Jeff Shaara's next novel, out this fall, is the European finale of his World War II series. (Photo by Guy Aceto)

Characters like Kesselring—what’s he really like?—get me excited as a storyteller.

With a criminology degree and a thriving rare-coins business, Jeff Shaara didn’t plan to follow in his novelist father’s footsteps—even after Michael Shaara won a Pulitzer in 1975 for The Killer Angels. But when Michael died in 1988, Jeff decided to manage his dad’s estate. One result: two movies (Gettysburg, For Love of the Game) from Michael’s books. Another: Jeff began to write a string of bestselling novels about American conflicts from the Revolution to World War I. Still, he hesitated to tackle World War II: “What can I possibly tell people that they don’t already know?” He says his research persuaded him there was a lot beyond “Hollywood history, which is unfortunately how most people learn about it.” His first two World War II novels (The Rising Tide, The Steel Wave) deal with North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. No Less Than Victory, the European finale, appears in November.

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How are your novels different from other historical fiction?
Almost all historical fiction, like The Red Badge of Courage, uses fictitious characters. My books—and this originated with my father and The Killer Angels—take you to a real event with the real people who made that history. But they have to be called fiction because I take you into the minds of the characters.

How do you do that without writing “Hollywood history”?
Research. I typically read between 50 and 70 books to write each novel. I read Eisenhower’s memoirs, Harry Butcher’s memoirs, Patton’s papers, Bradley’s memoirs, Rommel’s papers, Kesselring’s memoirs, Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s history with all those interviews, countless diaries and letters, and so forth. Characters like Kesselring—what’s he really like?—get me excited as a storyteller. I always tell writers, “If the story’s not exciting to you, why would it be exciting to anyone else?”

Where does the dialogue come from?
For World War II, unlike, say, the Revolutionary War, the wealth of material includes documented dialogue. So I’m not taking complete license. That’s why the research is so important: my first job is to get into the heads of these characters so that I’m comfortable putting words in their mouths. I’ve never had a critic say, “Eisenhower wouldn’t have said that.”

What about your GI characters?
Obviously GIs in the field say and do many things that aren’t recorded. But something amazing happened with this series that really made it work. Because I was on C-SPAN talking about starting this, people contacted my Web site. “I have my father’s diary.” “My mother saved my dad’s letters.” “Would you like to see this stuff?” Holy mackerel. I got fabulous material no one’s ever seen. A woman in Norfolk, Virginia, sent me an account of her husband in the 42nd Infantry Division, one of the guys who walked up to Dachau. This is treasure. I make full use of it to understand the GIs’ points of view.

How?
I go through the material, pick characters who are where I need them to be to advance the story, and from four or five real GIs I create composite characters who’ll do the job. Take Jack Logan in The Rising Tide. He’s a gunner in a Stuart M3 light tank. He’s a composite, but everything that happens to him happened to a real GI.

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