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

by Adam Makos

  * Marseille wrote a letter to his mother the night of his first victory that read, “I keep thinking how the mother of this young man must feel when she gets the news of her son’s death. And I am to blame for this death. I am sad, instead of being happy about the first victory.”2

  6

  THE STARS OF AFRICA

  ONE MONTH LATER, JUNE 25, 1942, EGYPT

  MOONBEAMS ILLUMINATED A circle of tents on the north edge of the Sidi Barrani Air Base. Franz, Roedel, and a handful of pilots sat within the tents’ circle, on thick stones around a campfire. They bantered while Franz ate tinned sardines. He had learned to tolerate anything edible. To the south of their campsite lay JG-27’s temporary airstrip, Sidi Barrani, its hard-packed runway glowing white in the moonlight. To the north, the sea sparkled near the coast then faded to blackness in the distance. Behind the tents sat a small, crumbling desert fort.

  Normally campfires were forbidden, but Roedel had approved the fire. He reasoned that if a British spotter plane saw the light, they would assume it was just a Bedouin campfire. There was nobody else for miles around anymore. Sidi Barrani lay within Egypt, just forty miles across the border from Libya. Just a few days earlier, the airfield had belonged to the British, evidenced by the empty cigarette packs they had left behind when they retreated. Rommel’s push had broken through their lines. He had sacked Tobruk, the British battle capital in the western desert, and had driven the British out of Libya and back into Egypt. Now he was ninety miles to the east, chasing the British deeper and deeper into Egypt while aiming for the Suez Canal.

  That month, JG-27 had followed Rommel like a nomadic herd, flying from a new airfield nearly every week. The men flew with renewed vigor, believing the end of the desert war was just beyond the horizon. They also operated under a new, inspirational commander, “Edu” Neumann, who had been promoted to lead JG-27, all nine squadrons. At night, the men slept under the stars. By day, the sight of the unit’s fighters lined up on sandy runways reminded Franz of a holiday at the seashore. Between missions, mechanics propped small white umbrellas over the fighters’ cockpits to keep the seats cool for the pilots. The pilots found time to sunbathe, and the ground crewmen worked on engines from the backs of trucks. Whenever Franz and the others saw the mechanics hurriedly collapsing the umbrellas, they knew it was time to go back to work.

  During one such mission, Franz lost his first airplane of the war. While attacking a desert fort, Franz’s plane had been hit from ground fire. He had belly-landed within friendly lines and returned to his unit on a camel after a Bedouin tribesman rescued him. Franz’s squadron mates had laughed when they saw him ambling the day after, still bowlegged from the bumpy camel ride.

  That night around the campfire, the sound of patrolling Ju-88 night fighters overhead promised Franz and his comrades that the skies were friendly. The sound reminded Franz of his brother, who had flown Ju-88s. Tears filled his eyes, but he brushed them away. A radio glowed on a crate behind the group. Cords led from the radio to a generator that hummed in the distant motor pool. The radio spouted music and military news. Other pilots wandered through. Among them were two of Roedel’s squadron commanders, Voegl and Lieutenant Rudi Sinner, who took seats around the fire. Sinner was short and unassuming with a long nose that stood sharply from his calm eyes. He was an Austrian, like Voegl, and had begun his career in the Austrian Army, tending horses that pulled cannons. Since those days he referred to himself as “just an ordinary soldier,” even though he was a seven-victory ace. Roedel had seen promise in Sinner and had appointed him to lead Squadron 6, replacing the commander who had been killed on the day when Franz scored his first victory.

  With the radio chattering, a fire going, and tents to shield them from the desert wind, the men enjoyed a luxury they had lacked in weeks prior. They joked that for once they had it better than their British enemies, who they knew received regular rest and weekend leaves to metropolitan cities. They had heard captured British pilots tell them, “Should you chaps ever make it to Alexandria, the Cecil Hotel is your place, and if you find yourselves in Cairo, you must look up the Heliopolis Sports Club.”

  “They’re gentlemen,” Sinner said. “You can’t ask for a better enemy.” The others agreed. Sinner related a story that Lieutenant Willi Kothmann, a JG-27 ace, had told him. “Kothmann warned me that you have to be careful with a captured Tommy pilot,” Sinner said, “because he is always planning his escape back to his Pomeranian dog and gambling debts. He will not be comfortable as a prisoner until he has seen to both.”

  Everyone laughed. Because the German pilots spoke English more readily than any other language, interactions between the two enemies were common. Once when someone asked Marseille why he showed such interest in captured enemy pilots, he said, “I just like to talk to them.”1

  “Where is Kothmann now?” Franz asked.

  “He was killed last April,” Sinner said sadly.

  Voegl scowled. He did not share the others’ sporting respect for their enemies. He envied his enemies. They had more pilots and better planes now that their advanced Spitfire fighters were arriving. They did shorter tours and then rotated to England or Australia for quieter duty. Franz could tell that the hardened veterans around him could all use a break. Their clothes were sloppy, their faces gaunt, and their eyes weary. Roedel told the others he was due for leave in a month but was not looking forward to it. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy.

  At 9:50 P.M., someone tuned in Radio Belgrade, a station that beamed from the powerful German transmitter in Yugoslavia. Every night at the same time, the station played a recording of Lale Andersen, a German girl in her thirties, singing the song “Lili Marlene.” A German soldier named Hans Liep had originally written the song’s lyrics as a poem during WWI. Thanks to Andersen’s rendition, the song had become the German soldiers’ anthem. Like many other homesick warriors, the pilots of JG-27 tuned in nightly. So did their opponents. In Egypt, the British pilots were listening to the same radio show, in silence, in their mess tents. At 9:55 P.M., on cue, Andersen’s hypnotically sensual and delicate voice floated from the radio’s speaker. She sounded gorgeous. Franz leaned closer, his ear glued to the radio.

  Andersen sang of a soldier who often met his girl under the lamppost outside of his camp, before he was called away to war.

  Time would come for roll call,

  Time for us to part,

  Darling I’d caress you

  And press you to my heart,

  And there ’neath that far-off lantern light,

  I’d hold you tight,

  We’d kiss good night,

  My Lili of the Lamplight,

  My own Lili Marlene.

  As the song continued, Franz wondered to himself if Andersen were singing to the men on the steppes of Russia or on the fields of Crete or on the bluffs of France. “Was anyone thinking of us in the desert?” he wondered.

  Resting in our billets

  Just behind the lines,

  Even tho’ we’re parted,

  Your lips are close to mine.

  You wait where the lantern softly gleams,

  Your sweet face seems

  To haunt my dreams,

  My Lili of the Lamplight,

  My own Lili Marlene.

  Beneath the stars, far from home, Franz, like his comrades and enemies across the desert, had tears in his eyes by the time the song trailed to silence.*

  ONE MONTH LATER, JULY 26, 1942, QUOTAIFIYA, EGYPT

  Franz brought his 109 to a halt on the taxiway that paralleled the runway. Ahead, Roedel powered up his plane in morning’s yellow light. A vortex of sand blew from beneath the machine’s belly. Roedel’s fighter’s bare rudder flapped left and right, his preflight check. His rudder should have borne forty-five victory marks but still remained unmarked. Their mission that day was the same as many days prior: Stuka escort over the front lines that lay just a ten-minute flight away.

  A month earlier JG-27 had come to Quotaifiya, a scorchi
ng, flat airfield halfway along the Egyptian coast. British bombers had hit the base only two days earlier. Craters now gave the field character, at least. Before it had been a blank swath of white sand. Even with the ocean nearby, to the north, the heat hovered like a mirage.

  Rommel had ordered JG-27 to this awful place. He had pushed the British back but not far enough to win the war in North Africa. When his advance had petered out, the Germans found themselves staring at the British from across trenches that ran from a coastal train station called El Alamein, deep into the desert. Rommel’s great progress would be his undoing. He had stretched his forces far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs. As British ships steamed into their port at Alexandria, carrying fresh pilots and planes to regenerate the Desert Air Force, the Germans flogged the same pilots and planes harder, sending them on Stuka escorts, often three times a day. The tiresome missions wore JG-27’s pilots to the bone. The turning point in the desert air war had arrived.

  In the weeks prior, Franz and Roedel had flown together almost daily. On one mission Roedel had downed three Spitfires and Franz had bagged one, his third victory. Franz’s fourth and fifth victories followed soon after, and he became classified as an ace. But Franz kept his rudder bare in an effort to emulate Roedel, who had grown larger than life to him.

  Roedel gave a fist-forward gesture to show Franz and the others in his flight that he was taking off, a silent signal in case the British were eavesdropping on the radio channel. He began his takeoff roll, his plane’s prop blast showering white sand onto Franz’s windscreen. Roedel’s fighter raced down the runway and shrunk in the distance. But either Roedel in his fatigue or the crewmen who had swept the runways after the bombing raid had failed to notice a piece of debris that lay in the path of Roedel’s fighter.

  Roedel was at full takeoff speed when he hit the jagged debris. His plane veered off the runway and cartwheeled through the sand.

  Franz radioed the control bunker to send firefighters quickly. He and the others cut their engines and sprinted toward Roedel. They never expected to see Roedel emerge from the plane, but he did and ran toward them, shouting, waving his arm, and pointing east.

  When the men met Roedel, his glare stopped them in their tracks. He clutched his ribs with one arm. His head was bleeding. “The Stukas!” he shouted at Franz and the others. “You don’t stop for one man!” Franz’s smile faded. The flight of Stukas was heading unescorted toward the British lines. It was too late to catch up.

  When medics arrived, they calmed Roedel down, insisting he lie on a stretcher in the shade of their ambulance. Franz stood by as the medics loaded Roedel into the truck.

  “Damn it, now I have to go home,” Roedel said with resignation before the medics slammed shut the doors. Franz knew Roedel did not want to go because he did not trust any other officer with the lives of his men.

  Before Roedel departed, he appointed a temporary successor from his three squadron leaders based on the only standard he knew they would agree on. He picked the top ace, the man with the most victories. Voegl, with twenty victories, got the nod. Roedel’s gesture of impartiality would soon prove one of his biggest mistakes.

  AS THE BLISTERING hot month of August arrived, life at Quotaifiya reached a low point. The men lived like animals. They no longer slept in tents or under the stars. To avoid British strafing, Franz and the others slept in “graves,” six- by six-foot holes hacked into the earth, with a sheet of canvas overhead. Here each man kept his cot, blanket, and belongings. The days of showering in freshwater were over. Everyone stank. When the men snuck away once a week to bathe in the ocean, they came back with their skin crusty with salt.

  Franz existed with the salt and sand caking his face, lining his hair, and sticking to the dried sweat on his back. The heat at Quotaifiya was often 125 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter. Franz and his comrades developed chapped lips and sores that would not heal, sores the flies loved. Worse was whenever a flight taxied past and blew grains of sand into the men’s bloodshot eyes and open cuts. On some days, sandstorms rolled in that settled over the airfield, choking Franz and his comrades with a white hazy cloud.

  At night, Franz and the others drank to forget the day. They then stumbled carefully through the “graveyards,” careful not to step on the poisonous asps and cobras that came out in darkness. After checking his grave for snakes, Franz said his prayers with his knees in the sand. Then he slid under his blankets and pulled them over his head so spiders would not crawl across his face.

  At Quotaifiya, Franz began dreaming of his mother’s cooking, of eating his favorite dish, leberkase, a pan-fried Bavarian meatloaf made from finely chopped corned beef, pork, bacon, and onions. He imagined bowls of fresh vegetables, a taste he had long forgotten. Red cabbage, spinach, potato salad, and potato pancakes appeared in his dreams. Then he would awake with his stomach cold and twisted, regretting that he had ever said, “I’ll pass on anything that flies or swims.”

  Within JG-27 it was common knowledge that a man could only endure six months of desert torture before his health fell to pieces. Life at Quotaifiya accelerated that breaking point. Even the Desert Fox, Rommel, had to return to Germany after the desert knocked him out with a sinus infection. Franz knew Voegl and others had somehow withstood eight months of the desert’s torture, some 240 days’ worth. But he would soon discover that even the bravest of men could crack.

  THERE WERE FEW options to escape the desert’s misery, among them death, wounds, insanity, and the passing of time. But one man had revealed the only other avenue of escape: victories. Marseille’s high scoring saw him flying home to Germany every two months to receive new decorations added to his Knight’s Cross—first miniature oak leaves and then miniature swords, each signifying higher degrees of the Cross. Franz, Voegl, and their comrades all watched Marseille leave and wanted to go with him. At a time when desert life was grinding JG-27 to a halt, the competition for victories intensified.

  Due to wear and tear from the countless Stuka escorts, the squadrons that once had sixteen fighters each now had, on average, just four planes operational. There were no longer enough planes to go around. When a perfectly good 109 arrived from Germany, the mechanics converged on it like cannibals and stripped its parts to keep several other planes flying. A new question arose in each squadron: “Who gets to fly?”

  As the leader of both II Group and Squadron 4, Voegl made that call. Because Roedel had crashed his fighter before Voegl could inherit it, Voegl had taken one of Squadron 4’s planes for himself. That left three planes for him to pass around among the squadron’s sixteen pilots. He assigned another to his wingman and longtime sidekick, Sergeant Karl-Heinz Bendert. Bendert was a veteran, too, and was known as the squadron’s most ambitious pilot. He had a baby face with tiny, pouty lips and was quick to snicker. Voegl gave Franz a plane because he considered him a friend. As if to spite the others, Voegl gave the squadron’s fourth and last plane to a replacement pilot, the squadron’s new arrival, Sergeant Erwin Swallisch. Swallisch was an “old hare,” seasoned in age and experience, with eighteen victories to his name, most from the Eastern Front. Voegl took Bendert as his wingman and assigned Franz to Swallisch but warned Franz, “Swallisch is an expert but watch out, he is ill in the head.” Voegl said this because Swallisch had rotated home for instructor duty as a reward but instead requested duty where the fighting was roughest—the desert. Without any say in the matter, Franz had become a member of Voegl’s inner circle, a group his peers would call the “Voegl Flight.”

  Franz met Swallisch when the “ill” pilot introduced himself at Franz’s grave. Swallisch had a strong face, a bulbous nose, thick cheeks, and a toothy smile. In talking, Franz discovered that Swallisch was “straight,” or “honest and professional.” Swallisch, too, had flown in the Spanish Civil War, but as a fighter pilot, and had scored three victories. The two bonded over memories of wine, tapas, and senoritas.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, AUGUST 4, 1942
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br />   At night, Swallisch entered Franz’s grave, obviously disturbed. In a hushed tone, Swallisch said he had to tell Franz something, in secret. Franz had not flown that day, due to maintenance on his fighter, but Swallisch told him what he had missed.

  Swallisch had flown twice that day, first at dawn when Bendert had summoned him to escort a reconnaissance plane with him. Together, they had attacked a dozen P-40s and Swallisch had knocked one from the sky. But on the way home, Bendert said he got one, too, and told Swallisch to confirm his victory, one Swallisch never saw happen. That afternoon Swallisch flew with Bendert again. This time, Swallisch shot down a Spitfire, and again Bendert claimed he had downed a Spitfire, too, one that Swallisch had not witnessed.

  Swallisch was disturbed and asked Franz if “loose scoring” was the way of the desert. Franz said it happened. He had been there when everyone questioned Voegl’s three claims in one mission, the victories that only Bendert would confirm. Franz and Swallisch agreed they had no choice but to give Bendert the benefit of the doubt.

  In the week that followed, the Voegl Flight flew and fought the group’s only battles because Voegl ensured that they had the best missions and the planes to fly them. A pattern developed. Whenever the men landed and claimed victories, Bendert always claimed something, and if others claimed a victory, Bendert claimed the same or more. Then came August 10, the day that broke the camel’s back. That morning Franz and Swallisch scrambled to intercept British fighters that had been sighted over El Alamein. There, among the thick clouds that bordered the sea, Franz and Swallisch attacked a pack of P-40s and Hurricanes. On their first dive, each claimed a P-40. On the second dive, Franz claimed a Hurricane. But as Franz pulled up to climb and repeat, he saw a terrifying sight behind his tail. Instead of the P-40s breaking into a defensive circle like they always had, they were chasing him! With Swallisch flying ahead of him and unaware of the danger, Franz radioed him with alarm and told him to run—they were being chased. Swallisch radioed back, “Nonsense.”