Bibliophobia’s Reviews > Decisive Darkness > Status Update

Japanese soldiers…noted the infamous 'Atomic sickness' and stayed clear of the city, choosing not even to defend the place…; instead they had taken positions in the hills around the ruins and left those remaining to die, lest their ailment was found to be contagious.
Now the only life in the city was the howling of the winds, and the rags that billowed in their wake.

Many who had survived the initial blast of the atomic bomb would not live to see the day, as their radiations and the radiation that had poisoned their bodies took its toll. Not Christian martyrs, but martyrs of Japan, announced Radio Tokyo; a testament to the murderous tendencies of the Americans, and why the fight that raged in the south was so crucial to preserving the future of Japan.

“The troops had been told not to expect a Christmas truce.
Though the battle for southern Kyushu, a war of relentless artillery, static advance, and mass slaughter for both sides had come to resemble the battlefields of northern France in 1914, neither side would choose to emerge to sing and pray and curse those who had sent them to this living hell to die for their own glory.”

…too delirious to understand why their guards reacted in horror at a single bomber, too weak to attempt to run for cover with them even if they had understood.
They and their captors died with the knowledge that there was nowhere to run.”

“Always in painful hunger as their skeletal bodies attempted to survive on the watery vegetable soup and the balls of rice that their captors would sometimes grant them, they now sat in cold, damp squalor in the centre of the city, as the B-29 Silverplate nicknamed Spook arrived overhead…

“Many had been threatened with death if they did not fight in the 'Volunteer' Fighting Corps, a chilling prelude of the junta's willingness to use their own population as human bullets, yet at the same time the population's unwillingness to play along with their apocalyptic visions.”