Friday is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, when the United States and its allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.
It is a date that many learn in school, along with tales of American soldiers being captured and held in prisoner-of-war camps.
What is not as well known is that the U.S. also had many POW camps. Novelist M.W. Tyrrell uses that aspect of the war as the background to his new book, “The Ship to Shawano,” which came out May 31.
The book is available free as an e-book through Saturday, with a paperback version coming out later in June. The book tells the fictitious story of a German soldier named Markus Goethe who was captured by Allied forces and brought to Shawano as a prisoner of war.
Tyrrell, who lives in St. Joseph, Mo., has visited Wisconsin but has never been to Shawano. However, he chose the community as the main setting for the book based on friends’ descriptions of the area.
“I’ve always liked history, and quite frankly, I’ve always liked Wisconsin,” Tyrrell said.
The idea came about while Tyrrell was working at a bank, and a co-worker spoke of her father, who had been a German prisoner of war. Tyrrell lives within 200 miles of two former POW camps.
“By and large, people don’t know that those existed,” Tyrrell said. “It was a completely different world then, and if the government didn’t want something known, they could easily do that. It was not necessarily through coercion; they just didn’t talk about it and nobody picked it up.”
Tyrrell never got the chance to meet his co-worker’s father, but through research of the POW camps, and drawing on his own character, Markus was born.
Tyrrell has an 18-year-old son, and he said he tried to envision what a man of that age would be like more than 70 years ago.
Tyrrell said he enjoyed the challenge of telling a side of the story that is rarely discussed. He noted the media is saturated with stories about American soldiers who fought and died for their country, but little is said about what German soldiers faced.
In the preface to the book, Tyrrell pointed out that the German prisoners brought to the United States tended to receive better treatment than American soldiers in foreign camps. Many of the foreign prisoners worked in the same areas as American citizens, and in some cases side by side.
“Germany was so heavily involved, provoking the war for so much longer (than the United States), and we never really hear that,” Tyrrell said. “Although what their government did was despicable and many of their citizens were complicit, there were a lot of people who, I think, didn’t fully know what was going on.”
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