A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (4 page)

Franz leaned close to the man and whispered in his ear.
^*
Leaning back in his seat, the manager said, “Go ahead, try it.”

In one motion, Franz grabbed the manager by his collar, pulled him across the desk, and punched him between the eyes.

The manager stumbled backward into a cabinet. Other laborers seized Franz and slammed him to the floor. One kicked Franz in the ribs. Another punched him in a kidney. Together they ground his face into the dust-covered floor.

“You have no idea!” Franz shouted, his cheek pinned to the tiles.

T
HREE
G
ERMAN POLICE
officers arrived and blew their whistles to part the mob. The laborers lifted their knees from Franz’s back. The police hauled Franz up to his feet. The officers were strong and well fed by their American overseers. Franz wanted to run but could not escape.

With tears in his eyes, the manager told the police that Franz had demanded work ahead of the others and refused to leave. The angry mob confirmed the manager’s story.

Franz denied the accusations, but he knew a losing battle when he saw one. He was going to jail. But he needed to get his papers back. Franz told the officer in charge that the manager held them.

The officer motioned for the other police to take Franz away.

“Wait! He still has my medical form!” Franz objected. The manager handed over the note. The officer uncrumpled the waiver and read it to the other policemen:“… head wound, sustained in aerial combat.” The officer pocketed both of Franz’s papers and announced, “You’re still coming with us!”

Franz knew there was no point in resisting. The officers dragged him past the line of workers and into the street. A rush of fearful
thoughts raced through Franz’s mind:
How will I ever find work with an arrest record? What will I tell my girlfriend and mother? How will I provide for them?

Exhausted from struggling against the mob, hurting from the beating, and overwhelmed with grief, Franz fell limp as the police hauled him away. The toes of his heavy black flying boots dragged against the rough, upturned stones where bombs had fallen.

*
Franz would remember what he told the manager: “See, I have a hole here, and if you don’t keep quiet I can’t control what I’m going to do.”

NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER, SUMMER 1927, SOUTHERN GERMANY

T
HE SMALL BOY
sprinted through the open pasture, his feet in tiny brown shoes. He chased the soaring wooden glider as its pilot took off into the sky. The boy wore thick knit Bavarian kneesocks, green knickers, and a white shirt with short sleeves. He ran with arms outstretched. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted as he waved the machine and its pilot onward. The glider resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur with a web of wires running within it. It flew one hundred feet above the pasture, and the sound of flapping fabric trailed in its wake. The boy followed the glider to the pasture’s edge and stopped when he could go no farther. He watched the contraption shrink into the distance over the rolling hills of Bavaria.

The glider soared with a whoosh over a farmer herding cows. An older boy flew the craft and sat in a wicker seat positioned over a ski that ran the glider’s length. There was no windshield or instrument panel and only straps across the young pilot’s shoulders secured him
to the spartan craft. Minutes later, the pilot steered the machine in for a landing. He aimed for a worn white strip of grass in a green field where many landings had happened before. There, on a hill next to the landing strip, sat a short, wide shed where the youngsters and their adult advisors of the glider club were finishing a picnic. The small boy stood waiting at the shed. He held a short-brimmed tweed hat in his hands. The pilot coasted from one hundred feet to fifty feet to twenty-five feet and made a gentle three-bump landing. The pilot put his legs down to keep the glider from tipping over as the small boy ran up to the machine and darted under its wing. The boy was twelve-year-old Franz Stigler. The pilot was Franz’s sixteen-year-old brother, August.

Franz stood alongside the cockpit as August removed his white safety straps. August swung his legs to earth and carefully lowered the glider to rest on its wingtip. Franz handed the hat to August, who removed his goggles and flopped the hat onto his head like an ace after a dawn patrol. August was dressed like Franz, in kneesocks, knickers, and a white shirt with a tiny collar.

The brothers were true Bavarians; both had dark brown eyes, brown hair, and oval faces. August’s face was longer and calmer than Franz’s. August was straightlaced, a deep thinker, and often wore spectacles. Franz had youthful, chubby cheeks, and he was quiet, although quick to smile. August had been named “Gustel Stigler,” but he preferred “August.” Franz had been named “Ludwig Franz Stigler,” but went by “Franz,” which irked the boys’ strong, proper, deeply Catholic mother. Their father was easygoing and allowed the boys to call themselves whatever they wanted.

Franz praised August’s flight, rehashing what he had seen as if August had not been there. August told Franz he was glad he had paid attention because it would be Franz’s turn next. The other eight boys of the glider club converged around the brothers and helped carry the glider up the nearby hill to the flat launch point on top. August was
the oldest of the boys and their leader.
^*
Some of the boys were as young as nine and were not yet allowed to fly. But on this day, Franz—age twelve—was scheduled to become their youngest pilot.

Two adults in the glider club followed the boys up the hill. The men hauled a heavy, black rubber rope used to launch the glider. One of the adults was Franz’s father, also named Franz. He was a thin man with a tiny mustache and circular spectacles that looped over big ears. He hugged August then helped Franz strap into the glider’s thin, basket-like seat. The other adult was Father Josef, a Catholic priest and the boys’ teacher, who handled fifth through eighth grades at their Catholic boarding school. Father Josef was in his fifties and had gray hair around the sides of his head. His face was strong, and his eyes were blue and friendly. When Father Josef was gliding, he traded his black robe and flat-brimmed hat for a white shirt and mountaineering pants. A large wooden cross dangled from his neck. Father Josef walked around the glider, checking its surfaces. Both men had flown for the German Air Force in WWI. Franz’s father had been a reconnaissance pilot. Father Josef had been a fighter pilot.

Both adults had a habit of downplaying their service in the war. From the bird’s-eye perspective of pilots, they had seen the stacks of muddy corpses between the battle lines. When Germany lost the first war, the two men lost their jobs. In the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious French, British, and Americans stipulated that the German Air Force was to dissolve and the Army and Navy were to disarm. Germany also needed to hand over its overseas colonies, allow foreign troops to occupy its western borderlands, and pay 132 billion Deutsche Marks in damages (about $400 billion today). As they paid the price for the war they’d lost, Germany fell into a deep economic depression long before the great global financial collapse of 1929.

Franz’s father and Father Josef had started the glider club to teach boys to enjoy the only good thing the war had taught them—how to fly. When the men had started the club, neither had enough money to buy a glider for the boys. Franz’s father managed horses at a nearby estate. Father Josef had left the military for the priesthood. They told the boys that if they wanted to learn to fly, they would have to build a glider themselves. After school each day for months, August, Franz, and the other boys collected scrap metal and sold it to buy the blueprints for a Stamer Lippisch “Pupil” training glider. Father Josef wrangled a woodshed for them, high on a hill west of Amberg, the ancient, ornate Bavarian town they all called home. There in the shed, on weekends and holidays, the boys began building the glider. Stacks of wood and fabric came first. Blueprints in hand, it took a year for them to build the glider. Safety inspections followed. Administrators from the Department of Transport would not let the boys ride without first checking out the craft. The verdict came back. The boys had done well and were cleared for takeoff.

High on top of the hill, Franz tugged the canvas straps that held his shoulders to the glider’s seat. Two other boys held each wingtip to keep the glider from tilting over. Franz’s father attached the rubber rope to a hook in the glider’s nose, next to where the landing ski curved upward. Father Josef and the other boys took hold of both ends of the rope, three per side. August knelt next to Franz. With a hand on his shoulder, he offered Franz some parting wisdom, “Stay below thirty feet and don’t try to turn. Just get the feel of flying, then land.” Franz nodded, too scared to speak. August took his place on the rope line. Franz’s father reminded him, “Land before you reach the end of the field.” Franz nodded again.

Franz’s father sat on the ground and held the glider’s tail. He was the biggest man and acted as the anchor. He shouted for Father Josef and the others to pull the rope taunt. They began to walk down the hill, spreading the rope into a V with the glider at the center, the slack tightening, the rope quivering.

Franz lifted his feet from the ground and extended his tiny legs to the rudder stick. He gripped the wooden control stick that jutted up from a box on the ski between his thighs. The control stick was attached to wires that extended to the wings and tail to make the glider maneuver.

Father Josef and the boys gripped the rope with all their might, pulling out all slack. The cord trembled with energy. “Okay, Franz,” Father Josef shouted up to him. “We launch on three!” Franz gave a wave. His heart pounded. Father Josef led the count, “One! Two! Three!” Everyone on the rope sprinted down the hill. The rope stretched with elastic energy, and Franz’s father released the tail.

Franz rocketed forward—then instantly straight up. Something was seriously wrong. Instead of a gradual, level takeoff, the glider blasted upward like a missile, carrying its sixty-pound passenger toward the sun.

“Push!” Franz’s father screamed. “Push forward!”

Franz jammed the control stick forward. The glider leveled off, nosed downward, then plunged. Frozen with fear, Franz flew straight toward the ground.
Crack!
The glider’s nose plowed into the dirt. The machine tipped over, its wings thudding into the grass above Franz’s head.

Franz’s father, brother, and Father Josef sprinted to the glider. The other boys stood in shock. They were certain that Franz was dead. All they could see was the tops of the wings and the tail jutting into the air.

The two men lifted the machine by the wing and Franz flopped backward, still tied to his seat. He was mumbling and groggy. August unstrapped him and pulled Franz’s limp body out of the glider. Slowly, Franz opened his eyes. He was stunned but unhurt. Franz’s father clutched his son, hugging and crying at the same time.

“It’s my fault, not yours,” Franz’s father said.