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9th
Annual Competition
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Ted
Grevstad-Nordbrock
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Ten
Literary Accounts of a War that Was Never Fought
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Ted Grevstad-Nordbrock and his collection
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As
the son of a Department of Defense civilian, my family and I
spent many years abroad during the Cold War. In the mid-1970s
we lived at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland,
and for most of the 1980s the West German city Frankfurt was
home. As far from our minds as it was at the time, the presence
of American military and civilians in Europe represented a commitment
to NATO should
war break out.
Years later, after the Cold War ended and the long-standing American military
communities in Europe began to be disbanded, I started to reflect on the reasons
that my family and others like us had been overseas. It was during this time
that I came across a used copy of The Third World War: August 1985 by
the British writer General Sir John Hackett. Written in 1978, Hackett described,
in a seamless blend of fact and fiction, the likely causes and outcomes of another
world war in Europe in his immediate future, in 1985. The book piqued my interest.
The destructive conflict that Hackett imagined would have occurred during my
junior year of high school in Frankfurt, and the calamitous events he described
would undoubtedly have impacted me, my family, my community—in short, everything
that I knew at the time. This was the impetus for my collection.
With Hackett’s work on my shelf I went looking for other, similar books from
the last decades of the Cold War. I was pleased to find that Hackett followed
his original work with a 1982 sequel, subtitled “The Untold Story.” But to my
surprise, I also came across approximately twenty other books in a similar vein.
Most of these were written in the 1980s, at a time of uncertainty in political
relations between the East and West blocs. With one exception, Bidwell’s World
War 3 (1978), all were works of fiction. Several, most notably Macksey’s First
Clash (1984) and Zaloga’s Red Thrust (1989), were similar to Hackett’s
books in that they told their stories with the stony-faced, detached exactitude
of a journalist reporting a current event. These works did not seem like fiction.
Nine of the ten books in the collection submitted here describe the military
efforts NATO’s member nations, including the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Not surprisingly,
the stories reveal a palpable Western bias. The exception
is Peters’s Red Army, which, while written by a U.S. Army officer, sympathetically
tells the story of a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict in Germany from the perspective
of
Soviet protagonists.
My small collection of books describing a Cold War “turned hot” represents a
fascinating—and overlooked—subgroup within a larger body of popular military
fiction from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These works might also legitimately
be regarded as successors to the earlier Cold War novels (e.g. Pat Frank’s Alas,
Babylon (1959), Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962))
that
contemplated mankind’s future in the Nuclear Age. Ultimately, I would like to
further develop this collection.
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Bibliography
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| Bidwell,
Sheldon, ed. (1978). World War 3. Feltham, England,
Hamlyn Paperbacks. |
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Though
non-fictional, Sheldon’s work takes on an air of fiction
when it hypothesizes about how a third world war in Europe
might realistically start, and how it would play out. Like
other books in this collection, slogging but indecisive
conventional warfare inevitably leads to the use of nuclear
weapons. |
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| Clancy,
Tom. (1986). Red Storm Rising. New York, Berkley Books.
Reprint edition (c.2001). |
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Clancy
is, of course, the best-known author of the group included
here. This work, one of his earliest, describes a NATO-Warsaw
Pact conflict on land and on the seas. |
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| Cook,
J. L. (1990). Armor at Fulda Gap: A Visual Novel of the
War of Tomorrow. New York, Avon Books. |
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Cook’s
illustrated work is an unusual mix of fact and fiction—of
real-world armaments that would have been used to fight
a third world war as well as fantastic imaginings of what
the near future might hold. The title of the book makes
reference to two common themes in the theory and literature
describing a NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation in Europe:
the Fulda Gap, a historical passage—a “gap” in the otherwise
rough terrain—from eastern Europe to the west, named after
the German city; and armor, the tanks and mechanized vehicles
that would contend for this strategic region. |
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| Coyle,
Harold. (1987). Team Yankee. New York, Berkley Books. |
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This
best-selling work intimately chronicles the efforts of
an American tank platoon in defending a small swath of
West Germany during a Warsaw Pact invasion. The story is
based on the Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985,
which Coyle acknowledges in his introduction. |
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| Hackett,
John, General Sir. (1978). The Third World War: August
1985. New York, Berkley Books. Illustrated reprint edition. |
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This
influential account of World War III is told by a British
general. The illustrated edition features images of the
battles, including the two terminal moments of the short
war: nuclear strikes on Birmingham, England and Minsk. |
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| Hackett,
John, General Sir. (1982). The Third World War: The Untold
Story. New York, Bantam Books. |
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Hackett’s
follow-up fleshes out and expands the narrative begun in “August
1985.” |
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| Macksey,
Kenneth (1984). First Clash: Combat Close-Up in World
War Three. New York, Berkley Books. |
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First
Clash offers a Canadian take on NATO’s efforts to repulse
the Red Army during its invasion of West Germany. That
this fiction is based in fact is emphasized through the
use of annotated maps, images, and text boxes that contain
discursive notes on tactics, armament, military organization,
etc. |
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| Palmer,
Michael A. (1994). The War That Never Was. New York,
ibooks, Inc. |
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Written
after the Cold War ended, this book describes World War
III on a global scale (a war that “never was”), as told
by a fictional Russian character to his old enemy and new
ally: an American. |
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| Peters,
Ralph. (1989). Red Army. New York, Pocket Books. |
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Peters’s
book is unique in that it tells the story of a conflict
in Europe from the perspective of soldiers in the Red Army.
This is perhaps one of the best written of the books of
this genre. |
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| Zaloga,
S. J. (1989). Red Thrust. Novato, CA, Presidio Press. |
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Though
no less fictional than any of the other works included
here, Zaloga’s text reads almost like a casebook. He offers
a series of hypothetical NATO-Warsaw Pact battle scenarios
in Western Europe, each with an accompanying postmortem:
tactical strengths, weaknesses, and what might have been
done by military leaders to affect a different outcome. |
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