A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (5 page)

Turning to Father Josef, Franz’s father said, “The glider was designed for a heavier passenger—we forgot to compensate.” Father Josef nodded in agreement. After a few minutes, Franz walked wobbly from
the wreck with August holding him up. He had made his first flight and first crash all at once. “I thought you did pretty well,” August told Franz with a grin. “At least you stayed under thirty feet and didn’t try to turn!”

T
HE GLIDER COULD
be rebuilt, so the boys worked on it, just as they had built it. Every weekend they would drag the glider’s wing from the barn and replace its broken spars over sawhorses in the grass. Franz’s task was to re-glue the wing ribs, while the older boys did more precise jobs, like cutting new ribs and fitting them. Franz brushed the glue over the wood’s seams heavily, thinking that he would not miss a spot if he coated everything. Franz’s father dropped in now and then to inspect their progress. When he came to Franz’s work, he looked long and hard at the globs of glue piling up along each seam. Franz stood a few paces back, proudly.

“It’s a little sloppy, don’t you think?” Franz’s father observed.

“I didn’t miss a spot,” Franz promised.

“There’s glue in places that didn’t need it,” Franz’s father elaborated.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Franz said, “the fabric will cover it.”

Franz’s father gave him a lesson. “Always do the right thing, even if no one sees it.”

Franz admitted it was sloppy, but he promised, “No one will know it’s there.”

“Fix it,” his father advised, “because you’ll know it’s there.”

That day and in the many that followed, when the other boys took breaks from their work to kick the soccer ball, Franz kept working. He wore his fingers bloody by shaving the excess glue with sandpaper. He smoothed the seams of each of the twenty-odd ribs, perfectly. When the boys rewrapped the wings with fabric then coated the fabric with lacquer that would forever seal the glider’s skeleton, no one noticed Franz’s meticulous work—except for his father and him.

Several months later, Franz shot into the skies with a sandbag tied to his waist. This time he soared, one hundred feet above Bavaria. August ran below, waving Franz onward. Franz saw his craft’s wings flex and bend with the turbulence. He could see the curving Danube River to the east. Turning to the south, he could see the foothills of the Alps. Turning west, he saw a swath of forest looming ahead, so he turned hard to avoid it. The air did not rise over a forest or river, every glider pilot knew—you steered for fields and hills where the updrafts lifted your wings. Franz felt the rising air currents and saw birds above him, spiraling upward. August had told him, “The eagles know where the good air is—follow them.”

*
“He was the best glider pilot we had,” Franz would remember. “We were brothers and best friends.”

FIVE YEARS LATER, FALL 1932, NEAR AMBERG

F
RANZ WAITED ON
the stone bench. It was just after the midday meal, and the tall walls of his Catholic boarding school loomed around him. Leafy trees above the walls cast thicker shadows. Monks in their brown robes darted along the corridors. Franz wore his school uniform, but his gray pants were grass-stained and his white shirt sullied and rumpled. Franz was now seventeen. The baby fat had melted from his cheeks, revealing a lean, strong jaw. One ear looked inflamed and red.

Franz’s mother, Anna, had enrolled him at the school. With August at a university studying to become a teacher, the boys’ mother had decided that Franz would follow the path of the cloth. She longed to have a priest or monk in the family, and Franz had no problem with the plan. He loved his mother and cherished his faith. He planned to begin his priesthood studies when he graduated. There was one thing standing in the way of the plan. He had a girlfriend—and she was a secret. Until now.

Wearing his black robe, Father Josef approached the bench where
Franz sat. On the priest’s face was a look of uncommon sternness. Graduation was still six months away, yet Franz knew he was in danger of being expelled. Father Josef taught the younger boys at grade school, and although Franz was no longer his student, he had come to Franz’s defense once before, when Franz was caught sneaking out on a windless day to fly his glider. But this day was different. Franz had snuck out during lunch and crept down to the brewery at the end of the street. He would have slipped back unnoticed, but the brewmaster had caught Franz in the bushes with his daughter. The brewmaster was a beefy sort and dragged Franz back to school before lunch hour ended—by his ear.

Father Josef knew Franz was a good student and a dutiful son to his parents and God. On Sundays, Franz sang in the boys’ choir at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Regensburg, forty miles from his home. During the school’s daily services he wore the robes of an altar boy.

“It’s time to behave like a man,” Father Josef told Franz. “A future priest cannot be sneaking out like this.”

“You’re right, Father,” Franz said, hanging his head in shame.

“A man thinks and acts for himself,” Father Josef said. “Because he knows he only must answer to God.”

Franz nodded.

“Are you certain you want to become a priest?” Father Josef asked.

“I think so, Father.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Father Josef said. “Your mother wants you to be a priest. What is it that
you
want to do with your life, Franz?”

“I’d love to fly every day,” Franz said quickly.

“Then go do it,” Father Josef said. “Your mother will get over it.”

NEARLY FIVE YEARS LATER, 1937

The muffled roar of three BMW radial engines announced the arrival of the Ju-52 airliner at Munich Airport’s posh Lufthansa terminal.
One by one, the plane’s passengers entered the terminal, the women in their furs and flapper-era floppy-brimmed hats, and the men in their crisp fedoras and three-piece suits. At their heels trailed luggage bearers in white coats with bags in their gloved hands. The scents of cigar smoke, hair pomade, and French perfume drifted through the bustling breeze of the hustle while upbeat piano music from a nearby lounge jingled over the pace of the traffic. Such was life in Germany in the post-depression 1930s. In this time of renewed optimism and expansive power, the airplane, like the autobahn, was a symbol of national pride and promise.

Lufthansa stewardesses, immaculately coiffed in navy skirts, blouses with flowery collars, and chic headwear, crossed paths in the flux, some leaving the terminal, others heading for their gates. Pilots from every European nationality darted to and fro. Among them was Lufthansa pilot Franz Stigler, now twenty-two years old. Clad in his navy suit with its yellow cuff bands, a crimson tie, and shimmering gold wings on his chest, Franz was a poster pilot for the airlines. He had come a long way since his life-altering talk with Father Josef.

After high school graduation, Franz had studied aeronautical engineering at the university in Würzburg, two hours northwest of his home in Amberg. He liked his studies, but once again he had found himself in trouble. After class one day, a friend pulled Franz aside and invited him to attend the meeting of a secret student club. Franz went along and discovered an underground dueling club where the boys fought with sharpened swords. The boys covered their faces and necks and wore long sleeves and gloves, but still, the swords were real. The rules were simple: they could swipe at one another but never stab. Franz joined because he liked the idea of pretending to be a knight. He picked up a few cuts on the top of his head, but none on his face.

What Franz did not know was that the Catholic Church had an edict outlawing dueling. When the club was discovered, he was caught. Church officials excommunicated him. He wasn’t bothered by the
edict—it was just part of church policy, he reasoned. His faith remained intact. But Franz felt ashamed for his mother when he heard that every Sunday for six weeks his name had been read aloud during Mass at the cathedral in Regensburg, among the list of the excommunicated.

The embarrassment over, Franz began to tighten his focus solely on his goal to fly. During the weekends, he began flight training at the local airport. It was called “Airline Pilot School,” and its instructors taught Franz to fly motor-driven planes at no cost. The government paid for the training because they wanted pilots. Faced with the choice of sitting in a classroom to learn about flying or actually doing it, Franz dropped out of the university and completed his flight training. When Europe’s largest airline, Lufthansa, offered Franz a job, he jumped at the chance.

For four years and two thousand hours Franz flew for the airline. His job wasn’t typical. Instead of flying commercial airliners, he flew navigators as an international route check pilot. His role was to establish the quickest and safest flying routes between Berlin and London, and over the Alps to Rome and Barcelona. During these long hauls, Franz filled his logbook with passport stamps and flight times. In a glamorous age of air travel, when zeppelins, trimotors, and seaplanes roamed the skies, Franz had never been happier.

But on this day, as Franz walked through the airport, past its art deco lounges, a German Air Force officer waved and approached him. The officer was dressed similarly in a blue-gray blazer with a black tie, except he wore a brown belt and flared riding pants tucked into tall black boots. Two years prior there had not even been a German Air Force. In fact, there had not been one for seventeen years. Then one day in 1935, Hitler defied the Versailles Treaty with the sweep of a pen and reinstituted the German Air Force, the “Luftwaffe.”

The officer gave Franz a tall sealed envelope. “Your orders,” the officer said, his face grim. “Your country needs your service.”

Franz had suspected this day would come.
^*
This was why the government had trained him for free. After the Versailles Treaty had outlawed their Air Force, the German government had secretly trained scores of new pilots like him and funded the national airline—Lufthansa—so that the nation would have seasoned pilots to one day rebuild the Air Force. The routes and times that Franz had been devising for Lufthansa no doubt had also found their way into the hands of the Air Force.

The officer informed Franz that he was to serve as an instructor pilot. He would teach new pilots how to fly long distances using instruments. Franz would remain a civilian, the officer assured him. He would fly his Ju-52 airliner under the banner of the airlines, although his missions would serve the Air Force. The officer promised Franz that they had the airline’s blessing.

“Where will I be flying?” Franz asked.

“You like the routes to Spain?”

“I know them.”

Franz knew why the Air Force would have an interest in Spain. A year before, the Spanish Civil War had broken out, between the socialist-leaning Republicans and the fascist-leaning Nationalists. Germany was unofficially sending “volunteers” to fight for the fascist side.

“You think it’s smart to train pilots by flying them into a war zone?” Franz asked.