About Me

  Michael P. Kihntopf is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and retired high school world history and special education teacher. He holds a B.A. in history from Angelo State University, San Angelo, Texas. He is the author of Victory in the East, the Rise and Fall of the Imperial German Army(2000), Handcuffed to a Corpse, German Intervention in the Balkans, 1914-1917 (2002), The Scent of Roses in Winter (2010), A Day with the Old Folks, Verdun 1916 (2015), Wars Without End, Battles Without Winners, France to Petrograd March 1918-December 1920 (2017),  A Remote Army Post in the Desert, Petrograd to Shanghai, November 1919 – January 1922, and Unexpected Twists, Berlin 1919 to Madrid 1936. The first two works dealt with a German perspective of the World War 1 Eastern Front. The rest are adventure novels with a central theme of individual experience at war and in the turmoil that followed World War 1. He has written over 20 articles about World War 1 for such magazines as Strategies and Tactics, Military History, Command, and Relevance and reviewed books for The Journal of Military History. Titles of those articles appear in the menu.  He is also the chairperson for the Southwest Branch of the World War I Historical Association, an organization affiliated with the Western Front Association which has chapters worldwide.   

The inspiration for my interest in World War 1 and its aftermath arrived at my house on a summer afternoon in 1992.  Amid packing of old newspapers I found my grandfather's World War 1 trip book and photo album.  The trip book contained place names and a rather large assortment of poems.  Painstakingly I arranged the images by date and considered each one.  My questions were who were these people, where were they and what happened to them.  Out of that came ten years of research and two non-fiction history books.  But I turned myself to fiction because I thought clinical representation of history did not reflect the emotions that went with people who formed events.