyer or two—adjutants—sat on one side of a long table, like a wedding party. The pilots sat across the table facing them. Franz glanced at the empty chair repeatedly. Steinhoff sat to Galland’s right. The empty seat was to Galland’s left. Franz wondered whom the general was expecting. The double doors of the dining hall creaked open. An officer strolled quietly through, hung his long, gray leather trench coat on the wall, and approached the table. The men saw with surprise that Luetzow, the Man of Ice, had departed his Italian exile to join JV-44.

As he showed Luetzow to his seat, Galland beamed with the same smirk he always wore. Luetzow’s frown seemed to lift as he took his place at the table. The morale of the pilots opposite him soared, marked by their grins. During the meal, Luetzow nodded to Franz, remembering him from Sicily.

Franz would learn that Luetzow had come because Galland had asked him, not because he wanted to join the unit. He had not flown combat for three years, let alone the 262. Galland had summoned Luetzow to serve as his right-hand man, to handle all logistics and operations so Steinhoff could focus on leading the flying. But Luetzow
insisted that if he joined the unit, he would shoulder his share of the dangers. He, too, would fly.

With JV-44’s table full, Steinhoff looked around and knew that never before had a unit existed with so many legends, “a body of young men in which everyone knew so much about everyone else.”
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Outside of JV-44’s dining hall the pilots’ peers would begin calling “the Flying Sanatorium” by a new name: “the Squadron of Experts.”

THE NEXT MORNING

Beyond the tree line east of the field, the night sky began to warm into day. By flashlight, Franz led Barkhorn to
White 3
. Franz hurried, aware that when the sun rose, so might the P-51s. Franz was going to give Barkhorn his first lesson in the instruments of the 262. Farther along the flight line, a light shined from Steinhoff’s plane, where he knelt on the wing over Luetzow, who sat in the cockpit.

“Where’s your nose art?” Barkhorn asked Franz, shining his flashlight on
White 3
’s nose. Franz explained that everyone in JV-44 shared planes, so there was no sense in staking a claim. Even Galland abided by this rule and ended his tradition of painting Mickey Mouse on his plane. Barkhorn told Franz about his wife, Cristl, and said he painted her name on every plane he flew, for luck. Franz cautioned Barkhorn to put his wife far from his mind if he wanted to see her again. Franz lifted the canopy for Barkhorn to take a seat. Shining his flashlight on the gauges, Franz told him not to be deceived by the 262’s “sinister beauty.” It was unforgiving. It flew so fast that a pilot needed to think faster than ever before, to anticipate every maneuver.

Franz remembered from flying school that Barkhorn’s mind was his own worst enemy. Barkhorn himself had admitted that when he first entered combat he flew more than one hundred missions without a victory, until he settled down. Franz had also heard that Barkhorn’s nerves, coupled with his physical wounds, had landed him in Florida.
Franz knew any man could succumb to strain. He almost had, if the B-17’s gunner had not shot him first. Franz worried about Barkhorn because he knew he was a decent man who cared about his comrades, the real reason he had left Florida to join JV-44.
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Franz would have worried more about his former student if he had known a story about Barkhorn and his enemy. Sometime during Barkhorn’s three and a half years of fighting over the Eastern Front, he had shot a Soviet fighter plane to pieces. The fighter was smoking and falling apart. Instead of finishing off the plane, Barkhorn pulled up alongside it. There he saw the Soviet pilot sitting in the cockpit, frozen in fear. The pilot looked at Barkhorn. Barkhorn gestured with his hand for the pilot to bail out. The Soviet pilot had given up on jumping, expecting to be shot if he stood to jump. With Barkhorn’s encouragement, the man jettisoned his canopy, jumped, and floated by parachute to safety. Barkhorn’s best friend, Erich “Bubi” Hartmann, who would trump him by fifty-one victories as history’s top ace, had asked Barkhorn why he risked his life to fly alongside an enemy to convince him to bail out. Barkhorn had told Hartmann, “Bubi, you must remember that one day that Russian pilot was the baby son of a beautiful Russian girl. He has his right to life and love the same as we do.”
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