Book Review – Tom Clancy / David Michaels’ “EndWar”
It’s not very often when I come across not just a bad novel, but a poorly written story with no character development, laughable scenarios, and absolutely no back story to a major event.
This book isn’t just bad, it’s horrible!
For the record, Tom Clancy’s EndWar was not written by the legend himself, but rather David Michaels. Mr. Michaels is certainly no Tom Clancy when it comes to authoring and telling a story. I don’t know anything about the details for creating the story, but I can only assume that the general plot was created by Clancy and he left it up to Michaels to fill in the details and write the sub-plots in the general story.
The book itself is short and an easy read. My version is only 400 pages long and uses a double spaced format. For comparison, Clancy’s story introductions are normally that long with the main story being three to five times longer.
As far as the general story itself, it would have been great to know about how the war as a whole was started. Reading the synopsis on the back cover, we already know that Saudi Arabia and Iran destroy each other with nuclear weapons and Russia is trying to rebuilt its military might and bring itself back to the greatness that it once was during the days of the Soviet Union.
Okay, that sounds pretty cool. Military stories these days don’t usually involve full scale warfare including using nuclear weapons. But does the actual story give us any background to the start of the war? Nope! There are just occasional references about Saudi Arabia and Iran using nukes, but that was it. So for the main story we’re thrown into the middle of action with no real idea on why the countries are engaged in combat.
The story opens at the end of a special operations raid in Moscow and the capturing of a certain Russian leader. This is about as international as the story goes except for the Russian invasion and fighting in Canada. The Moscow part itself is extremely short, too.
The military action is just completely ridiculous. Clancy knows how to write a military story. Novels such as Red Storm Rising, Rainbow Six, SSN and Without Remorse are exciting and very well-written novels using military combat on the large and small scale. Michaels, on the other hand, thinks that it’s okay for a single submarine, a single fighter aircraft, and a small detachment of American troops to take on an entire Russian invasion force.
Wow, so much for the powerful military that we have here in the U.S. Maybe that’s a vision about how small our military will be in the future as long as the president and Congress keep running things. Or maybe this is a sign that the author has no idea how to write at least a partially accurate story about war.
The official Canadian response to the Russian invasion is to just sit back and let them invade Alberta and conquer the Canadian oil fields. There was absolutely no mention of the Canadian military responding to the Russians, only a few concerned citizens who took up arms and tried to fight back against supposedly highly trained Spetsnaz troops.
As far as the air combat, that was also a complete joke. I found it hard to believe that with an airbase up in Canada, the Americans could only manage to send two fighters against the incoming transport aircraft before the entire airbase was suddenly destroyed (by bombers, or missiles or who knows / cares), only to have the rookie (a male pilot) get shot down almost immediately and leaving it up to the female pilot to go against the Russian air force alone and try to save the day. She somehow survived the initial combat and landed her F-35 in a snowy field of all places so that she could check on her wounded wingman who bailed earlier. She then wanted the wounded airman to fly her aircraft back to base, but her wingman convinced her that this wasn’t the best of ideas. Luckily, the female pilot was able to takeoff again and fly away after her emergency landing.
The air combat took another turn for the worse as the female pilot was shot down and had to parachute to the ground. She then found herself on the run from highly trained Russian special forces troops. Apparently no other American or Canadian aircraft could assist with her rescue as it was up to a small group of American forces on the ground to rescue her, which itself was a large chunk of the action in the novel.
The short amount of submarine combat in the novel was even worse. After sinking a few Soviet ships and launching a missile at a target on land, the ship had a malfunction and the bow planes were jammed down. The ship itself was crippled as it slowly sank and neared its crush depth. I must have missed the part on why the sub had to keep moving forward and forcing the water over the angles bow planes, forcing it to keep its bow pointed down and not just keep the propeller stopped or even going in reverse. I guess it just made for a more exciting story to have the ship moving forward and continuing to sink to its depth even though the crew was ready to blow the ballast tanks at the last moment and not be killed at crush depth.
This is just poor storytelling.
It got even worse when a Russian sub tried to sink the crippled American sub. Instead of sneaking up and getting close for a kill shot, the Russians fired a high powered torpedo (something like super cavitation technology, very high speed and noisy but inaccurate) from long range and gave the Americans enough time to simply nudge their sub out of the torpedo’s path! Now come on! What Russian would be stupid enough to go for a long range, noisy and inaccurate shot when they could have easily closed the distance to the American sub and then gone for an easy kill?
That was just plain dumb!
Of course, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the American sub magically repaired itself and easily found and then killed the Russian sub. I guess the rest of the Russian and American navies were out to lunch and didn’t want to assist their subs. The rest of the American Navy, including the mighty aircraft carriers, attack submarines and guided missile cruisers were nowhere to be found in this book.
The American troops sent to Canada to stop the Russians were just cannon fodder. There was no feeling to any of them and none of them appeared to have a personality, so you just read names and didn’t really care when they were killed at various points. The same could have been said about the leaders of the countries as they met with each other and tried to form plans for ending the war. The characters were so bland that they were just talking heads reading a poorly written script.
For a major international war, there was no mention about other countries such as China, Israel, Australia, Japan or even England. Were they not allies with America or Russia, or did they just decide to sit out in this war? What about the Islamic response to the nuclear battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia?
How about the mysterious terrorist force acting as a third player in the war? Things got a little bit interesting when they planted nuclear weapons in Canada, but like the rest of the story, that part was significantly inadequate and could have been a lot more elaborate. The terrorists themselves were left behind, which was also disappointing since they wanted to rule the world. The terrorist leader, Green Vox or whatever they called him, was a complete joke.
As a whole, this was a very disappointing story with a hard to follow plot. Michaels overused cliffhangers and it was very frequent for him to jump around from one scene to another to another and forcing you to remember who was who in that jumbled mass of boring characters and lame locations, especially near the end of the book. The military action in this supposed “war to end all wars” just wasn’t there. There was also no explanation to the military equipment used by the various forces.
I hate to say it, but this book just plain sucks! It’s an insult to lovers of military thrillers as it dumbs down the material to an extremely simplified and flawed vision of future combat. I can only hope that the EndWar computer and console game has more of a story than this P.O.S. book.
Tom Clancy should be ashamed for having his well known and respected name attached to this piece of crap.
Do not waste your time with this novel! Avoid it at all costs!