Hello everyone of Reddit! I'm a 14 year old kid who has been extremely interested in the second world war and I got an idea to write a book about a British solider named Lewis brown. He gets sent over the channel to fight on D-Day and helps bring Germany back to where they belong. When he's shipped back to his home town and finds that his home town was bombed and his house was destroyed. He rushes to the hospital and finds out that his mother died in a bombing raid. As he walks back with everything he sits on what was his porch then another solider sees him and takes him in then the book ends.10.0.0.0.1 192.168.1.254 hotmail.com
Sounds promising as a young writer...keep it up. I once wrote a story about a 19 year old German kid heading off to Stalingrad..he survived by making the last flight out but returned to find his town destroyed...war is hell.
Good show. Drop a couple of pages in here and let us critique it. I spent two and half years writing my book that was published in 2012. Several friends here read it and tore it up for me, but that made it better as they pointed out errors and inconsistencies.
Do a lot of research to get to know the soldier's experience from induction, training, deployment, wounding, illnesses that require hospitalisation, food and tea time, front line experience including loss of mates, chance meetings with leading personalities (Dempsey, Horrocks, Monty?), testing for promotion or declining of the same, etc. Be careful in selecting your theatre and regiment. Know that history so you can base you soldier's experience on historical events. You can do as a C. S. Forestor (Horatio Hornblower) and walk your soldier through as a private, lance corporal, sergeant, platoon leader and then off to officer training. There was one ante-bellum RTR tanker who rose from Sgt. Maj. to Lt. Col. commanding a regiment by war's end. He never had an opportunity to attend an officer's school and post war they wanted to reduce him in rank back to Sgt. Maj. He left the tanks and took a commission in the REME and retired as a major. I've written non-fiction and don't consider myself intelligent or creative enough to tackle historical fiction. Understanding what happened is tough enough.
Just a few points. Most major raids on British towns outside of London took place well before D day Postal services to British troops under SHAEF were efficient so it's unlikely that your soldier would be unaware of any raid before returning home American houses tended to have porches British ones did not.