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Creating Commando Comics: “For You the War is Over” – a Writer’s Commentary

By John Freeman on May 10, 2025 • ( 1 )

Andrew Knighton brings us another of his fascinating behind the scenes commentaries on his latest Commando tale, marking VE Day earlier this week, “For You the War is Over”. Commando 5853 is in newsagents now.

Our thanks to the Commando editorial team for providing the pages featured here, published with permission.

SPOILER ALERT – DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU WANT TO READ THE STORY FIRST!

Commando 5853 (For Action and Adventure): For You the War is Over
Story: Andrew Knighton | Art and Cover: Mike Donaldson

Germany, 1945. The end of the war is near. Commando Sergeant Alfred Millin and his comrades are forced to battle their way through what remains of the bitter German forces. Millin worries what awaits him when the fighting is over — will he be pulled back into his criminal past?

• Read our guide to Commando Issues 5851 – 5854 here

Creating “For You The War is Over”

Sometimes, I come up with a Commando script because a specific idea caught my imagination, whether it’s a murder mystery in the Western Desert or the story of a ship’s cat. Other times, they’re written to match specific anniversaries. It gives the folks at DC Thomson something to work with when marketing an issue, and means readers get stories on the bits of history they’re already thinking about. For the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, for example, several of us even wrote a series of connected stories for Commando, about a single family’s experiences of the war.

“For You the War is Over” is another calendar story, written for the 80th anniversary of Operation Plunder, the Allied crossing of the Rhine. This was a symbolically important moment in the fall of the Nazi regime, a sign that the Second World War was reaching its end. It was also one of the last big operations the western Allies carried out.

Issues of Commando are written up to a year in advance, so that there’s plenty of time for the editing, art, and everything else that’s involved in creating a comic. That means I don’t write them close to the anniversaries, when everyone else is talking about them. So 79 years after Operation Plunder rolled into action, I started on “Operation Write About Operation Plunder”, which eventually led to this story…

Details…

If you’ve not read the comic yet, now’s the time to bookmark this page for later. I’m about to get into spoiler territory, as I explore some of the details.

Think of this as a commentary track, for a comic instead of a film. I’m not going to go into every page, but there are some details that might add to our appreciation of the story, and give some insight into the thinking behind one of these scripts…

Page 3

Commando 5853 - For You the War is Over written by Andrew Knighton, with art by Mike Donaldson

Issues of Commando usually start with a bang, so here are our heroes in the thick of the action.

By March 1945, it was crystal clear that Germany was going to be defeated to the point of humiliation, and any sane government would have been suing for piece. But Hitler’s politics had never been rooted in reality, so he had his troops fighting in in battles they couldn’t win.

Page 4

I can’t remember where Millin and Cooper’s names came from. When I’m not turning my friends into action heroes, I usually pluck names out of the news or off the spines of my bookshelf.

Page 7

Action heroes are always climbing up drainpipes, but I’ve never seen anyone manage it in real life. One of these days I’m going to try, just to see if what I’m putting my characters through is practical, but I’ll probably get mistaken for a burglar by the police.

Page 8

Usually, if I want something specific in the layout of a panel, I describe it in the script through writing. For one of the panels on this page, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted but had a tough time putting it into words. To get around this, I drew a sketch to put into the script, and proved why I’ll always be a writer and never an artist…

Page 13

By the spring of 1945, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were facing the question Cooper raises here – what next?

On the surface, it seems like the answer will be good. After all, they wouldn’t face the regular danger of death anymore. But the transition out of army life isn’t an easy one. Many of these men had been in uniform for years. It had given them a sense of purpose and structure, both things that can be hugely beneficial, as Millin shows over the next couple of pages. They were about to lose that, and in 1945 the government wasn’t thinking much about how it would affect them.

Modern governments often do a better job of this. Academics have shad light on the challenges they face, while veterans’ advocacy groups and charities have campaigned for better support as veterans enter civilian life. But knowing the difficulties that question posed gave me something to hang this story off.

If you’ve built your adult life around war, how do you cope when it ends? That seemed like a good question for a story about the last great operation of the war.

Page 18

And now Operation Plunder starts. The smokescreen miles long was a real thing, an impressive piece of stagecraft.

This page raises one of the biggest dangers for soldiers trying to secure a bridgehead in enemy territory – the risk of getting cut off. There were a lot of landing operations during World War Two, some by air and some by water, some of them glorious successes. But any soldier taking party in Operation Plunder would have been painfully aware of the Battle of Arnhem the previous year, and perhaps 1942’s Operation Jubilee, in which landings in enemy territory had gone horribly wrong.

Page 22

Here we meet the other side of the equation, Max Teuber. For German troops, the end of the war meant something very different: defeat, confinement, and facing the ruin that war had made of their homeland. I tried to get across the combination of determination and exhaustion among those who remained.

Page 26 and 27

During the D-Day landings, Allied troops faced defensive positions that the Germans had been preparing for months, even years. By the time they reached the Rhine, a lot of defences were haphazard, hurriedly flung up for a fight that their leaders had never thought would take place. But even a roughly made defensive position gives the defenders an advantage, and that made the Rhine crossing a daunting operation.

Page 30

Much of 20th century warfare is about people shooting each other at a distance, but that limits your options for an action scene in a comic. The combatants often won’t fit in the same panel, and it can be hard to get variety and dynamism into people aiming and firing. This whole scene with Millin tackling Teuber was designed to add some variety and get these characters fighting in the frame together.

Page 32

Millin uses a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. The knife was designed by William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, two of the men who helped found and train Britain’s special forces in World War Two. The knife was designed for surprise attacks and close fighting, based on ideas they’d developed while working for the police in Shanghai. It became an iconic piece of commando kit and was widely imitated.

Page 34

I wanted to show how soldiers on both sides faced uncertainties about the future, which meant putting Teuber and Millin together. Teuber acting as a translator was the best excuse I could come up with. I’ve been learning a little German myself, so tried to use a few words and grammatical differences between the languages to make this seem authentic.

Page 36

As this commando points out, a lot of German towns were badly damaged by this point. This is meant to highlight destruction and foreshadow how the story is going to end.

Page 38

There’s a big problem with depicting German soldiers in World War Two, and that’s their complicity in a murderous regime. Whatever their reasons for fighting, they helped expand and uphold Nazism just by being part of the fight, and while not everyone knew the extent of the regime’s horrors, it took a level of wilful ignorance to be unaware. It’s hard to make that sympathetic.

I showed Teuber as someone who doesn’t like the Nazis, because I needed to make him at least a little likeable. But that skirts around the painful question of how complicit men like him were, as they chose to fight for their country rather than resist its leaders. Maybe I’ll find a chance to write about that question some day, though I’m not sure how I’d get into it within the action-packed pages of a Commando comic.

Page 46

With so many of Germany’s young men killed in the fighting, the old and the very young were recruited into the last desperate fight.

Page 49

Apologies to any readers from Birmingham. It’s a lovely city, I just needed to pick somewhere Cooper could be rude about, and any outsider who’s had to navigate New Street Station bears at least a little resentment from the experience.

Page 53

The counterattack that provides the final act of the comic was based on real events during Operation Plunder. Battered as they were, some German troops made desperate efforts to push back the Allied advance and stop them securing their foothold across the Rhine.

Page 56

Scargill and Major – by this point I’d resorted to 1980s politics for character names.

Page 57

Teuber faces the most difficult decision for someone on the losing side – at what point to stop focusing on the current battle and prepare for what comes next?

Page 59

I liked the opportunity for a role reversal here, putting the British in the sort of position the Germans had faced earlier in the story. Holding a bridgehead can be difficult and precarious, and a successful advance like the Rhine crossing inevitably left some people vulnerable while the main force caught up. Handy for making a high-tension ending by putting the characters in danger, even though it’s clear that the operation as a whole is going to succeed.

Page 65

And here’s what it was all moving towards – Millin’s growing leadership, the destruction around him, the connection with Teuber, the strands of the story all to get to this point. When any war ends, there’s one clear answer to what comes next, the positive thing that emerges from the ruins – rebuilding. A story about the last great act of the war becomes a story about the first acts of peace.

• Read our guide to Commando Issues 5851 – 5854 here

Andrew Knighton is an author of short stories, comics, and novellas. His novel, The Executioner’s Blade, a fantasy murder mystery set in a city under siege, is available now (AmazonUK Affiliate Link), and his novel about a fake chosen hero, Forged For Destiny, is coming from Orbit in April (AmazonUK Affiliate Link).

As a freelance writer, he’s ghostwritten over forty novels in other people’s names, as well as articles, history books, and video scripts. He lives in Yorkshire with an academic and a cat, growing vegetables and dreaming about a brighter future. You can find more of his work and social media links at andrewknighton.com

The Executioner’s Blade by Andrew Knighton

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.