Frederick Busch's novel War Babies set in 1984, is narrated by Peter Santore, the son of an American prisoner of war in Korea who was later convicted and imprisoned as a traitor for his active cooperation with his Chinese captors. Peter's mother divorced his father shortly after Peter was born and refuses to speak about him. Haunted by his lack of knowledge of his father's story, Peter visits England in order to meet Hilary Penells, the daughter of his father's polar opposite. Hilary's father had been imprisoned in the same camp as Peter's, the infamous Camp 12.

Camp 12 was known as "the Caves" because the prisoners were jammed into a series of tunnels dug into the side of a hill. The caves were constantly cold, wet, and overrun with lice, and the prisoners were subject to verbal abuse, torture, and beatings. Their jailers divided them into two groups, the "reactionaries," those who refused to cooperate, and the "progressives," those who paid lip service, along with the few who actively supported the Communist cause. On the threshold of death, Lieutenant Penells, Hilary's father, commanded his men to cooperate (his ordering them relieved them of responsibility) as a way to survive, but he himself refused to do so, even though he was beaten and eventually killed by the Chinese.

Hilary's heroic father is as much of a burden as Peter's, only in her case it is not simply psychological. She has to contend with the oppressive presence of Fox, her father's adjutant, a survivor of the camp and a man with a tenacious hold on the past. Fox holds a special hatred for Peter's father, whom he knew in the camp. That hatred is quickly transferred to Peter after Fox guesses that he and Hilary have begun an affair. The conclusion is underscored by the novel's title, War Babies. Peter and Hilary discover that they are at war with their dead fathers. Both the traitor and the hero have left their children a legacy of anger that stains everything in their lives, including their love. The novel is set in Dorset, the county in southwest England that Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) used as the basis of his "Wessex" novels. Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles plays a thematic role in War Babies. Tess's tragic fate foreshadows the novel's unhappy resolution.

The Pennels character is based on real-life Lieutenant Terence Waters, a young British officer. Waters ordered his men to cooperate with the captors, but he refused to do so himself. As a result, his men survived, while he was brutally tortured and killed.

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