Book Review: 'The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan'

It is July, 1945: As the scientists and military men who have built the atomic bomb prepare to test the ultimate weapon, an unexpected thunderstorm arrives at the Trinity test site near Los Alamos, N.M. Lightning strikes the tower where the first bomb -- code named "Fat Man" -- is tethered, and in a literal flash, history is changed. 

There are still two nuclear weapons left, but until the more complex plutonium bomb can be tested, their use is postponed until 1946. In the meantime, the conventional operation of the Japanese home islands, code named DOWNFALL, is launched as scheduled on Nov. 1, 1945.

With this almost Shakespearean touch, novelist and World War II veteran Alfred Coppel (Thirty Four East, The Dragon) begins his "what-if" account of the invasion of Japan in 1945 and 1946.

Instead of covering the entire two-part campaign (OLYMPIC, the landing on Kyushu, and CORONET, the final landing on Honshu) in the main body of The Burning Mountain, Coppel starts his tale by dispensing with the aftermath of the failed TRINITY test with an "excerpt" from a history of the 1941-46 Pacific War, covering the strategy and tactics used by both sides up to and during the OLYMPIC campaign.

The bulk of The Burning Mountain centers on the March 1946 landings as seen through the eyes of various Japanese and Allied participants, including a Marine sergeant who is unsure that his platoon commander will perform well in combat, a B-17 crewman who finds himself in dire straits when his bomber is shot down, an American Ranger officer whose connections with a Japanese family begin to affect his perception of the war the closer he gets to places he knew as a child, and the Japanese soldiers and civilians who desperately fight to defend their homeland from the invading gaijin.

Basing most of his account on actual American and Japanese battle plans for the home island campaign, Coppel blends historical speculation along the lines of Peter Tsouras' Disaster at D-Day with some melodramatic elements involving the Japanese-raised Harry Seaver and his Japanese paramour. 

Although The Burning Mountain is an entertaining novel,  I would have preferred that the author would have focused on the invasion rather than sidetracked into the mind-bending Seaver storyline. Everything else, from the description of historical characters (Gen. MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz) and the hardware (including the seldom-mentioned Alaska-class battle cruisers, which did indeed exist but were launched too late to see major combat in the real Pacific campaign) and units involved ring true. Coppel vividly depicts the yard-by-yard and often savage fighting that might have ensued had President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff been forced to greenlight Operation DOWNFALL.