Man this bums me out. I really wanted to love this, I dig Dixon and I am a rabid alternate history fan. I will devour any Harry Turtledove that comes out as long as it doesn’t have wizards in it. I own 3 copies of “Fatherland” and “Archangel”. But this is just soooooo blah. The delays don’t bother me they really don’t the story here is just sooo damn scattershot. A story that follows the classic “what if” for all history buffs of what would WW2 look like if Atomic weapons were duds and Truman went through with an American invasion of the Japanese home islands.

I can’t keep or feel connected to any character in this story. Part of the problem is that Dixon only gives the reader a panel or two per character. There is a spy priest, a young Japanese boy, a Japanese American soldier and I think John Wayne but that is all I can tell you about the characters. Who they are, and nothing more because they are written at the thinnest of surface levels. The art doesn’t help much and is the second problem here. Everyone is drawn with thick heavy ink and it seems half the time in shadows.

The story moves at a snails pace. Again all surface here. Dixon drops many cool tidbits of suicidal Japanese charges against 50 caliber machine guns, little boy grenade units, Nazi