My Love Affair With Historical Fiction

I fell in love with historical fiction when I was fifteen years old.  It happened at a most improvident time—during final exams for ninth grade. To take a break from full-time studying, I bought a copy of the 25-cent paperback version of Samuel Shellabarger’s The Captain From Castile at the Safeway store where I worked. After only a few pages, I became enraptured. Set in the early Sixteenth Century, the novel tells the tale of a young Spanish nobleman who escapes the clutches of the Inquisition to flee to Cuba. There he joins the expedition of Hernando Cortes to explore and conquer the Aztec Empire in Mexico. The book is rich in cultural and historical detail, and the plot closely follows the actual details of the improbable conquest. It had everything a teenage boy could ask for—high adventure, passionate romance, and battle against impossible odds. A novelist who invented this story from scratch would be accused of writing fantasy.

My final grades suffered, but Shellabarger’s writing enriched my life. I sought out other works of historical fiction, soon discovering the wonderful books of F. Van Wick Mason. This author wrote during the 1950s-1960s of events over several centuries, from Sir Francis Drake to Henry Morgan to the Napoleonic Wars. I still consider his volumes on the American Revolution to be the finest novels ever written on that conflict.

I was sixteen when I discovered my alter ego fictional character—C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. I immediately identified with the protagonist of Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. We were both children of parents of modest means, and Hornblower suffered from the same self-doubts that plagued me as a teenager. Hornblower overcame these obstacles with a dogged work ethic and a flexible mind. Over the course of the many Hornblower novels, he rose through the ranks to eventually become the Royal Navy’s First Lord of the Admiralty. He was clearly a character to emulate.

During my high school years, I also learned to love writing. My interest here was prompted by a mother-daughter duo of English teachers named Rogers. I had the mother in tenth grade and the daughter, Sally, in twelfth. Both were extremely knowledgeable and superb teachers. Sally taught me to love historical narrative poetry as well as historical fiction. She introduced me to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, which I adopted as my philosophy of life.

It should come as no surprise that, faced with the inevitability of the Draft during the 1950s, I chose to do my service in the U.S. Navy. But why, you may ask, did someone who loved historical fiction and writing so much become an engineer? That will have to wait for a separate blog post.

Note: Warren Bell's debut novel, Fall Eagle One can be purchased for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com. You can read sample chapters of his newest novel Hold Back the Sun by downloading the .pdf file from his website.  We look forward to a launch very soon!
 
 

World War II Through the Eyes of a Child

Photo via National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 515532



My first two novels both deal with different phases of World War II. Fall Eagle One is set during 1943-44 when Germany was already losing the war. Hold Back the Sun takes place in the opening months of the Pacific War, a period in which the Japanese armed forces ran wild. My focus on this period is probably because “The War” shaped the events of my childhood.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my father and older brother in a 1937 Chevy at the El Dorado Airport watching Army Reserve aviators taking off and landing their bi-plane trainers--high entertainment in 1941 South Arkansas. An announcer broke into the country/western music on the radio with the news that the Japanese had bombed the Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor. My father was stunned, and so was the rest of our family when we got home. Almost everyone expressed the opinion that the U.S. would stomp the enemy out of existence in six months. Reality proved something very different.

Life began to change almost at once. Hershey Bars and Coca-Cola soon disappeared from the local grocery store. Members of our family started to leave as they were called up or volunteered. My Dad’s cousin, Gordon, who lived with us, went off to the Army Air Corps. The husbands of two of my mother’s sisters went into the Navy (one of the others had served with Pershing in France in the Great war and the other was too old). My father was an “in-between’” too young for WWI and too old for WWII. He spent the war working 60-hour weeks at the lumber plant where he was the planing mill foreman. Lumber was in great demand for the armed forces.

The war affected everything from our diet to the movies we watched to our school curriculum. Everything was rationed. Meat and eggs were in short supply. The local oil company ran their vehicles on natural gas to conserve fuel for the Army. We were fortunate that our Uncle Earl owned a farm. He raised chickens and hogs and smoked his own meat. Like all her neighbors, mother tended a large vegetable garden and canned hundreds of jars to tide us through the winters. Metal toys disappeared. Our toy guns and dolls were soon made of sawdust and glue that dissolved in the rain.

When I started first grade in 1942, the curriculum contained material praising our many allies throughout the world. We read of Chinese children eating rice from Texas. Everyone was encouraged to buy Savings Stamps to support the war. Our classroom had a poster of a soldier. As our stamp purchases grew, we pasted pieces of equipment we had paid for on his body.

Newsreels touting progress in the war showed between the double features at the movies, along with documentaries like The March of Time. Feature films like Mrs. Minerva portrayed the British as steadfast and brave, the Russians in North Star determined and courageous. Bataan and Wake Island showed Americans fighting to the last bullet against impossible odds.  All the boys played war in our free time with wooden weapons we had made ourselves. We were as often Russians battling the Germans as U.S. troops.

The news as well as the movies was censored. We would get letters from servicemen with whole passages blacked out. Bad news about progress of the war was downplayed, while small victories were magnified. Propaganda filled the papers and the airwaves. I remember the jubilation when the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo came out. We never doubted for a minute that the Allies would be anything but victorious.

Blackout drills remain in my memory. These occurred with some frequency. We placed dark curtains over all our windows. Air Raid Wardens walked the streets and reported houses where any light showed. Others flew over more rural areas in a Piper Cub and dropped bags of spoiled flour on lighted houses. Offenders had to pay a stiff fine.

V-E Day and V-J Day brought relief to our long nightmare. The entire country celebrated for days. We had few second thoughts about using atomic bombs to end the war. Relief that our relatives and friends in the armed forces had survived triumphed all. 

Perhaps my most significant memory of World War II is of the national unity that prevailed throughout my childhood. Patriotism came naturally to those of us who matured during the war. Sadly, we would not see such unity again until September 11, 2001, and even sadder, it did not last nearly so long.

Dealing With Real Historical Characters in Fiction Writing

Photo by Hoffmann Heinrich [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Anyone who writes in the Historical Fiction genre must deal with the problem of how to portray real historical characters. Many authors feel free to make up their own interpretations without bothering to dig deeply into factual material. I have never felt that way. When I write about real people, I go to great lengths to illuminate the actual character of the subject based on exhaustive research. The most frequently portrayed real person in my novel, Fall Eagle One, is Hermann Göring, the World War II head of the German Luftwaffe.

The stereotype of Göring in popular consciousness is that of a fat, bumbling buffoon, reinforced by such motion pictures as The Battle of Britain. I could have adopted this caricature without fear of criticism and built my story around it. But I decided to check the facts first. I started by reading two biographies of the Reich Marshal and then branched off to scanning books about other Luftwaffe luminaries. What I discovered was a much more complex character than the popular stereotype.

Göring spoke of himself as a Renaissance man, and he was not far off the mark. He would have been quite at home in the court of a 1500s Italian prince. He was cunning and possessed a near genius IQ. Considering his World War I record, his courage can hardly be questioned. A skilled deer stalker, he wrote the German game statutes that remain in effect to this day. He also opposed vivisection and wrote his beliefs into law. But he did not have the same concerns for other human beings he considered “inferior races.” He presided over bloody purges in the Nazi party and hated Jews as avidly as did Hitler. The man appeared to be totally amoral. Like Hitler, he considered conscience a “Jewish concept” that had no validity. Perhaps his greatest sin was that he made the Nazi Party respectable at a time when many Germans considered them nothing but thugs.

Göring was also avaricious and somewhat lazy. He looted art treasures from all over Europe (he was in Paris buying paintings when the disastrous decision to supply Stalingrad by air was made by his subordinates). He tended to sign documents without reading their contents. One biographer relates how he authorized the Holocaust without troubling himself to read what the order contained.

Göring became addicted to morphine while recovering from a gunshot wound to the groin, which he received during the Munich Putsch. He never completely recovered. While he wore makeup and occasionally practiced cross-dressing, he appears to have been heterosexual. He engaged in numerous affairs and lived openly with both his wives while they were still married to other men.

Like Hitler, Göring may be considered evil incarnate. I believed my readers deserved an accurate portrait of his Machiavellian totality.

Note: My current novel, Fall Eagle One, a novel of World War II, is currently available for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com.

How We Did Research Before the Internet

Photo:  http://law.uark.edu/library/

Before the advent of the Internet, writers were dependent on libraries, newspapers, bookstores, interviews, and personal visits to mine research data. Nothing was available at the touch of our fingertips.

During my education, I was taught very well how to diligently use these resources. I learned to love libraries early on. In those days, we had card catalogs organized alphabetically by topic and numbered with the Dewey Decimal System (DDS). The DDS number pointed us directly to the right gallery and place on the shelf. I’ll never forget how I wandered the aisles of the massive University of Arkansas for the first time.  I was awed by the vast amount of information on diverse subjects immediately available. I still do quite a bit of library research. When looking for technical or geographical detail, I find it easier to take notes from a book. I’ll also confess to doing the same thing in bookstores, especially when a new book contains only a small amount of information that I need. Unless one writes about current events, libraries are also a good place to locate historical newspaper copies.

I wrote an earlier blog post about the importance of eyewitness interviews. It’s hard to beat getting history “directly from the horses’ mouth.”  Finding people with the right experience is the challenge.

Erwin Rommel had a favorite saying: “Nothing is as important as going and seeing for yourself.” It applies equally to writing as to war. Personally viewing geography helps tremendously in descriptive composition. The same holds true for other physical items. My visits to the National Air and Space Museums and RAF museums in England helped tremendously writing my soon-to-be-released second novel Hold Back the Sun. I find the Smithsonian museums in Washington beyond price as sources.

The Internet provides almost  instant access to much of the research information for which we used to have to dig hard, but not all. If you want true authenticity in your work, don’t fail to avail yourself of the more traditional resources.

Note:  My current novel, Fall Eagle One, a novel of World War II, is currently available for Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.com.

I Never Thought I’d Be Tweeting

Twitter engagement is fluid, the @ sign indicating a multitude of dynamics. Photograph: Alamy

Before I became an Indie novelist, I never thought I’d be tweeting.

I’m a member of what’s now called, “the older generation.” I came of age in the 1950s-60s before the advent of digital computers. In the early days, “techies” surrounded their discipline with mystery, tucked away in clean rooms where operators wore white coats like doctors and spoke in unintelligible jargon.  The first computer courses I attempted lost me early on because they all began with intensive binomial theory lessons rather than teach what the machines could do and how to operate them.

My interest reawakened after personal computers came along. The advantages of composing at a machine where changes could easily be made and where spell-check corrected my poor spelling were obvious.  After teaching myself how to operate a Wang word processer, the transition to PCs was surprisingly painless. Still, I more or less limited myself to desktops, and watching my grand children’s texting and tweeting on their cellphones seemed a colossal waste of time.

Then I published my first Indie novel, Fall Eagle One, on Kindle and CreateSpace.

I soon found the intricacies of marketing an Indie book somewhat overwhelming. My wonderful daughter, Karen, then stepped in and volunteered to help with the electronic side of getting my book before the largest possible audience. She set up my website, got me into blogging and other Internet activities, and got me into Twitter.

The advantages of marketing through Twitter were at once apparent. Two similes come to mind: the first is the spreading ripples of a rock thrown into a pond; the second is how a family tree spreads outward as on works back through time. A Twitter posting doesn’t just reach your own followers.  Many of them will in turn re-tweet the posting to their followers, and on and on. Re-tweets may be stimulated by in turn re-tweeting their postings on to your followers. I’m not sure the effect meets the definition of exponential expansion, but it produces good results.

Since adopting marketing through Twitter and other electronic media, Fall Eagle One has climbed into the upper one percent of Kindle book sales and stayed there. My next electronic challenge is to really master my Iphone.

Eyewitnesses Are a Priceless Resource

In his review of FROZEN IN TIME by Mitchell Zuckoff in this morning's WASHINGTON POST, Joseph Kanon points out that, "World War II remains the motherload of war adventure stories." For those of us who write in this genre, direct eyewitness accounts from the mouths of actual veterans has always been a priceless resource.


My own fascination with the events and technology of WW2 was sparked by the stories told by my cousin, Gordon Bell. Gordon served for three years in the China-Burma-India Theater. He was a fighter crew chief, and he worked with P-40s, P-38s, P-47s, and P-51s. His first pilot was a member of the original Flying Tigers. His tales of flying into Myitkyina, Burma, on the first day after Merrill's Marauders siezed it from the Japanese were hair-raising to an Arkansas pre-teen. The P-40s bombed enemy targets right off the end of the runway.

My brother-in-law, Edward Cook, flew and commanded B-24s in the 8th Air Force in England. He led many missions over Germany before the Nazis capitulated. Edward was the source of my knowledge about the difficulties of flying the B-24. It took a lot of muscle, but he was a big, strong man who grew up on a farm.

Much of the technical and operational detail in my novel, FALL EAGLE ONE, came from actual Luftwaffe veterans with whom I made contact on the 12 O'Clock High Luftwaffe and Axis Air Forces Discussion Board on the Internet. The details of German aircraft intercom chatter in my book came from this source, as did details of the German blind landing system.

The death of 89-year-old Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey last week was a grim reminder that we are rapidly losing our WW2 veterans.  Press reports tell us that they are dying at a rate of about a quarter of a million a year, over 700 per day. Gordon and Edward are both gone now, although both lived long and productive lives. At least Edward's experiences are not lost to posterity. His son, Charlie, talked him into giving an oral history at the WW2 Museum in New Orleans.

May Was A Good Month

The month of May brought new daily, weekly, and monthly highs in sales and borrows of FALL EAGLE ONE.  It's still selling in the top 1% of all Kindle book sales. It looks like people are beginning to discover it. FALL EAGLE ONE currently has 19 Amazon.com Reviews, 16 of which are five-star.

One milestone I had hoped to achieve in May but which did not occur was the launch of my new novel, HOLD BACK THE SUN. My manuscript is still somewhere in the Copyright Office awaiting action. My tale of the heroic fight of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet against Japan will be out as soon am the copyright is received.