buffoonery's Full Review: Tom Clancy - Red Storm Rising
Tom Clancy's second novel, Red Storm Rising (co-written with author and wargame designer Larry Bond), is the only one to date that does not fit into the Jack Ryan curriculum vitae. Red Storm is about a hypothetical Soviet assault into Western Germany, circa mid-1980's. This is a cut above the run-of-the mill genre novel. Despite his myriad faults, Clancy is an above-average writer for this type of stuff and the book really is thrilling.
A terrorist attack on Soviet oil facilities has created a serious lack of fuel. The Soviets determine to trump up a reason to attack West Germany as a precursor to their real objective, the Middle Eastern oil fields. The scenario is quite believable, the politics and machinations well-conceived. Indeed, (as Clancy undoubtedly intended), the faked murders that serve as the Soviet causus belli harken back to the German staging of the incident that preceded their attack on Poland in 1939.
The action is non-stop once the conflict gets going. A surprise Soviet invasion of Iceland creates real problems for the NATO forces, but the good guys….well, you can guess how this ends. The combat scenes are tense and highly technical. Acronyms abound. You'll know a lot about tank warfare and anti-submarine tactics before you're through with this.
Clancy and Bond extensively wargamed the incidents in this novel prior to setting pen to paper. Rumor has it, though, that the Soviet forces did a lot better on the game table than expected, so they added a (highly questionable) preemptive NATO air strike to even things up. The simulation results may be more of a problem with the game system that the actual state of Soviet forces in the period; Soviet performance in Afghanistan was less than stellar while NATO forces performed superbly in the Gulf. In any event, we're all lucky it never happened.
Red Storm Rising will hold little interest for readers who are not interested in this genre. The fashionably jaded will also sniff that it is just a tad too patriotic, if you know what I mean. (Such persons should spend a few evenings with The Gulag Archipelago or Robert Conquest's The Great Terror.) For fans, though, it is solid four-star reading, heads above most of the competition, and too short.
Here is a complete listing of my Jack Ryan reviews:
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