Behind the pages: The Bravest Soldiers by Elaine Schroller

Tell us a bit about who you are and how you write?

I was a long-time technical writer who read historical fiction and mysteries to escape to other places and times. At a certain point I wondered whether I could write too! I became fascinated by the historical and cultural relationships between Australia, France, and the US during WWI and WWII and simply had to explore the possibilities!

What is your book about?

Set in Sydney, Australia, The Bravest Soldiers is about how two women, one a mother who experienced WWI as a nurse in France and the other a daughter who was conceived during WWI and grew up amid its ruins, cope (or not in some cases) when WWII separates them from people they love. In the course of following their personal and emotional journeys, I’ve written how the Australian home front dealt with the effects of a threat of invasion by the Japanese and a very real invasion by hundreds of thousands of US service personnel, most of whom had never been more than fifty miles from home!

Why this story and why now?

While writing my debut novel Dare Not Tell, which does a deep dive into the long-term effects of WWI on an Australian soldier and an American nurse, I knew I wanted to continue their stories and explore how WWII would affect them. Despite a glut of WWII novels that were published in and around 2020, I had to tell the story I’d dreamed up! Luckily, Australia and the Pacific are less well-known venues than those set in Europe involving the French and Nazis.

Where did you go to research this story?

Abroad, I spent eight days in Sydney, visiting numerous museums, churches, memorials, and suburbs, plus two days in the Blue Mountains, to place the characters firmly where I wanted them on the home front – sitting next to the bronze soldier memorial in St. Mary’s cathedral, standing at what is now the Dudley Page Reserve in Dover Heights and taking in the ocean and harbor views, trying to compare everything I saw in 2019 with photos of 1940s Sydney. I also drew upon several trips to France (including the Somme battlefields and the Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux) and living in Lebanon for the locations outside Australia and the sphere of the South West Pacific Area.

At home in Bellaire, Texas, I read dozens of WWII-era novels by Australian authors, including the classics Come In Spinner by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James and Climate of Courage by Jon Cleary, multiple academic publications, and spent innumerable hours on the Australian War Memorial and Trove/Sydney Morning Herald websites. 

Tell us a story you came across in research that didn’t make it into the book.

One of the Australian ladies I interviewed worked as a WAAF assigned to General Douglas McArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane. She was twenty-ish at the time and desperate to escape the confines of conventional female plus family expectations and participate in the war effort. I wanted to include her and her experiences but simply couldn’t find a way to work her in except as a brief mention as the sister of one of the secondary characters.

Is there a WWII book that you would like to peek behind the pages of? It can be fiction or non-fiction. Feel free to send your suggestion to me via the contact page.