Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of World War II by Various Authors, Henry Herz

Combat Monsters brings together twenty award-winning and bestselling speculative fiction authors who each bring their own spin on an alternate history of World War II.

New research has uncovered deeply buried military secrets -- both the Allied and Axis special operations during World War II included monsters. Did the Soviets use a dragon to win the Battle of Kursk? Did a vampire fight for the Canadians in Holland? Did the US drop the second atomic bomb on a kaiju?

This collection takes real events from World War II and injects them with fantastical creatures that mirror the "unreality" of war itself. Each story -- and two poems -- feature mythical, mystical, and otherwise unexplainable beings that change the course of history. Dragons rise and fall, witches cast deadly spells, mermaids reroute torpedoes, and all manner of "monsters" intervene for better or worse in the global turmoil of World War II.

Together, Combat Monsters challenge the very definition of monstrous, with the brutality of war as a sobering backdrop.

Edited by Henry Herz

Introduction by Joshua Palmatier

Stories by Jane Yolen, Mary Fan, Eugen Bacon, Jeff Edwards, Peter Clines, Lee Murray, Bishop O’Connell, Tori Eldridge, Harry Turtledove, Catherine Stine, Scott Sigler, Gaby Triana, Henry Herz, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Jonathan Maberry, Andrea Tang, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Jeremy Robinson, Tanya Huff, and David Mack