Go For Broke cover

Go For Broke

The Rat Bastards • Book 12

4.08 Goodreads
(24 ratings)

Why You'll Love This

Twelve books in and the Rat Bastards are still the most recklessly violent, defiantly unglamorous soldiers in WWII pulp fiction.

  • Great if you want: gritty, no-mercy Pacific theater action with zero sentimentality
  • The experience: fast and brutal — chapters hit like ambushes, rarely letting up
  • The writing: Levinson writes combat as visceral chaos, not choreography
  • Skip if: pulp-era violence and blunt, macho tone aren't your thing

About This Book

War fiction at its most unvarnished: Go For Broke drops readers into the brutal chaos of New Guinea, where a ragtag unit known as the Rat Bastards fights on every front simultaneously — against the enemy, against their own command, and against the raw violence that combat demands of ordinary men. The stakes here aren't abstract. They're immediate, physical, and personal, from desperate hand-to-hand clashes to the impossible task of protecting the vulnerable while surviving the relentless pressure of a grinding Pacific campaign. This is war stripped of glory and filled instead with grit, improvisation, and dark solidarity.

What sets this twelfth entry in the series apart is how Levinson and Mackie sustain momentum without sacrificing texture. The prose is punchy and kinetic, built for readers who want forward motion but still rewards attention — characters carry weight accumulated across the series, and the action sequences are choreographed with enough tactical specificity to feel grounded rather than cartoonish. Returning readers will find the Rat Bastards as grimly compelling as ever, while the relentless pacing ensures the book stands on its own as a propulsive, hard-edged slice of World War II fiction.