A Higher Call

Five days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark shaped pulled up on the bomber's tail--a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called "the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II." This is the story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day: the American--2nd Lt Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17--and the German-- 2nd Lt Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II. A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz's harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies' planes, flak bursts so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of one thousand bombers, each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack. Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at each other. The American 8th Air Force would later classify what happened between them as "top secret". It was an act that Fraz would never mention or else face a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for each other, a last mission that could change their lives forever.   By Adam Makos and Larry Alexander