War Story

A fresh look at World War II through the eyes of four young people who come of age during the war years.

Nine-year-old Achim relates his experiences on the home front in New Haven, Connecticut. He's a canny Tom Sawyer type with a good heart and a knack for reporting the important events of the times and his adventuresome life. He manages a little business, goes to school, supports the war effort, becomes a black marketer and attempted murderer, and falls in love at least twice all before the age of twelve.

Horst is a hardened Nazi tank commander captured by the Allies as the Afrika Korps collapses and sent to a POW camp in Mississippi. His journey involves saving his Panzer crew, surviving the war as a prisoner, and making sense of the challenges to his core belief in the deity of Adolf Hitler. Improbably, his is also a love story.

Liesel gains her commercial pilot's license at sixteen, enters psychological doldrums when she feels betrayed by Lindbergh, her flying hero, and finds her way to Britain, where she and her sidekick, Marylou, become known as the Lancaster Twins and ferry British war plans for the ATA during the last two years of the war.

Paul, an engineering graduate from Yale, joins the Army as a second lieutenant to begin an eventful career as a code breaker, radar designer and rocket man. He takes part in two of the war's little known but highly significant secret missions that led to America's dominance in outer space.

The four heroes connect in ways the reader learns as the story unfolds. The author scrutinizes various forms of discrimination, from misogyny to anti-Semitism and examines forgotten aspects of the war, such as the incarceration of American citizens of German and Italian descent, the exchange of German for American prisoners in Sweden, and legacy of American POW camps.

And each hero has a love story to tell.