War's Wake: a love story from the shadows of WW2 by Allan Wilford Howerton

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WAR'S WAKE, a novel about postwar reentry following World War II, continues to be available at a wide variety of Internet booksellers. Questions and comments welcomed.

War's Wake: a love story from the shadows of WW2 by Allan Wilford Howerton added 3 new photos to the album: THE MAKING OF A POST WW II NOVEL.

Sometimes fiction can be more true than fact. Much of "War's Wake" (formerly "The English Paper) is true if not always literally. Perceptive readers will enjoy trying to tell the difference in this wild and woolly romance.

THE DAY BEFORE THE LAST DAY: We awoke this morning to find that about a half inch of snow had fallen during the night. As I laced by shoes to make the trek to the street to retrieve the newspaper, Joan found that someone had kindly placed it on the steps just outside the front door. Thankfully the Washington, DC suburbs are that kind of place. Looking inside over steaming coffee I was delighted to find this piece by my favorite local columnist. It is about libraries and the year 1949 and much more.

In that year I had gone to work as a payload control agent for United Airlines and enrolled as a part-time graduate student to build a graduate degree on top of my BA in International Relations. Much time would be spent at the University of Denver’s beautiful Mary Reed Library fighting battle fatigue by loading up on Keynesian economics and exploring the background of international organizations that had led to the United Nations and the possibility at long last of no more war. Then came Korea and in the wings the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and everything that was to result in perpetual warfare for the rest of my life and beyond as illusions shattered.

Today, given the beauty of a cold, snowy day I am surprised to have made it this far and hopeful of a little longer sojourn in this beautiful place. And yet I am regretful that the world we imagined after World War II did not unfold without the wars.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-truths-about-us-will-future-libraries-tell/2017/12/29/d2c3fd30-ec1f-11e7-b698-91d4e35920a3_story.html?utm_term=.76e77d86607b

Opinion | What truths about us will future libraries tell? The ribbon-cutting of D.C.’s new West End Library brought up childhood memories of the neighborhood — and worries about North Korea.

Here's to all my friends around the world: Greetings and best wishes for the holiday season and the New Year.

HIGH SCHOOL AND THE NEWS: Once is a while something in contemporary news reminds me of a passage from one of my books. This one is from “War’s Wake” about a classmate whom in the novel I call Monique. If you read to near the end I think the connection to several contemporary news stories will be obvious.
_______________________________

As the years at Pennyrile High diminished, the relationship between Monique and me became commonplace to the extent that it hardly seemed to exist at all. Our discussions matured from homework to the personal to matters of the heart. There was never a hint, save perhaps on one occasion, of an emotional attachment between us. Of if there was neither of us recognized it, an important something we hadn't seen. We were both into forensics. I loved to project my deep voice and went for radio speaking, a new forensic skill in those days. Monique had a bent for poetry reading and was pretty good at it. We practiced together and in light moments made up rhymes to fit our respective moods. Mine were usually dreamy and romantic. Monique's were witty, rueful and sometimes naughty.

It was in these giddy moods that we shared our secrets. I had a propensity for younger women, a trait which continued and increased even as the sergeant made the transition into civilian life as Will Ford. Monique's affections went in the opposite direction. That perhaps, and the fate of being born in the same year—that of the ascendancy of Calvin Coolidge and the great Japanese Earthquake—is what produced our conjugal attachment and destroyed any chance of passion between us. Monique assured me, when I swooned for a young cheerleader two or three years behind us, that the ardor, like all things, would pass. While it lasted she read to me from Robert Browning and played Chopin on the music-room piano. She was learning the chords and her playing was not the finest but it seemed so to me and I wallowed in its sweetness.

Monique had a bigger problem. A pool hall on Main Street called The Purity doubled, it was said, as a bootlegging joint. Her reputation somehow got connected with it. It may have been a result of her proclivity for slightly off-color rhymes. One which she loved, and maybe even composed as alternative words for the school song,

"Send old Troxel (the school principal) out for gin
Don't let a sober person in
We never stagger
We never fall
We sober up on wood alcohol
While our royal sons go marching
Home from The Purity"

was her favorite. She would belt it out on the piano to the rhythm of the Notre Dame fight song and sing it with a lithe girlish enthusiasm at the least opportunity. I never entered The Purity, and didn't know or care if she did, but somehow Monique and the establishment were forever connected in my mind. I suspect that she visited the place occasionally as a courier of bootleg booze for evenings at a country place called The Barn. Here they sold ice and set-ups to teenagers and adults alike with no questions asked and you put your own bottle of bourbon in the middle of the table. Monique, I remember, sometimes spoke of The Barn and perhaps if I had had a car or connections with the right crowd I might have spent some time at the place myself.

In addition to her innate confusion about homework, Monique's was often neglected due to dates with older boys already out of Pennyrile High. She was not especially pretty in the Miss This and That sense. But she was beguiling and her eyes seemed forever wistful and longing, reaching out for something barely seen on a distant horizon. When dressed up in pumps, nylons, and clinging chiffon dresses flaring a little at the knees, popular for going out in those days, Monique could be downright attractive. He dense black hair hanging loosely at her shoulders and pulled up from her forehead in a kind of low pompadour gave her a glamour rare for sixteen and seventeen year old bobby-soxers.

I rarely saw this side of her. I heard about it, however, from Monique herself. She always seemed surprised to find that she was an object of use by these older boys. To her the Trocadero, a posh night club, well, let's be blunt, an ersatz perfumed roadhouse, across the highway from a race track between two branches of the Ohio river in lawless disputed territory contested by two warring state legislatures, was simply a glamorous place of occasion. To her dates, who scraped up money to pay the not-so-small checks, it was an overture to a more intimate opera. If The Barn was innocent, the Troc as it was called, was well beyond it. Monique told me about midnight confrontations following the overture. I was pleased to allow her to cry, sometimes quite literally, on my shoulder. It was further confirmation that the seventh grade doubts as to my finesse with the opposite s*x was lessening. Guiltily, I liked wiping her eyes with my handkerchief and the reassuring feel of the warm moisture of her tears on my skin.

Monique bolstered my ego at every opportunity. Not making the Beta-bunny club herself she set a high objective for me. I would, with her push, she vowed, graduate at the top of the class. She tracked my grade-point and my marks on every test paper like a baseball fan studying the box scores. She analyzed the competition and determined that Bill Shep, the Rhodes-scholar type basketball star was the man to beat. I was sometimes annoyed when she needled me about a mark of 97 when Shep walked away with a 98.5 but I never let her know of it. Maybe, after all, in the retrospect of life's tribulations, I did treasure her more than was then apparent. When, in the end, I finished second behind Shep, Monique did not seem annoyed. "Well, we almost made it," she said to my delight.
___________________________________

“War’s Wake” is available through most Internet booksellers.

IN RESPONSE to inquiries: Yes, War's Wake is still widely available in several formats at a variety of Internet booksellers. Suggest reading it in conjunction with Dear Captain, et al., a day-today memoir of WW II. War's Wake is a novel about the wild and half-crazy aftermath that followed. In the latter I used fiction to better bring out the essence of the postwar delusional love story . . . because fiction, between the lines, can often be more "true" than fact, which most of us never truly tell.

The Girl of the Foxhole Dreams

Have you read this eBook version of War's Wake? II has a lot more photographs and you may find it interesting whether or not you have read the original print edition. and it's only $2.99. Enjoy. https://www.amazon.com/Foxhole-Dreams-Allan-Wilford-Howerton-ebook/dp/B005ME2FKW/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

amazon.com No war ever really ends for those who fight it. The same is true of love. Even when lost, it lives on in haunting remembrance, awaiting return in a different guise, when least expected. That is what happens in "The Girl of the Foxhole Dreams" . . . Just after World War II, on a universi...

Facebook reported today that this page has five new viewers. In anyone has questions about "War's Wake" we would be delighted to try and answer them here.

War's Wake is an autobiographical novel based upon a time in my life just after World War II when returning to civilian life presented many challenges. The characters are fictional but based upon real people who played important roles in my life during those years of shaking off the effects of the war. The story is often exaggerated to make a point. In this sense the freedom that fiction provides to a writer can sometimes bring out the essence of real events in more meaningful ways, such as imagination and fantasy, than would otherwise be the case. Hopefully some that is present here. Enjoy.

THE MONTH OF APRIL 1944 was a turning point in my military service and my life ever after. Suddenly, upon arrival at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana, I and others aboard a troop train from the Northeast, were transformed from soldier-students to riflemen in an infantry division heading for combat. In lieu of the Army's cadre for military government and reconstruction in Allied countries after the war we would soon be foot soldiers in the Siegfried Line. The war memoir, "Dear Captain, et al. would not have been written. Its sequel, "War's Wake," about the illusions, delusions, and confusing pathways of the postwar years would not have become a crucial part of my life story. Regardless, here is what happened as a result of that fateful April seventy-two years ago.
_________________________

CAMP CLAIBORNE . . . APRIL FOOL: The “ASTP boys” of Company K.

Seventy-two years ago, April 1, 1944 (April Fools Day and thereabouts) 2800 young cadets from the Army’s college training program (Army Specialized Training Program—ASTP) were reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Of these 53 landed in Company K, 335th Infantry. The Army -- proclaiming a manpower shortage -- broke its promise of a college degree and officers candidate school (OCS) to a competitively selected group of its recruits and draftees. After completing a double load of courses (mostly science and engineering) under military discipline, we ended up as buck privates in a division headed for ground combat in the Siegfried Line, the Battle of the Bulge, and across Germany to the West Bank of the Elbe River at the end of World War II.

The price of the broken promise was high for those who accepted the Army’s invitation to serve in its ASTP program. Of the fifty-three men entering on April 1, plus two at other times around that date:

THREE were killed in action.

THIRTEEN were severely wounded, leaving depravities that never fully healed.

FOUR suffered debilitating non-battle related medical evacuation.

EIGHTEEN were missing in action (most became prisoners of war) including two for which no record is available.

All in all more than SEVENTY PERCENT of the April Fools Day group became casualties in one form or another.

Yet, after several weeks of special training at Claiborne we settled in and did the job we had to accomplish. Many of us became non-commissioned officers, squad leaders, platoon sergeants, etc. and one earned a battlefield commission. Before long with the shock of the ASTP debacle behind us we became “real soldiers” with pride in the unit in which we fought along with more than five hundred others, including about three hundred replacements, as the company as a whole suffered a turnover rate nearing three hundred percent. But we never quite forgot April 1, 1944 and the broken promise.

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SPRINGTIME IN BERLIN: an excerpt from “War’s Wake.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
Berlin, 1945: Strolling the Unter den Linden

THE CONQUEROR COMETH
A Scene from the Pages of the German Occupation
A Short Story by Will Ford

This is a story without a beginning or an ending, because in Berlin in October 1945 there was no logical sequence of events out of which beginnings and endings are made. The hodgepodge of confusion was great; the currents and undercurrents illogical and varying so that no thought was given to the beginning and there were as many differing opinions concerning an ending as there were miserable human souls.

This is the story of a city, the remains of a city, the story of a once boasting, arrogant capital of an empire now lying prostrate at the mercy of or its conquerors from East and West. A pile of infamous ruins is all that remains of her former glory. This is a picture of a beaten people: confused minds, hungry mouths, emotions running rampant, shattered humanity struggling to survive. This is Europe six years after the beginning of a war.

It is almost sundown, the battered trees of the Tiergarten, Berlin's Central Park, are casting long shadows across the white pavement of the Charlottenburger Chaussee. A chilling breeze whips around the neck of the Man of the Moment and an American sergeant turns up a khaki collar as he stares across the park. Stares into a rancid, artificial, almost inconceivable scene accented by dead leaves floating gently toward the earth.

Observe The Conqueror perched astride an uprooted tree in the capital city of his former enemy. Observe more closely and you will become aware that the patterns in his mind are as varied and confusing as the handful of leaves being shaken toward the ground by the recent gust of wind. His eyes follow one of the leaves as it drops at the foot of a frail old lady pushing a cart almost loaded with any kind of stick she is able to find. She stops beside a huge tree, pulls off a little piece of bark and plods on down the trail. She has enough for a fire tonight, tomorrow she will look for more, and so it goes. The winter hasn't even started and coal is almost as scarce as gold. The few remaining trees in the Tiergarten, stripped of their bark as far as the human animal can reach, look like dead men still standing.

Another leaf floats into a bomb crater and disappears from view; the Master of Bombs and Bullets begins to notice the ground around him. Hardly one square yard is undisturbed; a few pieces of weapons still lie on the ground and every tree shows signs of bombs, artillery, or small arms fire. The once magnificent government buildings lining the Charlottenburger Chaussee stand gutted and ugly in the evening shadows with only portions of their walls remaining, symbols of a mad escapade of conquest gone remorse.

The sound of hoof beats turns his attention to the street as a leaf floats into the rear of a Russian military wagon clipping off a merry pace down the broad avenue. An American military police jeep speeds past it, the slanting rays of the setting sun reflecting from the shiny white helmets. The old lady never even bothers to look up as the wagon lumbers on.

People are walking along the street now. A middle aged man, stately and well dressed, carries a brief case the contents of which are no longer N**i state secrets but black market ci******es. A young lady pushes a baby carriage, the little fellow inside holding tightly to a small American flag; to him an olive drab uniform means candy and sweets instead of an enemy to be hated. But what will it mean twenty years hence?

The mind of the Conqueror endeavors to probe into the mind of the Conquered . . . why, they are people just like himself . . . no, they aren't just like himself . . . they would, and might still, stab you in the back if given a chance. The ordinary people are not to blame for the war . . . but if not, then why did they let the N**is come to power? . . . are they sorry for the murder of thousands, even millions, of hapless Jews, Poles, many others, any except pure A***ns? . . . no, when asked who started the war nine out of ten reply "the Poles". . . but now they look and act so much like me . . . like The Conqueror.

The sergeant's thoughts turn to the soldiers that so short a time ago he had stared at over the rim of a foxhole or down the barrel of a rifle. No, they weren't supermen, and they shivered as much as he under a barrage of hot flying steel . . . but when the scars wore off most of them would still be able to click their heels and “heil” a heel. But the heel lay dead yonder back of the Welheimstrassee . . . now he, the man sitting on a log in the middle of Hitler's ruined capital must determine the destiny of the German race. Yet not him, somebody else maybe but not him, because his "points are up" and by the middle of next week he may be half way back to Indiana. He is tired of the role, somebody else can occupy this "hell-hole." . . . he is going home. He remembers that perhaps his father had said the same thing on the West Bank of the Rhine some twenty-five years before . . . regardless, why sit on this log all alone in the presence of only God and destitute Germans? . . . and so he walks toward the street intent on thumbing a ride to the American Red Cross club . . . things are much more pleasant in a world one knows.

The Conqueror takes only a few steps before he comes fact to face with a blonde-haired girl of perhaps twenty. They start to walk around each other, both in the same direction. The girl laughs; the American manages a poorly pronounced "Guten Abent" and the German comes back with a perfect "Good Evening."
"Do you speak English?'
"Yes, perfectly. I once had an English governess." Her voice is warm and radiant. "And do you speak German?"
"Only a little. My . . . ah . . . governess wasn't German."
They both laugh, the girl first.
"Then we shall speak English." Her eyes light up and then fade as The Conqueror responds commandingly:
"Who says we are going to speak at all?" He takes a step backward.
She steps forward blocking his way.
"Please walk with me for a little while," she says, her voice tingling with excitement. "It's so lovely out this evening and so lonely all alone."

He feels like saying that the evening isn't lovely whatsoever, that in fact it stinks. Besides, why doesn't she look for a pure A***n to accompany her on evening strolls through the park? But suddenly a different idea shoots through his head like a bolt of lightning. She is a very pretty girl and a pretty girl in these days is a pretty girl regardless of race, creed, or politics.

The Conqueror thus extends his hand to the Conquered. She takes it eagerly and with no thought as to where they are going they set out toward the west as directly in front of them the Tricolor flaps in the wind over the Grosser Stern, a huge monument commemorating victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war. She offers to show him some of the famous landmarks so they turn abruptly and stroll through the Brandenburg Gate and out onto the Unter den Linden, past a reviewing stand on which are huge photographs of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.

She rambles at great length on life in Berlin before the bombs fell from the sky but after more than an hour he learns nothing about her except that her name is Ingrid. For that he is grateful because he is beginning to enjoy her congenial and entertaining company and would not care to have the conversation drift to unpleasantness. So he guides them safely from Dvorak of Bohemia to Whiteman of America and finally to dancing and night clubs and Berlin night life. Once the gayest in Europe, it is now trying to come back to life, digging itself out of piles of brick, trying to add a gay touch to the gloom of defeat. In the American zone a few theatres are open. They are popular; American soldiers and German girls stroll into them arm in arm, non-fraternization having long ago been proved a failure. But they are in the Russian zone. No movies here yet. Fraternization requires an alternative.

The Conqueror suggests to The Conquered that they go dancing and they find themselves at a rickety corner table in a small basement night club. Regardless of its size the atmosphere is warm and cozy as compared with the outside scenery on the streets of Berlin. As dim blue light tinged with cigarette smoke accents neat checkered cloths on small round tables, the Man of Today glances across the table at the Girl of Yesterday. She smiles and unnatural lines come into her face but she is still a very beautiful girl with the blue of her eyes blending gloriously with long blonde waves of hair falling just to the tips of her shoulders. They gaze out upon the crowded dance floor, a sea of olive drab interspersed here and there by the coarse khaki of a British Tommy or the dull gray of a Russian uniform. The sea floats by gaily to the stimulating three-quarter rhythm of J. Strauss of Austria while the German girl and the American boy drown the problems of the occupation in the wine of France.

They push their way to the dance floor. The music swings from Strauss to "Cheek to Cheek"—Astair and Rogers and Tophat. The theory of the superior race and the idea of the equality of mankind is seemingly forgotten in their fervent embrace. Neither even notice as two American MPs bodily remove an overly intoxicated corporal from the scene of the gaiety or as a Russian officer accidentally bumps Ingrid's shoulder and excuses himself, politely in German.

Thus the evening wears on, the smoke of the German standard of exchange becomes thicker and their conversation grows more stimulating as the wine in her eyes grows more enticing. But curfews have a way of halting occupation gaiety and the reluctant glance at a wrist watch lures them out into the reality of a bombed-out city.

The trolley is crowded so they decide to walk. The clear, distinct English of a young girl's voice sounds out of place in the dingy rubble-lined streets as she talks about concerts and operas and swimming parties in better days and about the one time she was out of Germany, a brief trip to Sweden in 1935.
"You have seen much of the world, haven't you?," she asks
"What's left of the world."
"But there will be even less left next time . . . you have an atom, or a bomb, or something."
"Then you think there will be a next time?"
"Oh, everybody says so . . . another war? Yes."
"Between America and Germany?"
"Germany and America against Russia . . . they say."
"And you believe them?"
"Oh, I don't know . . . I know nothing about international politics and all that . . . and what some people say is true and other people say is not true . . . and it is all very confusing . . . I do not know . . . how am I to know?"
The approach of a Russian patrol breaks the conversation. Ingrid stiffens and squeezes the hand of the American but they pass by peacefully. The girl relaxes.
"Why are you afraid of them?" The voice of the Conqueror is questioning, yet sympathetic."
"Because I hate them." She bites her lip and stares straight ahead into the night.
"But that's no reason. Why do you hate them?"
"I do not know . . . I just hate them."
The American tries to think where he has heard a similar sentence and thinks, perhaps, it was Georgia. But is hating Negroes or Jews in America the same as hating Russians or Jews in Germany?
"Then you hate Americans too?"
She doesn't answer but rests her head on his shoulder and gazes first at the pavement and then at the moon, playing hide-and-seek with the flitting clouds.

"This is my house."
The gray stone building is undamaged except for a couple of broken window panes. He comes in at Ingrid's invitation. She plays waltzes softly on the piano between ci******es and additional glasses of wine but whereas her eyes remain flirtatious her face is nervous and she gets up from the piano bench and walks across the room.
"Isn't it strange that not long ago bombs were falling and we were fighting and hating each other, and they told us that Americans were uncultured beasts?" she says, in throaty laughter.
"Well, tonight I had a date with an American and we were dancing and laughing together and I am . . . Is it wrong? . . . I mean, should we? . . Oh, what is the use of it?" Then after a long pause, "I mean, is it wrong that I should like you?"
She walks to the window and looks out.
He goes to her and, gently putting his arm around her shoulder, says consolingly, "No, Ingrid, of course not. It is not wrong."
"It is a lovely evening, yes?" After whispering the question she goes across the room, snaps off the light, lights a candle, looks out at the empty street, and still speaking very low but distinctly asks: "Were you ever in love?"
"Yes, maybe."
"An American girl?"
"Yes."
"Pretty?'
"Yes. Very pretty."
"You will marry her when you return to America?"
"I suppose so."
She goes to the couch, kicks off one shoe, and curls her foot up under her body.
"I was in love once, too . . . back in that other world."
"Where is he now?"
"He is dead. He was, like you, a sergeant . . . in the Wehrmacht and was killed in Normandy shortly after you invaded."
"I'm sorry." The Conqueror sits down beside her.
"It is alright. We would have not been happy. We believed in nothing except ourselves and thought that everything that was not German was wrong. He would hate me if he could see us now. Yet what am I do?. After his death I was hysterical. One night I refused to go to the shelter during a raid and stood out in the street shouting defiance at your planes. But they didn't stop and someone pulled me into a keller just as a load of bombs came whistling down."
She throws her head back on the couch and relaxes.
"After that I began to pray each time I heard the planes but I was selfish and only prayed that I would not be killed. When the Russians were coming into Berlin I intended to fight them but when the time came I was afraid and I tore my pistol to bits and threw it out the window. Oh, I shall never be different . . . I do not know how to be anything but German."

The Conqueror dries the eyes of The Conquered with an olive drab handkerchief and after a few moments of silence her face lights up into a twisted smile and her eyes become restive. Quickly, her arms enfold him and her chin buries deeply into his shoulder . . .

The girl watches from the steps as he disappears into the night. She walks slowly back into the room, flips the light switch, and opening her wallet stares blankly at a worn snapshot of a young soldier whose stripes turn downward.

Down the street The Conqueror glances up into the Berlin sky, swiftly moving clouds shadowing a full moon.

END OF EXCERPT: This story from "War's Wakr" was originally written as a short story for an English Class at the University of Denver in 1948.

Information on "war's Wake": http://www.amazon.com/Allan-Wilford-Howerton/e/B001HCV4VY/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Allan Wilford Howerton, World War II Era veteran and author, Alexandria, VA

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JUST PUBLISHED: My memoir about growing up in Western Kentucky, "BAPTISTS, BIBLES, AND BOURBON IN THE BARN." Google Title/Author. Questions welcome.

War's Wake: How a GI-Bill veteran and a sophomore lost their way in the time of Harry Truman and...

Read the first 40 pages of my autobiographical World War II novel, "War's Wake," about readjustment to the real world as a GI Bill student in the throes of a failed romance and a nightmarish case of battle fatigue brought on by deadly combat in the Siegfried Line, the Battle of the Bulge, and the mad dash across Germany to meet the Russians and end the war. And browse my other books at Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Wars-Wake-sophomore-paradise-Washington-ebook/dp/B0047DWB30/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

amazon.com Old photographs and ghostly remembrance empower an ethereal novel re-creating an obsessive romance in the aftermath of World War II. On a university campus bulging with ex-GIs, a traumatized combat veteran and a sophomore fell madly in love. Years later, the long-dead sophomore, invading his comp...