A Higher Call
Just before Christmas 1943 a badly damaged American bomber was limping home from a raid on Bremen when it was intercepted by a German fighter. The bomber was defenceless, but the German pilot decided to give the bomber a sporting chance and waved it on its way. A Higher Call is essentially the life story of the German fighter ace who spared the bomber, from his pre-war boyhood through his service in Africa and Italy to his desperate defence of the German homeland and the humiliations of post-war life. But also includes the stories of the US bomber crew and how the two pilots were reunited 50 years later. The result is a vivid, personalised story of the air war in WW2, one of the best I have read. Makos also tells us his own life history in the preface, of a man obsessed since boyhood with a war he is too young to remember and who turned his obsession into a career.
