A Call to War: World War II Comes to Rural America

On December 6, 1941, the rural township of Cussler was making final preparations for the town’s Christmas gala held every year. Nobody in the township, or the entire country, could predict that Sunday, December 7, 1941, would end far differently than anyone would ever imagine. The following morning during the gala, news broke of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The mood turned from celebratory to solemn in a matter of minutes as the reports of the attack on the Pacific Fleet came in. After the attack, the nation became galvanized, and over the coming weeks and months, the young men and women of Cussler Township answered the nation’s call for the war effort. Around the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor, a beautiful young redhead showed up at the local sheriff’s office asking questions about several citizens. Nobody in the town realized the enemy was much closer than anyone could have expected. Love and tragedy will follow characters such as Scott Abel, a German teacher at Cussler High School; Tommy Young, an eighteen-year-old kid and a professional baseball hopeful; Stacey Davis, a nurse at the local hospital; James Hall, a recent high school graduate who works as a mechanic at his father’s shop and others as they leave their sleepy township and are thrust into the most significant conflict the world has ever known. Who will live to make it home and who will not is anybody’s guess.