A Higher Call – By Adam Makos with Larry Alexander
This international best seller by Adam Makos is a startling true story about both American and German pilots during World War II who indeed answered a higher call.
It is a story of soldiers each fighting for what he felt he had to do rather than merely dropping bombs and trying to win a war while struggling with their own consciences on the whys and ways we fight wars.
The book follows both Franz Stigler, a German pilot from Bavaria and Charlie Brown, a B-17 pilot and recipient of the Air Force Cross and other honors for his heroism in military operations during World War II.
While it goes into great detail about the types of planes and training both American and German pilots had, and the battles each fought in the sky, it is more a background setting the foundation for the real story…..why a German ace fighting for Hitler while not espousing his beliefs would make the sudden decision to save an American crew in a badly damaged B-17 rather than claim a victory for himself and his country and earn yet another award for valor.
Markos is thorough and vivid in the account he researched for years, meeting with both heroes, Stigler and Brown and tracing the accuracy and truth of both their stories through official records, newspapers and firsthand accounts decades after the war ended, the nations came together, and Stigler and Brown went on to live the rest of their lives.
Almost as an anticlimax to the true drama of the book are the accounts of the search by Stigler and Brown trying to find each other decades after the war, one to say thanks for saving his life, the other to find whether the pilot he saved made it safely through the rest of the flight that day as well as the war itself.
The book forces you to pause and wonder whether every man who either volunteers or is drafted into service really wants to kill his enemy, whether he really feels the individual he fights on the ground or in the air is truly his enemy and whether the promise they each make to kill for their country surpasses their own faith and belief learned from childhood.
The book is riveting, frightening, exciting, almost unbelievable, and in the end heartwarming and honest. It gives you hope the world could one day be at peace in answering Makos’ own question…Can good men be found on both sides of a bad war?
Other Book Reviews by Muriel HERE
