Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy (1987)

It has been a little while! Life has been busy (too busy for me to find spare time to read), when I have had time I’ve been reading things I’m not quite ready to talk about here, and this book was an absolute monster to get through. A monster that I’m going to try and articulate my thoughts about here.

I think the quote (saying?) “War never changes” becomes more evident the older I get. Not in the literal sense; the act of war is changing constantly owing to improvements in technology and subsequently the adaptations in doctrine. I mean more in the sense that conflict arises over the same things: resources, power, greed. And I think the author understands this extremely well.

Set in the middle of the cold war, our story starts with a terrorist attack on a Russian oil plant, causing enough damage to the countries oil industry that they need to take oil from a neighboring country. However, rather than attack said neighbor outright, the soviet union opts to attack NATO first in order to weaken them so that they can take what they need more readily. The country then bombs their own building, and then blames/invades Germany in retaliation. The rest of the book covers the conflict in Europe, both with respect to the act of war and the politics of war.

I think the highest praise I can give the author is the excruciating detail that they include about war systems. This read like The Lord of the Rings but for people who enjoy war fiction: the grueling amount of acronyms and abbreviations, the (mostly) historically accurate technologies, and the detailed combat scenarios all make this novel read like a history book (which is a complement). This extends also to some of the politics. The author does a relatively good job of painting both sides of the conflict, although since they are an american author the americans are (of course) the good guys. And this is where some of the cracks start to show.

The soviet union (Russia in general, really) in the West is depicted strongly as “the bad guys,” and this book is no exception. The Russian chain of command is shown to be cruel to the point of stupidity, and while some plot points were convincing, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief for some others. Despite this, I actually found more character depth from the Russians than the Americans. Most of the American soldiers/commanders/politicians/other were fairly bland or seemingly one-dimensional. Toland, an intelligence officer who we follow throughout the war, is introduced as a reservist who is called to serve by his country. Only problem is that he has a wife and kids at home and very willingly leaves them to go join an extremely dangerous convoy. This conflict, which you would assume would be a major character point of his, is kinda glossed over with his wife barely protesting beyond a couple sentences. Another american soldier, Mike, is stranded on Iceland after the Russian invasion. We get to follow him and some Marines he outranks as they perform a stealth operation, providing intelligence to NATO. These sections were often my favourite, until the author forced a romance into it unnecessarily about half-way through. Aside from that, most of the American sections were quite boring, mostly focusing on what soldiers do during combat operations (primarily in the Navy, though there were some ground troop sections and some air force as well).

The Russian sections, however, were far more gripping. This is where the majority of the book’s politics were, with Generals trying to do their jobs as soldiers while trying not to get executed by their own party for failing to do the impossible. Some of the tightropes that characters like Alekseyev and Mikhail had to walk while still trying to win a war I found extremely well done. I’d even go so far as to say that, by the end of the book, I really only cared about the Russian side of things.

I think another thing that does get mentioned but never really explored is the consequence of war. The book ends rather abruptly, and we don’t get to see how combat has affected our characters. There are mentions of the horrors of dying in a submarine, for example, but not a lot on the psychology of the men who have taken the lives of others. There is a lot of “glory in combat” subtly in the book, and I try to remind myself when reading things like these that I am not immune to propaganda (and neither are you, dear reader).

Aside from the subject matter, I did find some notable typos/grammatical issues throughout. While this was a long book (830 some odd pages), this is disappointing nonetheless. Otherwise the general writing style was fine; I was never drawn out of the book due to how the author wrote, although I did get distracted during particularly detailed explanations of RADARs. That might not be a problem for some readers, but it got to be a little much for me at points.

On the whole, I think this was a good book. The story was interesting enough, the detail was incredible, and some of the characters were memorable. It is held back by the subject matter somewhat glorifying warfare, but if you’re interested in reading a book that covers a war from start to finish I strongly recommend it. That, or you can always read up on actual history.

Verdict: 3/5