“ life-or-death drama…Their story is worth retelling and celebrating.” - USA Today Thankfully they made it across the water, thankfully Franz wasn’t court martialled, and thankfully Charlie took that trip to try and discover the man who had mercy on them. Thankfully I’ve never experienced war, there’s nothing romantic about it. I imagined I was in the cockpits of these planes, with the smell of fuel, sweat, fear and so many other sensations. 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. 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.įranz 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. This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day-the American, Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17-and the German, Second 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 Franz’s harrowing missions. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.

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 bomber’s tail-a German Messerschmitt fighter.

At its controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. A beautiful story of a brotherhood between enemies emerges from the horrors of World War II in this New York Times bestseller by the author of Devotion, now a major motion pictureįour days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany.

A higher call