A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (45 page)

Hohagen asked Franz how he had come to join the unit. Franz explained that he knew Galland from Sicily and recently got booted from jet school courtesy of a political officer.

“So you don’t sleep well with The Party?” Hohagen asked. Franz laughed. Hohagen asked how he was to know Franz was not a political officer himself. Franz shrugged. Hohagen told Franz a joke that he called “the political officer test.”

“Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and all of their friends are out on a boat at sea,” Hohagen said. “There’s a big storm and their boat sinks! Who’s saved?” Hohagen’s mouth remained agape as if he wanted to give the answer himself.

Franz knew the joke. “Germany.”

Hohagen roared with approval. He explained that no political officer would have the stomach to finish the joke. Franz chuckled at the irony that the man he had thought was a sailor had told him a joke
about the sea. Throughout the Air Force, Hohagen was known for his colorful spirit, for flying in a yellow leather coat with a fox fur collar, and for wearing boots topped with fur. Hohagen was anything but a clown in the air and had fifty-odd victories to his name.

Unsettled by the paltry image of JV-44 around him, Franz asked where everyone was. Hohagen explained that JV-44 was off to a slow start. The unit had about a dozen pilots. A third of their jets were broken because they had been drawing refurbished planes from factory repair lines. They had no base housing and lived in private homes. Their motor pool was Galland’s BMW sports car, Steinhoff’s DKW motorcycle, and a few
kubelwagens
.

“Can you draw support from JG-7?” Franz asked, having seen Fighter Wing 7, one of the few jet fighter outfits, across the field. Hohagen explained that he had served under Steinhoff in JG-7 until Steinhoff was fired. Hohagen said that he, personally, had led III Group across the field, but the man who took his job, Rudi Sinner, could do nothing to help—they had already asked. Goering had forbidden anyone from assisting JV-44, “the Mutineers.” Franz’s ears perked up. He told Hohagen he knew Sinner from Africa.

“You can go over there,” Hohagen told Franz. “But I cannot.”

Franz was confused. Hohagen explained that he had been so angry when Steinhoff was fired that he trashed his office, destroying the place in protest. Before he could be arrested, he called the flight doctor and told him to hurry quickly, because his head wounds were making him crazy. Instead of a court-martial, he was banished to the hospital, from which Galland and Steinhoff retrieved him for JV-44. What Hohagen failed to mention was that to protest Goering’s treatment of Steinhoff he also stopped wearing his Knight’s Cross that day except for photos.

Franz removed his cap and showed Hohagen the dent in his forehead. Hohagen removed his cap and showed Franz the massive scar in his. They compared their doctor’s certificates and instantly bonded.

Later that afternoon, a BMW sports car pulled up to the office.
Galland and Steinhoff emerged from the car, grumbling from a fruitless trip in search of pilots. Galland had chosen Steinhoff as his number two man, the operations officer who would oversee training and recruiting when not leading missions.

“You must have pissed someone off!” Galland said when he saw Franz. Franz smiled guiltily as he saluted. Galland explained that he had wired Franz’s name to Berlin, and no one protested his attempt to join the unit. Galland said that Goering was blocking many of his pilot requests and only allowing men to stay with JV-44 if they had run afoul of him or The Party. Goering wanted the Mutineers to fly long enough to die, not to consume the Air Force’s last veterans and precious aircraft.

Franz asked Galland, “Will your brother be joining us?”

“No, he’s dead,” Galland said. Franz remembered from their meeting in Sicily that Galland had lost one brother but had another who was still flying fighters.

“No, the other one, who was flying 190s,” Franz said.

“They’re both dead,” Galland said as calmly as if he were ordering a cup of tea. “Wutz joined Paul in the afterlife more than a year ago.”

Franz apologized, but Galland cut him off. “Don’t apologize when you’re coming from the same place.” Franz realized that Galland had remembered his stories of August from their conversation in Sicily. At that moment, Franz’s doubts of the meager unit vanished. Regardless of JV-44’s strength or success, he knew that they were all fighting for the same thing. Not for the Reich. For their brothers.

D
URING HIS FIRST
week in the unit, Franz and the others waited around Brandenburg. Galland departed one morning in his sports car, motoring south. Steinhoff said the general had gone to find JV-44 a new base as far from Berlin as possible. The American and Soviet armies were driving to link up and separate the top half of Germany
from the bottom half. Galland wanted his unit to be on the American side, not the Soviet side, when the curtain came down.

Franz watched as ground crewmen painted his naked fighter a wavy, mottled green that covered the black Air Force crosses on its flanks. In place of each black cross, they painted the white outline of a cross and on both of the plane’s flanks they painted a white number 3.

One night Franz snuck across the airfield to visit Sinner, who welcomed him into his office. Franz was astounded that Sinner, in the nearly two years since he had seen him in Sicily, had never earned the Knight’s Cross. Sinner, who always called himself “just an ordinary soldier,” laughed it off. Franz knew Sinner was anything but “ordinary.” He had nearly forty victories and had been shot down eleven times.

“So sad about the bear, isn’t it?” Sinner said. Franz fell back in his seat. He knew Sinner was talking about Bobbi, the Squadron 6 mascot.

Sinner told Franz that he had heard their old squadron had been so torn up in the fighting that during their retreat to central Germany they needed to leave the bear behind. They could not release the bear into the wild, because he had been raised by humans and did not know how to hunt. Since the bear had come to weigh four hundred pounds, he was too heavy to transport. When the zoo would not take the bear back, the squadron had no other options. The squadron pilots and ground crew could not bring themselves to do what had to be done. Franz looked away, afraid to hear the rest.

“They handed the bear to a neighboring unit that led it into the woods and shot it,” Sinner said. Franz sat, unmoving and unblinking. Sinner saw this and put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Franz would later think how silly it must have looked, a grown man grieving over an animal. But to Franz, the killing of his bear was symbolic of so much more than just one death. As he had once told the pool manager in Wiesbaden, the bear never bit anyone.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, MARCH 31, 1945

Beginning at dawn, Steinhoff led JV-44 into the air for the unit’s first mission en masse. Galland had found them a new base at the Munich airport, far from Berlin. Franz and eight other pilots followed Steinhoff south.

As the autobahn passed beneath his jet’s wings, Franz saw that the elegant roadways were strangely empty. German civilians lacked gasoline. Most fighter units had disintegrated, too, from lack of fuel, and their personnel were transferred to the infantry. Franz knew, however, that the forests bordering the highway still contained life. There, the last of the Air Force operated. Units now parked their fighters and even four-engine bombers under the pine trees. Side roads served as taxiways, the autobahn as a runway. Mechanics repaired engines on wood benches, and fighters hid beneath underpasses between takeoffs. The once-gentlemanly, black-tie Air Force now operated like partisans. Racing from Berlin to escape the Allies and the grasp of The Party, the men of JV-44 felt a rush of freedom. They sensed that they were the last squadron of the Air Force, the last knights in a crumbling realm.

When the flights arrived over Munich, they steered east to the airfield. From the air, the field looked like an oval racetrack for horses. At the north end, the terminal and hangars curved like a reviewing stand
around a concrete parking area for aircraft. A vast oval of grass ran east to west where planes would take off. Franz knew this field from his airline days. As he flew lower, he saw that the white terminal’s classical architecture had been marred. Franz could see through the roof’s burned beams to pools of water where passengers once had sat. The control tower still stood from the second story of the terminal, but its glass had been shattered.

Franz landed and taxied to a halt in a line with the others in front of the field’s two damaged hangars. The pilots anxiously scanned the skies, expecting to see the Allied fighters that now flew from bases in France and Belgium. With endless numbers and fuel, the P-38s, P-47s, Spitfires, and plentiful P-51s orbited over Germany, their shadows challenging any German pilot to come up to fight. Galland greeted his men and assured them they were safe at Munich because no one knew they were there—yet.

The next morning, April 1, 1945, dawned with optimism as Franz and his comrades reported to the unit’s new headquarters, a tall, castle-like building two miles south of the field. The vacated building had been an orphanage once, but the children were long gone—now tucked away in safer territories. The pilots hung their pistols side by side on coat racks and ate breakfast together in a long dining hall beneath chandeliers. An outline on the wall marked where a large crucifix had once hung. At their morning meal together, the men sat wherever they wished, sergeant next to general. Galland had returned to his old charisma and Steinhoff toasted the unit, “a forlorn little troop of the outcast and condemned.”
²
The prior night the pilots had settled into the village of Feldkirchen, just east of the airfield, where German families loaned bedrooms to them. Galland had chosen quarters more befitting a general, on the fringe of town, where he moved into an Alpine-style lodge.

The men of JV-44 wasted no time preparing for battle. They set up their headquarters in the abandoned orphanage and spread a large war map across a table in the center of the room. Over the map they
laid a sheet of glass with grids. The map showed Southern Germany and northern Austria, the areas that Galland intended JV-44 to defend. A red line on the map showed the shrinking front lines. The Americans would reach Southern Germany first. They were now gaining fifty miles of territory per day.

On the airfield grounds, the pilots found an old shed in the northeast corner that they turned into an alert shack where they could gather between missions. Technicians strung a telephone line from the alert shack to the orphanage in order to coordinate flights. In the fresh light of spring, the men draped green camouflage netting over the shack’s roof. They arranged white lawn chairs and small circular tables on the side of the shack that faced the airfield. Between the shack and the terminal were blast pens. For easy access, the pilots taxied their jets up to the pens and shut down their engines. Hopping out, they helped their mechanics push the jets backward into the earthen half-moon enclosures.

A long-nosed FW-190D fighter landed on the field as the men worked. The 190D taxied to the empty terminal. Nicknamed “the Dora,” the 190D had an elegant profile and a long in-line engine where a fat radial had once sat. At the empty terminal, the plane stopped, the pilot unsure where to go. The plane then turned around and taxied across the field, stopping at the alert shack. The Dora’s pilot climbed out and glanced around, clearly disoriented. He wore a long, black leather coat and a forage cap. The men laughed until they realized who he was. He was Colonel Trautloft. The colonel walked closer and greeted his fellow outcasts and Mutineers. Galland drove over from the orphanage to greet Trautloft, who slipped the general a list of places where he could find the supplies he needed to build JV-44. As quickly as he had arrived, Trautloft hopped in his Dora and flew away to work for Galland in secret.

Galland and Steinhoff looked at the list. They knew that jets and supplies were useless without pilots. Their recruiting efforts had floundered thus far due to Goering’s interference. So they decided to take
more drastic measures. That evening they drove to the fighter pilot’s rest home—Florida. They had heard rumors that one of Germany’s top pilots was recuperating there, a man with 195 victories to his name.