When the protagonist of The Millennium Man, Harley Melanson, leaves his job as a barnstormer he joins the Lincoln Brigade as a fighter pilot and fights against the Facists forces of Francisco Franco. Supporting Franco is Adolph Hitler and he sends his Kondor Legion and its new Messerschmitt 109 fighters.Ernest Hemingway is a real-life character I used in this part of the novel in my zeal for a Forrest Gump-type theme throughout the book. As an ambulance driver in norther Italy at the end of World War I Hemingway witnessed the carnage and misery there that was being repeated in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, between General Franco and the (Republican) Loyalist government. In the fall of 1936 Hemingway was invited to cover the War as correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He spent an initial two months there in the spring of 1937, the first of four visits over the next year and a half.
The war was actually a dress rehearsal for World War II and the German Kondor Legion performed the first terror bombing campaign in history. During this time life in the besieged city of Madrid went on: bullfighting, partying and movies. The surreal atmosphere was a great setting.
Melanson enters the war as a mercenary pilot for the Loyalists. He is paid to shoot down German and Italian aircraft using his obsolete, open-cockpit Boeing P-26. This aircraft is the poster object for deco-art of the time and its fixed landing gear added to the drag coefficients.This ads to the David vs. Goliath scenes where skill is needed to survive.
The duel between Melanson and Benito Mussolini’s son actually happened except the American pilot, of course, was not my character. But Bruno Mussolini in a more modern Fiat fighter was shot down - and lived - and Captain Derek D. Dickinson landed with 326 bullet holes in his antiquated Russian Mosca.
I don’t like changing the facts like some writers, especially screenwriters, like t do. I want my characters to experience the historic moment.
