By Mark Ellis —
In the leaden skies over Germany in December 1943, two pilots—one American, one German—crossed paths in a moment that defied anyone’s expectations during aerial combat. Adam Makos, in his riveting bestseller A Higher Call (co-authored with Larry Alexander and published by Berkley Books), unearths this improbable tale of valor and grace, transforming a forgotten footnote of World War II into a testament to humanity’s capacity for redemption.
Through thousands of hours of interviews and meticulous research, Makos weaves the lives of U.S. Army Air Forces Lt. Charlie Brown, a rookie B-17 commander whose plane “Ye Olde Pub” limped home riddled with flak and crew blood, and Luftwaffe ace Franz Stigler, a Messerschmitt pilot whose finger hovered over the trigger to shoot the American plane out of the sky.
What elevates A Higher Call beyond the typical war chronicle—with gripping cockpit duels and dogfights that Makos renders with precision—is its look into the moral battlefield within. Brown, a young Pennsylvanian thrust into command after harrowing missions over Bremen, embodies the quiet courage of the “Greatest Generation.”
But it’s Stigler who steals the narrative’s soul, a devout Christian pilot whose devotion became an anchor amid the Third Reich’s quest for world domination. Trained under the chivalric code of his mentor, Hermann Baur, Stigler viewed combat not as slaughter but as a tragic duty, whispering the Lord’s Prayer before each flight.
When he spotted Brown’s crippled bomber, trailing smoke and crew exposed, duty screamed “destroy,” but grace whispered otherwise, his moral dilemma leading to actions that will shock the reader.
Makos doesn’t shy from the war’s horrors—the frozen Luftwaffe bases in North Africa, the B-17’s belly crawling with wounded men, the moral compromises that haunted both sides—but he frames them against the light of Christian conscience. Stigler’s faith, rooted in his Bavarian upbringing and the quiet witness of his mother, propelled him to see enemies as brothers, echoing Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:44 to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
The book reveals an incredible reunion in 1986, after four decades of silence related to this improbable incident.
A Higher Call proves that even in the depths of war, God’s image bearers can choose to live out their faith in surprising ways.
