All of us still can’t believe it. The war took you from us.
But then it sent you back. I think they called it “honorable discharge.”
We are luckier than so many families whose boys did not survive June 6, the invasion of France. Like Matt’s family. Poor Richard. I know you and Matt weren’t exactly friends, but … I’m so sorry.
The doctor thinks you’ll be back on your feet in six weeks. You might walk with a limp, but like you said first thing when they brought you home, “I still have my life.”
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t tell you before about what happened with Jed. It’s because I told myself that if I wished I could tell you in person, then one day I WOULD be able to tell you in person. But I wrote it down so if you ever forget what I think of you, no matter where I am and where you are, you’ll always be able to reread this to remind yourself.
I know you’re resting. But nothing is going to stop me from walking down the hall to give this letter to you right now.
Love,
Charlie
During World War II, no ground fighting occurred in the United Kingdom. But that doesn’t mean nothing dramatic happened there. Before I researched wartime England, I had never considered the enormity of what we now know as D-Day, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The date was June 6, 1944—the day after Joe’s last letter. I had never wondered just how the Allies could have trained more than 150,000 troops and sneaked them across the English Channel into Normandy. They had to set out from somewhere! And I knew nothing about the massive—and successful—deception.
Charlie, Joe, Matt, and Cookie weren’t real, but inflatable tanks were. The Allied plan to trick Nazi Germany with dummy vehicles was called Operation Fortitude, part of a larger plan called Operation Bodyguard.
Those operation names may sound cool, but this effort is sometimes known by another name that is even cooler: the Ghost Army. With your parents, search “ghost army” and “inflatable tanks WWII” online to see astonishing footage of the real fakes.
What’s more, the Allies created two fake armies. The one in this story was in southeast England. The other was in Scotland. And the plans involved more than phony tanks. To increase their chances of fully fooling Hitler, the Allies also used phony radio transmissions and double agents—in this case, people who pretended to spy on the Allies for the Nazis but who were actually spying on the Nazis for the Allies.
The soldiers of World War II were also the historians. Simply by writing letters to their families, they preserved thousands of smaller stories that took place alongside the big events. Most of these young men didn’t plan on being authors any more than they planned on being fighters. But their personal letters home captured a side of the war that journalists couldn’t. Numerous cities have World War II museums, including New Orleans (home to the National WWII Museum), and some display letters from soldiers. If you get the chance to visit any of these museums, you will almost certainly discover stories as surprising as Joe’s.
In real life, soldiers who had a role in Operation Fortitude would not have been able to describe in a letter exactly what they were doing. Therefore, to mention the fake tank in my story, I had to take a liberty. Perhaps that’s especially apt here because taking liberty—or rather taking back liberty—is often a driving force of war.
Thank you to Sarah Evans for issuing my passport (and a time machine) for my trip to 1940s England.
Marc Tyler Nobleman
August 2015
P.S. If you don’t know what Eisenhower (the general who pets Cookie) did after the war, you might want to look it up …
Marc Tyler Nobleman is the author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman, which made the front page of USA Today; Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman, which inspired a TED talk; and Vanished: True Stories of the Missing. He has spoken at schools and conferences internationally (from India to Tanzania) and blogs about his adventures in publishing at Noblemania. Follow him on Twitter at @MarcTNobleman.
Author photo by Karen London
Copyright © 2016 by Marc Tyler Nobleman
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nobleman, Marc Tyler, author.
Brave like my brother / Marc Tyler Nobleman.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: When Charlie’s older brother Joe is called up in 1942, Charlie learns about the tedium and dangers of war through Joe’s letters—and his brother’s bravery in dealing with a spy as D-Day approaches, finally gives Charlie the strength to stand up to the local bully.
ISBN 978-0-545-88035-0
1. Brothers—Juvenile fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Juvenile fiction. 3. Courage—Juvenile fiction. 4. Bullying—Juvenile fiction. [1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 3. Courage—Fiction. 4. Bullying—Fiction. 5. Letters—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N67154Br 2016
813.54—dc23
[Fic]
2015029287
First edition, July 2016
Cover art © 2016 by Shane Rebenschied
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
e-ISBN 978-0-545-88037-4
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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