Customer Reviews

Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III

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To say that Team Yankee is a high speed, low drag, and intense military thriller would be a vast understatement! This is an in your face, action packed, combat thriller that is hard to put down once you've started it. Being a former soldier, Harold Coyle knows what being a soldier is about. Armed with a VMI education and seventeen years of Active Duty in the US Army, the author set out to write a military thriller about a possible European, NATO/Warsaw Pact conventional conflict. He quite successfully accomplished that mission with Team Yankee, in flying colors! He has a particularly good writing style that is very fluid and doesn't get bogged down heavily in the details.

Team Yankee begins with a succinct set up as to why the conflict starts. He then flows perfectly into the nuts and bolts of a very likely scenario of how a conventional WWIII would've begun in the mid to late 80's. The story concentrates heavily on Captain Sean Bannon, commander of Team Yankee which is a detached armor team with mechanized infantry attached to them.

Along with the highly intense initial combat scenarios, there are the harrowing evacuation scenes of his wife Pat, their kids and the other dependents of Team Yankee! These scenes are exceptionally well written and will leave you exhausted.

The author puts on display a great many things that can happen during war, to include the "fog of war," where there are times when communications are cut and Company Commanders have to totally wing it and pray for the best. He flawlessly displays the entire gamut of emotions that Captain Bannon and the other soldiers are going through, throughout the entire novel. In essence, this novel puts you in the Tank Commanders cupola completely and thoroughly. The dialogue is tremendously well written, along with well detailed explanations for the "plans" of attack or defense. As an added bonus, there are detailed graphics with the proper symbols for units' friendly and enemy alike. Thank God this is a work of fiction and humanity did not have to face the brutal realism in this book!

Not since I read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" or Larry Bonds "Red Phoenix" have I read a military action thriller written this well. If you're into military/action thrillers, this true treasure is one you need to add to your library. It took me a while to locate a decent copy of this book and it was well worth the search!

I first read this book in 1990 while serving in West Germany as a Cavalry Scout with 4/7 Cav 3rd Armored Div. I really enjoyed it at the time. I later served in Operation Desert Sheild/Storm and was involved a heavy armor engagement at the Battle of 73 Easting. This book is as close as you can get without having to dodge sabot rounds. Coyle does a great job of not only mastering military jargon and weapons systems but he also captures the fear and terror felt by the common tanker and foot soldier... probably the most powerful war story I have ever read.

Harold Coyle's Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III (Presidio Press, 1987) was published a year after Red Storm Rising's triumphant debut in hardcover, and although it is thematically similar (Soviet forces invade West Germany after a series of crises escalate into an all out conventional war), Coyle's approach is very different from Clancy's. Instead of creating his own possible scenario for a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact confrontation, he asked for, and received, permission from British author (and retired General) Sir John Hackett to set Team Yankee within the scenario created in Hackett's two
"speculative fiction" books The Third World War: August 1985 and The Third World War: The Untold Story.

Team Yankee takes place within a two-week period in an August in the late 1980s. Since late July, a series of crises precipitated by the Iran-Iraq war has morphed into a clash between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the Persian Gulf region. By August 1, word comes that NATO is mobilizing and ordering their armed forces, including Bannon and Team Yankee, to their wartime positions. Soon, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact "allies" cross the Inner German Border in force. Team Yankee and the rest of NATO's forces in West Germany must then fight the invaders and stop them before the Red Army reaches the Rhine River. After that, assuming the Soviet attack bogs down, the mission will change from merely defending territory to taking offensive operations and pushing the invaders back. The question Coyle poses is, can American soldiers, using their weapons and tactics against superior numbers of Soviet and Warsaw Pact soldiers, defeat Russian weapons and tactics?

Readers familiar with Hackett's macrocosmic World War III will know the big picture, but first-time readers will be turning the pages to see who wins, who loses, who dies...and who survives in this outstanding first novel by a true master of the military fiction genre.

The only flaw, and this is not Coyle's fault, is that reality -- in the shape of the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War -- has made the novel's setting extremely outdated. Some of the then-modern weapons, such as the M1 main battle tank, have been since updated to M1-A2 standard, older weapons have been retired, and obviously there's no more Warsaw Pact.


All in all, it's an entertaining read.

Reading this book in the 21st century, this story is definitely dated. The major combatants are no longer diametrically opposed, and the concept for the novel is not as plausible as it was at the time it was written. That is the critical part, however, I really enjoyed the book. I still have my copy of Red Storm Rising and this one has earned a place on my bookshelf beside it.

Coyle does an excellent job. The story provides a minimal intro to the conflict and a minor side show with the evacuation of the servicemen's families, but the meat of the story is the telling of the combat actions. I haven't been in an M-1, so I have to assume that the details are accurate enough. However, I have driven, fired and TC'ed an M-60 during training at Knox, so I can say that the author has given a pretty good feel for the armored attitude and experience. Coyle tells the story from the perspective of company commander and based upon my own limited experiences has much of the details, as far as the operational and planning side, of command correct as well.

Given all of the above, my biggest complaint about the book was that I wanted the story to last longer; I was enjoying it too much to want it to end.
P-)

Harold Coyle's debut novel should definitely be on the bookshelf of anyone who reads military techno-thrillers. This novel creates a World War III scenario without making a single mistake. Coyle makes this techno-thriller as realistic as possible without it becoming bogged down in technical details. The characters are three dimensional (a rarity in the techno-thriller genre), and the consequences of war are explored in detail. Simply, this is a great book.

I read this book A while Back, While i was in the Army in an Armored Division. As a Tanker i can Say that How True to life this story is and/or Could have been. The fire commands in this novel are exactly the way they should be. Short,Fast and acurate. Helluva Book A REAL tankers MUST READ book.

I read a review in the local fishwrap that Harold Coyle was the best writer of military fiction. Team Yankee confirms this. It is a realistic hour by hour account of the first fourteen days of combat in World War III as it follows the commanding officer of a tank unit-Team Yankee fighting the Soviets on the Russian front. It also includes brief accounts of the viewpoint of the opposing Soviet tank commanders a la Killer Angels. A real page turner that kept me up half of the night.

As an aspiring writer I've been reading way too much lately about the craft and what makes a literary work "good." One thing that so many experts and novices alike hammer home is the notion of "showing, not telling." A good writer needs to show the reader the emotional impact felt by his characters: Instead of writing, "Joe Protagonist was scared," you're supposed to write, "A trickle of sweat rolled down Joe Protagonist's back," and so on. Harold Coyle's Third World War classic, Team Yankee, violates this so-called rule way too often. At first, this really bothered me. I cringed every time Coyle told me how one of his characters felt. Then I became irritated with how detached I was becoming from these potentially quite interesting people. About halfway through, I almost gave up on the novel.

And then I realized something: One doesn't read Team Yankee in order to glean some universal truth from its pages. There are tons of books out there where you can experience that. No, one reads Team Yankee to experience Godless Communists getting annihilated. One reads Team Yankee to learn about intricate military doctrines which typically only soldiers would ever have access to. One reads Team Yankee to get a visceral thrill from the white-hat-wearing good guys kicking the tar out of the black-hat-wearing bad guys, saving the girl, and riding off into the sunset. After realizing all this, I plowed through the remainder of the novel and didn't look back. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

Harold Coyles first book based on events from the book "The Third World War" By Sir John Hacket. This book does not deal with the politics of the war, it is just the combat thrill ride that you are looking for in a book of this type.

Looking back now, some of the technical ifo may be a bit dated, but it does not take away from the book in any way.

It is a nonstop combat action thriller, that is easily read, and not too technical for the novice, but still interesting for the more advanced reader.

After reading this book, I bought the rest of Harold Coyles' books at a yard sale just based on the quality of this one book.

They just don't write then like this any more.

There are a number of reviews here that mention the lack of 'the big picture' and 'political depth'. True. That depth was offered up in 'Third World War : August 1985' by Sir John Hackett, a senior NATO general. Hackett's tale, written in 1977, was at the other extreme; too dry and impersonal. This is the book 'A reader from Alexandria, VA' refered to when he said the missile strikes were straight out of another WWIII novel. Coyle used Hackett's WWIII as the framework upon which to hang the story of a small combat unit, fleshing out the General's big picture with a view from gunsights. Read both books for the total story and a more complete understanding of Cold War military thinking.