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And the Walls Came Tumbling Down follows American and German families across two world wars as their children inherit dreams, prejudices, loyalties, and choices that eventually place them on opposite sides of an altered World War II. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Several.
First, not all Germans were Nazis, just as not all Japanese Americans were loyal to Japan. (See my novel The Two Terrors of Tulelake)
Second, I wanted to explore the backstories, the local stories, of those who fought on both sides of that conflict.
Third, how would the war have changed if certain key historical events had failed?
What interested you about exploring not simply whether history could have happened differently, but what those changes might have cost?
I wanted to examine what those changes might have cost, both physically and mentally, to individuals, groups of people, and nations. My own family had several veterans of World War II, and they were not comfortable in sharing their stories. The History Channel‘s World War II with Tom Hanks had two interesting questions from survivors and participants alike: “Who could do such a thing?” “How can one people do this to another people?” I wanted to share with a younger generation the horrors of concentration camps. Also, the 1846 translation of Eugène Sue’s novel Memoirs of Matilda included a famous quote — “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” This quote served as a connection to the second book in the trilogy, The Spies From Camp X.
What did you want to explore about humanity’s relationship with increasingly powerful weapons?
Someone can always create a bigger gun, a faster bullet, or a higher platform from which to destroy mankind. J. Robert Oppenheimer once said, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Albert Einstein once said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
T.S. Elliott wrote, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” I ask, “Where will it end?”
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Two families, one American and one German, collide across World War I, the Great Depression, and a radically altered World War II, shaped by hatred, sacrifice, and forces that feel uncomfortably divine. As twin brothers choose opposing paths within Nazi Germany and a Texas farm boy takes to the skies, history veers off course. D-Day collapses in disaster. Britain faces annihilation. Volunteer pilots launch desperate missions, and a single flight toward Berlin carries the weight of ending the war at an unimaginable cost. Biblical echoes of Jericho haunt every turning point, raising unsettling questions about destiny, justice, and intervention.
Blending military history, family saga, and psychological tension, this gripping alternative history challenges readers to ask what if history changed, and what the cost of that change would be.
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down by WM Gunn is a sprawling historical thriller that mixes twentieth-century warfare, alternate history, family drama, espionage, and a strong supernatural thread. It opens during World War I, where reports of impossible apparitions and a mysterious force saving British troops at Mons immediately establish that history in this novel has another presence moving behind it. From there, Gunn moves through the aftermath of the Great War, the rise of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Manhattan Project, and the final stages of World War II. The book’s scale is one of its defining features. Real historical figures such as Manfred von Richthofen, Hermann Göring, Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Doolittle, Dwight Eisenhower, Robert Oppenheimer, and Adolf Hitler share the story with fictional families whose lives keep colliding with major events. The result feels like history being taken apart, rearranged, and then put back together along a more ominous path.
The novel’s emotional center comes from the families caught inside that history. Jürgen Kretz begins as a German pilot whose grief, pride, prejudice, and anger pull him toward extremism, while his twin sons, Manfred and Wolfgang, eventually represent radically different responses to the ideology they inherit. Gunn pairs their story with the Maxwell family in Texas, especially Allen Maxwell, whose childhood fascination with flight eventually places him at the center of enormous military decisions. That generational approach gives the novel a sense that beliefs don’t simply appear in wartime. They’re handed down, challenged, strengthened, or rejected. Manfred embraces the Nazi world his father helped support, while Wolfgang gradually chooses resistance, even helping prepare the bomb marked “Shofar” that will eventually be used against Berlin. His final realization ties his own Jewish ancestry to the novel’s biblical imagery, bringing a long-running family conflict into the book’s larger argument about responsibility, inherited hatred, and moral choice.
Gunn’s approach reminds me most of Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy. Like Follett, he enjoys putting fictional characters close enough to famous people and historical turning points that personal lives and world events begin to overlap. Gunn also has a similar appetite for military technology, politics, geography, and the mechanics of how history happens. His style can become almost documentary in its level of detail, especially when describing aircraft, weapons, operations, and military organizations. That density slows some scenes, but it also gives the alternate-history sections a strangely convincing texture. Gunn adds something much more speculative than Follett usually does, though: the destruction of Jericho becomes a template for later acts of destruction, with the image of a massive fist, the sound of the shofar, and the collapsing walls recurring across thousands of years. That biblical thread turns the novel from a conventional wartime epic into a story about civilizations repeatedly reaching moments of judgment.
The final stretch brings all of those elements together in a bleak and memorable way. In Gunn’s altered version of 1945, the Normandy invasion has failed, Nazi Germany remains powerful, and Hitler believes Germany is approaching an ultimate victory. The Allied response culminates in the atomic destruction of Berlin, killing Hitler, Manfred Kretz, and hundreds of thousands of others, while Wolfgang dies after witnessing the devastation and recognizing the connection between the bomb’s name and the shofar of his childhood. Germany subsequently surrenders, but Gunn closes on consequences: Maxwell and Akira face court-martial, the Atomic Age has begun, unresolved secrets remain, and an OSS officer receives a final message suggesting the danger isn’t finished. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down is ultimately a big, ambitious novel about war, hatred, faith, technology, and the decisions people make when history gives them the power to act. Its most interesting idea is also its simplest: walls can protect evil for a long time, but eventually someone has to decide whether bringing them down will save the world or simply create another kind of destruction.
Pages: 349 | ASIN : B0GY9HBXMV
