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

actually doing it, Franz dropped out of the university and completed his flight training. When Europe’s largest airline, Lufthansa, offered Franz a job, he jumped at the chance.
    For four years and two thousand hours Franz flew for the airline. His job wasn’t typical. Instead of flying commercial airliners, he flew navigators as an international route check pilot. His role was to establish the quickest and safest flying routes between Berlin and London, and over the Alps to Rome and Barcelona. During these long hauls, Franz filled his logbook with passport stamps and flight times. In a glamorous age of air travel, when zeppelins, trimotors, and seaplanes roamed the skies, Franz had never been happier.
    But on this day, as Franz walked through the airport, past its art deco lounges, a German Air Force officer waved and approached him. The officer was dressed similarly in a blue-gray blazer with a black tie, except he wore a brown belt and flared riding pants tucked into tall black boots. Two years prior there had not even been a German Air Force. In fact, there had not been one for seventeen years. Then one day in 1935, Hitler defied the Versailles Treaty with the sweep of a pen and reinstituted the German Air Force, the “Luftwaffe.”
    The officer gave Franz a tall sealed envelope. “Your orders,” the officer said, his face grim. “Your country needs your service.”
    Franz had suspected this day would come. * This was why the government had trained him for free. After the Versailles Treaty had outlawed their Air Force, the German government had secretly trained scores of new pilots like him and funded the national airline—Lufthansa—so that the nation would have seasoned pilots to one day rebuild the Air Force. The routes and times that Franz had been devising for Lufthansa no doubt had also found their way into the hands of the Air Force.
    The officer informed Franz that he was to serve as an instructor pilot. He would teach new pilots how to fly long distances using instruments. Franz would remain a civilian, the officer assured him. He would fly his Ju-52 airliner under the banner of the airlines, although his missions would serve the Air Force. The officer promised Franz that they had the airline’s blessing.
    “Where will I be flying?” Franz asked.
    “You like the routes to Spain?”
    “I know them.”
    Franz knew why the Air Force would have an interest in Spain. A year before, the Spanish Civil War had broken out, between the socialist-leaning Republicans and the fascist-leaning Nationalists. Germany was unofficially sending “volunteers” to fight for the fascist side.
    “You think it’s smart to train pilots by flying them into a war zone?” Franz asked.
    “There also may be
supplies
in the belly of your plane,” the officer said.
    The officer looked to Franz for his response. Franz nodded and accepted the assignment, knowing he had never had a choice in the first place.
    A YEAR LATER, SUMMER 1938, EASTERN GERMANY
     
    One thousand feet above the trees, the silver biplane flew in the evening light over the nature preserve within the suburbs of the city of Dresden. The pilots flew from two open cockpits, one in front of the other. The instructor sat in front, the trainee behind him. The plane was a perfect marriage of beauty and ugly functionality. Its radial engine was open to the wind and its spokes stuck out at all angles of the clock. Its landing gear was obtrusively fixed downward. The plane’s flanks were long and silver and wore the large black cross of the German Air Force. Painted on its elegantly curved tail was the smaller, crooked cross of The Party, the swastika. The plane was a Heinkel 72 “Cadet,” designed for the Air Force as a pilot trainer.
    Franz flew the plane from the instructor’s front seat. In the cockpit behind him sat a student pilot. After Franz’s successful missions to Spain, the Air Force had wanted him to keep training its pilots, and so he remained an