Death is Lighter than a Feather

Six hundred and fifty thousand U.S. troops prepared to assault the airfields and harbors of Kyushu, the southernmost island. Over a million Japanese dug into the beaches, furiously building underground fortifications, gun emplacements, and suicide craft, prepared to die to the last man if need be.

THE NAME OF THE PLAN — DOWNFALL.

Lighter than a Featheris the dramatic story of the epic battle for Kyushu, based on the assumption that the atomic bomb was not dropped, and that Downfall actually did place. Written by the author of Von Ryan's Express, it is the most ambitious, brilliant, and generally exciting novel ever to come out of the Pacific war, a monumental feat of unrelenting action and superb characterization.

Lighter than a Featheris narrated by the participants of both sides. These are some of the people who make up the cast: Cadet Hiroshi Arai, a seventeen-year-old kamikaze pilot torn between fear of certain death and a warrior's code of honor; war-happy Lester Waddell, expert marksman, who suddenly realizes that for weeks he's been killing the same Japanese over and over again; Miho Naito, a pretty young girl who has the misfortune to surrender to Staff Sergeant "Stud" Simmons; Maurie Stokes, chaplain's assistant, who with patient tolerance discharges what seems to be his primary assignment—looking (vainly) for Japanese Christians; and Jiro Matsuyama, sixty-one, a little deaf and blind in on eye, sitting n the ashes of his home, watching the battle.

These are the figures Westheimer understands so well and whom he portrays with such consummate skill. Combining the depth and authenticity of a true historical narrative with the magnificent satisfaction of a first-rate work of fiction, his novel projects with unfaltering ability both the essence of the Japanese and American people at war and the breathtaking excitement of one of the most daring military operations in the history of the Pacific.