A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (36 page)

Charlie followed the pilots out the nose hatch and found his men behind the plane. The bomber had crashed just across the runway from
The Pub
. The bomber’s pilots examined the blown engine with flashlights. Frenchy looked at his luminescent watch. It was 9:47
P.M.
“I think we’re gonna miss the dance,” he joked.

“I should have bailed out over Germany,” Doc said.

Charlie knew he still had to break the news to Doc and the others that their heroism was being swept under the rug. He was dreading
the letter he had to write to Ecky’s parents and the question he knew they would ask him, “How did he die?” Looking at the wrecked bomber that should have been their ride home and
The Pub
sitting proudly, as if ready for another trip to Germany, Charlie said what each man in his crew was thinking: “Why did I volunteer for this?”

*
“The lower we dropped,” Charlie would remember, “the more ominous the North Sea appeared with its dull gray mantle, interspersed with large whitecaps indicating strong wind and high waves.”

*
Author’s note: Decades later, when I talked with American bomber crewmen who had been taken prisoner, almost to a man they would admit, “I was never so glad to see the Luftwaffe” when a German pilot showed up to take them prisoner, as opposed to the alternative, who often wanted their heads.

*
“When I saw the condition of the airplane, it frightened me more than anything in the air did,” Charlie would remember. “It seemed as if a hand had been holding us up in the air, and it wasn’t mine.”

†
Some three months later Colonel James McKenzie Thompson led his group over Germany on April 1, 1944. Of the twenty-one planes dispatched, five did not return, including Thompson’s. His B-24 hit heavy headwinds on the flight home and ran out of fuel over France. Only he and one other man from his crew bailed out. Thompson’s parachute failed to open.

*
“As I sat there in the darkness, I reflected that it had been a very long and rather tiring day for a thoroughly frightened, confused, and totally misplaced West Virginia farm boy,” Charlie would remember.
The Pub
would sit at Seething until March, when the men of the 2nd Strategic Air Depot would repair her over twenty-three days.
The Pub
was then flown back to America and later scrapped.

TWO DAYS LATER, DECEMBER 22, 1943, KIMBOLTON AIRFIELD

C
HARLIE SLOWLY SULKED
up to the door of his Nissen hut dragging his canvas kit bag. Forty-eight hours after his traumatic flight over Germany, Charlie still wore his same heavy flying uniform. The 379th had sent a hapless truck driver to Seething to retrieve Charlie and his crew. The driver took all of December 21 just to reach them. He arrived at Seething wearing a ball cap too big for his head and said he had been lost because the English had taken down their road signs to confuse a German invasion. On the drive back to Kimbolton, he had crisscrossed the back roads of eastern England all night while Charlie and his crew bounced around in the rear of the truck. Only a flap of canvas separated them from the freezing cold. Following a twenty-hour-drive, they fell from the truck’s lift gate at Kimbolton, sick from diesel exhaust.

His eyes half-shut, Charlie slowly opened the door to his hut. He had not bothered to check in at the squadron headquarters like Pinky and the others had. He only wanted to drop to his bunk to sleep. Charlie saw that fellow officers were straightening their ties and slicking
back their hair for dinner dates. They stared at Charlie in the doorway then ran to him, slapping him on the back.

“Back from the grave!” someone yelled. Charlie grinned wearily. His good friend, Second Lieutenant Dale Killion, broke through the crowd beaming a wide grin. Dale was a rookie pilot, too, and a simple farm kid from Iowa who resembled film star Ronald Reagan. Dale was twenty-two years old, so Charlie looked up to him, although Dale’s “gee whiz” mannerisms made him seem younger.

“We were told you went missing over Germany!” Dale said. Charlie told Dale and the others he had phoned from Seething. “Somebody didn’t get the message,” another pilot said. One by one the men hurried to their footlockers and returned, piling Charlie’s arms with his cologne, his comics, his socks, and his broken watch. Dale handed Charlie a stack of perfumed letters from Marjorie. “Glad I held off on burning these,” he said. Charlie shook his head in disbelief. He knew the Air Force’s standard practice was to remove the possessions of a downed crewman as soon as possible for morale purposes. They would always give the missing man’s buddies the chance to sort through his belongings and remove anything embarrassing before the man’s effects were sent home to his family. By tradition, the missing man’s buddies were allowed to keep useful items, like books or toothpaste or hair pomade. Dale advised Charlie to hurry over to the Operations Office before they mailed the rest of his belongings home to West Virginia.

Glancing toward the corner of the hut, Charlie saw a man sprawled out in the bunk Charlie had claimed. The man’s feet were crossed and his nose was in a book. “What the hell?” Charlie muttered. Charlie approached the man and stood at the foot of the bunk, his shadow blocking the man’s light. “I think you have the wrong bunk,” Charlie said.

The man looked up from his book. Charlie knew the man was a replacement. The wings on his shirt revealed that he was a navigator. The navigator had already hung pinup girls on the wall above his head and sat his shoes on the footlocker that had been Charlie’s. “They assigned this to me,” he said flatly.

“They wrongfully assigned it to you because they thought I was dead,” Charlie explained.

“It was empty,” the navigator said. “Just grab another one.” The other officers in the hut looked up from their grooming. Dale lingered silently a few paces behind Charlie.

Charlie looked around. The hut was full. Charlie saw with relief that no one had disturbed Pinky’s bunk—yet. “That’s not going to work,” Charlie said.

“Then move to another hut,” the navigator said.

Charlie’s face turned red. He had lived in that hut for two months and had grown used to his friends’ snoring and nightmares. That cold, lousy hut was “home.”

Charlie set his kit bag on the concrete floor and dumped his belongings from his arms into the bag. He thrust a hand into the bag, fished around, and pulled out his .45 pistol. “You’re going to leave one way or another,” Charlie told the navigator.

“You’re goddamn crazy!” the navigator said sitting up in bed.

“I’m going to fire one round through the ceiling,” Charlie said. “The next round will be through your leg.” The man scowled but did not move. Charlie leaned in close and whispered something inaudible. The navigator saw the pistol wobbling in Charlie’s shaking hand. He got up, grabbed his shoes, and left the hut without his coat.
^*

As Charlie’s adrenaline dissipated, he sat down on Pinky’s bunk. No one had raided Pinky’s goods, because the replacement navigator had chosen Charlie’s corner bunk instead. Dale called the other officers to help him gather the navigator’s belongings. In a minute, they cleaned out the man’s footlocker and departed, carrying his uniforms and effects in sloppy bundles to the squadron headquarters. Charlie flopped onto his cot and fell fast asleep.

TWO NIGHTS LATER, WIESBADEN, GERMANY

The smoky pub was filled with pilots on Christmas Eve. The party was rowdy and coarse because the married men were away with their wives. Franz was in the center of it with Bobbi. Normally, Franz liked to be in the middle of the party but not the center of attention. With Bobbi at his side, this was impossible. Willi was drunk and telling jokes, his Knight’s Cross dangling proudly.

When Franz had returned from Jever, he told Willi he had found the B-17 he downed in the farmer’s field but had no witnesses to confirm the victory. He never mentioned the bomber he let escape over the sea. “You won’t get anywhere by not claiming victories—I’ll confirm it for you,” Willi had said. “Your word is good enough.”

Franz had never been closer to the Knight’s Cross. But to him, the Cross had taken on new meaning. He had seen the eyes of the wounded bomber crew, young men no different than the ones he had been killing for two years. He knew the Cross stood for bravery. But Franz now realized it also represented a man’s success at his most corrupted service to the world—his prowess at killing other men. Franz knew he could not stop fighting. The war would not let him. But never again would he celebrate his job as a fighter pilot, the role he had volunteered for. On December 20, 1943, he had given up on the Knight’s Cross for good. “Don’t bother,” he had told Willi. “Let’s go get drunk.”

Because Christmas Eve was a special occasion, the pilots bought Bobbi a beer. The bear loved the taste. So the men found him a bowl and filled it high with beer, then refilled it again and again, each pilot pouring the beer from his tall mug. The men got drunk with their mascot. Franz finally stopped his comrades from giving Bobbi any more beer by insisting that they would need to help carry Bobbi home if he became too inebriated to walk.

The pilots sang obscene songs to one another but changed their tunes when the local girls trickled in after midnight Mass. At some
point, they began singing Christmas carols, including a sad rendition of “Silent Night,” a German song by tradition.
^*
Franz stumbled out into the cobblestone street with Bobbi. Drunkenly, man and mascot plodded to their apartment. With the voices of his comrades still singing in the background, Franz smiled, unaware that their time together was coming to an end.

ELEVEN DAYS LATER, JANUARY 4, 1944, KIMBOLTON AIRFIELD

Charlie and his officers ate their lunches in silence in the nearly deserted mess hall. Dark circles sagged beneath their eyes. Instead of talking with one another, they looked around at other crews, at the swinging doors, at every sound outside the windows. They picked at their food and dropped their silverware, jittery.

That morning they had been assigned spare gunners and a temporary B-17 called
Anita Marie
. Soon after takeoff they had lost an engine and returned to base. Now the group was away, bombing the German ports at Kiel, without them.

Charlie and his officers had just wanted to log another mission to put December 20 behind them. Charlie had broken the news to them about their heroics being quashed. The men couldn’t care less. Russian and Pechout had survived and were going home. Rumor had it that Blackie was coming back. What bothered them was that they had been stuck in limbo for fourteen days. Three times they had gone to bed expecting to fly the next day. Three times they had tossed and turned all night only to wake up beneath the orderly’s flashlight beam and to hear his voice: “Sorry, sir, mission’s scrubbed.”

Now, instead of talking with one another, they talked to themselves and thought themselves in circles, pondering the odds against
their survival. They imagined what they could do to improve their chances, like sitting on a flak vest, finding a new lucky charm, or going to the chapel more. They had become mentally rattled or what the combat crews called “flak happy.”

Colonel Preston’s policies had failed to help the Quiet Ones. Whenever Preston knew a crew had come back from a bad mission, he tried to put them back into the air as soon as possible. Preston had learned to do this from an earlier mistake. Several months prior a crew had come back with wounded and dead men aboard. Preston gave them a week off at a rest home to calm their nerves. A 379th navigator would remember what happened: “They had used their week off to mull over their collective past and unpromising future. On their return they announced their unanimous decision to quit the war.”
¹
After that crew resigned from flying duty, Preston and the group’s flight surgeon instituted a new policy to get a flak happy crew back into the air and off the ground. But even Preston could not un-scrub a mission or prevent an abort.