A Higher Call by Adam Makos

A Higher Call by Adam Makos

Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a twenty-one-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 with the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War I. 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 I. 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 one thousand 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 Eighth Air Force would later classify as top secret. It was an act that Franz could never mention without facing 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.

Larry Alexander has been a journalist and columnist for the Intelligencer Journal newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for more than a decade, winning numerous awards for excellence in journalism. He grew up on the same street in the same town as Major Dick Winters, three decades later.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780425255735
ISBN 10	0425255735
Title	A Higher Call
Author	Adam Makos
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Dutton Caliber
Year published	2014-05-06
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.