It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for one another, a last mission that could change their lives forever. It was an act that Franz could never mention without facing a firing squad. What happened between them, the American Eighth Air Force would later classify as top secret. Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one another. 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. 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. What happened next would defy imagination and later be calledthe most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that daythe AmericanSecond Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17and the GermanSecond Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.Ī Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franzs harrowing missions. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger.

Suddenly a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bombers taila German Messerschmitt fighter. At its controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany.

The book a higher call