The amazing thing is that fiction, in a way similar to how Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler were later reunited, is that it incited someone to contact me: Jerry Lutz, a nephew of LeRoy. She decides to investigate and to piece together his life.Įxcept… except that Hélène’s quest is not about LeRoy Lutz, but about John Philip Garreau, a fictional character in my novel The Legend of Little Eagle, which was inspired by LeRoy’s fate. But he had, by a very short margin, managed to steer the plane away from a house in which were a family and a four year old little girl – the future mother of Hélène Marchal, a journalist, who discovers almost 70 years later that LeRoy Lutz had sacrificed his life to save the life of innocent people. Lutz had to make a split second decision: to bail out (though very risky at such a low elevation) or to try a crash landing in a nearby field. It was noon, there were people in the streets, children returning from school. He was inexorably heading down to the little village of Mardeuil and he sensed he was going to crash. His plane, the Lucky Lady, was barely maneuvrable and its twin engines were rapidly loosing power. He had been strafing german targets over the Champagne region in France and his P-38 Lightning had been hit by the flak. I n June 1944, Le Roy Lutz heard a higher call too. Charlie Brown died in November of the same year.
Their message was simple: ennemies are better off as friends. »įranz Stigler succombed to illness in March 2008. This was their last act of service to build a better world. « In the years following their reunion, » Makos writes, « Franz and Charlie traveled across North America telling their story to any civic clubs, air museums, or military units that requested them. And one day, in 1990, the two men were reunited in Seattle. After the war, Stigler emigrated to Canada.įor years, Charlie Brown had tried to find out if Stigler was still alive and where. But he later said that he had heard a higher call.Ī Higher Call is the title of a geat book by Adam Makos, in which the author tells « one of the greatest untold stories in military history » and of the great friendship that Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler came to share many years later. Franz Stigler would have been court martialed and executed had the Germans known what he had done: show mercy to the ennemy. « Good luck, you’re in God’s hands », he said.Īgainst all odds, Charlie Brown and his men were able to land their plane in England. That’s when Stigler did the only thing that came to mind: he saluted the B-17 pilot then doved away in the direction of Germany. Then Brown ordered a gunner to get up in his turret and swing his weapon toward the Me-109. They believed they were going to be shot down. But Brown and his crew didn’t get it, they were so confused by Stigler’s strange, unexpected behaviour. He pointed a direction and mouthed: « Sweden ! » Sweden was closer than England, they could make it. The bomber nose was blown away.įlying close, Stigler locked eyes with Charlie Brown, the B-17 pilot. Through the plane’s exposed ribs he saw its crew, huddled over one another, caring for their wounded. He swung his Me-109 past the tail and flew along the bomber’s fuselage.
Watching from close this ruined big plane and wondering how it could still fly, with so many holes and missing parts, a phantom of a plane, Stigler forgot he was a German fighter pilot. Normally, he has to « finish » the ailing plane. Its pilot is Franz Stigler, a German ace. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter plane pulls up on the bomber’s tail. Half its crew was dead or wounded, it was constantly loosing altitude. In December, 1943, a badly damaged B-17 american flying fortress was struggling to return to its english base after his first bombing mission over Germany.