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(More customer reviews)Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Peter Huchthausen provides an "I was there" account of the Crisis from alternating perspectives of U.S. Navy destroyer crews attempting to enforce a blockade of Cuba and Soviet submarine crews that unknowingly stumble into the largest antisubmarine warfare force ever assembled during the Cold War. In 1962 Huchthausen was a junior officer on the American destroyer USS Blanding which hunted the Soviet submarines and inspected Soviet freighters withdrawing from Cuba with ballistic missiles.
Other sources provide better overviews of the strategic and political aspects of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the unique aspect of October Fury is the story, based on Huchthausen's interviews with former Soviet submarine officers, of what happens to four Foxtrot Class submarines when the USSR attempts to move them from their base near the Artic Circle to the port of Mariel in Cuba. The Foxtrot crews, unaware of the larger ongoing Soviet deployment of land-based ballistic and surface-to-air missiles, bombers and other forces to Cuba that will soon trigger the Crisis, depart the Kola Peninsula in early September 1962, with orders to make their way to Cuba while avoiding detection by American forces at all costs. As the submarines near the Bahamas in mid-October the U.S.-Soviet face off over Cuban-based nuclear weapons has commenced and the Foxtrots receive orders to cancel their voyage to Cuba and deploy instead to combat patrol stations in the Atlantic and Caribbean . The rest of the book details action over several days as the Soviet submarines vainly try to remain undetected while American destroyers and aircraft hound them mercilessly, trying to force them to surface and withdraw. There are several tense encounters between the Soviet submarines and their American tormenters that nearly result in actual combat.
Huchthausen's writing would benefit from more editing to eliminate wordiness and repetitions (we're told three times that a pre-Crisis American military exercise was called "Ortsac, which is Castro spelled backward") and some of the dialog wording sounds improbable. The one small-scale chart showing the area of ocean and islands where the destroyer-submarine confrontations take place is grossly inadequate to help readers follow vessel movements as each side jockeys for advantage. And the former destroyer officer should have asked a submariner to edit the descriptions of submarine operations to correct some terms and details.
Despite these shortcomings, I greatly enjoyed October Fury and recommend it to everyone interested in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War military topics, submarine adventure and signals intelligence (SIGINT). Huchthausen's depiction of the Soviets' ambitious intended military deployment in Cuba and the operations of the Soviet Navy and its submarine crews will fascinate Cold War buffs. Readers won't want to put down the dramatic, detailed, back and forth descriptions from submarine and destroyer crew perspectives as the Crisis builds up and fades away. This story has the potential to make a great movie. A Foxtrot submarine like those in this book is currently on display to the public in Seattle...
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