Allies
Allies
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Alan Gratz on Allies
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
One day, too big for one soldierGratz had already written three WWII novels before he turned to D-Day, and the operation’s defining feature pointed him straight toward the structural choice that would shape everything else. D-Day was not one army’s story. It was the story of a coalition, and he wanted the form to match the fact.
Going into the project, I knew that D-Day was an operation of unprecedented cooperation, and I wanted to focus on that. That unity had to be central to the story. And the best way to show that, I thought, would be to not just tell one person’s story, but to tell many people’s stories on that day, to highlight the way so many people came together to stand against evil and make the day—and the war—a success.
The WWII setting was the occasion, but the book was written for a present-tense problem. Gratz saw the history of June 6, 1944 as an argument he wanted young readers to carry into their own political moment.
We live in a world of increasing polarization—at home and internationally—and I think the only way forward for us as human beings is to work together. If this book can help reinforce that message with young readers, then I will have done my job!
How he wrote it
Research that wrecked the first draftBefore he began researching in earnest, Gratz had a tidy plan for the book: a single beach, a single arc, one soldier’s climb from the waterline to the top of the bluff. The plan lasted until he started reading.
I thought when I was going to write this book, that that would be the entire book, that it would be one soldier coming out of a boat and fighting his way up the beach and finally getting to the top of the beach and defeating a bunker and getting into Normandy, and that would be the end of the book. [paraphrased from audio]
What the research returned was not a simpler story but a far larger one. Operations Gratz had never heard of were running simultaneously on June 6: paratroopers dropped miles off target improvising with soldiers from other nations, French Resistance fighters cutting telephone lines and blowing up railway tunnels, and Black American soldiers whose units reached an unsecured Omaha Beach and fought alongside white troops when the invasion fell behind schedule.
When I started to research this book, I found out there were all kinds of other things going on at the same time as this beach invasion, and before it, and after it, that all took place on D-Day… All these other things that I didn’t know were happening at the same time that were incredibly exciting and vital to the success of D-Day. [paraphrased from audio]
Research didn’t just expand the cast. It forced a structural rethink so complete that the original narrative logic collapsed. Gratz had imagined the story as a relay race, each character handing off to the next, but the actual shape of D-Day made that architecture impossible.
For *Allies*, I had expected to write a book that was essentially like passing a baton, or a string of dominoes. I wanted one character to do something heroic, meet the next character, and then send him or her on their way, then do that all over again until the end. But that’s not really what D-Day was like. Many people were working in concert, yes, but often simultaneously, and spread out over a large area. So my domino idea went out the window!
The collapse of the domino plan had a concrete consequence in the manuscript. When Gratz moved from draft one to draft two, the revision was not incremental. The character who had anchored the entire first draft simply did not appear in the second.
That book behind you guys, *Allies*. That one, I rewrote the first draft of that book so much that in the second draft, the character who’d been the main character in the first draft didn’t even show up. Right? Like I changed it so much, I changed around all the main characters and everything. It was a radical rewrite from the first draft to the second draft. [paraphrased from audio]
What replaced the domino structure was something closer to the operation itself: many characters, spread across geography and time zones, whose missions overlapped without most of them knowing the others existed.
What he wants us to sit with
Victory that came with a bill unpaidAsked directly what he hoped young readers would carry away from the book, Gratz gave the shortest possible answer. The phrase doubles as a thesis for everything the multiple-perspective structure was built to demonstrate.
‘We are stronger together’ is the central theme of *Allies*, and what I most hope young readers take away from it.
But the cooperation Gratz celebrated in the book’s structure exists alongside a history he refused to leave out. On his own author website, he named the specific groups whose heroism on June 6 did not protect them from the societies they fought to defend. The passage lists what the victorious coalition owed and did not pay.
many people played heroic roles on D-Day only to return to lives after the war filled with prejudice, segregation, and injustice. Algerian Muslim soldiers fought in the French Resistance and the Free French Army, only to have to wage a bloody war for independence after the war. Jewish soldiers fighting for the liberation of concentration camps dealt with anti-Semitism among the very men who fought alongside them. African-American soldiers fought on the beaches at D-Day but remained segregated from white soldiers throughout the war, and returned home to find German prisoners of war treated better than they were in their hometowns.
Two years after Allies was published, Gratz was explaining what each of his books is about. The summary he gave for this one strips the argument to its load-bearing element.
Allies says we’re stronger when we work together.
That sentence sits beside the list of what those who worked together were still denied. The two ideas don’t cancel each other. Gratz leaves both standing.