A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (17 page)

Each gun spit seven sharp .50-caliber bullets per second. At five hundred yards, with tracer bullets zipping past his canopy, Franz realized the awful truth of the tail attack.
You cannot do this and not be
hit.

At four hundred yards he saw the massive wingspan of a B-17 fill the ring of his gun sight. He squeezed a burst of his cannon for one second before he lost his nerve, snap-rolled his fighter inverted, and broke away. The pilots behind him did the same, some firing, but others too scared to squeeze a trigger.

When Franz pulled out of the dive, he looked up through the canopy roof and saw the bombers’ white bellies high above him, motoring upward and away, unscathed. Franz wondered how he had missed the bombers—the enemy’s wings had filled the ring of his gun sight. But, like Willi before him, Franz had failed to recognize a new variable. The massive, 104-foot wingspan of a B-17 was far different than the 40-foot wings of a fighter—it filled the gun sight faster although it was farther away. That day all of the 109 pilots’ shots fell short. They had yet to learn that a bomber’s wingspan needed to extend
beyond
the ring of the gun sight before it was time to shoot.

For the young American bomber crews, it had been a resounding although exaggerated victory. They would report being attacked by
“40 enemy planes” without loss and would later write simply: “Enemy aircraft fired at bombers from distance.”

W
ILLI PULLED UP
on Franz’s wing as their flights re-formed behind them. Willi jokingly asked if Franz wanted to try again. “I’d rather be a coward for seven seconds than a long time dead,” Franz said. So Willi radioed the others: “Mission complete, return to base.” The attack had carried them southwest of Marettimo Island, so Willi steered northeast toward the island.

Not a minute had gone by before someone radioed, “Fighters! Eleven o’clock low!” Franz leaned forward against his straps and peered ahead of his left wing. He saw green silhouettes just two thousand feet below him. At sixteen thousand feet they motored in the opposite direction, toward Africa. Franz’s eyes went wide. Each fighter had two engines, one attached to each large wing. The engines’ booms extended back like fork blades connecting to a small tail. They were P-38s, ten of them, the Fork-Tailed Devils of the 82nd Fighter Group. The Americans called their planes “Lightnings.”

Eager to redeem himself from his botched run on the bombers, Willi radioed Franz to say he was attacking. Willi knew no bounds when it came to pushing his luck, so Franz agreed to cover him. Willi dismissed his flight, as did Franz. It was like the desert again, two experts against many.

Franz followed Willi into a dive toward the P-38s. Both knew they had to hit them from astern or from behind, anywhere but from the front. Head-on, the Lightnings had them outgunned.
^*
The P-38 pilots spotted the 109s too late.

With height, speed, and surprise on their side, Franz and Willi swept across the P-38 formation from above, their guns blazing. Willi riddled a P-38 from wingtip to wingtip. Franz’s bullets stitched the right engine of another. Round and round they danced with the P-38s. Willi’s bullets hit another P-38 that spun from the sky. But the P-38s seemed reluctant to duel. After each joust they steered back onto their original southward course. All at once, they leveled their wings toward Africa and ran from the fight.

Convinced he and Franz had routed the P-38s, Willi began to chase them. But Franz warned Willi that the P-38s would only lead him out to sea, where he would run out of fuel. Willi reluctantly abandoned his pursuit.

Franz tipped his wing and looked down on the P-38 he had wounded. It was circling downward, its engine coughing black smoke. Suddenly the hood of its canopy tumbled away in the slipstream. The pilot stood in the cockpit then dove toward the rear of the wing. The draft sucked his body under the forked tail. He free-fell from twelve thousand feet, passing through the clouds. “Pull it!” Franz shouted at the American, urging him to open his chute. When the pilot’s parachute finally popped full of air, Franz felt relief. The pilot drifted lazily downward while his P-38 splashed into the sea. Franz flew lower and saw the P-38 pilot climb into a tiny yellow raft against the whitecaps.

Franz radioed Olympus to tell them to relay the American’s position to the Italians. He guessed they were seventy kilometers west of Marettimo and asked if the island could send a boat to pick up the man. For a second, Franz considered hovering over the man in the raft like an aerial beacon to steer a boat to the spot, but he shook the thought from his mind. It would put him at risk. If a prowling flight of enemy fighters found him, Franz knew he, too, could be shot into the sea. Franz and Willi departed the scene, leaving the pilot in his raft to fate. As they flew away, Franz wished the man a strong westerly wind.

The American who looked up from the raft was Second Lieutenant
Conrad Bentzlin, a young man from a large Swedish-American family in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was quiet and hardworking, having taught himself English in high school. He had paid his way through the University of Minnesota by working for the government’s Civilian Conservation Corps program, cutting firebreaks in the forests of northern Minnesota. Among his buddies of the 82nd Fighter Group, Bentzlin was known as “the smartest guy in the unit.”

Far from shore Bentzlin floated alone. A day later, another flight of P-38s flew over him and, through a hole in the clouds, saw him waving his arms from a raft. But he was in the middle of the sea and they could do nothing. Bentzlin would never be seen again.
^*

When Franz and Willi landed at Trapani, they hurried to fill out their victory claims in the operations shack. Willi claimed two P-38s and Franz one. Willi was cheerful because they had chased away an entire flight of Fork-Tailed Devils, but Franz felt a sense of regret. He had seen his enemy in the raft. He mentally put himself in that man’s shoes, floating alone as the sea grew choppy and storm clouds rolled in, without water or food. “That’s war,” Franz told himself as he lit a cigarette, another new habit. With each drag of smoke, he put the American pilot farther out of his mind. He scrawled his signature on the paperwork so he and Willi could go celebrate in Trapani, where black-haired “bella donnas” and bottles of sweet Marsala wine were calling.

*
Roedel would remember, “I do not think that it was a matter of intentionally lying about their victories, but it was proven to have been gross negligence in claiming victories simply because a pilot shoots at an aircraft, maybe getting hits, but not confirming the crash or the pilot getting out. The situation stained all involved in the Group and that flight, and even Stigler and I were questioned. Bad business really.”
¹

*
Franz would remember, “One cardinal rule we never forgot was: avoid fighting a P-38 head-on. That was suicide. Their armament was so heavy and their firepower so murderous that no one ever tried that type of attack more than once.”
²

*
Conrad Bentzlin had a younger brother, Carl, who would become a navigator on a B-24 that would be shot down over Vienna. Like Conrad, he became “missing in action” and never would return. When Conrad was shot down, his sister, Betty, was sixteen. For years after the war, Betty always looked for him in crowds.

TWO WEEKS LATER, LATE APRIL 1943, TRAPANI, SICILY

F
RANZ AND
W
ILLI
waited nervously in the courtyard of the villa on a hillside overlooking Trapani Bay. The high noon sun cast sharp shadows on the dried fountain that languished in the courtyard’s center between a cluster of palm trees. Willi flicked his cigarette nervously. All Roedel had told them was that General Adolf Galland had ordered that they report to the villa, the general’s new headquarters. Franz and Willi knew Galland’s face from postcards, the news clips before cinema films, and from the boxes of cigars he endorsed. He was a national hero, a ninety-four-victory ace and Germany’s youngest general at age thirty-one. All of Germany’s fighter pilots fell under his command.

Franz and Willi had pressed their tropical dress uniforms—tan blazers with white caps—and had assumed Galland either intended to decorate them with some awards or wanted their report on the disastrous supply convoys to Africa. In the week prior, Franz and Willi had flown to Africa daily, escorting transports with supplies for the doomed Afrika Korps. They had seen the Allies’ aerial blockade and
had watched as the seas grew covered with the burning wreckage of German transports and floating men. Allied fighters were shooting down thirty Ju-52s per week, and the Germans had begun naming days after big losses, such as “the Palm Sunday Massacre” followed by “the Holy Thursday Massacre.”
^*

Roedel opened the tall wooden doors of the villa and ushered Franz and Willi inside. Roedel nervously raised his eyebrows to Franz, as if to say, “Be prepared.” Franz had not seen Roedel since the shakeup when Galland had named him the new leader of JG-27. Neumann was gone. No one knew if he had been promoted or replaced, but he had had to leave his beloved JG-27 to work on Galland’s staff in Germany. Roedel chose Schroer to take his spot and lead II Group.

Passing through a vast room beneath a high ceiling with wooden beams, they found Galland outside on a patio, relaxing after his lunch at a small, circular table. The sea lay behind him. Galland’s thin smile beamed from beneath his black mustache. His slicked black hair and black eyebrows gave him a dark, menacing quality. A bad crash had made his face more rugged. The crash had flattened his nose and sunken his eyebrows over his eyes. Still, Galland remained a dashing lady’s man and unrepentant bachelor. He wore a tan, short-sleeved shirt that made his black Knight’s Cross dangle boldly.

Across from Galland sat his deputy, Colonel Gunther Luetzow, also a legendary pilot at only thirty-one years old. Luetzow was known as “the Man of Ice” because he showed little emotion, on the ground or in the air, where he had scored 104 victories and earned the Knight’s Cross. Slender in build, his face was scrunched by a thick nose and his small eyes always looked serious, either deep in thought or piercing with worry. Only a few people had ever seen him smile. Luetzow had
another side that few witnessed, in which he was a family man who cherished his wife, small son, and daughter.

Franz and Willi saluted the seated general and colonel and remained at attention as Roedel took a seat at Galland’s table.
^*
Roedel and Galland were old friends, going back to the Battle of France, where Roedel had been Galland’s wingman on the day when Galland scored his first victory.

Galland lit up a thick cigar, a trademark affectation he had discovered while flying in the Spanish Civil War. Galland loved cigars so much he had an electric cigar lighter installed in his 109. Galland’s 109 was legendary for other reasons. Franz had never seen the plane, but Galland was said to have customized it with extra machine guns and had his personal nose art, a custom-designed cartoon of Mickey Mouse, painted alongside the cockpit.