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

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: “Beautifully told.”—CNN • “A remarkable story...worth retelling and celebrating.”—USA Today • “Oh, it’s a good one!”—Fox News
 
A “beautiful story of a brotherhood between enemies” emerges from the horrors of World War II in this New York Times bestseller by the author of Spearhead. 

December, 1943: A badly damaged American bomber struggles to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls is twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown. Half his crew lay wounded or dead on this, their first mission. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter pulls up on the bomber’s tail. The pilot is German ace Franz Stigler—and he can destroy the young American crew with the squeeze of a trigger...

What happened next would defy imagination and later be called “the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.”

The U.S. 8th Air Force would later classify what happened between them as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could never mention for fear of facing a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search the world for each other, a last mission that could change their lives forever.

• Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice
• Voices of the Pacific: Untold Stories from the Marine Heroes of World War II
• Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II
• The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II
• Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
• Beyond The Call: The True Story of One World War II Pilot's Covert Mission to Rescue POWs on the Eastern Front
• Shot Down: The true story of pilot Howard Snyder and the crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth
• The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History)
• Sharpe's Tiger (Richard Sharpe's Adventure Series #1)
• The United States in World War II: A Documentary Reader: A Documentary Reader