"But what will I do for an army?" Eichelberger asked softly. It was a reminder to Bradley that he and the absent Hodges were scheduled to be field commanders for Coronet as Krueger was for the smaller Olympic. "Surely you don't expect to use the men now on Kyushu?"

"That's correct, I do not. Along with their presence being needed here, they are far too worn-out for further offensive operations. No, they are to stay here."

"Thank God," said Krueger, who could finally see an end to his horrors. "But Bob's right. What will he use for an army? The invasion of Honshu will use an additional fourteen divisions in the initial phase alone. Half those boys are either en route or not even formed up."

Bradley smiled tightly. "Then we'll use the half we got. Gentlemen, I've been coordinating with Nimitz and the Pentagon on the status of the Japanese army defending Tokyo. What had once been estimated at eighteen infantry and two armored divisions has been reduced to less than half that, and many of those remaining soldiers are nothing but untrained warm bodies in uniforms. They are recent conscripts who've had no training whatsoever and don't possess much in the way of weapons. Our air force has been pounding anything they see, so there has to be further erosion in their ability to fight.

"Bob, Walt, I don't think the Japs have anything left near Tokyo to fight with. I agree with intelligence estimates that there will be little resistance to an invasion of Honshu."

Bradley saw the disbelief on their faces. They'd heard much the same thing from MacArthur earlier in the year, and it had proven horribly, tragically wrong. But Bradley also saw a glimmer of hope that this would end the terrible fighting. This was information that had come from several sources, and not just MacArthur's pet intelligence coordinators who had been deemed infallible by their late commander.

Bradley moved away from the map. "The battle lines are almost static and we are playing into their hands. The harder we push against their defenses, the more men we lose. This battle for Kyushu is nothing more than a rehash of Verdun in the last war, or Stalingrad in this one, where one side tried to make the other side bleed itself to death. We can't continue fighting and losing men at this rate."

"All right," admitted Eichelberger. "We can't. So what's Walt to do while Hodges and I try to pull an army out of thin air?"

"First of all, Bob," Bradley said, "your army isn't coming out of the air. It'll be coming from the Philippines, California, Hawaii, and Europe. It'll be close, but I'll guarantee you at least two marine and ten army divisions, along with at least one armored brigade, for the invasion."

Eichelberger nodded. "If you're right about the state of the Jap army, it'll do. In fact, it'll more than do."

Bradley turned to Krueger. "Walt, you may have the most difficult part. Any reinforcements and replacements not already landed here are now going to go to Bob. You'll have to make do with what you have."

Krueger shrugged. "I kinda guessed as much. If it'll help end this thing, I'm game. As if I had a choice." He grinned for the first time.

"Good," said Bradley. "One thing I am very afraid of is a major Jap counterattack. If they detect that we've slowed down and eased off on the pressure, I'm convinced they'll try one. I want you to keep up a minimum level of pressure to keep their attention focused on Kyushu."

Eichelberger arched an eyebrow. "A counterattack? Do you really think the Japs are up to that? We've hit them pretty hard, Brad. They've taken a lot of casualties, probably a lot more than we have."

Bradley seated himself and leaned back in the chair. "Just about a year ago I was in Europe and we were all counting out the German army. They were dead, we said, defeated and destroyed. Then the Germans found a weak spot in the Ardennes and we wound up fighting the bloodiest battle in the history of the United States, at least until this one.

"Against all odds, the Nazis managed one last attack, one last hurrah, and just when we thought they couldn't. We were caught preparing our own plans as if they didn't have any of their own. Are you aware that our latest intelligence estimates are that the Japs still have more than half a million men on Kyushu?"

"I know," said Krueger. "We kill them and they keep replacing them with fresh bodies from Korea and Honshu. Maybe they aren't top-notch soldiers, but they're still fighting. Damned Reds are helping them too. We think we've caused a quarter of a million Jap dead or wounded, but they keep making good the losses."

"Truman will take care of the Russians," Bradley commented hopefully, "but you've got to watch out for the Japs. If the Battle of the Bulge is any guide, they will wait for an extended period of rotten weather when our air forces are grounded and attack then. Unfortunately, they are still getting good weather information from stations in Korea and even from Manchuria. Since the winter storms flow down from up there, they will have several days' advance notice. So will we, of course. Nimitz has already put a number of navy weather experts on ships and has them in the Sea of Japan off Korea and Honshu."

"Good," both other generals muttered in near unison.

"General Krueger, I want your boys to be ready to circle the wagons- and I mean that almost literally- when Nimitz gives the signal that the weather is ripe for the Japs to attack. If nothing comes of it, that'll be fine by me, but I'd rather have a false alarm, even a number of them, than a rehash of the Bulge, where two regiments of the 106th Division were forced to surrender. I don't want to even think of additional American troops being captured by the Japs. I don't care how you do it, but there will be no weak places for the Japs to exploit if and when they do attack."

"What about atom bombs?" Eichelberger queried.

"There won't be a place for them on the battlefield that I envision if the Japs do attack us." Mentally, Bradley hedged the statement. If a suitable target was found far enough from the battle lines, he would consider it.

The door to the room burst open. "Incoming!" yelled a sergeant. "Jap planes on a dead line towards us."

"Shit," said Krueger as the men raced in undignified haste down an earthen corridor to the reinforced shelter. "I guess our little secret's out. I was really starting to get fond of this hole."

Chapter 57

Relations between senior officers of the Japanese army and the navy were generally formal at best. The rivalry was historically intense. Each had its own priorities and each was bitterly jealous of the other, even to the point of orchestrating assassinations in the decades prior to the war.

The army had argued against the southward push of the navy that had brought the United States and Great Britain into the war. At the time of Pearl Harbor the Japanese army was fully involved in a major land war with China- one it had started without seeking government approval- and wished to finish that war before starting any new adventures.

Within a year of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Army could only sit and seethe in impotent fury as the Imperial Japanese Navy lost battle after battle and watch in frustration as enemy warships drew ever closer to Japan.

As 1945 drew to a close, only the army remained to defend Japan, and the naval officers who'd been so proud and smug the years before were scarcely tolerated pariahs whose rash efforts had failed the empire. While the navy licked its wounds and tallied its losses, the army had gone on the offensive in China and pushed the Chinese Nationalists southward, forcing the American air forces to evacuate bases from which they'd been bombing the home islands. As a result, many army officers now looked down on their naval counterparts. The army had always felt that Japan's true adversary was the Soviet Union, and it had galled the generals to have to make peace, however temporary, with Stalin, who had broken it that summer.