The Big War: The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall

Robert Westall's The Machine-Gunners has been called the best children's novel about World War II. Awarded England's Carnegie Medal for the best children's book in 1976 and made into a BBC television series in 1983, this grim and gripping depiction of young adolescents in the first year of World War II deals with both the horrors of German bombing raids which nightly and systematically destroy the coastal town of Garmouth and the intense struggle of fourteen-year-old students to control their fears by trying to become, not victims, but defenders of their world.

As the story opens, Chas McGill vies with bully Boddser Brown for the best German war souvenirs in town. In pursuit of such booty from a downed bomber, Chas discovers the aircraft and its intact machine gun, still manned by a dead German airman, in a wooded area. With the help of his friend Cem (for Cemetary) Jones, son of the local undertaker, Chas manages to hacksaw the gun out of the tail gunner's compartment and haul it, concealed inside the boys' Guy Fawkes figure, back to his father's garden shed, discovering in the process that it can still fire live ammunition. When their school is hit by a bomb and classes suspended, Chas recruits three other friends--Nicky and Clogger, two bombed-out orphans, and Audrey, a girl at odds with her family--to help him build a fortress-style bomb shelter behind Nicky's destroyed house. In that shelter the machine gun is implanted and aimed at the skies over Garmouth harbor to await the expected German invasion.

Just as the young defenders complete their fortifications, Rudi Gerlath, a German pilot shot down over Garmouth, sneaks into the shelter to hide from the authorities. The children capture Rudi and guard him with his own Lugar. The captors realize that they cannot turn Rudi in without revealing their secret fortress, but over time the enemy somehow becomes their friend, the only adult whom they trust with knowledge of their command post. When church bells ring to warn of a suspected German invasion, the friends rush to their fortress and prepare to defend against the approaching enemy.

Because he is older than Davy Bowman in the recently reviewed On the Wings of Heroes, the deprivation, destruction, and dangers of war are felt much more viscerally by Chas McGill and his comrades. Unlike Davy's family, the adults in Chas's world seem not so much heroic as ineffective and somehow distant. From Fatty Hardy, the bumbling local constable, to Chas's father, who does his best to protect his family in the overwhelming chaos of overwork and relentless fear, the adults cannot shelter the youngsters from the terror of war on their very doorsteps. Caught between childhood and maturity, Chas and his friends fight to shape a kind of ironic salvation in the German machine gun with which they hope to defend themselves against the enemy which made it. In wartime, courage comes in many and sometimes futile forms.

The Machine Gunners, like the previously reviewed B for Buster, is a novel for mature young adult readers who want a realistic portrayal of the World War II era which does not shrink from the moral complexity of those terrible years.