War Stories
All of the WW2 novels are based on real incidents or characters.
Early One Morning (2002)
Originally a short story commissioned by Arena magazine when it was edited by Peter Howarth. It was based on the true tale of the first man ever to win the Monaco Grand Prix, a mysterious Englishman called Williams, who drove a privately entered Bugatti. Throughout the Thirties this man with one name and his beautiful companion, Eve, were a fixture on the race circuits of Europe. Few knowing that he had once been a mere chauffeur (for the once famous portrait painter Sir William Orpen) and she his employer?s mistress. Williams continued to race Bugattis, often in the company of WW1 war hero and air ace Robert Benoist (imagine a cross between Stirling Moss and James Hunt, with the former?s skill and the latter?s charisma) and the highly talented youngster Jean-Pierre Wimille.
Come WW2, Williams returned to England and trained for Special Operations Executive (SOE), the subterfuge and sabotage force set up by Churchill. Parachuted back into France with orders to set up a ?circuit?, Williams recruited not only his wife but his former racing colleagues.
It was a great story - three hugely talented drivers against the Nazi occupiers. I discovered that although there were people working on biographies of Williams, details of his wartime efforts were scant (his SOE file was pitiful, Robert?s was fuller) and publication was a long way off, if ever.
Peter Howarth suggested I fictionalise the missing parts, so I wrote the short story, which I subsequently tried to develop into a novel. Unfortunately, part of the problem was that the saga had such a glum ending - betrayal, deportation, concentration camps, death - that it ended on a real downbeat note, for a novel at least. Then, in 2001, Jack Bond, a film director, was put in touch with me by the SOE office. He, it seemed, had information which threw new light on the tale. It certainly breathed fresh life into it, and what was to have been my first novel finally became my fourth (although the first as Robert Ryan). The movie, however, languishes in development hell for the time being.
I was drawn to Harry Cole because he seemed like a cross between Alfie and Flashman. This is the introduction from an article I wrote for The Daily Telegraph about Harry and his misadventures. THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY I first came across the name Harold Cole while researching the wartime career of Airey Neave, whom I wanted to use as a walk-on character in a novel about Whitney Straight, the American racing driver/pilot. Neave, subsequently famous for his role in elevating Mrs Thatcher to the leadership of the Tory party and his death at the hands of an Irish bomb in the House of Commons car park, had enjoyed a remarkable war. The first Englishman to escape from Colditz, he was later head of Room 900, the shadowy section of the MI9 which aided and abetted Allied escapers and evaders in Europe. He followed the liberating Allied divisions across France, Belgium and Holland with a ragtag privateer army, collecting soldiers and airmen - and their local helpers - who had avoided capture. In late 1944 he was in a Paris still giddy from the Liberation and the epuration sauvage, the settling of Occupation scores. Neave, though, was searching for the man he designated ?the most interesting and dangerous of our particular opponents?. He was not referring to a high ranking Gestapo or Abwehr officer, or even a particularly heinous Vichy official, but to a renegade sergeant from the British army, Harold Cole, whom Neave believed had not only decimated escape lines, resulting in the death of dozens of people, but had willingly donned the reviled Gestapo uniform to help interrogate his countrymen in the cells of the notorious Avenue Foch. In fact, by the end of his run, Cole, who used at least thirteen aliases, had served in the British army, the French resistance, the German Sicherheitsdienst (the SD, effectively a branch of the Gestapo) and the American 6th Army. At times he added bogus stints as an Inspector from Scotland Yard, a bodyguard for Mrs Simpson, and a spy for the Special Intelligence Services to his CV. Perhaps in a less self-deceiving moment he also described himself in a letter to a mistress as a ?psychologically complicated, unbalanced criminal?. She was one of many lovers; he had ?a craving for women? and was ?very attractive to them? according to his MI5 file, despite being physically unprepossessing - ?thin, reddish fair hair, blue eyes, long pale face, false upper teeth, small moustache.? Yet at one point this career criminal and Casanova showed a large spark of decency, helping to deliver, by his own estimate, ?more than a 100 escaped parachutists and pilots? down the ?rat line? from Lille to Marseilles, often literally under the Germans noses. To some of those he helped, he was, and remained, a charismatic and daring saviour. This combination of feted hero and despised villain fascinated me and Whitney Straight was set aside. Although Neave would retain his walk-on part, the focus of the new book, The Blue Noon, now switched to Harry Cole, his treacherous opponent. Ends. Quite a character. And since the book was published, I have been told that he was probably in the Canadian army for a while as well.
This was inspired by a number of disparate stories. One was discovering the huge number of German POW camps in the UK during the war - more than 250 - and that there had been a number of ?Great Escape? style breakouts, although all resulted in re-capture. I then came across an outfit called MI-19, responsible for the interrogation of German prisoners. This was an organisation that might yield some little known stories, I thought. It was then I found that five German POWs had been hanged at Pentonville in October 1945 (six months after the war had ended) by the notorious Albert Pierrepoint, publican and executioner, for the murder of one of their own men in a camp. It was all to do with a failed escape attempt. The central driving force for Night Crossing, though, came from a friend of mine, John Goldschmidt, who was trying to make a film of Underdogs, my first book. As an aside, he told me about his father who, although an anti-Nazi Austrian publisher, had been interned by the British in June 1940. He was eventually taken up to Liverpool to be shipped to the Isle of Man. My interest was piqued because I used to holiday on the island as a child, and I remembered my mother telling me tales of locals jeering and spitting at the ?Nazis? (a good proportion of whom were Jewish refugees from Hitler). In a mix-up at the docks, John?s father was put, not on the IOM steampacket, but the SS Dunera, bound for who-knew-where (it ended up in Australia, after they had been refused at South Africa). The Dunera was a voyage from hell - the ship was overcrowded, dirty and the deportees were guarded by the Pioneer Corps, many of whom robbed their charges (and some of whom were later court-martialled for their behaviour). Like many on board, John?s father lost possessions, including precious books, which were dumped overboard. What he couldn?t know, nor could any of the other victims, was that the ransacking and robbery probably saved their lives. It would be giving too much away of the novel's plot to explain exactly how. Another refugee/POW ship, the Arandora Star, had sailed for Canada before the Dunera. Despite flying a swastika below the Red Ensign (to show German POWs were on board) she was torpedoed on 1 July 1940, with the loss of many German (175) and Italian (486) lives. Some of the survivors were brought back to the UK, and an unfortunate few even ended up on the Dunera, which steaming south from Liverpool, picked up its own U-Boat.... However, I also wanted Night Crossing to be more of a love story than The Blue Noon, whose hero was probably incapable of true love, at least until it was too late. Hence the characters of Cameron Ross (based on a younger version of the strikingly-named Colonel Scotland of the Yard, who helped interrogate the German POWs who were hanged), Ulrike Walter, a musician who risks her life by performing banned music in Berlin, and Erich Hinkel, her fianc, who volunteers for the Bootwaffe, the U-Boat arm of the German Navy. How these three interact over the six years of war, and the bloody finale when they all meet up again, is the essence of NIGHT CROSSING.
After Midnight (2005) Below is the actual letter that inspired me to write this book. Anne Storm now lives in the UK. When she was one year old, in 1944, she was in Australia and her father was serving with the South African Air Force in Foggia, Italy. He dropped supplies to partisans over Warsaw (one of the most difficult missions of the war) and in Yugoslavia, bombed oil fields in Romania, sowed mines on the Danube, and on October 12, his Liberator was in Northern Italy, its mission to drop supply canisters to the resistance in the mountains. His Liberator was one of six which crashed in bad weather that night; the wreckage has never been found. 1/2/44 F/O T.R.MILLAR RAAF Aus 422612 - 104 Squadron RAF CMF Italy My Dear Daughter, This is the first time I have written to you and although you are as yet too young to read it perhaps mother will save it up until the time comes when you can read it yourself. In 2 days time it will be your first birthday anniversary-a great event for your parents. My regret is that I cannot personally be there to help you blow out your single candle but believe me lassie I will be there in spirit. I am writing this from a place called Italy which is far away from our fair land-a place where I would not be by choice so far away separated from a wife & daughter so dear to me. But I am here , precious one , because there is a war on caused by certain people who wished to rule the world harshly & despotically, imperilling an intangible thing called democracy which your mother & I thought all decent people should fight for. You will understand as you grow up what democracy means for us & how it is an ideal way of life which we aspire to put into practice. All I ask of you, Anne dear is that you stay as sweet as your mother & cling tight to the subtle thing we call Christianity, which has been the core of her way of life & her mother's & mine. I hope that you will love & respect me as I love & respect my father. That's all young lady. Have a happy birthday -may they all be happy birthdays. I hope to be home again one fine day. In the meantime lots of love to you & to mother From Dad Bob Millar Between March to December 2003 I wrote the first draft of the novel that the above letter inspired, and sent the two hundred-odd pages to Anne, who kindly gave me permission to proceed with it. I have changed the characters names and it is set in both 1944 and in 1964, but the missing bomber is still at the heart of it. I hope it has a happy ending beyond the book, and Anne discovers the fate of the real Liberator KH158. In December 2005 it was reported in The Times newspaper that a large bomber had been found at the bottom of Lake Bolzano, north of Rome. There is speculation it may be KH158. Diving the wreck should begin in Spring 2006. Watch this space.
