A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (51 page)

Luetzow continued to fly straight and level. “Something’s wrong,” someone stated. “But he’s flying well enough,” someone else said. “His radio must have taken a hit,” the Count concluded.

The Count called the orphanage and asked if they were talking with Luetzow on another channel. The orphanage said no, but they would try calling him. Franz found himself holding his breath between transmissions. Seconds later the orphanage reported back. They had received no reply.

Luetzow’s plane banked gracefully to the right. When it faced south toward the snowcapped Alps, its wings leveled.

The Count and the others called one another with alarm.

“Where is he going?” someone said. Beyond their right wingtips, they watched Luetzow’s jet shrink until it was barely discernible.

“He’s wounded,” the Count decided.

Far away, Franz’s heart sunk.

“Should we go get him?” someone asked.

“Stay in formation,” the Count ordered with a trembling voice. They all knew their fuel was low, too low for detours.

The Count would later conclude that a P-47’s bullets had hit Luetzow’s jet, probably striking him and his radio behind him in the fuselage. When Luetzow was flying home alongside his comrades, he was probably bleeding to death.

Franz dropped his oxygen mask from his face and breathed in heavy gasps. He knew Luetzow had never wanted to join JV-44. But Luetzow was a religious man, of the Lutheran faith, who believed the rule that Marseille had once voiced: “We must only answer to God and our comrades.” Like the others, Luetzow knew he had made a moral mistake by serving his country. He would answer to God for that. Luetzow had reported to JV-44 out of duty to his comrades.

The Count watched Luetzow until he vanished from sight. Far away in his cockpit, Luetzow must have known he was going to die and turned toward the mountains to die alone in peace. He was
probably thinking about his wife, Gisela, and his son, Hans, and daughter, Carola. Luetzow had cried for Steinhoff but was not one to cry for himself. He was probably flying with a face of stone.

The Count kept glancing south, even after the silhouette of Luetzow’s jet faded into the hazy distance. Far beyond the Count’s vision, over the medieval town of Donauworth, two P-47s caught up to Luetzow and dove to finish him off. Luetzow must have seen them coming and decided to deny the enemy pilots the reward of killing him.

Twelve miles in the distance, the Count and the others spotted an orange flash, just above the tree line. When he regained his composure, the Count radioed the orphanage and said he had seen an explosion where Luetzow had been flying. No one replied. The men of JV-44 had crowded into the orphanage’s map room. Everyone was listening. All were too stunned to speak. The radar operators called the orphanage. They had been tracking Luetzow as a white blip on their screens. The blip was now gone.

The P-47 pilots would later report Luetzow’s final moments. He had nosed forward and dove straight down from the heavens. When he crashed, he entered a forest, vertically. Galland would send planes to look for Luetzow’s crash site. They all would come back to report the same thing. Luetzow had vanished from the earth.

That night at JV-44’s long dinner table, Franz found it torturous to look across at his comrades. After his promotion, Galland had moved Franz across the table to sit among Galland’s staff. There, Franz had sat next to Luetzow, who sat on Galland’s left. When Steinhoff was burned, the men kept his chair, to Galland’s right, empty.

Listlessly, the pilots pushed their food around their plates. Franz could not bring himself to look over at Galland, who hung his head, knowing he had called Luetzow back from Italy and to his death. Galland sat alone that night, with Steinhoff’s empty chair to his right and an empty seat to his left, where the Man of Ice once sat.

*
Franz would remember, “He was tired, as were we all, and not exactly in love with the 262 either. It was the worst possible mix because the 262 couldn’t care less how you felt.”

*
Trautloft would remember, “After he told me about these things, my blood ran cold, I just could not believe it.”
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†
On October 19, trains carried the Allied airmen away from Buchenwald. Joe Mosher, an American P-38 pilot rescued by Trautloft, described the trip to a German Air Force (Luftwaffe) P.O.W. camp: “We were certain that conditions would be better where we were heading, particularly when we saw the disgust exhibited by the Luftwaffe officers on their visit [to Buchenwald]. It seems ironic now, but the Luftwaffe men who accompanied us as guards seemed our saviors. We wanted desperately to be free from the Gestapo and the SS and in the hands of men who still honored the brotherhood of fellow aviators.”
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*
The U.S. Holocaust Museum would write: “The psychological barriers to accepting the existence of the Nazi killing program were considerable. The Holocaust was unprecedented and irrational. It was inconceivable that an advanced industrial nation would mobilize its resources to kill millions of peaceful civilians…. In doing so, the Nazis often acted contrary to German economic and military interests.”

†
The SS put death camps into operation in 1942. These camps, such as Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, existed for the “efficient mass murder” of Jews, Soviet P.O.W.s, Poles, Gypsies, and others. Unlike Dachau, the death camps were built in Poland, to hide them from the German citizenry and military. The SS kept the death camps so secret and left so little evidence of their crimes that Holocaust denial arose in postwar years.
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A DAY LATER, APRIL 25, 1945

T
HE
KETTENKRAD
TOWED
White 3
from her blast pen toward the hangar. Franz chose not to walk and instead rode his jet’s wing. At the former Lufthansa hangar he delivered his jet to the mechanics. The hangar had become their favorite place to work because it had already been bombed and was the last place the enemy bombers would attack again.

Inside the hangar a radio blared the same war news as the radio at the pilots’ alert shack. Everyone kept an ear tuned, waiting to hear “It’s done,” so they could go home or surrender. After Luetzow’s death, Galland had called the pilots together on the airfield and addressed the men as they stood in a line. “For us the war is over,” he said. He would no longer order anyone to take off—they could only volunteer. “Whoever wants to go home may do so,” he added. A few men thanked him and left. One cited his fiancée, another his sick parents. But someone else said, “We fight until the end.” Galland’s eyes twinkled and he replied, “I am proud to belong to the last fighter pilots of the German Air Force.”
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Franz showed the mechanics his jet’s problematic engine, the one that had taken him from the fight where Luetzow had been lost. The engine had never failed, but Franz wished it had, so he would not need to wonder if he could have made a difference. Even though the Soviets were in Vienna and the Americans were north of Munich, Franz had decided to stay with Galland and keep flying. He knew that he still had a duty as long as four-engine bombers were over Germany.

A defiant, bombastic voice boomed from the radio, a broadcast that had been repeated for days. The voice bounced between the hangar’s brick walls, off its dirt-covered floor, and up through the burned rafters. It was the last broadcast of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and it came from Hitler’s besieged bunker in Berlin:

“I appeal in this hour to the defenders of Berlin, on behalf of the women and children of the Fatherland! Do not fear your enemy but destroy him without mercy! Every Berliner must defend his house or apartment! Those who hang a white flag are no longer entitled to protection and will be treated accordingly. They are like a bacteria on the body of our city!
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Every time Franz heard Goebbels’s speech, he shook his head. Goebbels’s broadcast had become the sinister soundtrack to the nightmare of Germany’s last days.

MEANWHILE, WEST OF MUNICH

Low over the forest a pack of P-51s chased a 262 with a smoking right engine. Barkhorn was behind the 262’s stick. He knew he could not fight the P-51s in his plane’s stricken condition, or outfly them. He was afraid to bail out and risk being shot, and he decided only one option remained. He steered for a forest clearing to crash-land.

As his jet neared the ground, Barkhorn removed his straps. He had seen Steinhoff burn and planned to leap and run, even before the
plane stopped moving. His jet touched down, skipped across the pasture, and slid. Barkhorn stood and lifted the hinged canopy. He waited for the jet to slow to a near stop, ready to leap to the wing. When his engines plowed into the dirt, the jet’s nose pitched violently downward. The machine jarred to a halt. The momentum flung Barkhorn sideways, his head falling outside the cockpit. At the same time the canopy slammed down onto his neck. Somehow the canopy rail did not decapitate him, although it sliced into his neck, pinning him to the cockpit ledge.

Barkhorn watched the left engine sizzle, just beyond his face. He moved his legs and knew he was not paralyzed. His eyes followed the sound of the P-51s as they looped around to strafe him. He braced for the sound of gunfire that never erupted. Instead, the P-51s flew overhead, one after another, and departed. Barkhorn looked to the engine, waiting for the spark that would burn him alive, but the spark never flickered. People from a nearby village found Barkhorn alive, pinned to his jet in silence. They took him to the hospital, where he would outlive the war and see his wife, Cristl, again.

A DAY LATER, APRIL 26, 1945

Franz and his comrades listened to the radio on a table at the alert shed as they ate their lunches. To the men, the radio was a beacon of hope, a squawking countdown to their surrender. In a twangy voice, the broadcaster read a statement from The Party meant to prepare the German people for news of another forced suicide. The pilots had come to know by then how The Party worked. The broadcast identified The Party’s new target.

A deep rumbling shook the radio on its table. Galland and his flight of six jets were in the air, but the men knew the sound was not the whine of turbines. It was a throaty grumble of massive American radial engines. A flight of four P-47 Thunderbolts ripped overhead with rockets slung beneath their wings. Their four-blade propellers blew a heavy gust as Franz and his comrades dove to earth. Hiding beneath tables and behind fallen chairs, Franz and the men looked up as the P-47s strafed and blasted the field.

To the west, a lone 262 flew through the cloud of gun smoke and explosions. Smoke trailed from its right engine and its wheels were down. Franz saw that it was
White 3
. He had loaned her to Galland to fly against B-26s. Over the field, Galland cut both engines and the jet touched down with a gentle whistle. Galland steered toward the alert shack as the P-47s flew over him without firing. The American pilots were struck speechless at the sight of such audacity.

In the middle of the field,
White 3
’s front tire deflated with each turn until it was flat. It had taken a bullet. Stranded, Galland hobbled from the jet, his right knee bloody. He had been hit by a bullet’s fragments during his earlier attack on the bombers. Rockets burst behind him as the P-47s strafed from one direction then another. Galland dove into the first hole he reached. There the thought struck him how “wretched” it felt to jump from “the fastest fighter in the world and into a bomb crater.”
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