Author Description

When the Depression turned America into a land of hardship, young Walter Schroder's family moved back to Germany. The boy was only nine, and he entered an Old World that was borning anew--the Germany of Nazi dreams.Events moved swiftly. Schroder joined the Hitler Youth and learned the ways of the Fatherland well. When war broke out, he was called up at age 15 to man antiaircraft guns against planes from the land of his birth. But 1945 turned Schroder's Luftwaffe unit into British POWs, and his captors soon realized that the young man spoke "Yank." With his birthright discovered, Schroder became a translator and conveyor of orders for a new regime; U.S. citizenship properly documented, he was--incredibly--drafted into the U.S. Army. The vanquished youth had become a victorious warrior.This is a unique first-hand account of life under two mighty powers in a major war, and its early Cold War aftermath. It is also the story of an impressionable youth, caught up in circumstance but willing to lend his life to a cause--one where children were turned into soldiers, or soldiers into cogs in a war machine. But mainly it is a fascinating observation of the vagaries of war. After all, when Schroder was an interpreter for U.S. intelligence in occupied Munich, both German and American eyes had already turned to the east, where the USSR crouched over all of Europe.