The Bear’s Claws:  A Novel Of World War III, by Andrew Knighton & Russell Phillips

[Note:  This book was provided free of charge by the author.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

In reading a book like this, I feel it is necessary to ponder two questions.  First, is this book a realistic example of military fiction?  Second, is it a compelling story on its own terms?  In this case I think the authors are a bit optimistic about the capabilities of a Soviet attack on Western Europe considering that the United States and its military are never mentioned and the author comments on how Norway (!) was able to stop the advance of Russian troops.  And this is not even getting into the fact that the book assumes that the Soviets were not already tied down to the quagmire in Afghanistan while supposedly being able to brush aside the British and German forces defending West Germany and Austria.  Admittedly, even though this is clearly from some fantasy universe where the Soviet Union was not completely falling apart in the 1980’s when faced with America’s resurgence under Reagan, the story itself is certainly compelling, especially the way that it divides attention between the efforts of Anna to encourage resistance to the Soviet totalitarian state even as her brother Vadislav on the front simultaneously becomes a war hero as well as disillusioned in Soviet politics.

This novel is about two hundred pages and it moves back and forth between a brother and sister who live in Leningrad.  Anna is a graduate student who finds herself caught up in radical politics thanks to the urging of her pregnant friend and soon finds herself an important figure in seeking to escape the power of the Soviet prison state and fight against the cruelty of the Soviet system.   Meanwhile, most of the action focuses on Vadislav, who is portrayed as a greenhorn would-be officer who takes over leading a platoon after the original officer is killed and tries to deal with a jealous captain who wants to sabotage his career even as he struggles with how to be a platoon commander and deal with tactical problems as well as the essential problem of discipline, sharing in the hardships of his men and seeking to prevent them from engaging in rapine and looting as they invade their way across Germany in an unrealistically successful invasion that ends abruptly in a cease fire once the West uses nukes to counteract the successful Russian invasion of Western Europe at the border of France.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the way that it discusses the shambolic nature of company command and the way that officers are often blind to the larger picture of what they are doing.  The book is also an ironic commentary on the way that the Soviet system tended to punish those who stuck their neck out and did more than they were supposed to do.  There is also a great deal of irony in the way that Vadislav wins an award for bravery and ends up leading his platoon effectively and yet he turns down the opportunity to become an officer once he has the chance because he has gotten so cynical about Soviet politics in the army, and finds himself agreeing with his smarter sister about the problems within Soviet society.  And so even in an overly optimistic war novel that ends with a Soviet victory made incomplete by the use of tactical nukes to threaten mutually assured destruction, the Soviet Union still comes off poorly because of its lack of economic development or freedom, or basic justice.