A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

Four days before Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled

to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his

crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark

shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail—a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the

German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber in the

squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be

called the 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 day—the American—2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West

Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the German—2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler,

a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War

II.

A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions.

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. Franz would face

sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of 1,000

bombers each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack.

Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one

another. What happened between them, the American 8th Air Force would later

classify as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could never mention or else

face a firing squad. 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.