TheLoop21.com

By: Gary Phillips (Add to your loop)
Mon, 06/22/2009 - 00:00

Book cover of Freedom's Fight, available in wherever books are sold.

Like a lot of kids growing up in the late 1960s and mid ‘70s along with blaxploitation and western movies, I watched more than my fair share of World War II movies and TV shows. I also read and collected the comic books of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and Sgt. Rock and Easy Company (DC) created by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert.

While there were black characters in the Fury and Rock comic book squads; they didn't fit into the stories I'd heard from my dad about the all-black squad he shipped out with from segregated Fort Huachuca, Ariz. to Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Or the stories about his older brother, Norman, who was a part of the black troops who did the "mop up" during D-Day in Europe, and stayed in Paris to establish new lives after the war.

So my WWII novel Freedom’s Fight wasn’t written to be polemic. It’s entertainment and I hope you read it with that in mind. It weaves three interlocking tales of the war on the homefront and overseas in a perspective that acknowledges the role African American soldiers, civil rights leaders and other civilians played in the war effort in those years. In Freedom’s Fight you’ll meet Madison Clay, a prideful soldier facing court-martial, who is propelled into an espionage mission in North Africa that could change the course of the war.

Then there’s Alma Yates, a young reporter for the leading black newspaper of the day. She’s traveling the country reporting on the war effort among African Americans in the States and inadvertently uncovers a deep secret that could shock the nation — and prove fatal to her.

Secrets also haunt once popular crooner Gil Giabretto, who is now a soldier on the front lines of the European Theater. When black troops are finally sent into combat and allowed to die side-by-side with white soldiers, Giabretto must make a choice between the man he thought he was, and the man he truly is.
 
Freedom's Fight is available from Parker Publishing on Kindle and in bookstores everywhere.