It was the first book I ever read in English, out of necessity: for a long time, it simply wasn’t available in German (the translation, “Im Sturm,” only came out much later). A classmate lent it to me. The pro-American slant was even more obvious in this one. The ending felt like a bit of a deus ex machina to me, but I still found the book gripping. If you can stomach reading about World War III, it’s a genuinely thrilling read.
By the time I read it, the Cold War was over. The book offered a glimpse of what might have been, had things gone very differently back then. Not that I had any illusions that it would have played out the way it does in the novel.
Today, the novel feels strangely close again. Maybe that’s why I felt uneasy when the military exercise here in the Port of Hamburg was called “Red Storm Charlie.”