Front Lines

I dedicate this book to the magnificent Kurdish women soldiers of Kobani. How could I not?

And to my equally magnificent

if slightly less deadly wife,

Katherine (K.A.) Applegate,

our son, Jake, and daughter, Julia.

War rages in Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and Northern Africa. Millions have died. Much of London has been bombed to rubble. In the Atlantic, German submarines sink more than a thousand ships. The western Soviet Union has been conquered by the German army, the Wehrmacht, and in their wake come the SS death squads. Throughout conquered Europe the Nazis have begun the systematic extermination that will come to be known as the Holocaust. And in Amsterdam, on her thirteenth birthday, a girl named Anne Frank receives a diary.

Never in human history has a more terrible evil arisen to test the courage of good people. The fate of the world rests on a knife's edge.

Among the great nations only the United States has stayed out of the fight. But in the dying days of 1941, Germany's ally Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and brings America into the war.

Adolf Hitler is said to be dismissive of the Americans as a self-indulgent, mongrelized people unwilling and unable to fight.

He is mistaken.

FLASH: “In a surprise ruling with major ramifications, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of
Becker vs. Minneapolis Draft Board
for Josiah Becker, who had sued claiming the recently passed Selective Training and Service Act unfairly singles out males. The decision extends the draft to all US citizens age eighteen or older regardless of gender.”

—United Press International—Washington, DC, January 13, 1940

“We interrupt this broadcast to take you to the NBC news room. From the NBC news room in New York: President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.”

—NBC Radio News,
December 7, 1941

“Lastly, if you will forgive me for saying it, to me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”

—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the US Congress, December 26, 1941