Cloak and Dagger and Spangles: World War II Spies and Secret Agents by Stuart A. Kallen

World War II's fields of battle are famous in many accounts, photographs, and film. But there was another war, one fought in secret by mostly unknown and unnamed agents, who fought, not just with weapons, but with with their wits and special skills to bring the war to its end in 1945. Some of these shadowy warriors planted explosives and staged assassinations behind the lines, but other agents worked in secret, unknown, moving among the enemies themselves. Great Britain drew upon the students or graduates of their most elite universities, Cambridge and Oxford, and the United States similarly recruited quite a few young men educated at Harvard and Yale.(/p>

But some of these secret agents were women, most unusual women indeed.

Josephine Baker began her career as a chorus girl in the mid-1920s at the Cotton Club in New York. But soon her ambitions took her to France in 1925, where she became the toast of Paris for her exotic dancing at the Folies Bergere, at times with her pet cheetah, and later opened her own successful nightclub. But when the Germans invaded and occupied Paris, Baker volunteered to work undercover against the Nazis.

"The people of Paris have given... me their hearts, and ... I am ready, Captain, to give them my life," she said.

After joining the French Intelligence Service, Josephine Baker pretended to cooperate with the Nazis, traveling to performances all over European countries under German control. Attired in glamourous furs and jewels, as a star Baker was able move freely with her entourage, acquiring information about troop movements and concealing it in invisible ink within her usual sheet music arrangements as she moved from city to city. She even smuggled photos of defenses and troop movements, if need be, on her own body at great risk. Another brave but quite different woman was spy Viginia Hall, of the British Office of Strategic Services (the famed OSS), known to the Nazis only as "The Limping Lady," worked closely with the French Resistance movement, training battalions of fighters, setting up safe houses, communicating stealthly with her handlers in London, and earning the Distinguished Cross for her heroism.

One spy for the OSS who ultimately gained fame for his service with British Naval Intelligence was Ian Fleming, whose missions broke codes, stole documents dealing with secret weapons, and kidnapped a coterie of Nazi scientists who eventually cooperated fully with the British. Ian Fleming became a novelist after the war, and after a success with the children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, turned his exploits as a secret agent into his famed series of James Bond novels. And like Fleming, wartime undercover agent Graham Greene also became a celebrated author of best-selling spy stories.

Not one of the usual dapper spy sorts, another unlikely secret agent was Morris (Moe) Berg, a third-string catcher who played on several major-league teams with the likes of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in off-season exhibition games in Japan before the war. Berg photographed significant governmental and industrial places in Japan, and his information guided U.S. bombers to many strategic targets during the war.

In Stuart A. Kallen's World War II Spies and Secret Agents (Heroes of World War II (Alternator Books ® )) (Lerner Books), readers will meet several colorful and yet crucial secret agents whose bravery and special skills helped military forces win World War II. In fascinating stories of quite unusual and courageous people, this short non-fiction book gives middle graders a look at an important period and the personal history of the unlikely people who helped end the war for the rest of the world. Writes School Library Journal, "A perennial favorite time period among students receives a fresh treatment."

Knitting Together: A Scarf for Keiko by Anna Malaspina

It was 1942 in Los Angeles. Everyone was saying, "There's a war on." Sam knows that. His big brother Mike was away in the army.

And in his class at school, everyone had to knit for the soldiers. Sam was not good at knitting, and he didn't want any help from Keiko, the girl sitting next to him. Her needles clicked fast as her rows grew longer quickly. Sam's yarn just tangled.

"We must do our part for the war effort," said Mrs. Olson. "Our soldiers are counting on us."

"No one should count on me," thought Sam.

At school some of Sam's buddies wouldn't speak to Keiko. But she quietly continued knitting, even on the playground. On his way home Sam noticed Keiko's father, sadly sweeping up broken window glass in front of his store, where he had put up a sign, I AM AN AMERICAN.

And at home Sam learned that to protect against spies, President Roosevelt had ordered that all Japanese families had to pack up only what they could carry to an Japanese internment camp with high barbed wire fences and guards in towers, far out in the desert. Keiko's mother's best tea pot and cups were sitting on their kitchen table.

"I offered to take care of Mrs. Saito's precious tea set," Sam's mother said.

"I told her it would be here when they get home."

And sometime later, Sam got a small package with a letter from Keiko.

Dear Sam,
Here are the socks I knitted for Mike. Tell him to come home safely.
Your friend, Keiko.

P.S. You can borrow my bike until I get back.

Suddenly Sam thought of how cold the desert can be at night. He found some red yarn in his mother's basket and began to knit something for Keiko. He knitted at school and every night as his family listened to the war news on their radio. And soon he sent a package to Keiko.

Dear Keiko,
I wanted to make this scarf for you to wear while you are away.
Your friend, Sam

And in her historical notes at the end of her A Scarf for Keiko (Lerner Publishing, 2019), author Anna Maspina includes the account of the removal of Japanese citizens from the west coast of the United States as seen through the eyes of a Jewish family in Los Angeles, paralleling the internment of part of their own family in Poland during the war. Maspina skillfully uses the knitted socks and scarf as a metaphor of the knitting together of immigrant Americans, particularly during World War II. With the help of illustrator Merrilee Liddiard, who sketches out the look of American life during the war years, shared things between the two families become hopeful symbols of lasting friendship between them. Says Publishers Weekly, "...A rich source for discussion, both about outward political oppression and the inward struggle to behave honorably amid it."

Together in Time: On the Horizon by Lois Lowry

Back in 1980, author Lois Lowry's father showed her some family silent movies of her at age two playing on the beach in Hawaii with her grandmother. Intrigued, Lowry had the film transferred to a video tape, and one day she and some friends watched them together.

I played once more on the beach at Waikiki.

"Wait," my friend John said suddenly. "Pause it and go back to the beach scene! We watched the beach scene again.

"Look on the horizon." John said. "That's the Arizona!"

We were no longer watching a little girl playing with a sand shovel in 1940. The battleship Arizona carried 1200 men. Almost all of them would soon be dead.

Stunned with that moment frozen in time, when she was connected with the sinking of that ship and the day that began World War II, author Lowry started to research the people who survived and those whose lives were lost on December 7, when "Remember the Arizona," had become the watchword of the nation.

Lowry learned that many of the sailors were young, seventeen and eighteen years old, on their first cruise. Thirty-seven sets of brothers were shipmates. Some brothers survived, and some pairs died together. One brother managed to save his brother, and one tried and failed and had his ashes buried on the ship, still visible underwater in Pearl Harbor, where his brother lay.

At eighty-six, he returned to his ship.
Divers took his ashes down,
and placed them in the fourth gun turret,
where he would rest with his shipmates.

Author Lowry and her family returned to Japan for a few years when she was older, where she heard the stories of people on the day the first atomic bomb fell on Japan. One little boy was buried with his beloved little red trike, which Lowry later saw when she visited the museum in Hiroshima. In Japan she had a much-loved green bicycle, and she once stopped to watch a playground full of Japanese children where one boy came to the fence and stared long at her pale hair and eyes.

His name then was Koichi Seii, and many years later, as the American Caldecott Award-winning author-illustrator, Alan Say, he met Lois at a conference, and chatting about her days in Tokyo, the two discovered that they were those two children who stared at each other through that fence.

So many years went by
that he was gray-haired; so was I.

I'd lived in his country, then.
And now he'd moved to mine, so when
we met (his name was Allen now)
we mused and pondered how
from our horizons we had viewed
a war begin, a war conclude.

We were young. We were alike.
A boy in a schoolyard. A girl on a bike.

Newbery Award-winning author Lois Lowry's memoir, On the Horizon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), comes at a good time in our history for children forced to live through another historic time. Quarantined with family, they have seen their worlds shrink even as they yet live through another momentous world event which they unknowingly share with children far away.

Lowry, whose notable Newbery Award books are Number the Stars and The Giver (1) (Giver Quartet), uses varied poetic forms, from quatrains to haiku, to tell a personal story that is entwined with a time that challenged individuals and nations, a time remembered that yet has many lessons for young readers today. We are in time as a fish is in water, all threatened, all hopeful, often all as unaware of what is on the horizon as little Lois on that long-ago beach, as history rolls on all around us, and Lowry's thoughtful words help convey that truth to those who are children now. Says School Library Journal,"This series of beautiful, moving, and sometimes horrifying poems gives a voice to the young men on the USS Arizona and offers an equally moving tribute to the survivors of Hiroshima. The author shares her hope for the future and stresses the interconnectedness of humanity."

To Make A Difference: White Rose by Kip Wilson

Growing up in the prewar days of the Third Reich, Sophie Scholl yearns to follow her older brother Hans to the university in Munich, to laugh and dance with other young people, to drink wine and talk all night, and to study and make a difference for the world.

"Our spirits are as light as dandelion fluff," she writes.

But Germany's future grows dark with the rise of Adolf Hitler. In Ulm, where she lives, the houses and workplaces of Jews are shattered and soon her Jewish neighbors begin to disappear--to where?

...my childhood is
fading away, stomped
flat by something that feels
like doom.

Hans goes off to train for the army, where as a medical student he is assigned to care for the wounded. Sophie and her friends are also called for six-month work camps where they assemble weapons of war. Her boyfriend Fritz is drafted to the frozen Eastern Front and Sophie despairs of his life and the life she has hoped for.

But finally in Munich, Sophie sees the secret glances between Hans and some of his friends, their whispered words, and their strangely ink-stained fingers every morning. Leaflets bravely speaking the truth of the horrors of Hitler's war have begun to appear around the campus, and finally Sophie confronts her brother with one, and asks the question:

With one glance at me,
Hans breaks, spills the truth.
I nod, we embrace.

Sophie Scholl joins the resistance movement called the White Rose and begins to work with the clandestine pamphleteers, purchasing paper and stamps and sometimes transporting hundreds of leaflets for mailing in her spare suitcase. When Hans is re-called to fight in the siege of Stalingrad, Sophie assumes a greater role in the preparation of their publications. To conceal their location she takes to boarding trains to mail leaflets from other cities, trying to look innocent as she rides, trying to keep her eyes off her rucksack...

... a rucksack full of treason...
a sentence to death.....

And one bright morning in 1943, Sophie and Hans are caught in a university lecture hall leaving leaflets outside each classroom, and their arrest leads to the capture of their friends as well. And on another sunny morning, Sophie and Hans are beheaded by the Gestapo's guillotine.

Sophie's wish to make a difference in Germany was not to be. The people were too terrified to object to their deaths, but in the years to follow the young students of the White Rose have become martyrs, remembered and celebrated for their courage and self sacrifice. Kip Wilson's just-published White Rose (Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2019) joins the accounts of this small band that could not stop the devastation but whose writings survived to speak volumes to the peace that finally came. Written in lyrical free verse, Wilson's narrative brings to young adults of our time the immediacy of the words of these courageous and hopeful young people who gave their own lives to save their country and speak their truth to the future. Sophie Scholl speaks in her own voice, across the years, of what must be done when there is no one else who will.

I for one refuse
to be guilty
going forward.

Author Wilson provides an author's note, a dramatis personae, a glossary of German terms, and a bibliography of books in English and in German for young scholars. See also Russell Freedman's dramatic history of this movement, We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards)) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2016) (reviewed here).

Seven Crows For a Secret, Not To Be Told: One For Sorrow by Mary Downing Hahn

At the door to my room, Elsie stopped and stared."This is all yours? Oh, Annie, you are so lucky."

Elsie tried out the rocking chair Father had made for me. She even opened the doors to the tall wardrobe and flipped through my skirts and dress and blouses. Finally she sat down on my bed and gave a little bounce. "You are my best friend. What good times we'll have playing here." I tried to smile. Elsie picked up Edward Bear and squeezed his tummy to make him growl. "What makes that noise?" She poked Edward's belly harder. "We should cut him open and find out. He's just a stuffed animal. Old and ugly and smelly."

"Give him to me," I cried. "I've had him since I was a baby. I'd never hurt him.""

It is 1918, and shy, only child Annie has just started sixth grade in a new school in a new town and longs to be accepted by the circle of girls led by the bold, red-haired Rosie, but before their first recess, Elsie grabs her hand and telling her how mean the other girls are, forces her to play only with her. And after school, uninvited she follows Annie home. Annie's mother kindly invites her to stay for dinner, but Annie finds it impossible to like Elsie, overweight, with horribly crooked teeth, and seeming to hate everyone--the teacher, the other students, even her stepmother and father whom she claims beat her and lock her in her room. Annie tries to be polite, but there is something frightening about Elsie that makes her wish she would stay away.

Then Elsie is absent from school for several days, and Annie is accepted by Rosie and the others into their group. Rosie is daring and mischievous and invents wonderful ideas for after-school adventures. And when the Spanish flu strikes their town, and black wreaths appear on the doors of many houses, Rosie has the most audacious idea ever--that the girls join the mourners and follow them to help themselves to the refreshments for the wake. Annie is unwilling, but follows Rosie for fear of losing her friends, and Rosie thinks nothing of studying the obituaries in the newspaper to prepare to make conversation at the wakes.

Then, on one cold dark afternoon, the girls come upon Elsie, wearing a flu mask, all alone on a swing, and Rosie leads the girls in teasing her. They circle around her, singing,

I had a little bird,
And its name was Enza.
I opened up the window,
And in flew Enza.

Annie feels ashamed as Elsie cries and tries to escape from the circle, but led by Rosie, the girls chase her partway home.

Then several days later, crashing another wake, the girls get a shock.

"Come in and say goodbye to her," the woman at the door said.

All five of us arrived at the coffin at the same moment. We all gasped, even Rosie, and backed away. It was Elsie. Rosie's face was so pale every freckle stood out. "We just saw her a few days ago," she whispered.

Sobered by the thought that they somehow might have contributed to Elsie's death, the girls attend no more wakes. Annie has constant nightmares about Elsie, but with the end of the war, everyone's spirits begin to rise, and with school still canceled, the girls spend their days outside in snowball fights and sledding. Then, near twilight one night, Rosie dares them all to take their sleds to the big hill inside the cemetery. The paths are crooked and icy, and Annie crashes into a monument adorned with an angel. When she comes back to consciousness, she sees that it is Elsie's tombstone, and inside her aching head she hears Elsie's voice. And then Elsie appears as well.

Elsie floated above the snow. She wore the same pale blue silk dress she'd worn when I last saw her lying in her coffin.

"Why don't you say hello? Now that I'm dead, I mean to have the friend I wanted--you, Annie," she whispers.

Elsie haunts Annie's sleeping and waking moments and begins to possess her mind, making her say and do things she doesn't want to do until her "precarious state of mind" forces her parents to place Annie in a convalescent home, in Mary Downing Hahn's moving story, One for Sorrow: A Ghost Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Inspired by her own mother's memories of the influenza song and many children's funeral wakes from her childhood days, Hahn places this story in the days of the Spanish flu epidemic, long-past time which sets the scene for a memorable ghost tale. But this one is no horror story, meant only to spark shivers and keep pages turning. Hahn's ability to blend evil and good in her stories is inimitable, here pitting the angry but pitiable spirit of Elsie against the essential goodness of Mrs. Jameson, a frail elderly patient at the home who, as she lies dying, promises to free Annie by leading Elsie's restless ghost to reunite with the spirit of her lost mother.

Buffered by the author's empathy for all her characters and her well-drawn apparitions, Hahn's novels leave her readers with a deepened understanding of human nature in which ghosts finally find peace, leaving the reader with an affirmation of life.

Hahn's other noted ghost tales include Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story, , a classic which was made into a feature-length movie, Time for Andrew: A Ghost Story,  The Old Willis Place, and Stepping on the Cracks, all great for middle readers on those long summer afternoons and dark and stormy summer nights.

"The War To End All Wars:" In the Fields and the Trenches: The Famous and the Forgotten on the Battlefields of World War I by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

On Monday, June 29, 1914, newboys on American and European streets shouted headlines with reports of an assassination. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie, shot, point blank, in Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Most Americans and many Europeans didn't dwell on the killings. Bosnia, tucked into the southern end of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, seemed remote. Irene Curie, a French student, looked forward to her vacation at the seaside. British student Ronald Tolkien was writing letters to his fiance' in a fanciful language he called Elvish. Across the Atlantic, high school sophomore Ernest Hemingway was working at his family's summer home. Seventeen-year-old Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, had friends coming to celebrate the Fourth, and comic Buster Keaton was making people laugh on New York's vaudeville stages.

But the "Great War," the war "to make the world safe for democracy," "the war to end all wars" was already inevitable, the jigsaw pieces of European alliances falling into place as if predetermined, and the lives of many young people--the famous, the future famous, and the unknown--were forever changed, as was warfare itself. On the ground, cavalry contended with tanks, submarines sank ocean liners full of tourists, civilians feared homegrown terrorists and spies, and in the air, the first fighter planes and bombers went to war. Powerful artillery limited ground warfare to deadly trench warfare in which waves of soldiers went "over the top" to be slaughtered by the thousands in the machine gun crossfire.

It was the cause celebre, and young people from two continents volunteered for military service. Those who could not join sought to serve in non-combat roles. Irene Curie, daughter of the famed Marie and Pierre Curie and a future Nobel Award winner, turned from physics to nursing and eventually, working with her mother, manned the mobile x-ray trucks which allowed surgeons to save lives. With three of his Oxford College chums, Ron Tokien, the J. R. R. Tolkien, left his language studies to rush to enlist in the Signal Corps, but eventually served in the infantry, surviving his time in the bloody trenches to go on to write of Middle Earth warfare between orcs and fairies, hobbits and dragons. Superstar of the 1910s, baseball pitcher Christy Mathewson, already in his thirties, signed up along with star Ty Cobb, contracting the tuberculosis which eventually cost him his life.

Too young for the army, teenager Ernest Hemingway served as a Red Cross ambulance driver for three weeks, heroically saved one soldier under fire, and spent the rest of his time recovering from wounds, charming and romancing the nurses, and living to gain fame as a foremost novelist. Deadpan comic Buster Keaton was drafted out of his early Hollywood success, and with only two weeks of basic training was thrown into the fray in France, losing much of his hearing but living to become a silent movie star. Future president Harry S. Truman lived through gas attacks at the front to return home to Missouri politics, but "gentleman pilot" Quentin Roosevelt survived little more than the eleven days, the average for U. S. airmen dogfighting against the Red Baron.

There were lesser known and unknown young people who sought to serve. Henry Lincoln Johnson, led the African American "Hellfighters Division" in the homecoming parade and ultimately was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2015. "Aviatrix" Katherine Stinson, famed early barnstorming female pilot, was turned down for fighter duty in the air over France, but with her flying circus was put to work raising millions for Liberty Bonds and the Red Cross and finally made it to France as an ambulance driver and had just received been made airmail messenger for General Pershing's headquarters when she became a casualty of the 1918 influenza epidemic in Paris.

World War I changed everything, casting its shadow over the rebound hedonism of the roaring twenties and the Depression years to follow, and foreshadowing the Second World War to come, impacted the lives of the lost and those who lived on far into the twentieth century.

Kerrie Logan Hollihan's In the Fields and the Trenches: The Famous and the Forgotten on the Battlefields of World War I (Chicago Review Press, 2016) gives young adult readers an up-close-and-personal look at some of real people, noted and unknown, for whom the "Great War" was the determining experience of their lives. Told with an engaging immediacy which will appeal to readers and backed up for research with ample photos, a timeline, end notes, bibliography, and index, this book is useful for supplementary reading for world history students and history buffs alike. “A worthwhile addition to every library collection and a natural for military-history enthusiasts,” says Kirkus Reviews.

Going Home: The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

The train was miserable, of course.

The world moved outside the train windows, faster and faster. The buildings ended and suddenly there was green. "What's that?" I asked. "Grass," Jamie said. There was nothing like it that I'd ever seen. I knew green from clothing and cabbages, not fields.

"Ada! Ada! Look!" Jamie whispered.

A girl on a pony was racing the train. She was actually on top of the pony, sitting on its back. The girl was laughing, her face wide open with joy, and it was clear even to me that she meant to be on the pony. I knew ponies from the lane, but only to pull carts. I didn't know you could ride them. The girl leaned forward against the pony's flying mane. Her legs thumped the pony's sides and the pony surged forward, faster, brown legs flying. I saw a stone wall ahead. I gasped. They were going to hit it. Why didn't she stop the pony?

They jumped it.

Suddenly, I could feel it with my whole body--the running, the jump, the flying. "I'm going to do that," I said.

Nothing could have seemed less possible for Ada, born with a clubfoot and confined her entire life to the one room in which she, her six-year-old brother Jamie, and her cruel mother live. While Jamie plays freely in the streets outside, all Ada knows of the world is the view from behind the curtain of their one window. Her mam considers her deformity a shameful mark of the Devil and refuses to let her leave the room.

Then the coming of World War II threatens London, and children are hastily evacuated to the countryside before the bombing begins. Mam agrees to send Jamie with the others, and despite her fear of her mother's beatings and the cockroach infested cabinet in which she is locked for disobedience, Ada resolves that she and Jamie will not be separated. Ada and Jamie slip out while Mam sleeps, Ada managing to walk to the station and talk herself and Jamie onto the train among the others. At last they reach a station in Kent, and Ada sees her first toilet and sink. As she washes her hands and face, she sees herself for the first time in a mirror--the shabbiest, nastiest looking girl ever, she thinks.

At their destination, Ada sees her self description in the eyes of the villagers who have come to take in the evacuees. But the stern woman in charge says she has the perfect place for them.

"It's a single lady," the woman replied. "She's very nice."

Jamie shook his head. "Mam says nice people won't have us."

The corner of the woman's mouth twitched. "She isn't that nice. Plus, it's not for her to decide."

Susan is not that nice. She is gruff and obviously not pleased with the dirty, malnourished pair assigned to her, but she gives them hot baths, and a couple of her own clean shirts to wear while she washes their one set of ragged clothes. And she feeds them--more and better food than they've ever seen. And then Ada sees something that changes everything for her.

To the right of the house a bright yellow pony puts its head through the bushes and and stared at me.

In Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's latest, The War that Saved My Life (Dial Books, 2015), the author portrays the long struggle toward trust and independence that Ada finds with Susan, and although Mam reappears and takes them back to London, Ada and Jamie realize where their real home is just as the Blitz begins in London.

Bradley's first-person narration has that magical quality of classic children's novels to put the reader right into the protagonist's mind and body, no easy task in the case of a character in 1940 who has almost no knowledge of the outside world. But somehow readers come to see the world through Ada's eyes as she, and Susan as well, find their way to a wider world and greater possibilities for themselves. With plenty of wartime action and a bit of Nazi spy-catching, there is much for middle readers to love in Bradley's exceptional storytelling. Few writers have the ability to take their characters so far, so believably, movingly, unsentimentally, and with no sacrifice of hard-headed reality, into a new life, right down to its pitch-perfect conclusion. Appropriately, this novel has been met with deservedly glowing approval by critics and merits high honors at award time, one not to be missed. "Achingly lovely . . . Nuanced and emotionally acute, this vivid tale from the wartime home front will have readers ages 10-14 wincing at Ada's stumbles and rejoicing to the point of tears in her victories," raves the staid The Wall Street Journal.

Spies Behind Enemy Lines: Danger in the Darkest Hour (Magic Tree House House) by Mary Pope Osborne

"JUMP, JACK!" Teddy yelled.

Falling through the air, Jack forgot everything--legs together--face earth--arch back--spread arms--count to five. But miraculously, he remembered, Pull rip cord!

As the chute's white canopy opened above Jack, it yanked him backward. The billowing silk slowed his downward plunge. Jack clutched his field pack as he drifted through the night air.

The drone of the spy taxi engine faded into the distance. Teddy was gone. Not far away, Jack could see Annie in the moonlight, floating to earth. He was filled with as strange happiness as they both drifted in a dreamlike fall.

Suddenly the earth rose up to meet him. Jack hit the ground with a thud.

"We're in France! We did it!" Annie called from nearby.

When they unrolled the message from a little red canister delivered to them by carrier pigeon from 1945, Jack and Annie knew that they wouldn't be in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, much longer.

This time the two time travelers are summoned, not on a Merlin mission, but on an undercover mission to help the French Resistance, alerting them to the coming D-Day Invasion that begins the end of World War II. The Magic Tree House delivers them to the Allied airbase at Glastonbury, England, where a huge air armada is about to take off to bomb Nazi installations and railroads in preparation for the invasion of Normandy. There they find their old friend, Teddy, in uniform as an agent of the Special Operations Executive, who asks them to parachute into the farming area near Caen to find Kathleen, who is missing on her mission with the French Resistance in the countryside about to be bombed by the Allies. Time is short, and Jack and Annie's special skills are needed to get her back to England before the Invasion.

Jack and Annie are shown the secret "V for Victory" sign to recognize the Resistance fighters and given only a cryptic rhyme and the promise of the help of the magic Wand of Dianthus.

Three miles east of Sir Kay's grave,

Cross a river to find a cave.

Look for knights and small, round cows--

A crack in the rock beneath the boughs.

It's only as the two are dangling from their chutes that they realize that Teddy has neglected to put the Wand in Jack's field pack. With no magic to help them, Jack and Annie realize that they are on their own behind Nazi lines and surrounded by truly deadly danger.

"I guess that means we'll have to help Kathleen without magic," said Annie. "But that's okay. We have lots of skills."

"Like what?" Jack asked grimly.

But the brother and sister find that they do have the right skills--to smile bravely and pretend to be French, to get people talking long enough to gather useful information, and to decode the rhyme and find Kathleen hiding a group of Jewish orphans in a cave accessed by the crack in the rocks by the river.

Now, their mission will be accomplished--if only Jack can resurrect his driving skills, learned in an old truck he was allowed to drive around the fields at Great-Grandpa's farm, well enough to drive an old bread truck loaded with Kathleen and the orphans through the Nazi checkpoint to the field where Teddy will land to take them back across the English Channel in the long night before the Longest Day.

In her new Magic Tree House Super Edition #1, best-selling author Mary Pope Osborne has the skills to take her beginning chapter book readers across the divide and into middle reader historical fiction. Used to the thrills, chills, and spills in the earlier and simpler series, Osborne's practiced readers will find themselves inside a darker historical fiction story where Annie and Jack are in real danger as they escape from the Nazis just in time to alert the French Resistance that it is time to start sabotaging railways, armament dumps, and bridges and tunnels to help the Allies establish a foothold in Europe.

Magic Tree House Super Edition #1: Danger in the Darkest Hour (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)) (Random House, 2015) drops young readers back into a time when the fate of Europe really hung in the balance and when the courage of many brave people saved the future world we now live in. An exciting and enlightening look back at a time that shaped our own, one from which most eyewitnesses are now vanishing, this rather realistic book makes a good introduction to the many novels and accounts of World War II waiting ahead for middle readers.

"I Am Become Death:" Bomb:The Race to Build--and Steal--The World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin

"Zero!

And then, without a sound, the sun was shining. Or so it looked."

"I looked back up, and I see this white light changing into... a big ball of orange."

"It lighted every peak, crevasse, and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described."

The fireball continued rolling, twisting itself into an enormous mushroom shape, glowing dark purple.

"It worked," whispered Robert Oppenheimer to himself.

With the billowing of that first iconic mushroom cloud, the Trinity Project proved that indeed an incredibly destructive weapon was now possible. The news of the first experimental fission in a German scientist's lab in 1938 had spread quickly throughout the world of physics. This new science was quickly understood as a source of potentially destructive energy, and as World War II began, physicists in England, the United States, Russia, and Germany realized that nuclear fission held the possibility for a super weapon and that whichever nation could first produce a bomb utilizing this power would win the war and could conceivably rule the world.

Steve Sheinkin's Newbery-winning Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon (Newbery Honor Book) (Roaring Brook, 2012) skillfully weaves three suspenseful strands together into one powerful story--the story of the band of scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer that raced to win the race to create the bomb, the story of the band of Soviet spies who infiltrated Oppenheimer's team  to steal America's  plans for Stalin's bomb, and the band of Norwegian resistance fighters who wiped out Germany's heavy water plant and prevented Germany from completing their bomb before their defeat.

Sheinkin's narration fully portrays the stranger-than-fiction suspense of all three of these stories, beginning with the frantic efforts of American Soviet spy Harry Gold's to destroy the evidence of his years of espionage as FBI agents approach his door. Sheinkin switches seamlessly to the search for Albert Einstein, vacationing incognito somewhere on the Atlantic coast, by two scientists determined to recruit him to petition President Roosevelt to set up the American bomb-building effort, and then moves to the mountains of Norway where resistance fighters cripple the Nazi plant to produce heavy water and then slip aboard a  nondescript barge ferrying the rest of the product, planting explosives and effectively scuttling Germany's atomic bomb project.  Juggling a cast of characters beyond a Hollywood script writer's wildest imagination, Sheinkin breathes life into these historic figures, showing them in all of their conflicted humanity, as revealed in the words of the principle actors themselves.

Oppenheimer's relief that his project had not failed faded immediately.

"It was solemn." Oppenheimer recalled. "We knew the world would not be the same."

He thought of a line from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The flight crew of the Enola Gay returning from the bombing run on Hiroshima had similar thoughts.  Navigator Rob Lewis immediately scribbled in his logbook, "My God, what have we done?"  Pilot Paul Tibbetts echoed Oppenheimer. "...the world would never be the same. War, the scourge of the human race since time began, now held terrors beyond belief."

To shape all of these small and world-shaking events into a meaningful whole, gripping for fifth-graders or adults, was a monumental effort for author Sheinkin.  His book reads like a "who-done-it"--and even though we may know how the story ends, the how and why of these three cataclysmic conspiracies make for totally absorbing and thought-provoking reading in which even the purported villains have their own understandable motivations, ultimately leaving the reader satisfied, but sadder and wiser.  The fact that Sheinkin's book was a National Book Award finalist and received three awards from the American Library Association--a Newbery Honor Award, the Siebert Award for informational books, and the Young Adult Library Services Award for nonfiction--shows his success as a storyteller and historian.

Even his grainy period photos and his khaki-drab cover convey a sense of the times, a time at once receding rapidly into the history-book past and yet still with us in the daily news of Iran's uranium enrichment scheme.   In his concluding chapter, the author reminds the reader that what he modestly calls "a big story," did not end at Nagasaki, as in a mind-blowing two sentences he traces the threat of the nuclear race to the present day.

"It's a story with no end in sight. And like it or not, you're in it," says Sheinkin.

For students, Steve Sheinkin adds a extensive appendix of source notes, quotation notes,  and a detailed index.

The Washington Post  calls this book "a fast-paced thriller that happens to be fascinatingly true…."

Survivor's Story: The Last Train: A Holocaust Story by Rona Arato

"We don't want the soup to get cold. We..." Mother froze.  Someone was pounding on the front door.

"Don't answer it." Anyu said.

The pounding grew louder. A voice barked, "Open up!"

Anyu wiped her hands on her apron. She walked to the living room... and opened the door. Two soldiers pushed past her, almost knocking her down. Aunt Bella ran in, followed by Kati and Magdi.

"You, Jews! Outside! Now!"

It is Hungary in 1944, and at last the police and SS soldiers have begun to round up the remaining Jews, the elderly, women and children, to transport them to the east, to the concentration camps in Germany.

Five-year-old Paul and ten-year-old Oscar and their mother are thrown into crowded boxcars and transported across the border to Austria and finally to Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died. Barely fed, wearing only their light summer clothes, they endure the horrors of the camp through the long winter and into the spring of 1945. Anyu, their mother, tries to take care of them, combing the lice that spread typhus from their hair and sharing what food and warmth she has, but as the winter passes, she sickens and grows weak, so weak that Paul and Oscar have to hold her up, standing for hours in the cruel daily lineups that lasted for hours, knowing that if she falls, she will be shot instantly.

But one day as spring comes, the brothers see something in the sky, something that gives them hope. The boys watched, transfixed, as what is clearly a British fighter gets the best of a dogfight with a German plane. As the Nazi aircraft falls from the sky, the boys realize that the Allied Forces must be nearing Germany, and they beg their mother to hold on.

Then, one morning their roll call is ominously different. The soldiers herd them again into boxcars, this time so crowded so that some of them are forced to stand, sometimes packed so tightly that the dead and dying cannot fall. For days with little food and water they roll again toward the east, deeper into Germany. And then, one morning, the train stops.

Through a crack, Oscar peered outside. The soldiers were yelling and setting up machine guns. He closed his eyes. It's over. They are finally going to kill us.

Oscar turned away, when something caught his attention. What was it? 

Silence. The soldiers had dropped their weapons and were running away.

"What is that?" Paul peered through the crack.

"It's a tank." Oscar's voice trembled. "It has a star painted on the front. And there's a Jeep behind it."

He turned to face the people huddled behind him. "I think they are Americans!"

And then the door slid open.

Paul and Oscar were lucky.  The Death Train, as it came to be called, was fortunately intercepted before the Jews inside reached the place where they would be executed and their bodies hidden from the advancing Allied forces.  Eventually  the family was repatriated to Hungary, then in the Soviet zone,  and Anyu, Paul and Oscar were reunited with their father.  Paul grew up eventually made his way to Toronto, his grim story mostly untold, even to  his own children.

And then, one day in 2008, as he was reading the news on his computer, Paul sees a photo that brought back that moment when the death train stopped and the doors opened.

The picture on the screen shows a woman running toward the camera, arms outstretched, her face a mask of surprise. Yet what catches Paul's attention is in the background--an abandoned freight train. Sixty years earlier he was on that train. He was six years old on April 13, 1945, when two American soldiers in a tank liberated him and thousands of other prisoners. For sixty years he has thought about that day and about the soldiers who saved his lives.

In her memoir of her husband's experiences, The Last Train: A Holocaust Story (Owlkids Books, 2013), Rona Arato recounts a survivor's story just as he lived it, part of a ongoing history of that time. Author Arato concludes with the 2009 reunion of some of the survivors of the last train with their liberators, as Paul finds and embraces the very two soldiers who saved their lives by stopping their execution. Arato tells the story matter-of-factly, but it is of itself a gripping story for young readers, of a young boy's memories of a time in human history that should never be forgotten.