The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [0]
Gods and Generals
The Last Full Measure
Gone for Soldiers
Rise to Rebellion
The Glorious Cause
To the Last Man
Jeff Shaara’s Civil War Battlefields
The Rising Tide
The Steel Wave
No Less Than Victory
The Final Storm is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey M. Shaara
Maps copyright © 2011 by Mapping Specialists
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Shaara, Jeff.
The final storm: a novel of the war in the Pacific / Jeff Shaara.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52643-4
1. World War, 1939–1945—Pacific Area—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Fiction. 3. Pacific Area—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H18F56 2011 813′.54—dc22 2011003096
www.ballantinebooks.com
Jacket illustration: © Robert Hunt
v3.1
For Brenda At Last
TO THE READER
The story of the end of the war in the Pacific pushes us toward a delicate line between what we know to be simple history (the facts) and what many of us prefer to think should have happened. Sixty-five years after the event, many of us sit in judgment on the way the Second World War was brought to a close, some of us wondering if there could have been a better way, or perhaps a more moral way to end the war. In the American psyche, those debates are likely to continue for a very long time. But those debates will not be found here.
This story attempts to complete what I began in a trilogy that dealt with the war in Europe. Those stories involved America’s first involvement in the fight against the Germans and concluded with the fall of Hitler. Half a world away, there had been another, far more brutal war, against an enemy who was even more successful than Hitler in conquering a vast swath of territory and threatening to slice off an enormous part of the world from our definition of civilization. Had the Japanese been allowed to maintain the empire they sought (and nearly won), all of Asia, including China, Korea, and Indochina, Thailand, Burma, and Malaya, would have become part of an empire that would also have included Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the thousands of islands that spread from those lands all the way east to Hawaii, and north to the Aleutians. What might have followed is speculation, of course. Would the Japanese have invaded the United States (which was one purpose of the conquest of the islands in the Aleutian chain, to serve as a base for such an operation)? Or, strengthened by the raw materials drawn from the riches of the lands under their control, would the Japanese have been strong enough to shove their armies across India, or drive southward to Central and South America?
The urgency of meeting the challenge in the Pacific seemed to many Americans to be secondary to the threat posed to our allies by Hitler. Despite the grotesque insult inflicted upon the United States by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the government, particularly President Roosevelt, understood that Germany’s conquest of Europe, including England, was a more immediate threat. And so greater resources were poured out of American factories toward that part of the world. But the Pacific was hardly ignored. After Pearl Harbor, the United States struck back at the Japanese, and in what now seems an amazing feat, fought both wars simultaneously, against two very different enemies, in two very different ways.
Though my plan had been to complete this story with Europe, I could not just walk away without touching upon the Pacific. (I was