Book Review: WW III By Ian Slater

WW III
By Ian Slater

Written in 1990, Slater's epic novel tells the story of a full-scale conventional war between the forces of the Soviet Union and the USA and its allies. The war begins in Korea and spreads to Europe.

The story, set in a vague but near future (a few references to aging celebrities who were young at the time of publication are used to establish the setting), follows a variety of characters. Among the cast are a woman who enlists as a nurse aboard a hospital ship, a South Korean officer captured in the initial attack, a pair of brothers who are captains of US naval vessels, and a US general with a reputation for risky tactics. The US president is depicted as a pacifist who reluctantly embraces his role as wartime leader, and who seems to have been modeled after President Carter. The author makes his positions on military budget cuts clear as he depicts US forces initially woefully unprepared to face the Communist onslaught.

In terms of tactics and descriptions of the action on the battlefield, Slater does a competent job. He includes a good mix of ground, air, naval, and submarine engagements in his fictional war. Although his background is in naval intelligence, he handles ground battle sequences well.

With twenty years and several wars since the publication of this novel, it's interesting to compare our present circumstances with the future that the author envisioned. He completely missed on the explosive growth of technology on the battlefield, displaying considerable skepticism for "smart" munitions and depicting a world lacking cell phones and other advances in communications technology that we take for granted.

Slater also relies on a variety of deceptive tactics by the Communist forces. Some of these make sense, others such as an amphibious assault launched from a disguised oil tanker stretch credibility a bit.

The characters are good, although the book takes a somewhat sexist tone in places. Slater event attempts to address that with the rather old-fashioned American general scoffing at the idea of female combat troops and then having to rely on a woman pilot to fly his personal chopper into the climactic raid. This would almost have saved the treatment of female characters in the story except for the fact that the woman pilot then gets no actual speaking parts for the entirety of the raid sequence.

Slater also displays a tendency to add and drop characters rather arbitrarily. Several major characters are not introduced until over halfway through the book, and others are dropped without much in the way of resolution.

The threat of nuclear war looms over the entire story, although it's only barely mentioned until the second climactic plot begins to resolve itself with a submarine that has lost communication with its command and might have to fire its nuclear missiles. The resolution of that plot point provides the book's best suspense.

In the end, this is an entertaining and suspenseful book with some great action sequences, but it lacks the logical flow and coherence of Clancy's Red Storm Rising or Bond's Red Phoenix, which both deal with similar scenarios.

WW III was book #20 in my goal of reading 50 books in 2010.