War Story

by Rolf Margenau

Overview

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940164997649
Publisher:	Rolf Margenau
Publication date:	08/17/2021
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	388 KB

About the Author

Prize-winning author Rolf Margenau has written six novels and published two photography books.

The novels feature a main character named Wylie Cypher, first seen as a twenty-year-old college dropout who comes of age during the Korean War. At forty, Wylie is a successful but burned out lawyer with a failing marriage. He tries to find lost youth on a trek with his daughter through the high Andes. Instead, he finds mayhem, murder, a devastating civil war in Peru, and loses a toe.

Retired, in his mid-sixties, Wylie does battle with BIG AG as a Master Gardener. He befriends a group of eco-terrorists who help save the Monarch butterfly. Then, in a novel called National Parks, an aged Wylie lives in a dystopian future where Congress attempts to sell off our national parks to bail out a bankrupt country.

Longevity, a fable about the results of a medical team’s effort to prolong human life by 30 years, is now available. In it, Lucy Mendoza leads a team of scientists at the Prendergast Foundation who are testing an enzyme that might extend our lives by thirty years. The federal government, a major pharmaceutical company, and a billionaire investor have no qualms about eliminating Lucy to ensure that project will fail. Her former lover Grant Duran, an ex-Marine special ops officer who’s lost a hand and is now a molecular biologist, thwarts the first attempt on her life.

The novels featuring a younger Wylie are realistic with a dose of humor. The books about older Wylie are solidly satirical. Critics find them hilarious, but meaningful and thought provoking.

The author retired Wylie Cypher in 2019 to research and write about how young people with a German background respond to the demands of World War II, on the home front, at war and in an American POW camp.He published war Story in September 2021.

Rolf Margenau lives amid farmland in northern New Jersey with his first wife of over sixty years.