Customer Reviews

Victory, Limited Edition

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Do not waste your hard earned money on this book. I bought it thinking short stories about WWII would be a great easy read book with very exciting story lines. In no way was this book even close. The only thing that keeps you going to the next story is the hope that the next one will be a little better than the last, which never really happens. Out of all the writers there is one or two that keep your attention but for the most part the writers have done a very poor overall job. You buy this book thinking you will be reading about hero's of WWII and you get stories about a little boy who helps in an aircraft hanger building an experimental aircraft. Not to spoil the ending the little boy turns out to be an alien and goes back to his home planet via a bicycle space craft. "WOW GREAT STORY"

Some of the stories in this books are excellent reads. Both the PBY stories are well constructed and written. My favourite, by Harold Coyle, was the story of the assault on Tarawa. I read the book two or three weeks ago and the metal images of the jungle fighting described still linger.

A couple of lightweight tales by Harold Robbins and David Hagberg detract, I believe, from the overall weight and authority of the book as a whole, but if you are an afficianado of WWII stories, then this book is well worth a read.

This book is in the same classification as the Combat book.In
this book you have ten authors write stories about World War II.
Stephen Coonts writes about a Catalina flying boatwho are doing battle with the Japanese in the Pacific.Harold Coyle does a story about the battle on Guadalcanal with the Japanese that earned this area the name of Bloody Ridge.Jim Defelice tells about an American pilot who parachutes into Germany to gather
intelligence and gets decieved.Harold Robbins tells a story about someone whi is sent to kill Hitler.Dean Ing tells a story about an effort to build an interceptor to stop a Nazi super weapon.Barrett Tillman tells of the role of a flamethrower operator in a battle at Tawara against the Japanese.James Cobb
tells of a Catalina searching for Japanese radar in the Pacific.
David Hagberg tells of allied agents trying to stop a Nazi superweapon that can cause havoc in the United States.R.J. Pineiro tells of an American pilot who trains Russian pilots in new Aircobras.Ralph Peters tells of a German soldier going home on foot after the war has ended.All in all this was an interesting book.It ranked as an equal to Combat.

They really aren't around anymore, but from the 1930s through the 1970s, there was a proliferation of what became known in the trade as "adventure" magazines. These ranged in quality from the semi-respectable (Argosy) to the not so respectable (a veritable slew of titles, such as Stag and the right-out front For Men Only). They featured stories of spies, derring do and jungle intrigue, but they primarily contained war stories. Lots and lots of war stories. The covers often told the tale regarding the type of quality you could expect within; this was particularly true of Stag, which featured damsels who were either in distress (especially with respect to the state of their undergarments) or inflicting distress upon U.S. soldiers who were tied to chairs and doing their best to appear panic-stricken. All of these magazines, alas, are long gone, or at least don't seem to have the circulation they used to. I was reminded of them, however, by the publication of a mammoth volume of war fiction titled VICTORY.

VICTORY is a companion volume to COMBAT, both of which are edited by intrigue-meister Stephen Coonts. VICTORY is a doorstop of a volume, weighing in at well over 700 pages and consisting of ten previously unpublished pieces by masters of the war story. The stories in VICTORY range in length from fifty to over one hundred pages; if they had appeared in any of the adventure magazines, they would have been serialized. Most of the stories in VICTORY would or could have found a home in Argosy, though one --- "Blood Bond" by Harold Robbins --- is definitely Stag material. More on that in a minute.

The stories in VICTORY do not glorify war. Far from it. All of the stories are set during World War II, with the exception of "Honor" by Ralph Peters, set immediately thereafter. It is difficult to pick an immediate favorite; the average reader may have several, for different reasons. Coonts's own "The Sea Witch," which opens VICTORY, begins as a fairly predictable tale with an unpredictable ending and that utilizes an unexpected technique to catch the reader flatfooted.

"Blood Bond" is typical Robbins. It is a spy story, dealing with a plot to kill Hitler, and stands apart from the other tales due to its unrelenting scatological narrative. Robbins writes the way James Bond really thinks. Though Robbins, gone for several years now, had his share of detractors, he never inflicted boredom on his audience, and this previously unpublished work continues his streak, even in his absence.

David Hagberg's "V5" concerns the German rocket that could have turned the tide of World War II and the Allied military and espionage components that feverishly work together, though at some distance, to ensure that the project never makes it off the ground.

Peters's "Honor" deals not with Americans in the war but with a German officer in the war's aftermath, trudging through the nightmarish ruin that is postwar Germany as he tries to return home to his wife. The conclusion of "Honor" is predictable, almost from the first paragraph; it is the journey, not the close-to-foregone destination, that is important here.

The biggest surprise in VICTORY may be "The Eagle and the Cross" by R.J. Pineiro, a tale of an American pilot who is sent to the Eastern front to train Russian aviators during the final months of the Battle of Stalingrad. The bittersweet ending is perhaps the most haunting of any tale in the book.

With VICTORY Coonts again demonstrates that his talent as a writer is matched by his editorial abilities. While this volume is aimed at a more narrowly defined audience, the quality of the stories involved should, for the most part, satisfy the more discerning reader of any genre. Recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Stephen Coonts could write a dictionary that was entertaining reading. Just remember this is a collection of different authors introduced and edited by Stephen Coonts only. I could not find the synopsis of the contents anywhere so I am introducing them here.

Story 1) 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 in The Sea Witch.

Story 2) 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.

Story 3) 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 from both sides.

Story 4) Harold Robbins takes us back in time when victory could be had on the Normandy beaches if a reluctant hero managed to stop the Master of Europe - with his blood.

Story 5) 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 Stalingrad in the winter of 1942.

Story 6) 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.

Story 7) 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.

Story 8) Jim 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.

Story 9) Barrett Tillman brings us into a gruesome fight as a Marine Corps flamethrower unit attacks Japanese defenders on tarawa Atoll in November 1943.

Story 10) David Ing takes us 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...

Fiction about World War II is practically redundant. How can you make up anything that is both plausible and that didn't actually happen?
May as well read non-fiction.
The writers in this anthology sometimes ape reality. Sometimes they write, as one reviewer implied, as if it were 1946 and the Saturday Evening Post were still publishing WW II pulp. Which, I guess they did for longer than that.
Two stories involve sneaking around behind German lines to steal aircraft. One has the protagonist beating more bad luck than could possibly be imagined and the other has a series of good luck and the requisite square-jawed (presumably) American hero.
One has a mixed team of heroes also beating odds to destroy a fictional German wonderweapon, a tale which would have been excusable in 1946. but not much later.
The PBY stories are interesting for different reasons. One has to do with fighting and killing for its own sake. The lead character is bounced from a dive bomber squadron because he is so intent on getting hits that he gets hit, gets his crew killed, and so forth. At the end, the killing is obviously without purpose but the characters go on as if it were the most important thing in the world to continue. One wonders if there are people like that, or if normal people become like that in war.
The other PBY story has a characteristic of war fiction when the war is a world war. To be important, instead of being one more unit expended amongst millions expended, the characters have to deal with a single, small, vulnerable but hugely important choke point or obstacle. The Guns of Navarone, for all its adventure, was all about a single battery of heavy artillery which could damage British naval operations in a narrow strait. But, for plotting purposes, the Brits really, really needed to operate unhindered in that narrow strait.
In this case, the naval battle of Guadalcanal, one of whose results is renaming a body of water "Iron Bottom Bay", or, later "Iron Bottom Sound", has a major operation depending on finding some mystery about Japanese reconnaisance and destroying it. Only the characters in the story can do it. If they fail.... Wow. Nevertheless, given the formula is old, the story is extremely interesting.
Flame at Tarawa would be a run of the mill procedural about a flame thrower operator on one of the worst Marine assaults in the war except that it is recounted in the voice of a much older man looking back at himself and the circumstances. I found it moving and unconventional.
Hanger Rat has a skewed ending, but its depiction of what might be considered a precursor of the Skunk Works, manned by Texas barnstormer mechanics, is a great picture of the entire process and the Texas cultures surrounding pre-war private flight. That it turns out to be science fiction is not relevant.
"Honor" has nothing at all to do with combat, except as the protagonist remembers it, but instead gives us an insight into a foreign world view, logical as to its consequences but entirely strange as to its premises.
I hate to say this, but the book would be a reasonable one to get from a library, but not to buy. Get the non-fiction.
A non-fiction analog would be the ancient "Combat. Pacific Theater" and "Combat, Pacific Theater". The stories are short--short stories, get it?--and varied as to operation and character, but they're true.

More good than bad is this admittedly uneven anthology of World War Two tales. My favorite by far was the tale by Ralph Peters, which is sad and poignant and not by any stretch a "thriller."

Yet thrills abound in stories liie V5, an espionage yarn so exciting it reminded me of a level from a video game like CALL TO DUTY or MEDAL OF HONOR (who wouldn't want to heist a ME-262?).

Recommended.

I agree with another reviewer that this book is somewhat of an anachronism; I too, perceived a similarity between these stories and pulp war stories from the late forties through the sixties.It is a veritable grab bag of stories that vary from quite good "The Sea Witch" to the yawner "Hanger Rat". To me, the two best stories by far deal with combat missions in a PBY flying boat in the south pacific in early WW2, they are fast paced, have good character development, show the authors spent some time with historical detail,and ,finally,seem plausible. It goes down hill from there to me, but everybody has their favorites on the smogasbord! In short, if you are old enough to remember war pulp stories and enjoyed them, then you will probably enjoy this compendium; if not, you may find many of the stories too tedious or far fetched to maintain your interest. I give it 3 stars solely on the strength of the 2 PBY stories.

This is a wildly uneven anthology of stories about WWII. The best of the stories are Stephen Coonts'"Sea Witch" and James Cobb's "Eyes of the Cat" oddly, both are about PBY planes, a definitely unique topic. Both deliver excitement and unpredictability and a unique perspective. Stories by Barrett Tillman and Harold Coyle are standard, well told combat tales. Stories by Harold Robbins and David Hagberg belong in a different espionage anthology and there is a truly boring and glaringly out of place story by Dean Ing, who is a much better writer than this. Ralph Peters does well with his tale of a German soldier's problems returning home.
Not up to the caliber of Combat, the earlier modern war anthology, this still offers enough diversion for those interested in WWII fiction if you're willing to accept the uneven nature of the stories.

This book is in the same classification as the Combat book.In
this book you have ten authors write stories about World War II.
Stephen Coonts writes about a Catalina flying boatwho are doing battle with the Japanese in the Pacific.Harold Coyle does a story about the battle on Guadalcanal with the Japanese that earned this area the name of Bloody Ridge.Jim Defelice tells about an American pilot who parachutes into Germany to gather
intelligence and gets decieved.Harold Robbins tells a story about someone whi is sent to kill Hitler.Dean Ing tells a story about an effort to build an interceptor to stop a Nazi super weapon.Barrett Tillman tells of the role of a flamethrower operator in a battle at Tawara against the Japanese.James Cobb
tells of a Catalina searching for Japanese radar in the Pacific.
David Hagberg tells of allied agents trying to stop a Nazi superweapon that can cause havoc in the United States.R.J. Pineiro tells of an American pilot who trains Russian pilots in new Aircobras.Ralph Peters tells of a German soldier going home on foot after the war has ended.All in all this was an interesting book.It ranked as an equal to Combat.