“You better get out of here,” Freddie advised the newcomer. “They’re loading us up any minute now. We’re shipping out.”
“Yeah, me too,” Beau told them.
“I thought you were a fancy paratrooper,” Jacob challenged.
The big Texan shrugged. “I washed out of jump school. Fear of heights—how do you like that? You guys are Bravo, right? I’m with you now. Hope nobody snores.” He regarded Jacob intently. “How old are you, kid? Shouldn’t you be in high school?”
“I’m old enough,” Jacob replied, knowing he wasn’t.
A horn sounded outside. The truck was here to take them to a future none of them could predict. For just an instant, the steamy heat of Fort Benning turned ice-cold.
Beau gathered the four of them into a huddle. “Piece of cake, fellas. We’re going to look out for each other through this whole war.”
“Right,” agreed seventeen-year-old Jacob Firestone. “Nothing can touch us if we stick together.”
General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II, once commented, “Andrew Higgins is the man that won the war for us.” Higgins’s invention, the Higgins boat or LCVP (landing craft, vehicle, personnel), was the workhorse of the fleet that delivered the allied troops—like Jacob Firestone in this book—to the invasion beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Without the Higgins Boat, Eisenhower went on, “the whole strategy of the war would have been different.”
One of the most fascinating details I discovered during the research for War Stories was that, before the war, in the 1930s, Andrew Higgins had been close to going bankrupt. He might never have stayed in business long enough to supply the boats that saved the world from the Nazis had it not been for a much shadier group of customers than the US military—American gangsters. During Prohibition, the shallow-draft Higgins boats ferried countless shipments of illegal liquor from Canada to the shores of the Great Lakes and East Coast.
To this day, the D-Day invasions stand as the largest military operation in human history. But the entire undertaking would not have been impossible without the bootleggers, rumrunners, and criminals whose support made the Higgins boat a reality. Does this make Al Capone and his associates war heroes? Of course not. What it shows is that, in a conflict as massive and chaotic as a world war, it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between heroics and villainy.
Behind every battle and every movement in the war, there are hundreds of stories to be found. When researching War Stories, I drew a lot from the reporting of war correspondents like Ernie Pyle and A. J. Liebling, accounts for adult readers like The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan and Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose, and online resources like the website of the US Infantry. Among the great nonfiction resources for kids on the subject are Deborah Hopkinson’s D-Day: The World War II Invasion That Changed History and Rick Atkinson’s D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy, 1944. I encourage all readers to dive into the stories of World War II—and to keep in mind that the story of any war needs many voices from many sides to be fully told.
GORDON KORMAN is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many favorite novels for kids, including Restart, Slacker, the Swindle series, and the classic This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! He lives on Long Island with his family and can be found on the web at gordonkorman.com.
Restart
Whatshisface
Slacker
Level 13
Radio Fifth Grade
The Toilet Paper Tigers
The Chicken Doesn’t Skate
This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!
The Hypnotists
Memory Maze
The Dragonfly Effect
Swindle
Zoobreak
Framed
Showoff
Hideout
Jackpot
Unleashed
Jingle
The Titanic trilogy
The Kidnapped trilogy
The On the Run series
The Dive trilogy
The Everest trilogy
The Island trilogy
Copyright © 2020 by Gordon Korman
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First edition, July 2020
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll
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e-ISBN 978-1-338-29021-9
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