A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (54 page)

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, SPRING 1953, CANADA

When Franz and Eva relocated to Canada they settled with Eva’s brother, who had moved to Vancouver, on the west coast, to work in the lumber industry. There, Franz waited to be called to work on the Aero. When the Canadian government approved the Aero for production that July, the military classified the jet as top secret. Franz lost his job before it began. When he applied for a security clearance, he was refused because he had been a German officer. Franz took the setback in stride. His brother-in-law helped him find a job at a logging camp in the Queen Charlotte Islands. There, Franz worked as a diesel mechanic, fixing logging trucks. He lived in the company of twenty-seven lumberjacks and their families. He quickly learned English and liked working with his hands and amid nature. He and Eva had a daughter named Jovita, but the couple’s relationship was not to last. Some would say that a good relationship requires “a sun and a moon,” and Franz and Eva were both suns—strong and stubborn. Their divorce, when it came in 1954, was amicable.

Because the job paid well, Franz stayed on at the lumber camp after Eva had departed. The distant sight of the Canadian Rockies and their snowy peaks reminded him of the Bavarian Alps and the life he had once loved. He began to write home, at night, to his mother, the men he had served with, and the people he had known.

On a whim, he wrote to Mr. Greisse, the kindly bureaucrat who had supervised pensions, whose address he had saved. But Mr. Greisse did not write back. Instead, his daughter, Hiya, did. She told Franz that her father was ill. Because he had been a member of The Party, the Soviets had locked him up in a camp at the war’s end. An average-sized
man before the war, he came back to his daughter five years later weighing just ninety pounds. Hiya had been a short thirteen-year-old kid with strawberry-blond hair when she and Franz first met. Now she was twenty-three and eager to explore the world. She asked Franz questions about Canada. Franz wrote back. Despite the fifteen-year age gap between them, the two began to correspond.

Hiya told Franz about her experiences after the war’s end, how she traded her mother’s china for food from local farmers. She wrote about the Soviet soldiers who had moved into her house, washing their potatoes in the toilets, shattering her mother’s crystal glasses, and getting drunk every night while singing “Lili Marlene.” “They were mostly nice, but boy if they got drunk you didn’t want to be around them as a girl,” she told Franz. Hiya confided that the Soviets had raped most of the women in and around Berlin in the year after the war. She would not talk about what happened to her sister.

For the better part of two years, Franz and Hiya corresponded weekly. Every so often Franz called her from the only phone on the island, one located in the office of the lumberyard.

In 1956, Hiya boarded a plane and traveled to Vancouver, where she and Franz met for the first time in twelve years. Her blond hair curled above her ears and her posture was impeccable. She wore a sky-blue skirt and blouse with white buttons that led up to a high collar and tiny black gloves. Franz had come to know Hiya’s beautiful personality, but he never guessed that the short little girl would one day grow up to be so gorgeous. Their plan had been an unspoken one. Within a year of meeting they headed to the city hall in Vancouver and were married.

Hiya enjoyed moving with Franz to his island in the Queen Charlottes, where they shared a small cabin. On their first night together on the island Franz led Hiya outside, to look at the sky just as they had during the war. He held her hand as he showed her the Aurora Borealis, the colorful Northern Lights. But when Hiya saw the lights flickering on the horizon, she cried hysterically. The Northern Lights had
triggered flashbacks in her mind, memories of Potsdam and Berlin burning. With time, she came to appreciate the lights, but she never saw the same beauty in them that Franz did.

Franz’s mother came to visit him and Hiya even though she was not thrilled about the idea of them having married in city hall instead of a church. She stayed for four months. When Franz would tell old fighter pilot jokes during their dinners together, his mother would always chide him. “Franz, you’re lucky Dad is not around!” Franz’s mother asked him to go to church with her and to attend confession. He did and confessed to a priest that he had not attended church for twenty years because he had been caught dueling. The priest laughed, welcomed Franz back, and said, “In that case, you’re overdue for communion.” Franz and Hiya tried to convince Franz’s mother to stay with them longer, but she refused. She missed her friends—but more than anything she missed her beer.

Hiya and Franz seldom discussed the war. Hiya discovered a story from Franz’s past one night, by accident. In the logging camp, the families often threw parties. After one party, Franz had too many drinks. As Hiya steered him on the path to their cabin, they came across a mother bear in the moonlight. She was leaning over a fence, grunting, calling her cub that was stuck on the other side. But in his drunken state, Franz forgot where he was. “It’s my bear!” he told Hiya. But she did not understand. “I have to say hi to him,” Franz pleaded. Hiya whispered that it was a bad idea. She held Franz back. But Franz insisted that it was his bear and struggled. Hiya knew he was going to get himself mauled. When Hiya could no longer hold Franz back she kneed him in the rear. As he was distracted by his hurting backside, Hiya pulled him home and put him to bed. The next morning, as Hiya served breakfast, Franz ate standing. He told her, “I must have hurt myself last night—I don’t know how, but I can’t sit.” From her seat at the table, Hiya explained why he was so sore. Franz slowly took a seat across from her, wincing. Then he told her the war story of a lovable bear.

*
Franz would remember, “They were all old sergeants, mostly from the Air Force.”

*
In 1949, the Allies had given West Germany her sovereignty back. They needed an ally and knew that if the Cold War turned hot, Germany would be its battlefield. To block the “Red Tide” from invading Europe, the Americans were preparing to train German pilots to fly American jets to shoot down Soviet bombers before they dropped their nukes on Europe. With the Allies’ blessing, a group of German generals had quietly gathered in 1950 to plan the revival of the military that would be called the Federal Defense Force or Bundeswehr.

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, 1980, VANCOUVER

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
the eighties found Franz and Hiya happily enjoying their retirement years, exploring the mountains of Vancouver and fishing from its lakes. Time had shrunken Franz’s stature. Now sixty-five, he had grown shorter and thicker. His neck seemed to shrink into his shoulders, but his face remained strong. As his cheeks sagged, they gave a sterner impression when he was not smiling. He still dressed like every day was a day in the office, wearing dress slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and a fleece vest over top, the look of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur well before its time. Hiya cut her hair short but retained her youthful charm, her sassy German spirit only growing.

Together they had bought a ranch and raised a Shetland pony in a barn behind their home. Franz smoked like a chimney until one morning he felt winded after walking to feed the pony. That afternoon, he told Hiya, “I don’t smoke anymore.” “Since when?” she asked. “Since this morning,” he told her. In a moment, Franz kicked a nearly forty-year
habit. For fun, Franz took to flying sport planes and even purchased a Messerschmitt 108, a four-seat personal transport plane with elegant lines just like his old 109’s. He even painted the 108 like his wartime 109 and flew it at air shows as “the bad guy” that P-51s would chase around the sky to the crowd’s delight.

One day, Franz’s old commander, Galland, came to visit him. When Galland arrived at Franz’s doorstep, he was a smaller, gentler version of his larger-than life self in World War II. His trademark mustache was gray, and he still wore his hair slicked back, only now it was gray at the temples. Galland’s black eyes pierced from heavier eyelids. His smirk was unchanged. After the war, he had found work as a forestry agent, maintaining game lands, hunting, and reflecting on the war. Then German aircraft designer Kurt Tank invited Galland to join him in Argentina, where he was building a fighter jet for Juan Peron, the country’s dictator. Peron needed someone to train his pilots and build his Air Force, so Tank recruited Galland. After that stint, Galland had returned to Germany and flown an air race with Edu Neumann and in air shows. He had consulted on the movie
Battle of Britain
and ran the Association of German Fighter Pilots. He had married three times, raised a family, and often vacationed with his former British enemies, fighter pilots Robert Standford Tuck and Douglas Bader.

Galland wanted to go hunting with Franz, so Franz borrowed a Beaver floatplane from a doctor friend. He flew Galland to a lodge on a river in northern Canada. When Franz taxied the floatplane to shore, he approached too fast and beached the craft on the sand. Galland gave him heck for the bad landing. Franz laughed him off, telling Galland, “You always have to be the general, eh?” Franz was not one for hunting but accompanied Galland, who shot a moose. They gave its meat to a local Native American tribe then hauled the moose’s head back to Vancouver, where Franz shipped the horns to Germany for Galland. In the days that followed, Franz and Galland talked once a week by phone.

FIVE YEARS LATER, 1985

Franz looked at the party invitation in his hands with disbelief. The Boeing Company had learned of Franz through his air show flying and invited him to attend their 50th Anniversary party for the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. Franz pondered the invitation, unsure if he should attend. He began thinking about the war again. A memory resurfaced, one long locked away. In his mind, he saw the battered bomber he had let escape. He told the story to Hiya for the first time. The question began troubling him again, like an unhealed wound: “Did the B-17 make it home to England?” He knew the only people he could ask would be the plane’s crew. But the odds were slim that they had made it across the sea, let alone survived the war. Of the twelve thousand B-17s built, five thousand had been destroyed in combat. Even slimmer was the prospect that if the crew had survived, they would still be alive forty-one years later, or even possible to locate. Franz had no names to reference. No tail number, just a memory. But Franz knew he had taken a great risk in helping the bomber escape, and he longed to know:
Was it worth it?

“You should go to the party and ask around,” Hiya advised Franz. “It may be your last chance.”

Despite his hesitation, Franz traveled to the Museum of Flight at Paine Field to attend Boeing’s party. Once again, Franz found himself a lone German traveling through a swarm of Americans. Some five thousand former B-17 pilots and crewmen had attended. Franz nervously wandered around the three B-17s that had been flown in for the veterans to tour. He expected his old enemies to hate him. Instead, the old B-17 veterans—who now wore thick glasses with big frames—crowded around him and bombarded him with questions. “How did you have time to aim when attacking us?” one asked. “You only had a fraction of time then you had to go right through,” Franz explained. “Yes, you used to go right through us!” another B-17 vet chimed in, to which Franz laughed, “
Ja
, more or less.” Franz asked every veteran he
met if the man knew of a bomber that had been escorted to safety by a German fighter. None had heard of such a thing. Colonel Robert Morgan, the former captain of the famed B-17
Memphis Belle
, was there and Franz asked him. Morgan had heard of no such thing, but the notion gave him a chuckle.

A camera crew from the local King 5 TV station was filming the party and interviewing veterans for a TV special. They filmed Franz, who described the B-17 he was looking for, the most badly damaged B-17 he had witnessed. “I’ve seen a B-17 flying without the rudder,” Franz said in their TV program. “I saw him flying with half the tail shot off and still flying.” Franz did not know the name
Ye Olde Pub
, or the name of its pilot, Charlie Brown. And he had long forgotten the date, December 20, 1943—but he knew what he had seen. “We knew we had a job to do—defend our country,” Franz said in the program, “and we knew the boys in those airplanes had a job to do, too, because they had orders to get the war finished and it was just such fierce combat.” Franz left Boeing’s party with new friends among former adversaries and an invitation from the American Fighter Aces veteran’s association to attend future reunions as their guest. Franz returned to Vancouver certain that he would never know the B-17 crew’s fate.