World War II

hello!

Mine will - partly - be about French people living in occupied territory and also as forced labourers in Germany during WW2 (which did happen, just doesn't tend to make it into history lessons).

So far research has been Google and Wiki, that's about it! A lot of the best information (for me) is in different languages, so the public library doesn't carry it, therefore am slowing reading my way through foreign language tests online :)

My novel takes place in World War II as well. I've four main characters: a young Japanese man in Manzanar, an American solider sent overseas to Poland and taken hostage by the German Security Police, and two Jewish teenagers in hiding in Poland.

As far as research, Wiki has been my best friend. For Japanese Internment, Discover Nikkei has helped me a lot. I'm re-reading Anne Frank's Diary and am getting the book 'Farewell to Manzanar' to get personal perspectives. I plan on going to the library a few times this month to see what else they carry that could help me.

Mine takes place during WWII Paris. I'm writing a sequel to Hilda van Stockum's book The Borrowed House. To research it I've read over a dozen books, mostly WWII fiction, just to get the flavor of the time period. I've been reading all year and am so excited about this year's NaNo. I can post my reading list if you're interested.

---------------
VictoriaPL

I would definitely be interested in any and all reading lists--I always need more material to read about my topic =)

"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. "--Nietzsche

Here's my reading list:

Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates
Skeletons at the Feast by Chris A. Bohjalian
The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks
Jackdaws by Ken Follett
Summer of my German Soldier by Bette Greene
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
Shining Through by Susan Isaacs
Mannequin by J. Robert Janes
Stonekiller by J. Robert Janes
The Kommandant's Gril by Pam Jenoff
Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
The Hidden Children of the Holocaust: Teens Who Hid from the Nazis by Esther Kustanowitz
Is Paris Burning by Dominique Lapierre
The Good Liar by Gregory Maguire
Waiting for Anya by Michael Morpurgo
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Forger by Cioma Schonhaus
The Forger by Paul Watkins
The Mistress by Phillipe Tapon
The Rules of Perspective by Adam Thorpe
April in Paris by Michael Wallner
The Borrowed House by Hilda van Stockum

---------------
VictoriaPL

Wow, thanks for that, VictoriaPL :)

Oh my, that's is lovely. Thank you, Victoria. :D

I'm not writing a novel in that period but I just finished a short story set in World War II.

One place I would check out are the National Archives website

http://www.archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/

There are tons of photos there from World War II.

Here's a few others

http://www.historylink101.com/1/world_war_II/research.htm

Below is a link to a living history and WWII reenactment site. This is a pretty good site for getting info also.

http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/ww2/

I noted you're writing about a German soldier. The websites I cited are more from an American perspective but might be a good place to start.

----------------
Nulla Dies Sine Linea - Never a Day Without a Line

Thanks, Jenna. These sites look awesome. *bookmarks* (:

You're very welcome. Hope they prove useful.

----------------
Nulla Dies Sine Linea - Never a Day Without a Line

mines going to be set around Dunkirk, but mines going to have a bit of a supernatural twist to it

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best. Voltaire

Mine will be set during the London blitz, but the focus is so narrow I hate to label it a WWII novel. :P

I am doing research by guessing.

><> ><> ><> ><> ><> ><>
2004: Unday: WON -- 2005: Fortune's Fool: WON -- 2007: Hench: WON 2008: The Wey of Dolor -- 26k

Wow, all the websites and booklists look awesome! Thanks so much everyone, I hope that all your planning and noveling goes well.

Just a quick aside, is anyone else having a hard time coming up with names that suit the era? My MC has a last name, but no first name. I figure he'll name himself when I start writing, but it's still a little worrisome. Anyone else having this difficulty?

"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. "--Nietzsche

part of my book is set in WWII and the other part is set in 1980's

Sark--check out the "1930s names" thread farther down the page, it has some great links.

><> ><> ><> ><> ><> ><>
2004: Unday: WON -- 2005: Fortune's Fool: WON -- 2007: Hench: WON 2008: The Wey of Dolor -- 26k

Over the past two or three years, I've only really written Fantasy-themed novels.

This year, I decided to challenge myself and am writing a historical fiction novel, based almost entirely in the concentration camps of World War II. My synopsis is in my "Novel Info" link, although the synopsis itself is still a WIP.

I've gone to the library a few times and checked out a few non-fiction/fiction books on the subject of World War II and have found a TON of useful information on the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org

I think my biggest challenge this year is going to be creating the characters. I know who my MC is going to be, but I don't know him yet, y'know? Plots always come first with me, and then characters follow. Bleh.

"The unicorn lived in a lilac wood and she lived all alone..."
-Peter S. Beagle

you might want to check out the book The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. it's a first hand account of the Eastern Front from the perspective of a German soldier... well, a soldier in the Wehrmacht anyway.
warning: it is very, very 'raw' writing. it presents an extremely compelling (i.e. disturbing) picture of the hellish conditions that existed and the effect it had on some people so if your story focuses on combat at all, you might find that helpful.
-----------------------
nano 2005. version II, draft 2
body count: 25+
length: ~ 58k words
% rewritten: 37 (AAAARRRGGGHH!!!! *headdesk* *headdesk* *dies*)

----------------------
NANO 2008 - a gang of pathetic losers including an angsty and overly feminine gothboy vampire, a sniveling demon prince, an ugly elf and the obnoxious Mari'Su go on a pointless and non-sensical quest through a completely illogical

I may end up doing WWII. It's the top contender at the moment. ;) I was going to use this idea last year, but ended up having too many tendinitis problems to do NaNo. Today I was looking through a writing notebook from last fall and I found my list of names for the novel, and I suddenly found myself very attached to my family again. ;) So hopefully I can pull it together and use this idea! I have to get it written at some point, so why not in November? It would be set on the American homefront, following a family's life together. Think WWII-era Little Women.

Trying to decide what to write. A WWII-era novel set on the American homefront is the top contender at the moment. That may very well change tomorrow, though.

My novel is set around this time, but in China, during the Chinese civil war.

For personal accounts of people who lived through world war 2 in Britain, check out the BBC People's War archives at www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/categories, that's a fascinating read - though hard to tear yourself away from, so I found.

The TV show Foyle's War helps too. OK, so it's a whodunnit detective show, but it gives a fantastic sense of time and place, and the little details you might not think of otherwise.

NaNoWriMo 2007: This Place Called Home - WINNER AND COMPLETE
Work in progress: Dorrie Bright
NaNoWriMo 2008: TBC

My novel has a little of WWII in it - my main character lives with her small child in London at the beginning of the war, so she's evacuated out with him (I believe the mothers went with children under the age of five). And I guess it will be strange for her as she's always lived in a town so she'll go and live in the country and be somewhat weirded out. But there won't be any actual warfare and very little mention of the war as a political thing. I might kill off one of my main characters in the war though. I can't decide. And I want my MC to marry a man whom she meets when she's evacuated, but I can't think whom she might marry. A conscientious objector? Somebody with some kind of illness? A doctor? Who else might there be who would be around in a rural setting in the 1940s? Young men, I mean.

[img]http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/6428/nanosigzp4.jpg[/img]

Healthy young men were likely to be in one or another branch of the armed forces.

You could make your MMC a Quaker, since members of that denomination were more likely to be recognized as bona fide conscientious objectors. Certainly some COs were assigned to do 'work of national importance', including farming or mining, so your MFC could meet a CO working on the harvest. (Of course, there was a social stigma to being a CO in those times, so that would be a theme to complicate things,)

Another possibility would be for a young man who had some physical handicap, perhaps from polio contracted as a teenager. (Think of Franklin Roosevelt, but possibly with a less severe disability.) A common result in younger polio survivors was that one leg grew slower than the other. This would cause him to walk with a limp -- which would disqualify him for marching, but still leave him able to move around, perhaps with crutches or at least a cane. In the case of a visible handicap you don't have to deal with accusations of cowardice. There would be other complications, though.

I'd be interested to see what you decide to write.

Thanks, that's really interesting. I'm definitely interested to hear that conscientious objectors could be sent to do labour - seeing as this part of the action is set on or near a farm (on a farm makes the most sense, as I imagine that the farmer will have taken my MC and her son in as she would be able to work for her living), that makes it quite useful. But I'm still unsure about it because I don't want my character to be seen as a coward or anything - I don't think it would suit the purpose he's to play. Maybe he could have been injured in the war - a convalescent. I need to find a list of reserved occupations also - I know farmers were included, but it may have been farmers above a certain age as there were age restrictions on such things.

I'm also thinking of changing where I send my evacuees from Derbyshire to Oxfordshire. After all, Derbyshire is quite a way away - the evacuees there were probably from Sheffield and other such northern towns.

[img]http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/6428/nanosigzp4.jpg[/img]

My Nano novel centers on my husband's parents and their journey from Poland/Russia through Austria to Italy during the Second World War. They have both passed away and didn't speak much about their early life together so much of the story will be "imaged." I sort of feel like I didn't pick this time period and story as much as it picked me. It is an incredible story and I just thought someone should try to tell it. I'm excited to get writing come November 1!!

Throwing in THE UNLIKELY SPY by Daniel Silva
to the reading list. ;) My favourite WWII book.

This year I'm completing Book III of a trilogy about Berlin. Book III begins at the end of WWII, so I've already done the era which you are contemplating. Research? Mine consists of more than 30 lineal feet of bookshelf, and probably a good third of that is from 1933 to 1945, with another 3 feet of 1945 to 1963. I also have something like 3000 bookmarks on my browser.

Wiki is good, but sometimes suspect. Simple Google searches can often find some good stuff, but you have to sort through the dross.

Now, with all of that said, to really help you I need some more information. The experiences for "German soldiers" varies greatly depending upon which branch of the services there are in, and where they were stationed. Did they fight in Poland? In France and the benelux countries? Were they sent to the eastern front, and if so, when? Did they man the Atlantic wall? The Siegfried line? Were they part of the Afrika Corps and/or fight in Italy? Where they actually in the Navy? (In Germany, members of the Navy were not called sailors, but rather "soldiers") Did they serve on a battleship or a U boat?

If you can give me more information, I can easily suggest some great sources. Do you read German? A great deal of the best source material is on-line, but in German. Google translate can do a reasonable job of turning it into English, but it's not always reliable, and it's never quite the same.

Send me an email, and I'll be happy to give you hours of reading and sources. BTW, I spent a month in Germany in the spring doing research for my own books, and I'm headed back again next spring, so I can recommend some great places to look that almost no one knows.

GP

GP
--------------
2006 NaNo winner - Berlin, Witnesses at the Crossroads of History, Book I
2007 NaNo winner - Berlin, Witnesses at the Crossroads of History, Book II

I haven't decided what to write about yet for NaNo, but I've always wanted to write a novel about a German soldier on the Eastern front. I don't know if I could write historical fiction for NaNo though, just because I hate writing a single sentence without hours of research on every detail to ensure accuracy, not so good for fast writing.
My school just began a class in World War II this year. It's amazing, This is the first time I can ever say that school is fun. That's one of the reasons I'm considering writing historical fiction, so that every day I'll be either motivated or inspired and I have the teacher to ask questions.
As for research I'll be reading anything I can get my hands on.
Grand Poobah, I will definately be sending you an email. Thank you for sharing your sources with all of us.

Mine is an alternate history set during WWII- the timeline's all off and some people aren't in the same place as they were in original history, and so things are different, although some things kind of remain the same. Mostly, I'm playing off the rumored Vril Society and the idea that their mythical 'Vril' is real and somehow, they got ahold of it during the Beer Hall Putsch, which kind of rocketed the whole part up into power much sooner than they should've been. It ends pretty disasterously for the world, but the story follows a Paragraph 175er in Dachau - at least, that's the charge he's officially under, but he's actually there because he's the only one who can summon the Vril and he doesn't want to do it. (Why Dachau? Eh, pretty much because it was close to where he first summoned the Vril and they want him easily dragged back to that place when he finally breaks and gives in. I didn't realize at the time I picked it that it was the first built.)

Of course, I don't get to get into the ultimately consequences for the world, because the MC manages to sacrifice the camp for the energy to get himself snapped back to the Aldebaran system. :/ (Er, basically.) So he never finds out what happens, ultimately. XD;

It's a very fascinating part of history, but man, when your primary area of research is on the concentration camps, it can get tough to get through all of it. :/ Especially when you find more and more horrendous stuff that isn't going to be part of your story (thank you, Auschwitz) while trying to find one scrap of information that doesn't seem to exist. -_-; (You can find the numbering system for Auschwitz, but not Dachau. ::facepalms::)

This is my second NaNo, and I'll be writing about about an English agent working for the French Resistance. I've been researching since July, but I'm pretty busy, too, so I haven't got as much read as I would have liked. Still, I think I have a feel for it. I haven't read Charlotte Grey on purpose, because I'm afraid of stealing it's plot. My inspiration was The Wolves at The Door, by Judith Pearson. I've also enjoyed The Women Who Wrote War, Sorel; Women at War, Sim; In the Shadows of War, Childers; Conscience & courage, Fogelman; and Soldiers of the Night, Schoenbrun.

Incidentally, my mother lived through the London Blitz. She was born in '31 and has a few stories to tell about it.

Mine is during WWII also. It's about a young man who wants to live his own life and wants to get away from his family expectations. He joins the US Army expecting it to be a grand rite of passage of some sort and a big adventure, but he ends up traumatized by the time the war is over and struggles to handle living with the guilty of what he's done.

2008 :: Bullet Through Blue Eyes
Genre :: Historical Fiction
Current Word Count :: 13,193
Number Behind Daily Word Count :: 10,145
Characters Dead :: 1