World War II screeched to a halt as the great military powers scrambled to meet an even deadlier foe. The enemy's formidable technology made their victory seem inevitable. Already Berlin and Washington, D.C., had been vaporized by atom bombs, and large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its conquests lay under the invaders' thumb. Yet humanity would not give up so easily, even if the enemy's tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet aircraft seemed unstoppable. The humans were fiendishly clever, ruthless at finding their foe's weaknesses and exploiting them. While Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Togo planned strategy, the real war continued. In Warsaw, Jews welcomed the invaders as liberators, only to be cruelly disillusioned. In China, the Communist guerrillas used every trick they knew, even getting an American baseball player to lob grenades at the enemy. Though the invaders had cut the United States practically in half at the Mississippi River and devastated much of Europe, they could not shut down America's mighty industrial power or the ferocious counterattacks of her allies. Whether delivering supplies in tiny biplanes to partisans across the vast steppes of Russia, working furiously to understand the enemy's captured radar in England, or battling house to house on the streets of Chicago, humanity would not give up. Meanwhile, an ingenious German panzer colonel had managed to steal some of the enemy's plutonium, and now the Russians, Germans, Americans, and Japanese were all laboring frantically to make their own bombs. As Turtledove's global saga of alternate history continues, humanity grows more resourceful, even as the menace worsens. No one could say when the hellish inferno of death would stop being a war of conquest and turn into a war of survival-the very survival of the planet. In this epic of civilizations in deadly combat, the end of the war could mean the end of the world as well.
(Characters with names in CAPS are historical, others fictional)
ANIELEWICZ, MORDECHAI
Auerbach, Rance
Bagnall, George
Barisha
Berkowicz, Stefan
BLAIR, ERIC
Borcke, Martin
CHILL, KURT
CHURCHILL, WINSTON
COMPTON, ARTHUR
Cooley, Mary
Daniels, Pete ("Mutt")
DIEBNER, KURT
Donlan, Kevin
Embry, Ken
FERMI, ENRICO
FERMI, LAURA
Fiore, Bobby
FLEROV, GEORGI
Fritzie
Fukuoka, Yoshi
GERMAN, ALEKSANDR
Goldfarb, David
Gorbunova, Ludmila
GROVES, LESLIE
Harvey
HEISENBERG, WERNER
Henry
Hexham
Hicks, Chester
Higuchi
Hipple, Fred
Ho-T'ING, NIEH Chinese Communist guerrilla officer
Horton, Leo
HULL, CORDELL
Isaac
Jacobi, Nathan
Jager, Heinrich
Jones, Jerome
Karpov, Feofan
Kennan, Maurice
Klein, Sid
Klopotowski,
Klopotowski, Zofia
KONIEV, IVAN
KURCHATOV, IGOR
Laplace, Freddie
Larssen, Barbara
Larssen, Jens
Leon
Lidov, Boris
Liu Han
Lo
Maczek
Meineckt, Klaus
MOLOTOV, VYACHESLAV
Morozkin, Sergei
MURROW, EDWARD R.
Nakayama
NISHINA, YOSHIO
Okamoto, Major
Olson, Louise
