Book picks similar to
H-Hour by Bart Gauvin


military
war
alt-history
alternate-history

Protect and Defend


Eric L. Harry - 1997
    Slowly, it has grown in power, extending its sphere of influence beyond the Asian continent. Now, it has launched a final assault against the only possible obstacle to world domination...The United States of America.

Bombs Away


Harry Turtledove - 2015
    Now, this masterful storyteller turns his eyes to the aftermath of World War II and asks: In an era of nuclear posturing, what if the Cold War suddenly turned hot?Bombs Away begins with President Harry Truman heeding the advice of General Douglas MacArthur, whose control of the ground war in Korea has slipped disastrously away. MacArthur recognizes a stark reality. The U.S. military has been cut to the bone after victory over the Nazis—while China and the U.S.S.R. have built up their forces. The only way to stop the Communist surge into the Korean Peninsula and save thousands of American lives is through a nuclear attack. MacArthur advocates a strike on Chinese targets in Manchuria. In actual history, Truman rejected his general’s advice. But here, he does not. And the miscalculation turns into a disaster when Truman fails to foresee Russia’s reaction.Almost instantly, Stalin strikes U.S. allies in Europe and Great Britain. And as the shock waves are settling, the two superpowers are caught in a horrifying face-off. Will they attack each other directly with nukes? And what countries will be caught in between?The fateful global drama plays out through the experiences of ordinary people—from a British barmaid to a Ukrainian war veteran to a desperate American soldier alone behind enemy lines in Korea. For them, as well as Truman, Mao, and Stalin, the whole world has become a battleground. Strategic strikes lead to massive movements of ground troops. Cities are destroyed, economies ravaged. And on a planet under siege, the sounds and sites of nuclear bombs become a grim harbinger of a new reality: the struggle to survive man’s greatest madness.

SS-GB


Len Deighton - 1979
    London is in shock. The very look of daily life is a walking nightmare of German uniforms, artifacts, regulations. There are collaborators. There are profiteers. But there are others working in hope, in secret, and desperate danger, against the invader. And still others are living strangely ambiguous lives – none more so than Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer ("Archer of the yard" as the press like to call him), trying to maintain a peculiarly, almost sacredly, British institution under a Nazi chief. Archer has started work on what seems, at first, a routine murder case. But suddenly an SS Standartenführer from Himmler's personal staff flies in from Berlin to supervise the investigation, and Archer is plunged deep into an espionage battle for which he is completely unprepared, and where the stakes are incredibly high. "We’re dealing with something that could prove so deadly that not even the Black Death would compare with the consequences", the SS man tells him.Setting forth on a tight rope trail of violence, betrayal and danger, Archer moves into worlds within worlds of intrigue. The British resistance, wealthy collaborators, high-level scientists, German army and SS factions and vicious rivalry, a beautiful American reporter on assignment for the still-neutral papers back home – these are the players that Deighton's treacherously shifting drama, as it races toward its chattering climax that involves the fate of the King, and of England itself.SS–GB is fascinating in its premise, utterly authentic and convincing in its detail. It is the most gripping novel we have had from the author of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Bomber. Already, in England, it has become Len Deighton's greatest best seller.

Putin's Gambit


Lou Dobbs - 2017
    Born comes Putin's Gambit, an international financial thriller about a KGB plot to use a series of terrorist attacks as cover for a Russian military incursion into Estonia. Adjusting to civilian life has not been easy for former Marine Derek Walsh. As he navigates a brutal job on Wall Street and a challenging romance, he wonders if he could be doing more with his life. When an inexplicable $200 million dollar money transfer is made on his computer, he is thrust into the world of international terror, and the global economy is knocked off its hinges.On the other side of the Atlantic, a dangerous alliance has formed. Radical Islamists and Russian extremists have set the wheels in motion for Russia to assert its power in Europe. The US President has proven to be weak on foreign policy, the military is stretched too thin, and Vladimir Putin judges this to be the time for Russia to regain its Soviet Empire. Troops mass on the Estonian border, waiting for the order to move.The FBI believes Walsh was involved in the money transfer, and a group of Russians are intent on killing him. As New Yorkers are outraged upon learning of the illegal money transfer, and the world economy crashes after a series of terrorist attacks, Walsh and his Marine buddies are the only ones that can keep the world from spinning off its axis.

Red Phoenix


Larry Bond - 1989
    Seizing the opportunity, North Korea launches a lightning invasion, with heavy Soviet support, whose aim is to unite North and South under Communist rule. The second Korean War has begun and World War III may be imminent.

Body Count: A Special Forces thriller set in the Vietnam War


Eric Helm - 1984
    BUT CHARLIE OWNED THE CLOCK! One morning there was nothing but hot, thick jungle and steaming swamp. And the Viet Cong. The next morning there were three hundred sweating, groaning men chopping and chain sawing a hole in that particular hunk of hell. And that's where Captain Mack Gerber and his Scorpion Squad were going to set up shop. Right in the VC's backyard. Gerber's orders were simple: Let the VC know they didn't own the delta anymore; let them know they were in a lastditch fight; and make sure it was the last thing they'd ever know. But Victor Charlie had their own plans. A clock was ticking. Soon all hell would break loose and there wouldn't be enough survivors left to do a ... body count.

The Forest of Assassins


David Forsmark - 2013
    It is must-read on every page.” ----THOMAS FLEMING: Author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of the Civil War“The Forest of Assassins is a great read, a novel as good as the best journalism, with vivid and accurate details driving a tale of danger and deception and betrayal during the Vietnam War. This book doesn't just feel researched, it feels lived. Whether tightening the suspense – our protagonist, Navy Lieutenant Hank Dillon eyeball to eyeball with a VC soldier and watching for the skin to whiten on the man’s finger curled around the trigger of his AK-47 – or describing the oppressive heat of an innocent afternoon on the Mekong Delta, David Forsmark and Timothy Imholt make you believe every word of it. I couldn't recommend it more highly.-ROBERT FERRIGNO, NY Times best-selling novelist, Prayers for the AssassinAs real as fiction gets. A non-stop ride into combat told with perfection.-BOB HAMER, veteran FBI undercover agent and the author of The Last UndercoverThe Forest of Assassins is a historic thriller set in the earliest days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. It involved the earliest of Navy SEAL teams. It is set in a time when the NAVY still did not admit these men existed, much less had they determined if those units would survive until the next conflict, or if the experiment would be abandoned. The Forest of Assassins tells the story of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Hank Dillon, a squad commander, deep in the jungles of South Vietnam when America’s involvement in the war was still in the “advisor” stage. Dillon’s mission is to wreak havoc among the Viet Cong guerillas who are terrorizing the countryside.Their mission—and even their presence in the region—is top secret. But Hank has a problem even bigger than a deadly and determined enemy; he has a traitor in the ranks.Meanwhile, a suspicious NCIS cop is nosing around Hank’s mysterious operation, certain that it is a front for drug running and other illegal activities.Things are tense for the young Lieutenant who just wants to go home to his wife…intact.

The Second Korean War


Ted Halstead - 2018
    Another nuclear weapon nears Seoul in a tunnel built by North Koreans. And North Korea's new military dictator launches an all-out invasion. Will Seoul or Pyongyang be the new capital of a united Korea?

Ghost Sniper


David Healey - 2014
    On the dawn of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, two snipers find themselves fighting a battle all their own. One is a backwoods hunter from the Appalachian Mountains in the American South, while the other is the dreaded German “Ghost Sniper” who earned his nickname on the Eastern Front. Locked in a deadly duel across the hedgerow country of France, the hunter matches wits and tactics against the marksman, both of them one bullet away from victory—or defeat—as Allied forces struggle to gain a foothold in Europe.

The Rifleman


Oliver North - 2019
     This is a war story. It’s about real people and events before and during the American Revolution. The central characters in this work—Daniel Morgan, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Charles Mynn Thruston, and Generals Arnold, Knox, Greene, Lee, Gates, and a host of others—actually did the deeds at the places and times described herein. So too did their accurately identified foreign and native adversaries. Though this is a work of fiction, readers may be surprised to discover the American Revolution was also one of the most ‘un-civil’ of Civil Wars. If Daniel Morgan were alive today, he would be my near neighbor in Virginia’s beautiful Shenandoah Valley. While visiting a nearby gristmill, Daniel Morgan and Nathaniel Burwell, a fellow Revolutionary War veteran, built in the late 1700s [now restored and operated by the Clarke County Historical Association], I became fascinated by this unsung American hero. “My good friend Oliver North has spent his life in the company of heroes. In this great read, he tells the stories of some of my personal heroes—the Riflemen you will meet in this book!” —LTG William G. “Jerry” Boykin, former commander, U.S. Army Special Forces and author of six books including his autobiography, Never Surrender

Silver Tower


Dale Brown - 1988
    Iran has been invaded. And America responds in a grueling counterattack by air, by sea--and by brave new technology that will redefine war: the most sophisticated laser defense system ever. It is called Silver Tower. And it will change the balance of world power forever...

Standing the Final Watch


William Alan Webb - 2016
     Lt. General Nick Angriff has spent his adult life protecting family and country from a world of terrorism spinning out of control. On the battlefield, off the grid, in clandestine special task forces and outright black ops, Angriff never wavers from duty. But when a terror attack on Lake Tahoe kills his family, he’s left with only the corrosive acid of revenge… that is, until a hated superior officer reveals the deepest of all secret operations. Against the day of national collapse, a heavily-armed military unit rests in cryogenic storage, to be awakened when needed, and Angriff is named its commander. Fifty years later he wakes to find the USA destroyed and predatory warlords roaming the ruins. Stalked by assassins bent on seizing his command for their own purposes, Angriff has to prepare for war while avoiding murder. Because the only wall still shielding survivors from slavery and death are the men and women of The Last Brigade.

2034: A Novel of the Next World War


Elliot Ackerman - 2021
    On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically out maneuvering America's most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and literary, human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters--Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians--as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power.Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Punk's War: A Novel


Ward Carroll - 2002
    Written in the tone of the quixotic lieutenants who populate its pages, this novel vividly illustrates the pressures on the new generation of war fighters. Along the way the book introduces an engaging cast of characters: a self-centered squadron commander hell-bent on fixing his tainted professional reputation; a reluctant air-wing commander more suited for life within the walls of the Pentagon than on a flight deck at sea; a battle-group commander trained in the art of driving ships, now thrust into the snap-decision matrix of supersonic jets; and a host of junior officers. Seeking only the ideals they were promised, these technology-savvy aviators are products of pop culture, unimpressed by rank for its own sake and unresponsive to petitions in the name of the profession's lofty mottoes. But for all of its irreverance, Punk's War is a loving tribute to those called to service during an unsteady peace and a definitive statement about why flying fighters for a living remains among the most noble of professions.

Invasion USA


William W. Johnstone - 2006
    Johnstone delivers an all-new action-packed series torn from today's headlines in which the greatest danger is not posed by those kept out of America-but by those let in.INVASION USALittle Tuscon, Arizona, just twenty miles north of the border, is a small town whose citizens believe in God, country, and hard work. But their peaceful existence is about to be shattered by Mara Salvatrucha-the murderous Central American gang known as M-15.Culled from the scum of the earth, M-15 runs a drug smuggling operation through the ill-protected border, terrorizing defenseless communities into submission through theft, rape, and murder.With Washington turning a blind eye to the crisis in Little Tucson, Vietnam vet Tom Brannon takes the law into his own hands and forms his own volunteer army, which he names The Patriot Project.But now all hell's about to break loose, because M-15 is coming back to take out the Patriots. Outnumbered and outgunned, with the fate of their families, their homes, and their very country at stake, Tom Brannon and his men will meet the enemy. It's high noon in Arizona-and time to take America back once more.