In the Offing

With the end of the War in the offing, the Japanese still had not surrendered, a bloody battle lay ahead before the Home Islands could be wrested from their hands. Japan believed they could make the cost of invading too high for the Allies to accept and that would lead to a face-saving armistice rather than total humiliation. The Americans estimated the cost in lives of an invasion to be anything from forty-nine thousand to half a million with a necessary replacement flow of one hundred thousand men a month. The race to get the atomic bomb ready for the faint hearted and impatient politicians was on. Japan was also in a race to manufacture their own weapon. The ‘Flea’ bomb’ would make the atomic bomb with its abilities to kill tens of thousands look like the tender ministrations of Florence Nightingale by comparison. It could even mean that the invasion of Japan, ‘Operation Downfall’, could well have a contradictory meaning... Commodore Barr’s men are in place to do something about a perilous situation only ‘Orca’ knew of, one that could completely reverse the fortunes of the Allies and make a half a million casualties look like a release of liquid from the urinary tract into the saline water that composes much of the planet's hydrosphere.