A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (22 page)

The plane’s pilot sat in the left seat. Although he was only twenty years old, he wore the gold bar of a second lieutenant on his tan shirt collar. His face was square and his brown eyes gazed up beneath short, flat eyebrows. His name was Charlie Brown. Charlie’s eyes looked worried, although a smile spanned his thin lips. He always looked this
way, even when things were going well. His looks were ordinary, his build thin to average, but Charlie was a thinker. For his age, he was emotionally deep and quite happy to talk silently to himself, the best companion he had ever known.

Charlie’s smile reflected his rough and humble upbringing on a West Virginia farm like those below his wings. Down there, he had milked the cows before school and lived without electricity. Down there, he had never missed a day of school and had worked as the janitor at the local elementary school every night. On the weekends he had served in the National Guard to earn money for his family. After high school Charlie had transferred to the full-time Army, where he found himself behind the controls of a B-17.

Charlie gripped the W-shaped control yoke while his newly assigned copilot, in the right seat, ignored his yoke to study a map. Charlie’s copilot wore gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses that looked small on his round, full face. He was a second lieutenant named Spencer “Pinky” Luke. Behind his glasses’ green lenses, Pinky’s eyes appeared small and closely set. Pinky was from Ward County, in desolate West Texas, where he had been a mechanic before the war. He and Charlie were still getting to know each other, but Pinky refused to say where he had picked up such an unflattering nickname. Charlie guessed it stemmed from Pinky having a goofy demeanor and growing up in hardened cowboy country. Somehow the name followed him to flight school.

Pinky clicked a white button on the yoke’s handhold to talk over the plane’s intercom. His throat microphone, like a rubber collar, picked up his voice and beamed it to Charlie’s earphones over the cacophony of aircraft noise. Pinky gave Charlie a new heading that would turn them away from their easterly course. Instead they would head south, directly toward Charlie’s hometown of Weston, West Virginia. The detour was Charlie’s idea. The flight that day was the final mission of B-17 training school for him and Pinky. Their instructors at their base in Columbus, Ohio, had assigned their final training flight
with one stipulation—stay in the air for seven hours to simulate a mission over the Pacific or Germany. As a reward, they let the pilots plan the route.

Charlie turned his B-17 toward the new heading. He had been flying for five hours already, but nervous energy kept him sharp. Through the cockpit’s side window he watched the fifty-foot wing tilt upward. Two massive round Wright Cyclone engines spun black propellers just feet from his face. Ahead, the B-17’s nose looked stubby to Charlie because most of the plane sat behind him. She was a B-17 F model, seventy-five feet long nose to tail. After this mission, Charlie would fly to Texas with Pinky to pick up the other eight men of his crew. There, they would mount eleven machine guns in the bomber, turning her into a “Flying Fortress.” Until that day, Charlie liked to think of the gentle plane by her other nickname: “the Queen of the Skies.”

Charlie leveled the bomber with the horizon. Through his windshield he saw the West Fork River gleaming in the sun. He knew the river’s bends would lead him home. Charlie’s eyebrows lifted when he looked west of the river and out Pinky’s window. There, a collection of lifeless green barns bordered a grass airstrip. “That’s the state 4H camp,” Charlie told Pinky. “Beyond it is the airstrip where I took my first airplane ride.” Charlie explained that when he was young, a Ford trimotor airplane stopped there while touring the country, offering rides for a fee. He lacked the money to buy a ride, but the pilots took sympathy and made him a deal: if he washed the plane, they would pay him with a free flight.

“Is that how you got hooked on flying?” Pinky asked.

“Not quite,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that he had originally been a soldier in the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord in Monterey, California. As a form of self-improvement, he had entered the base’s boxing tournament in the lightweight class.

“That’s where I met the opponent who changed my life,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that a skinny old soldier had stepped into the ring to fight him, a man with gray hair and arms so spindly his boxing
gloves looked cartoonish. Charlie said he had planned to go easy on the old-timer, to pull his punches, and had even smiled at the man to let him know he would not hurt him. “The referee had barely blown the whistle when, all of a sudden, he slapped me upside the head two or three times,” Charlie said. “I didn’t even see his arms move!”

Pinky looked unsure if he should laugh or groan.

“The old-timer was actually an old pro,” Charlie said. “I knew then and there that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Charlie told Pinky that the man had knocked him out of the fight in the first round then visited him at his stool. The old-timer said something he would never forget. “You’re too nice a kid for this army. Check out the Air Corps.”

Charlie turned to Pinky, grinning.

“I did check out the Air Corps, and he was right,” Charlie said. “Flying fits my personality far better than fighting.”

Pinky laughed. Charlie secretly knew that Pinky fashioned himself a fighter, although he was really the nonconfrontational type. He had told Charlie that he wanted to fly fighters and had only accepted B-17s with reluctance. Charlie thought bombers suited Pinky’s personality, too, but did not want to say so.

A small town came into view with buildings on both sides of the teal-colored river. Charlie banked the aircraft and orbited over a flat gray bridge. He told Pinky that he was looking at Weston, his hometown. Pinky looked intrigued. The town was tiny. The bulk of its brick buildings sat east of the river, and none were larger than two stories.

Charlie pointed out east of the town to the town’s glassware factories, which he said made a third of the country’s glassware. He showed Pinky the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum on the west side of the river. The asylum resembled a haunted mansion. Charlie said that during his stint in the National Guard he had guarded patients there after the asylum caught fire and needed to be evacuated.

Charlie tipped the bomber’s right wing toward a gray bridge over
the river that ran through town. Old men sat and fished from the bridge, hoping to catch bass hiding under its shade.

“I was almost killed on that bridge down there,” Charlie said. He told Pinky that he had been riding in a car driven by his older sister, one of his five older siblings, when another car hit them, head-on. He had flown face-first into the dashboard and broken his nose badly. “That’s why I get nosebleeds,” Charlie said. Pinky nodded, having witnessed Charlie’s nose bleed during high-altitude flights. Charlie knew he was lucky that Pinky had told no one about his nosebleeds, or else their instructors would have banned him from flying.

In the town’s center Weston’s citizens walked from their shops and homes to congregate in the streets and marvel at the sight of the world’s most advanced aircraft circling their town. Children jumped and pointed, amazed that such a large airplane could fly.

Steering the bomber south, Charlie told Pinky he had one last site to show him. He followed the curving river several miles until veering east, over farm fields. Charlie drew Pinky’s attention forward. There, on Pinky’s side of the plane, was a rundown house with a gray tin roof on a small farm.

“Is your family down there?” Pinky asked as they flew past the farmhouse.

“Nope,” Charlie said. “But that was my home for most of my life. We moved out after my mother died.”

Charlie explained that he was twelve when his mother, Myrtle, had died from illness. She had been the family’s guiding light. Her loss crippled his father, who fell into a depression, and they moved to a smaller house. It took years for his father to recover, but he did. While Charlie was in the Army, his father was elected as the local justice of the peace.

Charlie turned the bomber westward, back toward the river and on course for their base. Pinky asked Charlie if his dad was still living. Charlie said he was.

“Do you think he’s ever seen you fly?” Pinky asked.

Charlie admitted he had no clue. He said he had tried calling his dad but could not reach him. Secretly, Charlie wanted his father and everyone else in Weston to see him and know he was no longer the farm boy bringing in the cows, no longer the janitor scrubbing toilets, no longer a PFC in the back ranks of the local Guard unit. He was a B-17 pilot.

With an eager grin, Pinky asked, “What do you think about buzzing the town?” Charlie said it was a good idea and a bad one. They both were aware of the Army’s rule that forbids flying beneath fifteen hundred feet over a city. But Charlie also knew Pinky had always wanted to fly a fighter plane, until the Air Corps shot down his dream. Despite carrying a grudge against the brass, Pinky never resented Charlie for sitting in the “lucky seat.”

Charlie knew the town’s layout like the back of his hand. He also knew if they flew fast enough people would be unable to discern the call letters on the bomber’s flanks. Without catching their letters, no one would be able to call the Army and report them.

Charlie rotated the control yoke to the right and steered the plane north, locking once again onto the river as a course. He smiled to Pinky and told him to close his eyes so he could deny witnessing anything illegal. Pinky jokingly held his hands over his eyes, just for a second, then leaned forward in his seat.

With his right hand, Charlie pushed the four throttles forward. The bomber surged with power. The wind whipped faster through his side window, trying to swipe away his cap. Charlie pushed the control column forward, and the bomber dove toward the river, where he leveled off, just feet above the teal water.

Outside Charlie’s window, the trees on the riverbank blew past in a green blur. The bomber thundered over fishermen in their canoes, who ducked with terror. Without the weight of bombs or a crew, the bomber raced along at 250 miles per hour. Pinky smiled with delight at flying like a fighter would. The control yoke vibrated in Charlie’s
hands. Ahead, he spotted his target, the flat gray bridge at the center of the town, where the old men fished.

The fishermen must have seen the bomber racing toward them. They ran shouting. Other citizens looked toward the bridge. One man had never left the sidewalk from the moment the bomber had first been heard overhead. He was a short man with gray hair, and his black judge’s robe hung from his frail shoulders. He had been waiting, hoping the bomber would reappear. He knew Weston had a lot of boys in the service, but only one was flying B-17s. He was Charlie’s father, Charles Miller Brown, and he knew his son was looking down on him.

Charlie jerked the yoke back, just enough to lift the bomber’s nose above the bridge. The plane blasted over the bridge with a thunderous roar. The small brick town flashed past Pinky’s window, and he waved at the town’s startled residents. Outside Charlie’s window, the asylum’s white clock tower whipped by his window.
^*
The force of the blast blew the river water over its banks and billowed the dust in Weston’s dry streets.

“Who is that crazy son of a bitch?” a man in the street shouted while leaning around a corner to confirm that the bomber was gone.

Charlie’s father heard this, clenched his fists, and walked up to the man. “You can’t talk about my son that way!” he said.

The man shirked away.

Charlie and Pinky were so busy looking over their shoulders at the effects of their low pass that when Charlie’s eyes turned forward they bulged with alarm. A towering green mass filled the bomber’s windscreen. He had forgotten about the mountains north of town. The bomber’s blistering speed made everything come closer more quickly. With both hands, Charlie and Pinky gripped their control yokes and pulled them toward their stomachs. The B-17 lifted skyward as the g-forces slid their maps and bags back along the floor. Only after
the blue sky filled the windscreen did Charlie and Pinky push the yokes forward and level out. Together, they pulled the throttles back. Charlie breathed a sigh of relief. Pinky panted and swept beads of sweat from his forehead. Charlie turned the bomber west for Ohio and asked Pinky if he still wanted to fly fighters. “I’m happy right where I am,” Pinky chuckled. Charlie smiled in agreement.

*
“I was so low that I was level with the clock,” Charlie would remember. “Looking back, it was an incredibly stupid move.”