Document text
- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels April 8, 2004 The dark tale of 'Wings' By Andrew Scot Bolsinger Ashland Daily Tidings For Marshall Umpleby the motivation to write was not to become the next Tom Clancy. It stemmed rather, from a lifetime of teaching others to write. The vocation pushed the love of stories to a more conscious level of wanting to create one himself. He also began reading more about the World War II era. Having twice been to Prague, Czechoslovakia, the impact of Nazi Germany during the war became a perfect setting for a historical novel percolating in Umpleby. "I was doing research, not realizing I was doing research," he says. Finally, after retiring to Ashland and dabbling in short stories, the idea for a historical novel was turned from wistful dream to reality. The final ingredient for the book came when Umpleby listened to a distant relative tell the story of how, when he was 18 years old, he was conscripted into the German army during World War II. The relative managed to escape and get back to Prague. "But that's all he would tell me about it," Umpleby says. "I thought, 'God, that would be a great story.' So I made it up." "On Falcon's Wings," a historical novel to be released sometime this year, was the end result. The plot line centers on five boys, ages 16 and 17, "virtually kidnapped by drunken German soldiers, put on a troop train headed for Stalingrad," Umpleby says. Umpleby draws upon the true story of an assassination attempt on top Nazi Reinhardt Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust. Though the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, Heydrich died from complications, sending Adolph Hitler into a rage. Thousands were killed in punishment and an entire town - Lidice, population 197 - was destroyed, with all the inhabitants killed or sent to prison camps. During his visits to Prague, Umpleby went to the museums, the bullet-scared churches and the place were Lidice stood just a generation ago. "There is absolutely nothing there," he says of the town. "Go there now and it's really a landscape." In the tragic aftermath of the assassination, the boys are kidnapped and sent to the Eastern front to do brutal work like digging anti-tank trenches or finding safe passage through mine fields. Realizing that they will most likely be killed by either the mines, the Russians or the Germans, some of the teenagers manage to escape. During their perilous trip home, the boys are rescued by partisans, aided by sympathetic Ukrainians, and brutalized by Nazis. "Some pretty horrible things happen, as you can image," Umpleby says. The story is not a happy one, but a tense war novel. "It was hard to write about," Umpleby says. "I had never written about this type of thing before. In many ways it was painful." At times he rereads the manuscript and it "still brings me to tears," he says. "It's dark. It's not a very happy story. But the kids that did survive, and some of them obviously did not, are lucky." But that's how novels are for many writers. They take over. The fiction lives in the inner mind, playing out, rolling around and as the writing continues, the lives on the page become almost real. Umpleby says the experience surprised him, as the book took turns and moved in ways he didn't anticipate at first. The end result, "is something of a dream come true," he says, eagerly anticipating a release date some time this year. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams