From Publishers Weekly
This hefty, thoroughly absorbing anthology, a companion to Coonts's Combat, gathers novellas about WWII from 10 leading thriller and military fiction writers. Some are character driven, like "Blood Bond" by the late Harold Robbins, about an American Jew working undercover as an SS officer, and Ralph Peters's "Honor," about the reflections of a German officer after defeat, as he makes his way home on foot through American- and British-occupied territory. Other entries make technology the major player. Coonts's "The Sea Witch" and James Cobb's "Eyes of the Cat" romanticize the PBY Catalina, a lumbering, graceless plane that was not state of the art even back in 1942, but was versatile and rugged. An American pilot parachutes into Nazi-occupied France and makes off with a Messerschmitt jet fighter in Jim DeFelice's "Wolf Flight." David Hagberg's intricately plotted "V5" explores the German rocket program and anthrax research as it weaves together the stories of Brits and Americans working undercover in Berlin: Benjamin Steinberg, a German Jewish machinist who's spying for the allies; an American pilot working for MI6; a young woman spy who's seducing a German general; and her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, is also on a secret intelligence mission in Berlin. WWII buffs and military fiction fans will have a long and luxurious feast.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
Stephen Coonts's name is in huge type on the cover, but his writing appears only in the introduction, which explains the need for historical fiction to help preserve memories of important events. The marketing ploy for this collection of WWII stories seems misleading, but the two short novels featured are exciting character-based war dramas that stress the personalities behind the action and live up to the mission explained by Coonts. Dean Ing writes of espionage in the Army-Air Force, while James Cobb's entry follows the search for a Japanese radar station. Readers Eric Conger and Ron McLarty do an excellent job of getting into the minds of their protagonists. Listeners who enjoy short fiction should look beyond the cover and check out VICTORY. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Successful techno-thriller author Coonts recruited his brethren to write the original tales in this collection of World War II stories. The grouping relies on its authors' literary stock-in-trade, the hyperdetailing of technology, suitably reverse-engineered onto WWII equipment. Readers whose mouths water at the mention of the PBY Catalina, the P-39 fighter, the German FW-190 fighter, or a German missile will have all the nuts, bolts, and tracer fire they can chew on, courtesy of brand-name thrill-meisters Harold Robbins, Harold Coyle, Coonts himself, and a half-dozen others. In addition to weapons, spies are de rigueur in technodom, the more unlikely and bizarre the better, as one author fantasizes about an American Jew posing as an SS officer on a mission to assassinate you-know-who. Alas, only one or two stories, such as "Flame on Tarawa," by Barrett Tillman, stretch the genre's conventions by presenting a three-dimensional character. Nevertheless, because of the proven popularity of the authors, this collection might burn brightly, if briefly. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Stephen Coonts asks what happens when you load a Catalina flying boat with five tons of bombs, a half dozen machine guns, and a crew that walks a line between valor and suicide. In the Pacific Theater of war, the Japanese Navy is about to discover the answer to that very question.
David Hagberg sends the OSS and MI6 behind enemy lines in Germany to stop the one weapon that can win the war for Hitler and Nazi Germany: an electromechanical guidance system that can launch missiles not only across countries, but across the ocean . . . and hit the United States.
Barrett Tillman brings us into gruesome fight as a Marine Corps flamethrower unit fights Japanese defenders on Tarawa Atoll in November 1943.
About the Author
Stephen Coonts is the author of seven New York Times bestselling novels, the first of which was the classic flying tale, Flight of the Intruder, which spent more than six months at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. His novels have been published around the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He was honored by the U.S. Naval Institute with its Author of the Year Award in 1986. His latest novel is America. He is also the editor of two anthologies, War in the Air and The New York Times bestselling Combat. He resides with his wife, Deborah, in Nevada.
Victory: Call to Arms FROM THE PUBLISHER
A stirring tribute to the Greatest Generation of Americans, Victory brings together the finest military fiction writers in the world with short novels of courage, skill, daring, and sacrifice. Here you will meet the men and women who fought and won World War II and truly made the world safe for democracy, in thrilling stories of war as it was really fought.
An exciting sequel to Stephen Coonts's bestselling Combat, Victory brings together today's greatest military, espionage, and technothriller writers in all-original thrilling tales of World War II--great short novels that range from the home front to the battlefields of Europe to the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Join Stephen Coonts, Ralph Peters, Harold Coyle, Harold Robbins, R. J. Pineiro, David Hagberg, Jim DeFelice, James Cobb, Barrett Tillman, and Dean Ing in a book filled with nonstop action and adventure.
Stephen Coonts asks what happens when you load a Catalina flying boat with five tons of bombs, a half-dozen machine guns, and a crew that walks a fine line between valor and suicide. In the Pacific theater of war, the Japanese Navy is about to discover the answer to that question.
Ralph Peters follows a German officer in the starving days after World War II as he makes his way on foot back home, where a defeat more terrible than the Allied victory awaits him.
Harold Coyle takes us to the fierce fighting in the Pacific where the Japanese and the Americans clash over a strategic airfield on the island of Guadalcanal. Their battlefield will earn the nickname Bloody Ridge for both sides . . .
Harold Robbins goes back to a time before the war was fought--when a doctor is brought in to diagnose a very special patient, one whose survival could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. Now caught between his ethics and his humanity, he must make a choice with the fate of the world at stake.
R. J. Pineiro brings the Eastern Front to light as a young American pilot is ordered to train Russian pilots in the new American made P-39D Aircobras during the final months of the brutal battle of in during the winter of 1942.
David Hagberg sends the OSS and MI6 behind enemy lines in Germany to stop the one weapon that can win the war for Hitler and Nazi Germany, an electromechanical guidance system that can launch missiles not only across countries, but across the ocean and hit the United States.
Jim DeFelice takes us to the height of the war when information was bought dearly on both sides. When an American pilot parachutes into Germany to gather information, he lands right in the middle of the viper's nest--a place more deadly than anything he could have found in the skies above.
James Cobb sends a special detail of PBY Catalina flying boats hunting for a hidden enemy radar station that provides the Japanese Navy with an edge in the war for the Pacific.
Barrett Tillman brings us into a gruesome fight as a Marine Corps flamethrower unit fights Japanese defenders on Tarawa Atoll in November 1943.
Dean Ing takes into the world of espionage as the Army Air Force becomes convinced that a Nazi superweapon can reach New York and Washington. As an interceptor is rush developed, a plane-crazy young Texan begins to suspect that someone on the team has an agenda all his own. . . .
Here they are: ten bestselling military, espionage, and technothriller authors paying tribute to the Greatest Generation of Americans.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This hefty, thoroughly absorbing anthology, a companion to Coonts's Combat, gathers novellas about WWII from 10 leading thriller and military fiction writers. Some are character driven, like "Blood Bond" by the late Harold Robbins, about an American Jew working undercover as an SS officer, and Ralph Peters's "Honor," about the reflections of a German officer after defeat, as he makes his way home on foot through American- and British-occupied territory. Other entries make technology the major player. Coonts's "The Sea Witch" and James Cobb's "Eyes of the Cat" romanticize the PBY Catalina, a lumbering, graceless plane that was not state of the art even back in 1942, but was versatile and rugged. An American pilot parachutes into Nazi-occupied France and makes off with a Messerschmitt jet fighter in Jim DeFelice's "Wolf Flight." David Hagberg's intricately plotted "V5" explores the German rocket program and anthrax research as it weaves together the stories of Brits and Americans working undercover in Berlin: Benjamin Steinberg, a German Jewish machinist who's spying for the allies; an American pilot working for MI6; a young woman spy who's seducing a German general; and her husband, who, unbeknownst to her, is also on a secret intelligence mission in Berlin. WWII buffs and military fiction fans will have a long and luxurious feast. (May 6) Forecast: Coonts has seized on a previously hard-to-sell format-the novella-and turned it into something profitable. Expect this volume to follow up on the successes of Combat. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
As with Coonts's preceding anthology (Combat), this volume is a compilation of new novellas by a number of writers, many of whom appeared in Combat. The current list includes Ralph Peters, David Hagberg, Barrett Tillman, James Cobb, Harold Coyle, and Coonts himself. Whereas Combat looked toward future wars, Victory turns to the vast panorama of World War II. Several major battles are included, but so too are smaller incidents, including tales from the home front, from behind enemy lines, and even from the enemy's perspective. Sadly, the results are uneven. There are some very good stories by Tillman, Cobb, Coyle, and Peters, while the rest are average at best, and a piece by Harold Robbins is dreadful. As a result, Victory does not compare well with Combat. Where Combat was thought-provoking as well as entertaining, the overall impact of Victory is one of disappointment. World War II was a rich source of material that is largely wasted here. Recommended for larger fiction collections.-Robert Conroy, Warren, MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Sequel to Coonts's giant editorial effort Combat (2001), which featured ten original long works of military/technothriller fiction. Victory, with many of the same authors, does much the same for WWII, although none of its ten authors fought in that conflict, and few, aside from Harold Robbins, were even born (Coonts was born in 1946). Harold Robbins? Amazingly, even with four postmortal novels having sprung from his pen, still more has been found, this time a short one, "Blood Bond," which he apparently wrote during the war or just afterward. It tells of a German-speaking Jewish bigmouth in the OSS whose golden locks help him masquerade in Germany as an SS captain in the black uniform of the Master Race. Coonts himself, a former Air Force pilot, leads off the sheaf with "The Sea Witch," about a dive-bomber pilot who has three bombers shot out from under him by the Japanese and so is transferred to a Black Cat squadron on New Guinea and winds up downed by a Zero and stranded on an island. The prolific Harold Coyle shows up with "Breakthrough on Bloody Ridge," a tale about Marines making the first amphibious assault of the war and hitting the beach on what comes to be known as Starvation Island. As with his More Than Courage (see below), Coyle focuses on men with the courage and will to go eye-to-eye with the enemy, especially on a barren spine of land called Bloody Ridge. In R.J. Pineiro's immensely exciting "The Eagle and the Cross," a surreal madness sweeps Russian defenses that find themselves bombed and then invaded by German panzers: the Nazis have broken their nonaggression pact! As Coonts makes clear in his introduction, "Only in fiction can the essence of the human experience ofwar be laid bare . . . . Only through fiction can we prepare ourselves for the trial by fire, when it comes." Goes off like an ammo dump.
Art & Photography
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