by Adam Makos
In an attempt to reverse the tide of the war after four years of his bad decisions, Goering had decided to drive the tired veterans like Franz harder. Now, on Goering’s orders, pilots had to attack until out of ammo, land, rearm, refuel, and go up to attack again and again, until the bombers had all departed German airspace. Goering’s new rule succeeded best in breaking men, causing them to lose their nerve and pass out in their cockpits to the hum of their engines. Pilots began to fly drunk. In Fighter Wing 26, a squadron leader even shot himself in his cockpit with a handgun.*
That night at the base, like most nights late in the war, Franz wrote to the parents of a young pilot who had been killed in action. He always told the parents that their son had died a hero, because the truth was too terrible to tell. The best the rookie knew was to “target fly”—straight and level—until an Allied fighter came along to claim him as a victory. “What can you do with kids like that?” Franz often lamented to his fellow veterans when they got drunk at night. By the time he finished the letter his bottle of cognac would be half-empty. When Franz splashed water on his face and looked in the mirror, he realized that he was penning the same kind of hollow letter that his brother’s squadron leader had written to him when August died.
The knock always came in the evening. Franz knew it was coming that night; his group of forty pilots had lost nine of their men the week before. And so it happened. A light rapping on his heavy door. Then a heavier knocking. When Franz opened the door, he wanted to throw up his arms. He saw a new pilot standing there, a teenager, maybe seventeen years old. The new rookies these days were always lowly corporals. The boy reported for duty and gave Franz his name, but Franz tried to forget it just as quickly, to keep his own sanity. The boy’s face was white and devoid of lines. He made Franz’s rookies from Graz look like grown men.
The rookie clicked his heels and tried to look brave as he gave The Party’s stiff-armed salute. Franz returned the salute the old way, with a hand to his eyebrow. So much had changed since July 20, when a former Afrika Korps officer, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, had tried to assassinate Hitler. Stauffenberg was a Bavarian Catholic opposed to Hitler and had tried to kill him with a briefcase bomb that only wounded the dictator. In the aftermath, Hitler and The Party arrested five thousand suspected “conspirators” and executed two hundred of them. The Party turned paranoid. Suddenly they viewed the “old military” style of salute as a form of resistance, so they made their stiff arm salute mandatory. But Franz was too tired to adapt. The new salute was like the new award Berlin had given Franz on October 1. It was called “the German Cross,” although it was not even a cross. It was Hitler’s invention—a black swastika wrapped in a circular laurel wreath. It was worn on the tunic, below the right breast. The German Cross fell below the Knight’s Cross in prestige and was awarded for six or more acts of bravery. Franz found it insulting and amusing that after four hundred combat missions someone thought he had finally managed six brave acts. He had to wear this “cross,” no questions allowed.
Franz ushered the rookie into his office, sat him down, and welcomed him to Squadron 11 with a drink. He faked a smile and told the boy that he was lucky; he had joined “the best squadron in the Air Force.” Franz told every new pilot this to bolster his spirits. He knew that no squadron in the Air Force was half of what he had known in the desert. There, he had served in a squadron of experts. Those days now seemed a mirage.
AS DAWN CRACKED across the frozen horizon, Franz found himself suited up and watching the sky. He always prayed that the weather would be foul—preferably sleet or blinding snow—anything to keep his squadron from flying. He knew the rookies had to fly that day, possibly two, three, or four missions. He wanted them to have another day of life. More often than not, snow did not fall.
Franz and his pilots waited in chairs beneath the trees behind their planes. Mechanics had camouflaged the planes with black tarps that ran from the cockpit to the wings and with pine branches layered across the wings. A nearby radio speaker broadcast the air defense channel that announced when Allied fighters had entered German airspace. These days the Allied fighters were always spotted before the bombers. They would fly ahead of the bombers in a new strategy to kill the German fighters as they formed up, before they could attack the bombers. The strategy was devastatingly successful.
Franz looked at his nervous pilots around him and saw the rawest form of bravery. They were to go up against impossible odds. His enemies saw the same bravery. A B-17 pilot, Joseph Deichl, remembered, “When we did see the German fighters queuing up and start making their passes at us, we always thought they must have been on drugs or something because they were absolutely fearless, coming through the formation.”2 Goering, however, attributed his pilots’ inability to stop the bombing raids as “cowardice.” Their grievous losses did not matter to him. He accused his own pilots of sabotaging fuel depots so they wouldn’t have fuel to fly. He told the general of fighters, Galland, that his wing and group commanders would rather “play with themselves on the ground” than fight. Goering told JG-77’s leader, Steinhoff, “The fighter force is going to give battle to the last man. If it does not, it can go and join the infantry.”3 Goering even transmitted a message to group commanders authorizing them to court-martial pilots who had been seen to “run from a fight.” If any pilots were found guilty, Goering wanted them shot in front of their comrades.
The fighter pilots’ “problem,” Goering decided, stemmed from their lack of National Socialist spirit, so he sent political agents into the squadrons. Some agents arrived undercover as typists or clerks whose job was to listen for anti-Party rhetoric. Other political officers were announced to the units as “inspirational officers,” who led the squadrons in daily readings from Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. The pilots’ reactions to the political officers were similar. “Nobody took kindly to being spied upon,” one pilot wrote. “We all loathed these Commissar types and considered their presence among us to be an insult.”4
When the radio blared out a warning that Allied fighters had crossed into German skies, Franz and his comrades turned toward the speaker. This alert served to warn student pilots and transport pilots to return to earth immediately. Franz’s young pilots looked to him. They knew this was also their signal to launch—the announcement of Allied bombers would follow shortly. Franz looked back at the young men in his care. They were barely able to fly by instruments and only capable of simple aerobatics. Fuel shortages from Allied bombings had cut short their training. Since the spring, Germany’s aviation fuel production was down from 175,000 tons per month to just 5,000 tons, and combat units, not training units, took every drop. At this point in the war, the average British pilot began combat after 450 flight hours of training. An American went into combat with 600 hours. Franz’s rookies came to him with fewer than 150 hours of flying time.*
Franz stood. “Stick close to me,” he reminded his boys, then walked to his fighter. He no longer told them, “… and you’ll come home alive,” because he knew it was no longer true. He had seen too many veterans die when trying to rescue rookies from hopeless predicaments. Since Graz, Franz himself had been shot down more times than he could count. In seven months, he had bailed out four times and belly-landed his fighter just as much. Franz still checked his rosary before every flight. The beads were now more purple than black. They were getting worn out, too. Still, off Franz went with the men and boys of Squadron 11 into the skies that others fled.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, OCTOBER 26, 1944
Franz’s 109 taxied slowly to a halt along the trees. Its engine shut down, but the canopy did not open. The ground crewmen saw this and ran to the plane. The first to climb the wing popped the canopy open and saw that the windshield’s glass had cracked like a white web. In the center was a hole the diameter of a man’s pinky finger.
Grabbing Franz’s shoulders, the crewman pulled his body toward him. Franz fell limply to the canopy rail, his head flopping like a ragdoll. The crewman gasped
. Red blood surrounded a black hole of dried blood in Franz’s forehead. A bullet had pierced the windscreen’s supposedly bulletproof glass. The crewman looked at the back of Franz’s head and checked for an exit wound, but there was none. He saw that Franz was still breathing. The crewmen lifted Franz from the fighter. On the ground, Franz slowly regained his senses and opened his eyes. The men were startled—they were certain that a bullet had pierced his brain. Franz opened the palm of his hand. In it was an inch-long copper bullet, its point mashed and coated with blood. The crewmen were in awe. Somehow Franz had managed to stay conscious long enough to land. They remembered to call for the medics only when Franz’s eyes closed and he passed out again.
That evening the flight doctor cleaned and placed a bandadge on Franz’s wound. The .50-caliber slug, which had come from a B-17’s gun, had not pierced Franz’s skull, although it had caused a nasty dent in his head. Franz stood to leave, but the doctor stopped him. The doctor knew Franz’s skull was weakened, maybe fragmented.
Franz tried to pretend that he had not seen flashes of light. He denied having headaches. But the doctor knew better. Franz insisted he was not going to leave his young pilots, but the doctor told him otherwise. The doctor explained to Franz that he probably had brain trauma from the impact, problems that would be compounded by high altitude and stress. “You’re grounded,” he said, as if handing Franz a gift. But Franz begged him not to report his condition to the higher-ups. The doctor shook his head. He had to. He handed Franz a medical waiver that recorded that he had suffered brain damage, which could trigger “adverse behavior.” The form said Franz “should not be held responsible for his actions.” Franz reluctantly took the waiver and walked away, steadying himself against the wall.
A day later, Roedel called. Franz promised Roedel he could still fly, but Roedel knew better. He told Franz to take a leave of absence to the fighter pilot’s rest home. Franz had heard of the resort on the banks of Lake Tegernsee, at the foot of the Alps below Munich. There sat a tall white, Alpine-style chalet, with the resort’s name, FLORIDA, in bold letters over its wide, double doors. Pilots’ weddings and Knight’s Cross award parties were often held there. It was a place of levity where a tired pilot could check in with his commander’s consent to enjoy good food, alcohol, a warm bed with feather comforter, views of the lake, and a place to repair his mind. A pilot could stay there weeks or months. If he claimed his nerves were no better, he could sit out the rest of the war. To placate Roedel, Franz agreed to check into Florida. As Franz packed his bags, sadness struck him when he looked at his tan JG-27 cuff band that said AFRIKA. He had been with JG-27 for two years and seven months before a lone bullet took him down. The men of the legendary “Desert Wing” had become the only friends he had left, and now he was leaving them.
At a time when Germany needed every fighter pilot, Franz Stigler was out of the war.
SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, NOVEMBER 1944
Franz was amazed at the destruction around him as he sat in a train that chugged through the suburbs of Berlin. The train passed by buildings that looked like cutaways, whole walls sheared off and their insides gutted. Stairways in apartments climbed up to floors that had fallen through. Children played among the rubble in the streets. Other children watched from the sidelines, some on crutches, others missing limbs. Sixteen RAF firebomb raids had likely caused this ruination. The 8th Air Force had hit Berlin the prior March, before shifting focus to bomb targets in France in preparation for D-Day.
The people who sat in front of and behind Franz were silent and depressed. Their clothes were worn and tattered. Everyone wore the same weary frown. Franz had heard how the British had sent a few speedy Mosquito bombers over Berlin every night, just enough to trigger the air raid sirens and send people stumbling outside to the bomb shelters, a form of psychological warfare to deny the populace sleep. It worked.
Now their tired eyes glanced at Franz in his black leather jacket and gray riding pants. They saw that his black gloves had all their fingers intact. They looked at his thick cheeks and knew he was healthy, while their faces were lean and gaunt from substitute “ersatz” foods. Their “coffee” was made from oats and barley and tinted with an extract taken from coal tar. Their “meat” and “fish” were really just rice cakes flavored with animal fat or fish oil. Their “bread” was made of flour from ground chestnuts. In some cases, the people expanded their rations with pet rabbits and house cats.
Shouldn’t you be flying? their eyes seemed to ask Franz with sarcasm. His officer’s cap obscured the bandage on his forehead. He looked away, knowing he could never explain what he had seen. After his medical expulsion from JG-27, Franz had gone home and found his mother cold and hungry, alone in their empty house. Father Josef checked on her when he could but had told Franz that his father’s war pension and death benefits had stopped flowing. His mother had no income to rely on. Father Josef’s letters to the old soldier’s office had gone unanswered. So Franz decided to travel to Berlin, a three-day train ride through bombed-out train yards, to find out where his father’s pension had gone. Only after his mother had been cared for would Franz allow himself to report to Florida.
Walking the streets of Berlin, Franz saw that they were dotted with piles of black rubble, the result of the citizens’ daily cleanings. In craters that had been buildings he saw rats drinking where pipes had burst. Franz entered the tall “old soldier’s” office, its white façade now pitted by bombs. There, Franz sat across from a bureaucrat who supervised pensions, a balding man with a round face, glasses, and sagging cheeks. The man introduced himself as Mr. Greisse. He wore a round, red National Socialist swastika pin over his breast.
Mr. Greisse made small talk, asking Franz about his unit. Franz told him he was “in between outfits,” but reporting to Lake Tegernsee next. Mr. Greisse asked Franz what unit was there, so Franz told him about the Florida resort. Mr. Greisse said he admired fighter pilots and would have permitted his eldest daughter to date one if her mother had not forbidden it. Franz smiled at the backhanded compliment, well aware that fighter pilots had gone from heroes to villains in the eyes of the German people due to Goering’s slander.
Getting down to business, Mr. Greisse told Franz it was heartwarming to see a young man travel so far to look after his mother. But then to Franz’s surprise he said, “Only you can care for your mother these days.” Franz’s father’s pension and death benefits, Mr. Greisse explained, had dried up like those of every other old soldier to meet the needs of the war.
Franz eyed Mr. Greisse’s swastika pin with contempt. “You don’t like me because I’m in The Party?” Mr. Greisse asked him. Franz replied that he had nothing against him personally but that he represented the people who had put his mother in a bad fix. Mr. Greisse leaned forward and in whispers told Franz that some jobs required Party membership—he had worked in veterans affairs before the National Socialists took over his office, as they had the post office, the transportation authority, and every facet of government. Franz nodded that he understood.
“Where are you staying?” Mr. Greisse asked him. Franz said he was taking a train home that night. Mr. Greisse warned Franz that he might be stuck on the platform in the cold, if there was an air raid. He asked Franz to come with him to his home in Potsdam, a short train ride southwest to the suburbs of Berlin. Franz trusted the man’s smile and agreed.
Hours later, Franz arrived at the tall, stately Greisse home in Potsdam. He was amazed upon entering to see heavy blankets dangling in place of a front door. Inside, the home’s windows had been blown out. Wooden boards had been hammered up in their place. Still, a grandfather clock stood untouched in the hallway and Mr. Greisse bragged that the house’s pipes had not yet burst.
Mr. Greisse introduced Franz to his wife, who was preparing a meager meal. His eldest daughter was out and about, but he introduced Franz to his little daughter, Helga, a short thirteen-year-old girl with strawberry-blond hair. The little girl called herself “Hiya” and was not a
fraid of Franz or fighter pilots because her sister had brought one home before. Hiya showed Franz to her room, where she kept her bomb shard collection. She handed him one and explained that she would trade the pieces with her friends, swapping unique shapes for bigger ones. Franz saw how the rough edges of the shards reflected light like a prism.
Franz left Hiya and went to talk with her father. Later, around the dinner table, Hiya arrived wearing her Indian costume. She had made a headdress out of cardboard that she’d colored. She had frayed her pants to look like tattered buckskin. Her mother wanted her to take her costume off, but she let her keep it on throughout dinner when Franz acted impressed.
During the meal, Hiya showed Franz how to behave in a bomb shelter. She put both thumbs in her ears and opened her mouth. Franz knew this but pretended to learn. He knew this was done so the bombs’ concussion would not rupture one’s eardrums.
That night, Franz saw Hiya leave the dinner table without a word and run outside. Her parents did not follow her and Franz thought this odd. Her mother started sobbing. Mr. Greisse comforted his wife while explaining to Franz how hard it was as parents to have to wake Hiya up night after night, to grab her backpack, their suitcases, and run to a bomb shelter. He asked Franz, “What do you say when she asks, ‘Papa, in America are their kids getting up now, too?’”
Franz looked down at the table. After a few moments of silence he asked Mr. Greisse if he could go check on Hiya. Mr. Greisse nodded while hugging his wife.
Franz stepped through the blankets in the doorway and found Hiya standing in the cold looking up to the sky. Franz kneeled next to her and looked up, too.
“If you see the stars,” she told him, “it means the bombers won’t be coming.” Franz nodded. He knew this might have been true in the early war, when the bombers avoided clear skies because the flak gunners could see their silhoutettes, but now nothing stopped them.