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

by Adam Makos

  “Bandits!” Ecky cried from the tail. He reported five 109s leaping from below and behind The Pub, the same clouds where Walt had disappeared and where Blackie had seen the flash.

  Charlie’s heart raced. He tried to look out his side window to see backward, forgetting it offered no rearward visibility. From the nose, Andy cried, “Bandits! Twelve o’clock high!” Charlie looked up and above the instrument panel. There he saw a flock of eight German fighters climbing far ahead in trail formation. They blocked The Pub’s path to the North Sea. Charlie squinted and saw they were Focke-Wulf 190s, each with a big, rounded nose and a sharply angled dark gray body that flowed into a rounded tail. Each wore a yellow number on its fuselage and a yellow band just ahead of the tail, the markings of Fighter Wing 11 (JG-11). Charlie saw them lingering at a distance, as if trying to decide who got the honor of attacking first, them or their friends behind the wounded bomber.

  I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, Charlie thought.

  Charlie yelled to Doc to give him a course out of Germany. With the arctic wind blowing through the nose and tossing his navigation charts, Doc tried to work.* Stopping for a moment, Doc unzipped his jacket. Despite the subzero temperatures, he found himself sweating.

  At the controls, Charlie longed for the safety of the formation. When huddled in formation, a bomber could absorb little bites of damage, each plane taking its fair share. But now The Pub was alone. Charlie knew that if an enemy fighter poured even a two-second burst into her, he and his crew would be finished. Then he remembered something from his attempt at boxing. He had underestimated the old-timer who had pummeled him and worse—he had stood still and “taken it.” Charlie decided to do something radical. “Let me know when they start their attack!” Charlie told his crew.

  Barely seconds had passed when Frenchy radioed from his turret, “Here they come!”

  Ducking to see beneath the lip of the roof ahead of him, Charlie spotted two 190s diving straight for the cockpit. The Germans’ approach revealed that they knew the fastest way to remove a Fortress from a fight. They were gunning for its pilots or the controls, in either order.†

  Biting his lip, Charlie hauled back on the yoke and climbed directly up and into the path of the two enemy fighters. Pinky realized what Charlie was doing and braced his arms on the instrument panel, his eyes wide with disbelief. Charlie held the course. Instead of giving the enemy a flat target with wide wings and a long body, Charlie was presenting the bomber at her narrowest, increasing the closing speed. He was playing Chicken.

  The maneuver caught the first enemy fighter pilot by surprise. He opened fire from a distance, his bullets glancing off the bomber, biting metal but failing to deliver a knockout blow. Frenchy remained cool in the top turret and waited to return fire. When Frenchy opened up with his twin .50s, their muzzles belched fire just above the thin, sheet-metal ceiling that separated Charlie’s head from the sky. Charlie flinched. Shrinking in his seat, he struggled to hold his climb. Frenchy’s heavy slugs found their mark and hammered the 190 in its gaping mouth before it could break away. The 190 coughed flames across its fuselage and bled smoke as it zoomed past, out of the fight.

  Charlie kicked the rudder and swerved the bomber left toward the next onrushing 190. “Here he comes, Doc!” Charlie shouted. But in the nose, Doc’s gun hung idle in its mount. Instead of firing, Doc was feverishly using his gloved fingers to scrape away frost from the glass. “Get him, Doc!” Charlie urged.

  Doc swung his gun toward the fighter and fired. The heavy machine gun bucked and spewed brass casings that clattered to the floor. The 190 fired back, its wing guns blinking. The fighter scored hits, its slugs rattling the bomber’s skin, but Charlie’s maneuver had reduced its firing time. Snap-rolling, the 190 tried to dive away but revealed its belly in the process. Doc stitched it with a string of bullets. He failed to follow the plane to watch it crash because he became distracted by his shaking knees.

  CHARLIE SCANNED THE skies, keeping an eye on the other enemy fighters that circled ahead. “What the hell are they waiting for?” he said aloud to Pinky. Charlie allowed a moment of hubris to run through his mind: Are they afraid?

  Pinky noticed that the needle in the RPM gauge for engine three was quivering backward. He tapped the gauge. The needle dropped farther. Pinky slapped Charlie on the arm and pointed to the gauge. “Don’t tell me…” Charlie muttered. Surveying the engine just outside his window, Pinky reported that bullets had shredded the skin around it. Charlie pushed the throttle forward, but the engine did not speed up. He looked at Pinky, who did not blink. Charlie pulled back on the throttle, but the engine did not power down. “The controls are shot out,” Charlie said. Engine three was frozen at half power. With one engine out, one irregular, and now one at half power, Charlie knew they were on the verge of a complete disaster.

  Ecky called out from the tail, “Fighters attacking, six o’clock level!”

  Charlie suddenly realized why the 190s were orbiting above—they weren’t afraid; they were giving their comrades a crack at the B-17 from a new direction.

  From behind, five 109s bore in on the bomber. Their spinners were black and their bodies a ghoulish gray on top and pale blue on the bottom. They, too, were from Fighter Wing 11, a unit that was slowly replacing its 109s with newer 190s.

  Charlie expected to hear the noise of Ecky’s guns but instead heard Ecky shout, “Get them, somebody! My guns are jammed!”

  Blackie swiveled his ball turret rearward to cover Ecky. He saw the 109s motoring in, fixed in their purpose. He pressed his thumb triggers. But his guns did not bark. Did I forget to turn the gun selector switches on? Blackie thought. Did I overlook putting a round into each of the chambers? Horrified, he leaned forward against his straps and saw the problem. “My God!” he shouted so everyone could hear. “My guns are frozen!” A half inch of ice encircled the barrels of his twin .50s.

  Blackie knew the 109 pilots could see him and knew they would be watching his barrels, so he did the only thing he could. He tracked them with his frozen guns—as a bluff.

  Charlie asked Blackie if he could clear his guns, but Blackie screamed, “Jesus, they’re firing at me!” Hearing this, Charlie threw the bomber into a bank. Blackie shielded his face with his hand as bullets ricocheted off the bomber’s frozen belly and clanged against his turret, cracking its glass but not penetrating.

  Up front, Charlie felt the controls grow sluggish and knew the enemy had landed some jabs. Where, he did not know. In reality, half the rudder had been shot away, but none of his gunners were in a vantage point to see it. More reports came through the intercom, all claiming frozen guns. Andy on the right nose gun, Jennings and Russian on the waist guns, and Pechout in the radio room—all reported that their weapons had been welded shut by ice. Of the bomber’s eleven guns, only three were operational: Doc’s up front and those in Frenchy’s top turret.*

  After the enemy fighters’ first two passes failed to knock the bomber from the sky, they attacked the twisting and weaving bomber haphazardly, every man for himself. Their bullets and cannon shells slowly dismembered The Pub.

  Spinning 360 degrees in his turret, Blackie tracked the fighters. The gunners’ shouts overlapped on the intercom. Desperate for assistance, Charlie told Pechout to patch him into the friendly fighter radio frequency.

  “Denver 1, Denver 1,” he said. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is Goldsmith two-zero, under attack south of Wilhelmshaven. I need assistance!”

  The only response was the lonely sound of static.

  “Keep trying to get us some help!” Charlie told Pechout.

  Charlie felt liquid trickling over his lips, inside his oxygen mask. Pulling the mask from his face he discovered he had a nosebleed, brought about by the thin atmospheric pressure. The blood was freezing inside his mask and stood to block the hole that supplied his oxygen. Charlie took a deep breath and held it. Removing the mask, he blew into it, spraying clear the accumulated blood. Pinky’s eyes went wide and h
e panicked. He shouted for Frenchy to bring a first-aid kit, screaming, “Charlie’s been shot in the head!”

  “It’s just a nosebleed!” Charlie assured Pinky and his startled crew.

  Pinky shook his head, having forgotten about Charlie’s chronic nosebleeds. Charlie resumed flying. The Pub was still responsive as he banked, dove, and racked the bomber around on a knife’s edge to meet each new threat that his gunners called out. The maneuvers slashed the Germans’ firing times and spoiled their aims. The enemy pilots did not know how to react. They had never seen a “target” attack them.

  Despite The Pub’s resilience, her thin, sheet-metal walls were not enough to shield her crew. A fighter’s 20mm cannon shell tore through the bomber’s right waist gun position and exploded. The shell’s concussion threw Jennings and Russian to the floor. The shell fragments blasted the bomber’s skin outward. Both gunners’ flak vests had shielded their vitals from shoulder to groin but the vests had not covered everything. When Jennings sat up he saw Russian holding his left thigh skyward, groaning through his mask. His lower leg hung by just a few strips of tendon. The stump of his thigh gushed blood.

  “Russian’s hit!” Jennings yelled into his mic as he rose wobbly to his knees. Jennings grabbed a nearby first aid kit and knelt over Russian with a pain-relieving morphine syrette in his hand. He fumbled to pry open Russian’s flight gear to find a place to stick the needle.

  At the bomber’s rear, Ecky reported with uncharacteristic alarm, “FW-190 attacking from nine o’clock level!”

  Up front, Doc heard Ecky’s cry and braced for the impact. Prepare to meet your destiny, Doc thought. But Charlie had heard Ecky, too, and threw the bomber into a wild bank. The FW-190’s shells flew wildly, missing the bomber’s waist and striking the tail instead. Down in the ball turret, Blackie saw sparks and metal cascade from the tail. He expected Ecky to say something. He heard only silence.

  His guns worthless, Blackie retracted the ball turret, pulled his mic from the intercom, and flipped open the hatch. Disconnecting from the oxygen system, he crawled out and tried to stand but fell to his knees. His feet were frozen because the heating wires in his boots had shorted out. Blackie needed oxygen. He crawled for a nearby yellow “walk-around” oxygen tank and clawed his way up the bomber’s metal ribs to pull the tank from the wall. Plugging in, he twisted the knob. Oxygen flowed into his face before he could pass out. Blackie saw that Jennings had pulled down a corner of Russian’s pants and was sticking him again and again with the morphine as Russian convulsed with pain. What the hell? Blackie wondered. He crawled to Jennings, who told him the morphine had gelled due to the cold and would not flow.

  “Slip the tube inside your glove and try to warm it up!” Blackie shouted.

  Staggering to the rear, his feet like bricks, Blackie assumed Ecky’s intercom had been knocked out. Crawling through the narrow tunnel under the rudder, Blackie saw Ecky sitting in his seat, his shoulders hunched over his guns, the painted name “Eckey” facing the ceiling. He was not moving. Blackie slapped the back of Ecky’s jacket, but Ecky did not raise his head. Crawling closer, Blackie saw that the tail gun position had been destroyed; the glass was gone, and the metal walls had been hacked open to the sky. A cold breeze blew from one side to the other. Only direct hits from several cannon shells could have done this. Blackie turned Ecky by a shoulder then reeled back in fright. Ecky’s head had been nearly severed and dangled onto his chest. His guns pointed silently earthward.

  Blackie backpedaled out of the tunnel in terror. Returning to the waist, he found Jennings clinging to his gun mount while holding Russian as the plane tossed around. The morphine had worked and Russian was asleep, but now Jennings fought to keep his friend from flying out the waist window. Plugging into Russian’s intercom port while holding on for dear life, Blackie told the crew: “Ecky’s dead!” In disbelief, Charlie and the others asked for clarification, but Blackie stopped mid-sentence as a flash erupted in the plane’s midsection. Blackie saw sparks, smoke, and papers floating in the radio room.

  Walking slowly in a living nightmare, Blackie stumbled past Jennings and Russian and toward the radio room. Entering the compartment, he saw Pechout hunched over his desk. The room resembled “the inside of a cheese grater” to Blackie after the destruction from several 20mm shells. Blackie was terrified to inspect Pechout after what he had seen with Ecky, so he waited a second and saw Pechout moving. Blackie put a hand on Pechout’s shoulder. Pechout ignored him. Pechout was intensely focused on his radio that had been blown into pieces. He was in shock and had removed his gloves to try to reassemble the radio, to obey Charlie’s last order to keep calling for help. Blackie assured Pechout he had done his duty. He gently lifted his friend from his seat and set him on the floor. Blood trickled from one of Pechout’s eyes where a tiny steel shell fragment was imbedded. His fingers were frostbitten and bleeding, missing skin from handling the frozen metal radio. Blackie found Pechout’s gloves and slid them back over the wounded man’s hands.

  In the cockpit, Charlie frantically scanned the skies through his narrow windows. With the radio and intercom dead, he knew he could only defend against enemy planes he and Pinky could see. Blinded in a sense, Charlie’s maneuvers became more radical in his attempts to dodge a knockout blow.*

  Inside the bomber’s frozen nose, Doc kept firing. The plane was gyrating so wildly and the 20mm shells were blasting so frequently that Doc found himself looking over his shoulder, to confirm that Andy was still there. He saw Andy hugging the floor. Are we the last ones living? Doc thought.†

  Behind the controls, Charlie was flailing, flying by survival instinct. He racked the bomber into a near vertical turn of eighty degrees, slamming his crewmen and their gear in a landslide against their compartments’ walls. In the waist, Jennings held Russian back from falling out the window. Charlie aimed at any fighters he saw coming in, knowing it was better to duel head-on than have them hanging on his tail. For nearly ten minutes, The Pub had stayed on her feet after a pummeling. But the punch-drunk bomber’s turns grew sluggish.

  In the nose, Doc’s gun stopped rattling, its ammo spent. One of Frenchy’s twin .50s jammed. The bomber was down to one operational gun in Frenchy’s turret. In sheer desperation, Charlie flew in circles, pulling tighter and tighter. He was flying in a near-vertical bank with the bomber’s left wing pointed toward the earth when bullets ripped through the cockpit’s ceiling. In a shower of glass and sparks the bullets passed between Charlie and Pinky and punctured the oxygen tanks behind their seats. A bullet fragment ricocheted and embedded itself against Charlie’s left shoulder blade. He ignored the sting and gripped the yoke tighter. With a violent hiss the bomber’s oxygen system vented a white cloud that Charlie felt behind his seat back.

  The Pub shook from the tail forward, almost breaking Charlie’s turn. Charlie knew an enemy plane was behind him, chewing up his tail section; he could feel it. But he did not know that a fighter had just shot off his left horizontal stabilizer, leaving just a three-foot stub from what had been a sixteen-foot rear wing.

  Charlie clutched his mask as the oxygen slowed its flow. Gasping, he said to Pinky, “We gotta reverse the circle or they’re going to nail us!” Charlie rolled the bomber violently to the right, turning the left wing upward from the earth to the horizon then to the sky. But the bomber did not stop rolling. With a stabilizer shot off, the left wing kept tipping until the bomber flipped and entered a slow, upside-down, flat spin. Through his groggy eyes, Charlie saw Pinky hanging upside down by his straps, unconscious. The world outside his window spun. Charlie’s mask stopped feeding him oxygen and he pulled it down around his neck. He gulped for air but only an oxygen-poor chill filled his lungs. As Charlie’s eyes faded, his head went limp. Through the cockpit ceiling window above him, he saw German farm fields orbiting five miles below. Then he, too, closed his eyes as The Pub spiraled toward the patchwork earth.

  AT THE SAME TIME, THIRTY MILES NORTH

  From above, the gray 1
09 with a dark green spine blended with the pine trees surrounding the air base at Jever, Germany. The plane drifted downward, landed on the gray concrete runway, and taxied up to ground crewmen in heavy parkas who directed the plane to park on a slab of concrete. The base had circular parking spaces nestled among the trees, but ground crewmen knew this fighter was not one of theirs—it wore the red Berlin Bear of JG-27’s II Group—so they guessed its owner was dropping in for a pit stop like others had before from the fighting over Bremen.

  The 109’s white spinner had barely stopped whirling when the ground men swarmed the plane, connecting a hose from it to a fitting in the concrete that led to an underground fuel tank. Others pulled up with a kettenkrad, a small vehicle that was half-motorcycle in the front and half-tank in the back. Wooden ammo boxes filled the kettenkrad’s rear bed. The crewmen could see that they were dealing with an ace, because the plane’s rudder wore twenty-two white victory marks and a low number on its flanks, Yellow 2.

  As he slid from the wing in his black leather flight gear, Franz’s thick black boots stomped the earth. He knew Jever from his flight instructor days, when the field had been a training school for bomber pilots. It lay on a peninsula northwest of Bremen, just ten miles from the North Sea. The lead ground crewman, a portly sergeant with his hood pulled over his cap, approached Franz and saluted. Franz had been promoted a month earlier and now wore the rank of a lieutenant on the shoulders of his jacket.

  “Any luck, sir?” the sergeant asked. Franz shook his head and explained that he thought he had knocked down a B-17 just northwest of Bremen, but he had lost sight of it before it crashed. The sergeant asked Franz how he had attacked it, but instead of answering Franz just smiled and pointed to the man’s clipboard. Remembering his duty, the sergeant handed Franz the clipboard and Franz signed off with his hand still shaking, authorizing the ground crewmen to start the fuel and ammo flowing into the 109. The time was 12:30 P.M. With wounded bombers limping across Germany, Franz was impatient to get back into the fight.