“I’ve met many presidents, politicians, celebrities, kings, QE2, scientists, historians, and senior military figures over my 59 years, so I can incorporate those experiences into my work. It’s a delicate dance, but one I cherish as a mind-bending challenge.”
So says John W. Warner IV, about how he melded actual historical figures and events into a vast, immersive three-volume historical novel called Little Anton. From his position as a member of one of the country’s most respected and historically significant families, the author has had first-hand encounters with many dignitaries, and that background shows up in spades in this absorbing, richly detailed and researched work.
In a wide-ranging Q&A, the author recently delved deeper into Little Anton, its themes, inspirations and how it all came together.
Q: Little Anton could be classified as historical fiction, a history lesson, a love story, spy story, family saga or all of the above. How do you want people to think of it?
A: The story can be whatever anyone wishes to take away from it. It’s all of the above plus a revealing look at some of Germany’s genuine secret technology that was in the works, technology that’s still classified to this day. The story of the SS and the occult is a true one, but few understand the greater impact of this uncomfortable and inconvenient history, nor its bizarre legacy today.
Q: Whoever would have thought there was a connection between Grand Prix racing and the rise of the Third Reich? How did you come to discover the connection and merge these two seemingly vastly different themes?
A: The story is true but obscure, so I dramatized a good part of it. Josef Goebbels saw the propaganda value of auto racing, and pressured Hitler to sponsor two German teams with Ferdinand Porsche’s help. Hitler may have been a murderous psychopath, but he loved fast cars and racing like his friend Mussolini. The German teams dominated the Grand Prix in the 1930s, a portent of things to come. Racing is war.
Q: How much of your life experience is reflected in the story and in its characters?
A: There’s some in there, especially the racing. I know what it’s like to risk your life weekly and crash at high speed as part of your profession, and as a result I’m in chronic pain to this day. I’ve never been in the military or in combat, but pro racing is an adrenaline-fueled blood sport, so I can relate a bit.
As for Bea, I understand what it’s like growing up in an extremely wealthy, old-money family with very close high-ranking government, intelligence, and military ties. Family politics are also a blood sport.
Q: Lady Bea has been described as a “volatile James Bond.” Would you agree with that assessment?
A: She is by no means a true James Bond, though the author Ian Fleming was a WW2 MI6 agent just like Bea. She is dangerously flawed, irreverent, loathes authority, and doesn’t follow orders very well. Complex, she’s a free spirit, brave, sensitive; a depressive, a drunk, a middling psychic, and a creative genius of sorts under pressure, although an erratic one that pulls many frazzled rabbits out of threadbare hats. Bea’s not cold and calculating like the sexist Bond, nor a lone wolf. She needs others around her to get the job done, preferably old lovers and close friends; she’s quite emotional and prone to outbursts whilst shaking from stress and anger, finger on trigger. Though an arrogant, polished upper-class toff, her dress uniform or clothes can be unkempt at times, her wit biting, slang and cursing worthy only of a British sailor. Twitchy old girl, she is. A “fritzy nut job.”
The inspiration for Bea came from many true accounts of WW2 spies, both male and female. Her cutting humor, historical knowledge, mechanical prowess, hair-brained schemes, and love of speed and flying come from me.
Q: Tell us about the mechanism of combining real-life personalities with fictitious characters. Does this force you to make sure things are correct from a historical perspective, but allow you the freedom to be creative in how the story unfolds?
A: I’ve met many presidents, politicians, celebrities, kings, QE2, scientists, historians, and senior military figures over my 59 years, so I can incorporate those experiences into my work. It’s a delicate dance, but one I cherish as a mind-bending challenge. As always in a novel one must take liberties, but I try to make them historically accurate ones. However, history is also a set of lies agreed upon by the winners, so…
Q: The book weaves in industrial history, the women’s movement, international relations, America’s foreign policy, and engineering challenges. Why were these themes important for you to write about?
A: The mainstream view of WW2 is changing by the month, and we historians know so much more of the secret events that happened, or might have happened. The role of women during the war has never been illuminated at length; women proved themselves over and over in many roles. The war was a game changer. I really like writing and researching about topics that have been given short shrift by mainstream historians ––suspiciously so.
The engineering passages in the book are my gift to fellow gear heads of the world. Everyone’s life is touched by clever engineering; most everyone owns a car or has flown on a plane. Ferdinand Porsche created the first hybrid-electric car in 1903. Few know this, they think it was Tesla or Toyota.
America’s foreign policy of that era is highly intriguing; many in officialdom admired Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. As for technology, we now know much of what we’re told is false, especially regarding atomic, scalar, free energy, and antigravity secrets. Secret weaponry and massive slush funds affect foreign policy under the table. That’s why Hitler declared war on America in January of 1942. He thought Germany was invincible with its new “Wonder Weapons,” and his unlimited Swiss accounts full of captured treasure that grew daily by the ton. He knew he had atomic weapons at his disposal, and much more.
Q: The book details the hidden history of various technological inventions. Why was the history “hidden” and why did you choose to include this in your book?
A: Secrecy is power. Secret weapons, money, and technology constitute raw power.
This history is still hidden because revealing it officially and publicly would cause a political firestorm. The zero-point free energy technology I cover in the book––one that’s clandestinely used by most big militaries worldwide, thanks to the Germans––could have 100 percent alleviated the world’s need for gas, coal, and oil since 1945, and would have transformed entire deserts into lush gardens. But that would have meant the loss of many trillions of dollars to certain corporations, banks, and governments.
But tell people that history, science, and religion are mostly bunk, that secret societies, corporations, and big banks rule the world in the shadows, and international academia and religious institutions completely lose their already fragile credibility. Bea struggles with McMaster’s top secret Gift of the Lamp report on the state of the world––our true history and society as he saw it in 1937––and today, most people would still struggle with it. Or not believe it at all.
Q: Tell us a bit about your upcoming sequel, Lion, Tiger, Bear.
A: The new book is much shorter, a very intense and fast-paced sequel.
Bea, Bernie, Lutz, Porsche, and Alice are back and in rare form, feisty as ever. They are joined by a new character, a Malian French soldier named Gwafa who helped save Bea’s life after her plane crash behind enemy lines.
The sequel begins in June of 1942 during the Libyan-Egyptian Desert War between England and Germany’s Afrika Korps under Rommel. Situations are dire, and Bea continues to grow as a woman and combat-hardened officer.
In the story, via his friend and lover Rudolph Hess, Bernie is convinced the Germans have constructed a new type of airship, a game-changer to win the war carrying an atomic bomb. Together, he and Bea devise an MI6 expedition to find a covert Ahnenerbe SS thorium mining operation hidden in the vast high-altitude Iraqi mountains.
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About John W. Warner IV:
John W. Warner IV is a writer and gentleman farmer whose passion for history, vintage cars and the unsung heroes of WWII has inspired two large-scale creative ventures: a DVD documentary series on the early bootlegging days of NASCAR, The Golden Era of NASCAR, and a four-part historical novel series, Little Anton. An avid researcher of revisionist/alternative history, Warner began writing this book series during a two-year-long recovery from a racing car accident. His extensive research for Little Anton evolved into a gripping historical narrative that reveals hidden truths about technological advancements and prominent leaders active in the WWII era, including Adolf Hitler, Ferdinand Porsche, and Winston Churchill. Part love story and part satire, the book centers on Hitler’s use of Porsche’s brilliant engineering mind to build the world’s fastest machines, and the occultism of the SS to further new advanced weapons of the Wunderwaffe.
John and his wife Teba split their time between their Washington D.C. area residence and their Virginia farm, where he is finishing the sequel to Little Anton, titled Lion, Tiger, Bear.
