This revised and updated edition of the classic Cold War novel Team
Yankee reminds us once again might have occurred had the United States
and its Allies taken on the Russians in Europe, had cooler geopolitical
heads not prevailed.
For 45 years after World War II, East and West stood on the brink of
war. When Nazi Germany was destroyed, it was evident that Russian tank
armies had become supreme in Europe, but only in counterpart to US air
power. In 1945 US and UK bombers sent a signal to the advancing Russians
at Dresden to beware of what the Allies could do. Likewise when the
Russians overran Berlin they sent a signal to the Allies what their land
armies could accomplish. Thankfully the tense standoff continued on
either side of the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century.
During those years, however, the Allies beefed up their ground
capability, while the Soviets increased their air capability, even as
the new jet and missile age began (thanks much to captured German
scientists on both sides). The focal point of conflict remained in
central Germany--specifically the flat plains of the Fulda Gap--through
which the Russians could pour all the way to the Channel if the Allies
proved unprepared (or unable) to stop them.
Team Yankee posits a conflict that never happened, but which very well
might have, and for which both sides prepared for decades. This former
New York Times bestseller by Harold Coyle, now revised and expanded,
presents a glimpse of what it would have been like for the Allied
soldiers who would have had to meet a relentless onslaught of Soviet and
Warsaw Pact divisions.
It takes the view of a US tank commander, who is vastly outnumbered
during the initial onslaught, as the Russians pull out all the cards
learned in their successful war against Germany. Meantime Western Europe
has to speculate behind its thin screen of armor whether the New World
can once again assemble its main forces--or willpower--to rescue the
bastions of democracy in time.
