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Summary
Summary
Placed in charge of the OSS's Pacific operations for the purpose of uniting warring interests, Fleming Pickering is directed to rescue Americans from the Gobi desert and set up a critical weather station there.
Author Notes
W. E. B. Griffin is one of eight pseudonyms used by William E. Butterworth III, who was born in Newark, New Jersey on November 10, 1929. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in 1946 and was assigned to the Army of Occupation in Germany. He left the service in 1947 but was recalled to active duty in 1951 because of the Korean War. After leaving the service for the second time, he remained in Korea as a combat correspondent. He was later appointed chief of the publications division of the Signal Aviation Test and Support Activity at the Army Aviation Center in Fort Rucker, Alabama. He received the Brigadier General Robert L. Dening Memorial Distinguished Service Award of the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association in 1991 and the Veterans of Foreign Wars News Media Award in 1999.
He wrote more than 200 books including the Brotherhood of War series, The Corps series, Badge of Honor series, Honor Bound series, Presidential Agent series, Men at War series, and A Clandestine Operations Novel series. Under his own name, he wrote 12 sequels in the 1970s to Richard Hooker's book M*A*S*H. His other pen names included Alex Baldwin, Webb Beech, and Walter E. Blake. He wrote over 20 books with his son William E. Butterworth IV. He received the Alabama Author's Award in 1982 from the Alabama Library Association. He died on February 12, 2019 at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The gung-ho Marines familiar to readers of Griffin's seven Corps novels (Behind the Lines, etc.) return for an eighth adventureand not their best. Young Marine officers and enlisted men with high morale and low morals such as Ed Banning, Ken McCoy and Ernie Zimmerman are perfect for a secret (but remarkably improbable) OSS operation behind enemy lines in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in 1943. Their mission: to establish a clandestine weather station and rescue a wayward group of Americans who fled China after the Japanese invasion in 1941 and have been lost in Mongolia for nearly two years. While the plot teases with a promise of suspense in an exotic and forbidding locale, the reality is that not a shot is fired, not a cliffhanger is encountered and three-fourths of the narrative is set safely back in the States, where the characters spend most of their time drinking, womanizing, disobeying orders and wringing their hands over how they can rejoin the war. Under the leadership of fatherly Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, a kind of Marine den daddy, they do return, although the result is anticlimactic. Numerous side plots provide color and historical perspective, but overwrought dialogue, flat narrative and soap-operatic storytelling leave this lengthy tale without snap. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
For those readers who are counting, this is Griffin's twenty-seventh novel and the eighth in his Marine Corps series. Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, head of the OSS' Pacific operations during World War II, is the hero, and such wartime leaders as Admirals Nimitz and Leahy, General Douglas MacArthur, President Roosevelt, and OSS Director William Donovan are included in the cast of characters. Pickering is a can-do kind of guy, whose assignments include the rescue of some American ex-servicemen and their families who are fleeing the Japanese in the Gobi Desert, and the setting up of a weather station in the desert to aid in air attacks on the Japanese. As in Griffin's other novels, this one is packed with adventure: secret missions, coded messages, warlords and bandits, and aircraft-submarine rendezvous on the high seas. Griffin's favorite word is still sonofabitch, and this new story seems to have the ring of familiarity, but so what? It will undoubtedly be another best-seller. --George Cohen
Library Journal Review
Griffin continues his prodigious output of military novels (e.g., The Last Heroes) with this latest installment of his "Corps" series. There is the usual array of historical characters (FDR, "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, and others) plus the hero, Fleming Pickering. Throw in a number of rough-talking, hard-living men and women and we have an action-packed tale that takes us from Washington to the Gobi Desert. The action concerns a mission by the OSS to extract a group of American ex-servicemen and their families from the Gobi and then to establish a weather station to assist the air corps in bombing Japan. In this abridgment, seasoned actor and reader Stephen Lang displays his many vocal talents: the characters all have credible accents and are performed with a certain gusto; the narrative sections are done in a manner both lively and engaging. Unfortunately for Lang, the music and sound effects in this production distract from his efforts. Still, this should be in demand in any public library.ÄMichael T. Fein, Catawba Valley Community Coll., Hickory, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
