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

the powerful German transmitter in Yugoslavia. Every night at the same time, the station played a recording of Lale Andersen, a German girl in her thirties, singing the song “Lili Marlene.” A German soldier named Hans Liep had originally written the song’s lyrics as a poem during WWI. Thanks to Andersen’s rendition, the song had become the German soldiers’ anthem. Like many other homesick warriors, the pilots of JG-27 tuned in nightly. So did their opponents. In Egypt, the British pilots were listening to the same radio show, in silence, in their mess tents. At 9:55 P.M. , on cue, Andersen’s hypnotically sensual and delicate voice floated from the radio’s speaker. She sounded gorgeous. Franz leaned closer, his ear glued to the radio.
    Andersen sang of a soldier who often met his girl under the lamppost outside of his camp, before he was called away to war.
    Time would come for roll call,
    Time for us to part,
    Darling I’d caress you
    And press you to my heart,
    And there ’neath that far-off lantern light,
    I’d hold you tight,
    We’d kiss good night,
    My Lili of the Lamplight,
    My own Lili Marlene.
     
    As the song continued, Franz wondered to himself if Andersen were singing to the men on the steppes of Russia or on the fields of Crete or on the bluffs of France. “Was anyone thinking of us in the desert?” he wondered.
    Resting in our billets
    Just behind the lines,
    Even tho’ we’re parted,
    Your lips are close to mine.
    You wait where the lantern softly gleams,
    Your sweet face seems
    To haunt my dreams,
    My Lili of the Lamplight,
    My own Lili Marlene.
     
    Beneath the stars, far from home, Franz, like his comrades and enemies across the desert, had tears in his eyes by the time the song trailed to silence. *
    ONE MONTH LATER, JULY 26, 1942, QUOTAIFIYA, EGYPT
     
    Franz brought his 109 to a halt on the taxiway that paralleled the runway. Ahead, Roedel powered up his plane in morning’s yellow light. A vortex of sand blew from beneath the machine’s belly. Roedel’s fighter’s bare rudder flapped left and right, his preflight check. His rudder should have borne forty-five victory marks but still remained unmarked. Their mission that day was the same as many days prior: Stuka escort over the front lines that lay just a ten-minute flight away.
    A month earlier JG-27 had come to Quotaifiya, a scorching, flat airfield halfway along the Egyptian coast. British bombers had hit the base only two days earlier. Craters now gave the field character, at least. Before it had been a blank swath of white sand. Even with the ocean nearby, to the north, the heat hovered like a mirage.
    Rommel had ordered JG-27 to this awful place. He had pushed the British back but not far enough to win the war in North Africa. When his advance had petered out, the Germans found themselves staring at the British from across trenches that ran from a coastal train station called El Alamein, deep into the desert. Rommel’s great progress would be his undoing. He had stretched his forces far from their ports and supply lines while pushing the British closer to theirs. As British ships steamed into their port at Alexandria, carrying fresh pilots and planes to regenerate the Desert Air Force, the Germans flogged the same pilots and planes harder, sending them on Stuka escorts, often three times a day. The tiresome missions wore JG-27’s pilots to the bone. The turning point in the desert air war had arrived.
    In the weeks prior, Franz and Roedel had flown together almost daily. On one mission Roedel had downed three Spitfires and Franz had bagged one, his third victory. Franz’s fourth and fifth victories followed soon after, and he became classified as an ace. But Franz kept his rudder bare in an effort to emulate Roedel, who had grown larger than life to him.
    Roedel gave a fist-forward gesture to show Franz and the others in his flight that he was taking off, a silent signal in case the British were eavesdropping on the radio