Where authors dare... is this the biggest WWII anachronism?

Saturday August 31st sees the publication of the latest in my Chasing Mercury series of historical espionage/action thrillers. Again, it's set in the immediate postwar period in Europe, where the terrible effects of Hitler's actions are still predominant, but the crusade to defeat him has now ended.

Why set my stories in the shadow of the Second World War rather than during it? Lots of reasons, of course. As I've said before, this is a murky period of shifting borders and allegiances, often falling between chapters in the history books – providing original storylines and fertile ground for spy fiction. But the one I want to focus on today has to do with an even more fundamental requirement for storytelling: individuals and their motivations.

It's possible I'm overstating this, but I've detected a key difference between modern stories about the war – be that in books or films – and the memoirs of people who lived through it (or the books and films based faithfully on these). It's the supremacy of individual or personal motivations. These are a staple of character-building and drama, of course, so it's only natural that writers creating WWII characters strive to build them in as plot drivers. It would be foolish not to.

Yet in reality the war was so big and demanding a drama that it tended to overwhelm personal ambitions, even to make them appear unpatriotic and distasteful. When you read the real accounts, both from the battlefield and the home front, it's clear people accepted that they were caught up in something greater than themselves. Not just in clichéd terms of duty and 'we're all in this together' but in the sense that their individual lives, while still offering potential for personal tragedy or heroic sacrifice, were less important than the whole. After all, everyone had lost someone, so what made your loss such a big deal – even if it was your own life?

Sometimes this is embodied in the fatalism of the combat soldier (a sentiment often expressed is 'the only way to go on is to accept that you're already dead'); other times you see it in the defeatism of those left behind, as neighbour after neighbour and family member after family member is reduced to a smoking bomb-site or a curt telegram. I noticed it particularly in the contemporary memoirs penned by airmen recuperating between tours, who appear to accept that while they themselves have no chance of surviving to the war's end, it's enough that the tide is turning and Hitler will be defeated (Guy Gibson's Enemy Coast Ahead is a sobering example of this).

Of course there will always be exceptions: both real people who pursued personal goals during WWII (nobody actually lost their internal life, after all) and people in smaller modern conflicts who shared this WWII outlook. But more often than not, as far as I can tell, soldiers in smaller wars or operations favour that oft-cited loyalty to the man next to them, or to their unit, rather than to a greater cause. While this might inspire an equal sense of service and sacrifice, it doesn't seem to remove the individual from the equation in quite the same way. And what goes for Helmand Province is, I presume, true also for those combatants in earlier wars: hence the tales of bayonet drill at Culloden, in which men covered their mate on the right and let their mate on the left defend them (apocryphal maybe, but clearly tapping into the same not-so-'modern' mindset). 

The First and Second World Wars were different. The sheer scale of the conflict and the slaughter, and the need for repeated rotations to the front, meant that the men on your right and left were more likely to be replacements, and then replacements for replacements. In the case of WWII, (though not so much for the average American,) there was the added factor that your loved ones back home might be in equal or even greater danger. Time and time again, when you read the memoirs and other factual accounts, it adds up to a numbing or sublimating of selfish urges.

OK, perhaps there's also an element of 'survivorship bias' here. Selfish individuals would be less likely to have comrades come to their aid when they needed it, and so less likely to survive to have their part in the crusade recorded for posterity. The same is true on the home front, with the added factor that there's literally not much to be gained by being selfish when there's nothing to be had. And of course it's immensely more complicated in those countries occupied by the enemy, where decisions taken for reasons of self-preservation could come back to haunt you in the end.

Back in the present day, however, and especially if basing their stories on real or realistic events, writers have to decide whether to insert that implausible love story or betrayal arc to 'liven up' a situation that seems emotionally flat not because it's unemotional at all but rather because it's overwhelming. And, when they do, they run the risk of creating something that's every bit as anachronistic as London without a proper black-out or infantry using their sights while patrolling (a personal bugbear, grrr...!) or, yes, that bloody Bell 47 in Where Eagles Dare. Sometimes they pull it off. Often they don't.

Because at the end of the day, whether it's a historical story, a spy story, a war story, a crime story (or, as in the case of THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT, all of these), it's about characters and settings 'ringing true', isn't it? Modern readers don't want the people in a new novel about the WWII period to feel too much like modern people; a few exceptions maybe, but too many or too much and it spoils the illusion. Yet neither, I suspect, do they want them to be so authentically 1940s that they're hard to identify with (if you wanted that, you could read a book written in the 1940s).

So it's a balancing act, of course. It's just that, to my mind, it's much harder to populate your book with true-ringing characters if you're making them all the modern(ish)-minded exceptions to a pretty big rule. And I think the wartime selflessness rule (even though it isn't a rule, just an observation and a self-imposed restriction) is a pretty big one indeed.

So I chose to set my books directly after the war when, as the tagline goes, 'it just got personal'. Suddenly, as people began to accept that they might survive, they found they had a lot of catching up to do: with missing loved ones, with grievances and with other personal needs and ambitions. Lots of scope, in other words, for compelling drama that doesn't feel shoehorned-in.

Have I pulled off the balancing act? You tell me...

THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT: CHASING MERCURY BOOK TWO is out in Kindle Edition and paperback on Amazon on 31 Aug 2024. (And the first book, THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, is available at a reduced price now.)

P.S: 
As someone has just pointed out, the abiding and (to varying degrees) overriding personal ambition in a conflict like WWII is, of course, the ambition to stay alive – even if one is then prepared/resigned to risk or lose that life for a bigger cause. Right away, this trumps any other character motivations.
So perhaps the better model for realistic stories set in the midst of WWII is the survival drama. From the likes of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Nando Parrado‘s astonishing Miracle in the Andes on the page to Gravity or All is Lost on the big screen, these tend to be accounts of individuals with a particularly strong will to survive.
This may seem at odds with my argument above, yet in fact many Second World War memoirs read very similarly.
All are tales in which the protagonist becomes an Everyman, becomes ‘Us’ – how would we cope in that position, what would we do – with the individual's identity almost smothered by the uncaring immensity of Nature, or Fate, or global conflict. And while a bit of backstory may enrich the character’s motivation here, there remains no need to insert character-led plot twists, or any goals or stakes beyond unlikely survival. 
Image of Bell 47 adapted from: Airwolfhound from Hertfordshire, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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