Book dives into local WWII history

A forgotten chapter in Valley history and a prominent local military school play central roles in a new book by novelist Elizabeth Tidwell.

Device and Deceit is a historical-fiction thriller set in the Waynesboro area during World War II and involves a German scientist being held at a prisoner of war camp near Sherando Lake who has been working on a device that theoretically could disable the Eastern Seaboard.

Tidwell worked on the book for nearly three years, researching the POW camp at Camp Lyndhurst, even having an adventure of her own earlier this year on a visit to the site of the camp.

“I got turned around and ended up thinking I was going to be stranded out there overnight,” said Tidwell, who followed a dry stream bed back to Va. 664 on the January trip to the Sherando area.

The POW camp in the area held German prisoners in 1944 and 1945. The prisoners were farmed out literally to work on local farms, a fact that Tidwell uses as a key part of the storyline in Device and Deceit.

The captured scientist is farmed out to a local Mennonite family farm, where he convinces the teen-age son of the farm owners to help him build the device that he had been working on before being captured in the North Atlantic.

The story breaks when the boy’s teen-age sister slips a note about the scientist to a Fishburne Military School cadet, who shares the contents with an administrator at the school.

Device and Deceit is Tidwell’s second book. Her first, Memories Will Always Linger, is also set in Waynesboro, at the old girls school at Fairfax Hall.

– Story by Chris Graham