A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II (55 page)

A
T THE OPPOSITE
corner of the continent, in Miami, Florida, Charlie Brown was pondering his half of the December 20 encounter. Charlie’s life after WWII had been idyllic. During college in West Virginia he had met a girl named Jackie, a petite brunette who always wore her hair in a neat bun. She was from a small West Virginia town like Charlie’s and captivated him with her colorful dresses and classiness. Jackie understood what Charlie had endured during the war. She was a young war widow whose first husband had been a fighter pilot killed over Europe. Charlie and Jackie hit it off and married in 1949. That same year Charlie returned to the Air Force and made a career in military intelligence and even served in London as an attaché to the RAF.
During this time, he and Jackie had two children, daughters Carol and Kimberly. In 1965, Charlie retired early, as a lieutenant colonel, to work for the State Department in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. There, for six years, he supervised the flow of food and aid to America’s regional allies.

When Charlie retired for good in the early seventies, he moved to Florida, bought a house, and drove a big Cadillac with Air Force wings on its license plate. Charlie seemed to grow taller and lankier with age, and lost only a few inches of his hairline. He wore yellow-tinted glasses, high-waisted pants, and long shirts with their sleeves always rolled up. He was never without a bolo tie. He drank a martini each night and always carried a “first aid kit” of gin, vermouth, two glasses, and a shaker in the trunk of his car. As a hobby, Charlie pursued his passion for science and invention and worked with other inventors to develop environmentally friendly diesel engines long before such research was popular. He spent hours on the golf course, volunteered at his church, and doted on Jackie, who still wore her colorful dresses and makeup every day. She was calm, dignified, and a great cook. Charlie’s daughters lived nearby and often came for dinner. He knew he had a wonderful life.

In these, his golden years, Charlie’s war memories resurfaced. He had attended a bomb group reunion in 1957 but nothing more. Back then, the memories were too fresh and painful. Now he began having nightmares again. He would dream about December 20, and the dream always ended with
The Pub
spinning to earth in a death dive from which he could not recover. Charlie always awoke just before he crashed in the dream. Standing in his bathroom looking in the mirror, Charlie tried to tell himself that December 20 was long over. But something deep within him was eating at his subconscious, and he knew it was not just the spin. He needed closure.

Charlie joined the 379th Bomb Group Association, as well as the association for his pilot class, to reconnect with his old buddies. At the 1985 Las Vegas reunion of his pilot class, Charlie and his classmates sat
in a circle in the hotel’s hospitality suite, swapping war stories. One of the men in the circle was Charlie’s former classmate, Colonel Joe Jackson. Jackson had a round, friendly face and still wore his hair in a military crew cut. He told his war stories with an upbeat Georgian accent. Jackson had been a bomber pilot in WWII and a fighter pilot in Korea. In Vietnam, he had flown transport planes, and his actions had earned him the Medal of Honor. Jackson did not tell that story, but Charlie and the others had heard what he had done. Jackson had landed a transport on an airfield that was being overrun by the enemy. Miraculously, he had rescued three Air Force combat controllers, picking them up and whisking them away. His plane came back with countless holes and even an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade in the nose.

Charlie stunned his Scotch-sipping buddies when he casually remarked, “You’ll never believe this, but one time I was saluted by a German pilot.” Jackson and the others were so intrigued that they prompted Charlie to reveal the full story. Charlie told them of the German pilot who had spared him and his crew.

“You should look for him,” Jackson urged Charlie. “He might still be out there.” Charlie knew the odds were slim. The German fighter pilots had been all but wiped out. How could he find an unknown enemy pilot he had flown with for ten minutes, neither having exchanged a single word? It was forty-two years later, but still he wondered,
Who was he and why did he let us go?

Charlie began his search for the German pilot. In his free time during the next four years, Charlie used his Air Force connections to cull the archives in America and England and discovered his crew’s after-action report from December 20. It had been stamped
CLASSIFIED
but contained nothing sensitive. Charlie recalled the man who had written the report—Seething’s lanky intelligence officer, Lieutenant Robert Harper. So Charlie contacted the 448th Bomb Group Association and discovered that Harper resided in New England. Charlie called Harper, who remembered him instantly. Harper told Charlie that he had stayed on for another tour in England then become an
architect after the war. Having retired, Harper told Charlie his new hobby was painting. That gave Charlie an idea.

“Do you think you could paint a portrait of our plane?” Charlie asked him. Harper remembered
The Pub
and agreed. “This time is it safe to include the German?” Charlie joked. Harper laughed and agreed to paint the 109 flying alongside
The Pub
, his way of making amends for having quashed the story during the war. Harper painted the scene in watercolors then hit a roadblock. He called Charlie. He did not know what markings to paint on the German plane. Charlie had no idea either. “Let’s leave that part blank,” Charlie told Harper. “Just in case I find him.”

Charlie had read in an aviation magazine that Germany’s most famous pilot, General Adolf Galland, had recently made an amazing reunion of his own. Galland had reunited with his wartime crew chief, Gerhard Meyer, by placing an ad in a newsletter called
Jagerblatt
.
Jagerblatt
(“
Fighter Journal
”) was the official publication of the Association of German Fighter Pilots, the reunion group for past and current pilots. So Charlie wrote to the editor of
Jagerblatt
and asked if the editor would publish his short letter describing the December 20 incident and the German pilot he was trying to find. But the editor was not eager to help a former bomber pilot. He declined Charlie’s request. So Charlie tried another route and wrote to Galland to ask for his help. Galland replied by letter that he had never heard of a 109 sparing a B-17, but he would order
Jagerblatt
’s editor to publish Charlie’s note. Galland could do this because he had once served as the organization’s president. He told Charlie to resubmit his letter, and Charlie eagerly complied.

In his letter, Charlie outlined the time, place, and general details of the encounter, in which “a single Bf-109 made a non-firing gun camera run on the B-17 and ended up flying formation on the right wing.” Charlie listed his address in Florida where he could be reached. But Charlie did not mention that his bomber’s left horizontal stabilizer had been blown away or that his rudder was nearly gone or that his tail gunner had been killed. His years in military intelligence had bred a
sense of skepticism. He saved those details and one last fact as a secret test in the event that a German pilot actually came forward.

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, JANUARY 1990, VANCOUVER

At his mailbox, Franz saw that his
Jagerblatt
had finally come from Germany. He plodded slowly along his driveway. Inside his house with its walls filled with woodcarvings, cuckoo clocks, and paintings of mountains, Franz dropped into his easy chair. He perused his
Jagerblatt
expecting to discover who had died since the previous issue. Then he saw it.

“Hiya!” Franz shouted.

Hiya came running. She assumed something bad had happened—maybe Galland had died.

“Here, look, this was him!” Franz shouted. Hiya looked confused. “The one I didn’t shoot down!” Franz clarified.

Over Franz’s shoulder, Hiya read the newsletter, amazed. As Galland had promised,
Jagerblatt
had published Charlie’s “looking for” letter. Like a small ad it occupied a quarter of a black-and-white page. Franz stood up and shuffled to his den, with its wallpaper that resembled old newspaper print. He opened the cover on his typewriter, slipped a piece of paper within the rollers, and quickly pounded out a letter that read:

Five days later in Miami, Jackie brought Charlie his mail as he sat at his desk, listening to the radio. He sliced the letter with an opener. “My God,” Charlie muttered as he read the letter in disbelief. He called his wife. “Could it be him?” Jackie asked. Thinking like an intelligence officer, Charlie pointed out that Franz had asked for nothing. He had not listed his phone number or said they needed to write a book together and tell the world of their encounter. He simply had suggested that maybe they could meet someday and that he was happy Charlie had made it. “I’ve got a good feeling this is the guy,” Charlie told his wife. “But I’m not getting my hopes up, yet.” Charlie sat down to type a letter back to Franz. Midway through the process he became impatient and stopped. “The heck with it,” he said. Picking up the phone, Charlie dialed information. He asked for the Vancouver phone directory and if there was a Franz Stigler listed. The operator told him there was and gave him Franz’s number. Charlie called and Franz picked up.

The conversation was strange and awkward at first. Charlie asked Franz a series of questions to figure out if he was really the one. Franz described the bomber’s battle damage. He mentioned the missing stabilizer. He said the rudder was nearly gone. He told Charlie the tail gunner’s position was shattered. Charlie’s heart skipped a beat. He had never mentioned the stabilizer, rudder, or tail gun position in his
Jagerblatt
letter—but Franz knew everything. Then Franz told Charlie, “When I let you go over the sea, I thought you’d never make it across.”

“My God, it is you!” Charlie said. Tears ran down his cheeks and onto the phone’s handset. Charlie had purposely never mentioned anything in the letter about flying over the water. That was his secret test. All Charlie had mentioned was that the encounter had happened over land. Yet Franz knew they had flown together out and over the sea. His emotions flowing, Charlie asked Franz the first thing that came to mind. “What were you pointing for? You kept pointing and trying to tell us something?”

“To get you to land in Sweden!” Franz told Charlie, choking up himself.

“I had no idea!” Charlie replied, “Otherwise I would have flown there and would still be speaking Swedish today!”