Alive and Kicking by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Our target turns out to be Saint-Nazaire, which comes as very little surprise since the port at Saint-Nazaire has been a legendary enough place for a lot of reasons throughout the whole war. It’s a major repair operation with a massive dry dock and the only one big enough to handle the Nazis’ biggest sea monsters like the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz. It had also been the main staging area for the brutal U-boat attacks on merchant shipping, convoys, and the Liberty ships that the United States had been sending across to try and help out the Brits well before we were technically involved in the war. Saint-Nazaire was the source of all those nasty sneaky subs that had been prowling under the waters of New York’s outer harbor, and the Carolinas’ and Florida’s so far back most Americans were barely aware at the time of any serious conflict being carried on in Europe, and the few who noticed were not really concerned. That’s what the papers were all saying anyway, after everything blew up in our faces and the Japanese bombed another famous harbor that I still can’t bring myself to name out loud.

WHILE AMERICA SLEPT! is basically what all the big newspapers said when we were humiliated by a sucker punch way off in the Pacific, which changed every aspect of life in America and eventually most other places in the world, too. In the span of less than two hours and with more than two thousand murders, Japan stepped right up, jumped onto the front pages, and made itself the bully of everybody’s nightmares. It was the kind of low-down, dirty move that would cost a local guy every friend he had, and on a bigger scale forced just about every country in the world to fall one way or the other. One way to react was, hey, I don’t want any trouble and looking down at your shoelaces. The other way, taken by most nations with at least a granule of actual human soul among their leaders, was to condemn this inexcusable act without reservation.

Oh, right, there was a third way. Four days later and over seven thousand miles away, Germany declared war on the United States.

My brother passed through that famous harbor in the sunny Pacific paradise more than once. He loved it instantly and couldn’t wait to tell me all about what made the place so special. He put it all in a letter.

I read it a lot, still. Last letter I got from him. Most recent, anyway.

Anyway, the point of all this is the whole interconnectedness of everything now. The full circleness. It was always there, of course. The Earth is round, after all. But we keep seeing it now, keep knowing it, because this gigantic miserable war connects everything to everything eventually. And this gives the newspapers all those great opportunities to connect the dots and sketch the maps and shout the headlines that connect the far-flung nasty places like Japan and

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