Few characters in fiction have a bad heart and live in a hotel with a trickster-hero of an uncle while continuing to chase a lost love in and around the streets of Paris and take racy photographs of girls on bicycles that appear in newspapers around the world.

But then, you haven’t read GERMANY SURRENDERS!

This novel’s narrator, Kurt Bauer or “KB,” is all of the above, as well as being a Harvard student who had gamely tried and failed to enlist after Pearl Harbor before lately settling for suiting up as a war photographer. KB tells his memoir of what followed from the day that his uncle, Fred Morrissey, welcomed him to the war correspondents’ residence in Paris, the Hotel Scribe, and helped get him oriented. The Hotel Scribe was “frat-house crazy” in the middle of war-time Paris. Among other events, KB, still head over heels in love, sees his lost love when that woman, Ripley Fairweather, herself now a war correspondent, suddenly appears at the Hotel Scribe. Any hope of a rekindled romance is short-lived, however, because Ripley falls in love with his uncle. KB’s troubles increase even as the European war zone shrinks until, in the wee hours of the morning of May 7, 1945, he finds himself standing uncomfortably at his uncle’s side at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, France, where they (and the reader) witness the surrender of all German military forces on land, on sea or in the air.

For KB’s uncle, the Army’s immediate attempt to hold back news stories of the surrender is unacceptable. Especially when it turns out that the authorities are motivated by political, not military reasons, Fred’s mind is made up. Fred sees but one moral choice binding him: to get the story out. Against the opposition of all of his colleagues of the world’s free press, he acts in the face of the military censor, whom he confronts personally. No dramatic scene that actually happened in real life is omitted from this novel.

Satisfyingly fast-paced during the war, the novel’s narrative only accelerates after the surrender. A reader observes first-hand a great, historic event on the run, following closely as KB’s Uncle Fred presses on in the only possible way — as the only possible person – from whom the people of the outside world might learn that Germany surrendered that morning and that the war in Europe is finally over.

Will Fred succeed? If he does, what will his government do to him? How will his peers judge Fred? Do Ripley and Fred stay together now? KB answers all of these questions and more in a rare and memorable novel memoir that is educational, entertaining, epic and, in the end, inspiring as well.