Series Review – The Hot War (Harry Turtledove)

Harry Turtledove is a big fish in a small pond. He may not be widely known outside of alternate history circles, but within them everybody knows his name, and has probably read some of his work. Dust jackets have proclaimed him the “Master of Alternate History” for about three decades now. He was my personal introduction to the genre, at any rate. For today’s post we will be looking at Turtledove’s The Hot War trilogy, about a global nuclear war in the 1950s—and one that, for better and for worse, displays every facet of his characteristic style.

The opening shot of this trilogy was Bombs Away, released by Del Rey Books in July 2015. This was followed by Fallout (no relation to the video game franchise) in 2016, and the third book, Armistice, in 2017. Structurally they are just one giant novel split into three pieces, which is why I’m reviewing them in a single post. I read the first two books all the way back in high school¹; I found them too slow for my liking, which was why I didn’t rush to pick up Armistice when it came out. I only revisited the series this past month. To my surprise, it was better than I remembered.

Our point of divergence—where the fictional timeline splits from the real one—is in November 1950, during the Korean War. North Korea started the war that June by invading its southern neighbor, prompting an intervention by a US-led United Nations army. UN forces stabilized and ultimately pushed back the front line. By the fall, the US had wiped the floor with the North Koreans, overrunning almost their entire territory, and it seemed victory was assured… only for Red China to enter the fray with a very, very large army of their own. This was not a pleasant Christmas surprise for President Truman and his lead general, Douglas MacArthur.

Here’s what happened in our timeline: the bulk of US troops fell back before the communist onslaught, barely escaping encirclement at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, and MacArthur, short on conventional firepower, asked Truman to let him use nuclear weapons against China. Truman promptly fired him. No weapons of mass destruction saw use, the war didn’t expand² beyond Korea, and things settled into a stalemate that rumbled along for another two and a half years (and still technically hasn’t ended).

The Hot War plays out very differently: Bombs Away opens with the Chinese successfully encircling the UN forces at Chosin Reservoir, killing or taking prisoner tens of thousands of American troops. Truman, facing total defeat, proves more amenable to MacArthur’s proposal. US bombers promptly incinerate half a dozen cities across northeastern China. It’s supposed to be a proportional response—but limited nuclear warfare, once unleashed, has a way of not staying limited.

Mao’s China doesn’t have atom bombs. His Soviet big brother, Joseph Stalin, does, and he swiftly avenges this attack on a fellow socialist nation. Just as the US destroyed six cities of a Soviet ally, the Soviet Union hits six medium-sized cities in Britain, France, and West Germany, sending a clear message: we’ll meet anything you send at us. Even so, Truman can hardly back down. Britain and France are NATO members, which means he is obligated by treaty to defend them. So the US hits back against Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, which prompts the Soviets to destroy an airbase on US soil, which triggers a US nuclear attack on a Soviet airbase… and by February, the Third World War has begun, not six years after the last one ended.

Note that I haven’t said anything yet about the characters of this series. Here we get to one of the more pronounced aspects of Turtledove’s writing style: he loves multiple points of view. Loves, loves, loves them. The fewest POVs I have seen that man use in a novel is two³. Here we have… seventeen, if I’m counting correctly. That’s more like eleven or twelve at any given time, since several die and make room for others. Still, we witness the sweeping events of World War III through a bewilderingly large cast. To name just some of them:

• Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, and also the only viewpoint character in any kind of high-level decision-making role. We don’t get to see what Stalin is up to, so the Soviets and their war strategy remain somewhat mysterious throughout the series.
• Gustav Hozzel, a Wehrmacht veteran living in West Germany, who was just getting used to peacetime when everything went up in flames again. He joins a militia with several other former soldiers (and former Nazis) to repel the communist invaders glorious vanguard of the world proletarian revolution.
• Boris Gribkov, commander of a Soviet Tu-4 heavy bomber⁴. He has the honor of reducing several cities to rubble—including Seattle, the home of…
• Marion Staley, stay-at-home wife of a US bomber pilot and mother to their six-year-old daughter Linda. Thanks to Gribkov’s atom bomb, she becomes a refugee in a displaced persons camp.
• Konstantin Morozov, commander of a Soviet T-54 tank on the German front. He has a certain knack for survival, even if tanks (and crews) keep getting shot out from underneath him.
• Bill Staley, husband to Marion, who does not have a knack for survival. Don’t get too attached to this guy (spoiler alert). Soviet air defenses render poor Marion a widow fairly early on.

And the list goes on! And on some more. Male and female, military and civilian, communist and capitalist and those unfortunate enough to get caught in between—the numerous points of view make the war feel titanic in scope, an escalating horror far above and beyond any individual human. Unfortunately, this style also means there isn’t much of a plot. Things happen to people, sure, but those things are more or less random. The constant POV shifts can make for jarring reading, too; one protagonist might finally be having a stroke of good luck, catching a break from combat or entering a fiery romance, while another is getting carted off to forced labor in some grim Siberian gulag. C’est la vie, I suppose.

You will likely get attached to some characters more than others. The characters you aren’t attached to may turn dull—and with so very many points of view, it can take several chapters before Turtledove returns to the particular person you wanted to read about. I must confess that by the time of Armistice, there were a couple POVs I just skipped. All that being said, though, the multitude of narrative threads can intersect in interesting ways; one character might drop a bomb on a city another lives in, while a burning tank, knocked out by our German militiaman, creates a traffic jam for another protagonist not two blocks away.

Plenty of other aspects of The Hot War show Turtledove’s authorial fingerprint, besides the seventeen points of view. The prose is casual, breezy, packed to the brim with various colloquialisms and wry observations. There’s a distinct frankness about the text—all the ugly, dirty, and unsavory aspects of life are proudly on display here, from the squalor of a gulag latrine to the raw terror of enduring an artillery barrage. The focus is less on grand military maneuvers, and more on the grinding misery of getting by in a world gone mad.

That gets to what I think is the greatest strength of these books. The nuke-slugging match between the US and the Soviet Union plays out as a grand tragedy, uprooting every life it touches. People get blown to bits for no good reason, and their loved ones are left to mourn. Through it all, there’s a note of rugged optimism, or at least stoic acceptance: whatever happens, life goes on, and you try to pick up the pieces as best you can.

As for The Hot War as a work of alternate history? Harry Turtledove is a historian by training—he has a PhD in Byzantine history—and it shows. He deserves a lot of credit for including things that are absolutely not in the Western popular historical imagination. How many Americans know anything at all about the Arrow Cross regime in Hungary, or the Ukrainian partisan movement that lasted from World War II into the 1950s? You could learn a lot reading these books; I sure did.

And on the whole, the alternate timeline here is quite plausible. Click the “SPOILERS” drop-down for details.

SPOILERS

World War III, as depicted here, lasts for about a year and a half. The Soviets punch far above their weight in the nuclear exchange; they’re tricky bastards, sending their Tu-4s on carefully planned one-way missions to strike the American mainland, blowing up (off the top of my head) Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Denver, New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. They also destroy the Panama and Suez canals by sneaking nuclear weapons aboard merchant ships. In turn, the Americans absolutely plaster the Soviet Union with atom bombs, taking out just about every city of note. The red behemoth keeps rumbling along, but it becomes an increasingly desperate and dysfunctional society.

The ground war is also a brutal slog. On paper, the Soviets have enough troops in Germany to overrun all of Western Europe, but the Americans slow them down somewhat by nuking their supply lines. It takes them months just to fight their way through West Germany⁵ to the border with France and the Netherlands. Then the US drops a volley of atom bombs on their front-line troops, forcing the Red Army to retreat in disarray almost to where it started. And in Korea, the flashpoint for this whole miserable slaughter, things bog down even sooner.

Truman attempts to decapitate the Soviets by assassinating Stalin. His method of choice? Dropping an atomic bomb on his head. Eventually US intelligence learns that the Soviet dictator is in Omsk, which soon sees the combat debut of the hydrogen bomb—a thousand times more powerful than the little fission-only devices that started the war. No surviving that one. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov succeeds Stalin after a brief power struggle, and agrees to an armistice to spare his country any further devastation. The Soviets have problems closer to home, anyway. Poland, Slovakia, and the Baltic States have all risen up in revolt against their fraternal socialist allies.

Armistice has the Soviets pulling back to their pre-war sphere of influence, while just barely crushing the various revolts by their allies. We end the series with a dramatically weakened Soviet Union facing off in a resumed Cold War against a US that isn’t doing too hot, either. Not all that exciting. Countless millions of people died in this awful, unimaginably destructive war, and it accomplished hardly anything at all—but that’s the point. As Truman points out in the book, the US is hardly in a position to occupy the Soviet Union the way it did Japan and Germany. It’s just too vast! And the Soviets, for their part, don’t have a chance in hell of imposing regime change on the United States⁶.

The scope is impressive, to be sure. But this probably could have been trimmed down to two books. Turtledove repeats himself a lot, going over and over again through the same digressions about, say, collective farming (it’s bad because nobody is incentivized to work hard), or British beer (which is apparently much better than what Americans drink). The first scene featuring a character in each book will inevitably repeat everything they’ve done up to that point, with whole pages spent on recaps. It can be… tiresome.

To put it all together? My overall impressions are positive, particularly with the first two books. There’s plenty of action to be had, and plenty of meaty historical detail, particularly for a military buff like me. It may be the best depiction yet produced of a nuclear war in the early 1950s. If you’re in the mood for a sprawling, leisurely paced narrative, The Hot War could be worth your while.

Rating: 6/10.

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1. Earlier in high school, I’d discovered Turtledove’s magnificently bonkers Worldwar series, which made quite the impression on me. We will be reviewing those books at a later date. ↩︎
2. Though US pilots noted suspiciously Russian radio chatter coming from “North Korean” fighter jets. ↩︎
3. In The Guns of the South, which is the best book of his I’ve read. And in Joe Steele, which is probably the worst. ↩︎
4. Which the Soviets copied bolt-for-bolt from the B-29. ↩︎
5. There’s also fighting in northern Italy, but we don’t see that through any viewpoint characters. ↩︎
6. Red Dawn is a ridiculous movie, by the way. ↩︎