The Hot War: Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove
Cover design by David G Stevenson
Published by Del Rey Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Did we miss an opportunity to shorten the Cold War when President Truman refused to allow General MacArthur to bomb Chinese troop concentrations north of the Yalu River, and relieved him of command when he persisted in arguing for aggressive action rather than merely holding the line? There has been a persistent argument in certain conservative circles that we avoided short-term pain at the price of decades of misery, particularly for those who were under the thumb of various Communist regimes. Furthermore, the argument goes, by appearing weak and unwilling to press our advantage when we had it, we may well have made ourselves easier targets for future aggression, both overt and covert, which demoralized the populace and made it easy prey for Communist subversion from within, particularly in the upheavals of the 1960's.
In this novel, the first of a trilogy, Harry Turtledove takes on the question of what would've happened if Truman had gone the other way and given MacArthur the go-ahead to use nuclear weapons against those troop concentrations in the People's Republic of China. Like most of his works of alternate history, his primary focus is on the "little people," the ordinary Joes and Janes trying to live their lives as history is made around them. However, we also have several scenes from Truman's point of view, as he struggles with the decisions he must make and where they are taking the country, particularly as the war descends into tit-for-tat destruction.
The novel opens with a young lieutenant in Korea, realizing that his position is about to be overrun. After this view from the sharp end, the next scene is Truman being presented with the situation by none less than Douglas MacArthur, who pushes the argument that there's no use fighting the war piecemeal, letting the Chinese act freely on the far side of the Yalu River, attacking and then running back to safety, and building up substantial troop concentrations and supply depots. In it, MacArthur addresses Truman as "Your Excellency" rather than the normal "Mr. President." Is this a slip after having spent so much time dealing with foreign heads of state and government, for whom it is the normal form of address, or is this a deliberate act of mockery?
In the next several scenes we meet a wide variety of characters: Americans, Russians, Germans, etc. Some are military, some are civilians, but all of them are small fry who can only persevere in their lives as their nations are acting like angry tomcats circling one another and spoiling for a fight. The shadow of the last war hangs over more than a few of them, particularly the Germans who need to keep a firm lid on exactly what they may have done in that fighting.
And then the rubber meets the road. As soon as Truman gives MacArthur the formal authorization, we have a briefing of the pilots who will fly the bomber missions. One of them is the husband of another point-of-view characters, which will become increasingly significant as the war develops.
Unsurprisingly enough, Stalin does not stand idle while his ally Mao suffers nuclear destruction on his territory. Soviet bombers answer the attacks in Manchuria with the bombing of regional cities in the UK, France, and West Germany. Among the last is the city of Augsburg, which had an important role in the Protestant Reformation (viz. the Augsburg Confession), and was just beginning to rebuild after the destruction of the previous war. As if that's not enough, Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces start rolling westward, putting Truman in the position of having to stand by the NATO provision that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
From here the nuclear tit-for-tat escalates steadily until the US and USSR are attacking cities on each other's home territory. Here I found some weaknesses in the technical side: specifically, a weak grasp of the difference between the effects of air bursts and ground bursts. Although it's been decades since I took a couple of courses on the effects of nuclear weapons, I remember that the doctrine was generally to use air bursts for destroying urban areas (as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and reserve ground bursts for digging out hardened military installations. An airburst does not leave a crater, since the fireball does not touch the ground, yet there are several points in which we have details that indicate ground bursts used against cities: Marian Staley and her daughter have to run through a rain of fallout after the destruction of Seattle, and a crater is mentioned in the center of another city.
The further the war goes, the more grim things become for the civilians caught up in it. Marian and her daughter go from living in a comfortable suburban tract house to sleeping in their broken-down car because it's safer than the barracks in the refugee camp. And she has it good compared to the refugees in Western Europe, fleeing on foot just ahead of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces in a land that still remembers how brutally the Red Army behaved as it forced the Wehrmacht back to Berlin.
One scene from Truman's point of view raised my eyebrows. Although I've not exactly made a great deal of study of his life, I was not aware that he had any interest in science fiction, which in that era would've meant the pulps. On the other hand, I can completely believe that he would not be fond of HP Lovecraft's brooding stories in which the protagonists can only hold out against the eldritch monstrosities of cosmic horror, rather than truly triumph. Truman was a straightforward, can-do sort of person who preferred to roll up his sleeves and tackle problems -- he once threatened to horsewhip a reviewer who'd given a bad review to his daughter Margaret's piano performance -- than to brood about tainted blood and approaching doom.
On the other hand, the reaction of Marian Staley to news of her husband's death nearly snapped my disbelief suspenders. There have been a number of places in Turtledove's works where mid-century characters think and react more like people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, this scene is the most egregious that I have read in his work. There is simply no way that a military wife of the early 1950's, upon receiving news that her husband is missing, presumed dead, would respond by cursing the US and crying that she wants her husband back. It simply doesn't fit with the mindset of the 1950's, a time when patriotism was still a bedrock part of good character, when every schoolday and every public meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance. Not to mention that it was a time when people were still much more religious, and still viewed God not as a metaphor but a very real Person whose hands were on the controls, very much in charge and making decisions about how things would happen, from the weather to matters of life and death.
At least it's not quite as bad as in one of his more recent alternate World War II novels, in which he has a character who's lost a son in the war and is now going around protesting against the war effort, wanting to make peace and bring the soldiers home. Um, nope. In the 1940's, anyone who tried that would find no sympathy anywhere, and like as not would quickly be arrested and clapped into Federal prison. It might not be possible to make a charge of treason stick, since that has a very specific definition stated in the Constitution, but it's still likely such a person would be facing lesser charges that would still result in pretty severe punishment.
Maybe that's why I'm not dropping this series like a hot potato after that scene. It was a single outburst in relative private, that could be viewed by any witnesses as a momentary mental breakdown, a passing loss of sanity as a result of the shock of sudden grief. So long as it's not repeated, it's likely that people of the time would be willing to give it a pass and pretend it had never happened. After all, women were still regarded as the weaker sex in those days, and allowances were made for such frailties.
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Review posted January 2, 2022.
