When Underdogs Refuse to Fight
Why I wrote fiction about WWII combat
I’ve written two novels about war on the frontlines. We’re talking about grueling World War II combat, where a small percentage of soldiers faced a mechanical brand of violence honed over centuries. It’s more horror story than historical fiction.
I’m still not sure why I had to do it. I was born more than twenty years after that war ended. I have no experience in combat let alone the military. I’ve barely been in a fight apart from a few particularly rough soccer games.
Outgrowing a Childhood Fascination
You might have seen it coming if you’d known me for a couple years as a kid. Before I discovered a lifelong love of soccer, I was into war stuff—especially World War II. It makes me chuckle now. Who was this awkward fourth-grade kid dressing up in homemade army outfits and building tank models and reading volumes about Operation Barbarossa or whatever?
My parents played an unwitting role in my obsession. Much older than other kids’ parents, they had lived through the World War II era as young adults. In our basement they’d kept trunks of memorabilia from that era, like old newspapers, my dad’s Army paraphernalia (he never saw combat, thankfully), LIFE magazines, and more. As the youngest of four and happy to be on my own, I dove right into this world. In my suburb, the World War II era seemed so heroic and exotic, so larger than life.
But outside that basement, a nearly opposite world had formed. The sad and pointless exercise in American exceptionalism that was the Vietnam War had just ended. And look at TV. Sure, the patriotic old war movies marched on as reruns. But TV offered other angles, too. Anti-war. Anti-authority. I saw M*A*S*H and reruns of movies like Kelley’s Heroes and The Dirty Dozen. In that surprise blockbuster, you got the feeling those convicts recruited to assassinate Nazi generals would just as well kill their own officers given the chance.
That opposite world pulled me in, too. Here was a kid who quit the Cub Scouts because of too much regimentation (I couldn’t customize my uniform!). And, to the puzzlement of my parents, I also declared that I would stop going to our harmless suburban Lutheran Church.
Much later, I got a master’s in history. I could understand the World War II era intellectually, but not emotionally, not what it truly felt like for those GI “dogfaces” up on the line. It was still exotic. Then I discovered that I loved writing fiction. That led to new questions about the era. And like most fiction writers, I was soon writing to understand on a deeper level.
I did the research. I toiled away at rough drafts. I risked deep emotional dives and countless rewrites to claw even deeper—to get at the truth. It hurt. I found ways to give the reader a little hope. And I kept reaching the same conclusion.
Sure, some wars become necessary, sadly, tragically. Much of World War II. And now, the war in Ukraine. In an era seemingly so far removed from World War II, dictators like Putin and the fight to save Ukraine help us understand why some wars need to be fought.
But most wars? Not so much. Because the little guy was always doing the dirty, deadly work.
Glory for the Bigshots, Hell for the GIs
Throughout history, untold hordes of poor scared bastards have been forced or inspired (or both) to square off to the death. This setup has served as another tool for the power-hungry, the greedy, the warmongers. Sometimes the bigshots do have to put on a uniform, usually adorned with medals. But they never have to see their own threads bloodied.
At its best, war is a nasty chore that must be done, but it’s still a failure of strategy, diplomacy, intelligence, and human nature. At its worst, only a few at the top truly gain anything from it.
The Allied fight in World War II, despite its clear moral urgency, worked the same way. The soldiers drafted to serve on the frontline were sometimes like exploited factory workers, miners, farm laborers, you name it. Except they were killing and getting killed and they had no union.
I based my fictional scenes on real conditions, operations, and mental states, but it was tough to express the true horrors of frontline duty. You can’t make up such degrees of organized savagery without sounding far-fetched.
In the WWII US Army, a small segment of combat GIs did almost all the deadly fighting without break and they died for it in droves. They had signed up “for the duration,” an open-ended if not hopelessly endless stretch before tours of duty became common.
And this led me to a little known part of the war that not many have told.
Some of those soldiers could only perform so much duty for a big-picture war effort they rarely saw or could appreciate. By 1945, the number of AWOL and deserted soldiers in war-torn Europe had reached tens of thousands. Only some were considered active criminals. Others surely chose to quit fighting in a war that only they could know intimately in its horror and unique capability to consume lives and souls in increasing numbers.
Meanwhile, the great majority of GIs kept fighting. A few did it for patriotism, many did it for their buddies in their unit, and many others just slogged on so they could get the damn dirty job done and get the hell back home.
Still, the World War II campaigns in which these boys died by the shipload have become mythologized in our culture. It gives us an ideal alternative to the United States’ ruinous involvement in more recent wars. We were largely united in our fight. We sacrificed for the common good.
But ask a dogface who was there then, in the shit, and he’ll tell you the truth: “The Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty,” wrote the late historian, professor—and World War II combat veteran—Paul Fussell in Wartime (1989).
One of those two novels I wrote is Under False Flags. For the epigraph, I translated a quote from wounded WWI veteran Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote the antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front:
“I always thought everyone was against war, until I found out that there are those who don’t have to go there.”
Just Re-released: Under False Flags
In Under False Flags, two opposing soldiers are each sent on a suicidal mission during the Battle of the Bulge of 1944. One American, one German. Cut off amid the horror of a winter war, the two enemies must face off against each other as these two dogs have been bred to do.
But this time, the two dogs don’t bite on command. Each questions the bigshots they are fighting for, and what they’re dying for. The answers they find make them revolt even though they know the bigshots will punish them to the extreme. And yet, for once, they find something like hope among madness.
Does this explain your drive to write about the war? Older parents, their wartime memorabilia and the sense that “World War II era seemed so heroic and exotic, so larger than life”
I don't remember you running around in the yard but I do remember reading your Under False Flags recently and it's a searing rendition of what it was really like to be fighting a war. It's frankly surprising more foot soldiers don't walk away from battle when they realize wars are started only by men who don't have to fight.