One of the best popular history books ever written, The Reason Why, consists of a long answer to an obvious but tricky question. Why did the Light Brigade charge into the valley of death at the Battle of Balaclava when it turned out to be such a crazy thing to do? Cecil Woodham-Smith wasn’t much interested in mid-19th century cavalry tactics. She was interested in everything else — personal, political, cultural, accidental — that could feed into one fateful decision. So she wound the clock back from the Crimean War and found a big part of her answer in the Irish potato famine.
A Higher Call is put together the same way, with the difference that Adam Makos starts with a “what” question that most of his readers won’t be aware of. What happened to the crew of an American B-17 bomber nicknamed Ye Olde Pub just off the north German coast on the afternoon of December 20, 1943?
If you know that you don’t want to know, skip the next few paragraphs. If you’re not sure, don’t worry. This book will still be well worth reading after the next four words. The crew was spared.
A German fighter pilot, decorated many times and deeply experienced in the art of chopping Allied bombers in two with his machineguns, drew alongside the badly damaged B-17 as it laboured out over the North Sea. He could have shot it down from a safe distance but was curious to see how it was still flying with only half a tail and a huge hole in its starboard wing.
There was also a long gash in its fuselage from an earlier encounter with German fighters, and through it the pilot could see most of the bomber’s crew huddled together for warmth and comradeship, waiting to die.
Instead of finishing them off, Franz Stigler moved down the stricken plane so that he was level with its cockpit. At the controls of the B-17, its captain, Charlie Brown, had given his crew a final chance to bale out. None had taken it, and Brown was concentrating on the almost impossible task of getting them back to England alive. He became aware of Stigler’s Messerschmitt 109 but preferred not to look at it. When Stigler finally made eye contact he gestured urgently to his right, to the north east, towards Sweden. That way the Americans could be over friendly territory in half an hour.
Brown ignored Stigler, who gave up, saluted and headed home, knowing he might be shot if it were learnt that he had spared a bomber crew tasked with dropping three tons of high explosives on the Fatherland.
Why would a man do that? What brought on this extraordinary, merciful act of inaction? But for Makos’s persistence in tracking rumours of the story to their source in Charlie Brown, we might never know. Even then Brown had to persuade Makos that the real story was Stigler’s, and Makos had to overcome his reluctance, as a young and avowedly patriotic American military historian, to allow that a German in the Second World War could be a hero.
The author acknowledges his own naivety in a prologue that adds force to what follows. A Higher Call pounds along with the all-action rhythm its genre seems to demand, but still manages to rescue the idea of German chivalry from cliché. It takes us to the Libyan desert near El Alamein, where Stigler is told by his commanding officer, a Lieutenant Roedel, that if he is seen shooting at an Allied pilot who has already baled out, Roedel will shoot him down himself. It introduces us, through Stigler, to Hans-Joachim Marseille, the lanky Luftwaffe ace who coined the name “the Fat One’ for Hermann Goering and was said personally to have taken at least one British pilot whom he shot down to a field hospital to be treated for his injuries.
There are valuable glimpses here of life on the wrong side of history. Stigler and his exhausted comrades could not say so when visited by the delusional thought police of the Gestapo, but most of them knew from the moment Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 that they were going to lose the war. The appearance of American aircraft in their crosshairs the following year only confirmed it, and the reality of retreat was harrowing. On one occasion Stigler witnessed the arrival in Sicily of German fighter aircraft fleeing the American advance in North Africa with their mechanics stuffed so tightly into tiny compartments meant for tools and spares that they had to be pulled out feet first and barely conscious.
Makos gives the same meticulous attention to Brown’s backstory as to Stigler’s even though to most of his readers it will be more familiar and less absorbing. But the long build-up does pay off — in the air when Stigler stays his trigger finger, and 47 years later, when he sees an ad placed in a German Luftwaffe veterans’ magazine placed by Brown, looking for him.
Stylistically, A Higher Call is no masterpiece, but it is deeply felt by its author, who took eight years to write it, and deeply affecting to read. Apparently humans react more sentimentally to films and books consumed on aeroplanes than on the ground. I read this at 30,000ft between the continent where Brown and Stigler first saw each other and the one where they were eventually reunited, but I suspect it would have ambushed my emotions anywhere.
