A Higher Call

2LT. Charles L. “Charlie” Brown thought to himself, “I knew I had made a mistake by volunteering!”
It was Monday, December 20, 1943.

Charlie, a farm boy from Weston, West Virginia, was the pilot of “The Pub.” “The Pub” was a giant four engine B-17 Flying Fortress with a crew of ten men. It was in a group of 475 bombers loaded with over a 2.6-million pounds of bombs flying at twenty-seven thousand feet over Bremen Germany. Just below sat 250 flak gunners each firing their 88mm cannons with deadly accuracy at his formation. Minutes away from the target Charlie had seen four quick flashes just ahead of him and heard shrapnel race down the right side of the plane. Anti-aircraft fire had hit his plane. Unbelievably he unloaded his 6,000 lb. load on the target a Focke-Wulf airplane plant.

Charlie was a Methodist.

He carried his Bible in the chest pocket of his leather jacket. He said God was his third pilot. This was his second bombing mission and his first as command pilot. As he surveyed the damage he had lost one engine, and another was running rough. Flying on two good engines and one not so good, the plane began to lose airspeed. It couldn’t keep up with the formation and Charley could only watch helplessly as the rest of the formation slowly sped away. Nine other men were riding with him and he felt responsible for getting them home safely. They were alone now. Only God could help them.
2LT. Franz Stigler was raised Catholic and had thoughts of being a priest. His love of flying (and girls) was stronger, so he became an airline pilot.

In 1937, he was given orders to become a flight instructor. He would train pilots for the German air force. In 1939, he had the privilege to train his older brother August as a pilot. When war broke out, August began flying a JU-88 bomber. In October 1940, August was killed in a plane crash. The news shocked and stunned Franz. As a flight instructor, Franz was far from the war. Now he wanted revenge. He would avenge his brother’s death. He resigned as a flight instructor and volunteered to become a fighter pilot. In time he would become a decorated ace with 27 victories. On that fateful December day, Franz was in the air over Bremen just one victory away from earning the coveted Knights-Cross.

For Charlie and his crew, it would be a slow solitary trip back to England.

Stragglers were easy targets. Over a dozen enemy fighters swarmed Brown’s plane. For over ten minutes, they pounded Brown’s aircraft with gunfire yet the B-17 continued flying. When the fighters finally broke off the attack, eight of his crew were wounded and the tail-gunner was dead. The bomber’s internal oxygen, hydraulic and electrical systems were damaged, half of its rudder and its left side elevator and its nose cone were gone, only one gun was operable. What’s more German coastal anti-aircraft batteries lay ahead.

Franz had been sent to Africa to fight the war. He took his Bible and a book on the lives of the Catholic Saints.

In Africa the more he read the more he was, “bothered by the hypocrisy of the war he was a part of.” There was something wrong with “people who believed in the same God fighting each other.” “Killing just to kill is wrong” he was told by seasoned veterans of the fighting. Humans, even in war, must live by a “code of honor” they said: “otherwise you lose your humanity.” As he became more battle hardened, he began to appreciate their words and there were times a man had to answer a “higher call.”

As the B-17 limped home, it flew over a German airfield.Franz had landed there to refuel and rearm. He saw the B-17 fly overhead and took off in hot pursuit. As he closed in on the B-17 his Knights-Cross was on his mind. This would be an easy kill, he thought. He was lining up for the kill, closing fast with his thumb on the trigger. Just seconds away from dispatching his enemy, he sensed something odd. A B-17 has 12 guns and can put up stiff resistance. But this plane was eerily quiet. Franz inched his plane in for a closer look. The rear of the plane had been heavily damaged. He could see the tail-gunner slumped over his gun, dead. He inched closer coming up on the right side of the plane. Huge gaping holes were everywhere. He could see men huddled inside the plane severely wounded. The rudder was nearly gone, an engine was out; “how is this plane still flying,” he thought? Franz laid his hands over the pocket of his jacket and felt his rosary beads. He decided, “I will not have this on my conscience for the rest of my life.”
He inched close to the right side of the plane and motioned to the copilot with a downward motion of his hand to land.

Better to land and sit out the war in a POW camp than cash and die, Franz reasoned. To his surprise, there was no response. He gently maneuvered his plane to the pilot’s side. Again, he motioned down. There was no response. He mouthed the word Sweden. The safety of Sweden was just a half hour away. Sweden was a neutral country. They could set out the war interred. Again there was no response.

Franz knew the German anti-aircraft batteries below were watching him flying alongside the stricken B-17. He knew they wouldn’t fire as long as he was there. The B-17 was so damaged that Franz believed it was doomed to crash into the sea. He made several more attempts to signal to the crew to land, but they ignored him. “What a dumb guy,” Franz thought. Finally, nearing the coast, Franz took one last look at Charlie, saluted him, and as he peeled away he said, “Good luck, you’re in God’s hands.” It relieved Charlie when the enemy plane vanished in the distance. The enemy’s salute was frozen in his mind. One thing he knew, “whoever he was, his enemy was a good man.”

Every time the plane would shudder and drop a few feet Charlie would touch the Bible in his pocket and asked his third pilot to stay close.
Despite the odds Charlie landed the plane intact at the American Airbase at Seething England. Charlie became frightened as he surveyed his beaten up airplane. He thought, “It seemed as if a hand had been holding us up in the air, and it wasn’t mine.”

On April 11, 1944, Charlie and his crew would complete their final mission.

Behind them were twenty-eight missions filled with fear, anxiety, frustration and terror. Charlie wondered about the German pilot who had escorted them out of certain death. “Who was he and why did he let us go?” Charlie secretly hoped that his enemy would survive the war. Franz survived the war and God wasn’t done yet.

After the war, Charlie returned home to West Virginia, went to college, retired from the Air Force, and became a State Department Foreign Service Officer. He never quit wondering about the pilot that saved his plane and eight other lives and why. Franz Stigler immigrated to Canada in 1953 and became a successful businessman.

In 1986, Brown decided that he would try to find out who was that enemy pilot who spared his life? As if still being led by his “third pilot,” he found Franz Stigler living in Canada in 1990. They became close friends and remained so until their deaths. Franz never earned the Knight-Cross, but he believes he received something better. Franz gave Brown a book and inside the front cover Franz wrote, “In 1940, I lost my only brother as a night fighter. On the 20th of December, 4 days before Christmas, I had the chance to save a B-17 from her destruction, a plane so badly damaged it was a wonder she was still flying. The pilot, Charlie Brown, is for me, as precious as my brother was. Thanks Charlie. Your brother, Franz.”

Read a similar story of “The Christmas Truce”

© 2023 Curtis Bond