Gina Rae Mitchell

What type of novels do you write?

I write historical fiction and modern-historical suspense novels. I don’t want to be limited to one particular time or physical setting, so my stories take place from the 1600s to the present day, primarily in the United States and Europe. For the time being, I am focusing on historically accurate historical fiction on WWI, the Golden Age of Piracy, and pre-1900 U.S. Western and colonial history.

What is your newest book, Soldiers of Freedom about?

Soldiers of Freedom: The WWII Story of Patton’s Panthers and the Edelweiss Pirates, Book 5 of my WWII Series, is the true story of the 1944-1945 War in Western Europe and the final Allied struggle to conquer Nazi Germany. The story is told through the eyes of William McBurney, a tank gunner in the 761st Tank Battalion, the first African-American tank unit in U.S. history; dynamic General George S. Patton, Jr., commander of the U.S. Third Army; and Angela Lange, a sixteen-year-old German resistance fighter with the anti-Nazi Edelweiss Pirate Resistance Group in Cologne. In the book, Patton’s forces liberate France and Belgium, fight in the grueling Battle of the Bulge, and cross the Rhine to conquer Germany, while U.S. tanker William McBurney and his Black Panthers under Patton’s command must fight two wars at once: one against the German army, the other against the racism of their fellow white soldiers from the Deep South. As the Allies drive into Germany, Angela Lange and her Edelweiss Pirates must survive the Allied bombing of Cologne, while she engages in fierce resistance against the Hitler Youth and Nazis and is hunted down by the Gestapo.

Who do you think will enjoy Soldiers of Freedom?

Fans of Beneath A Scarlet Sky, Spearhead, and the WWII novels of Ken Follett (Winter of the World, Jackdaws, Eye of the Needle), I believe, will enjoy the real-life heroism of the 761st Black Panthers and legendary Patton to liberate Europe, and the Edelweiss Pirates to combat Nazism. Readers will be interested to learn that the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion was not only the first African-American tank unit in U.S history to see action, but was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its service during WWII. They will also be interested to know that the German Edelweiss Pirates have been recognized by the German government and by the Holocaust Remembrance Group Yad Vashem for their resistance activities against the Nazis. Most people don’t know that German resistance fighters were struggling to take on Hitler and National Socialism and who wanted the war to end. My book is dedicated to the members of the 761st and to the Edelweiss Pirates: they are the Soldiers of Freedom.

It’s fascinating that you’re the ninth great-grandson of the notorious privateer Captain William Kidd. How has that relationship influenced your perspective and research on privateers and pirates?

Most of all, the ancestral connection to Captain Kidd has made me want to strive for historical accuracy because the Golden Age of Piracy and privateers-pirates like Kidd and Blackbeard have been inaccurately portrayed in books, movies, and television. Historians, authors, and filmmakers are going to have different interpretations of character and motivation, but they should never purposefully deviate from the established historical facts. In my book Blackbeard: The Birth of America, I strove for historical accuracy, and there is not a single character in the book that is not based on an actual historical figure (with the exception of a quartermaster to a secondary pirate captain, whose name is unknown). I owe it to my ancestor Captain Kidd to get privateer-pirate stories right.

You mentioned that you are especially interested in military history and espionage, specifically related to the Golden Age of Piracy, Plains Indian Wars, and World War II. What is it about those subjects that fascinate you, and does that fascination influence your work?

The short answer is that I’ve always loved history, especially the underdogs and iconoclasts of American history. I grew up watching classic World War Two movies and Westerns with my dad like The Great Escape, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, Where Eagles Dare, and Patton. These movies had a profound impact on me and the stories I have come to tell. Because of this, it comes as no surprise that my books have been compared to movies like The Great Escape, Public Enemies, The Day of the Jackal, and old-time Westerns and to WWII books like Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War.

How much of your historical fiction novels are real (pure history) versus fictionalized?

As long as I have solid documentation of a historical figure (date, place, people present, main items being discussed or actions taken, etc.), I try to base every scene in my books except romance scenes on actual, known historical events. For these scenes, I pick the highs and lows in a character’s historic career. Some of the famous characters whose heads I get inside in a deep way are WWII Generals Patton and Rommel, Blackbeard the pirate captain, and Eddie Chapman, the famous WWII British spy, and safecracker who took on the Nazis and was the basis for James Bond. My historical fiction books are typically 80-90% pure history, taken from interviews, case files, direct quotes, memoirs, interrogations, and intelligence reports.

What is the number one thing you want readers to take away from your novels?

I want people to root for the underdog. All of my books feature underdogs, iconoclasts, and sympathetic villains that are torn up inside on account of the havoc-causing decisions they are forced to make. I also want the reader to come away having learned something, whether it be about the first African-American tank unit in U.S. history, German anti-Nazi Youth Resistance fighters, or what privateers and pirates were really like.