The Burning Mountain – Alfred Coppel, 1982 ★★

The Longest Day that Never Was

For those who balk at the morality of using A-bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, The Burning Mountain presents a hellish alternative: mass waves of suicide boats and planes, gas warfare, hordes of crying children wearing explosives, and much more.

Between 150,000 to 250,000 people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Alfred Coppel imagined a death toll at least as high in the hypothetical event the atom bomb failed to work. The invasion of the Japanese Home Islands becomes a series of endless battles fought with bamboo sticks and flamethrowers; one side full of people eager to die, the other side worn out both by their own casualties and those they must inflict.

As a worst-case scenario, The Burning Mountain convinces. As a story, it mostly misses the mark with a handful of distinctive yet dull characters and an uninvolving, shapeless narrative.

This is a tale of constant violence and devastation, told episodically through the eyes of several participants who mostly die before the end. For the Japanese, particularly, losing with honor matters more than what they leave behind:

The war, Takahashi had been given to understand, had reached the point of simple choices. Tactics and strategy had been reduced to one simple directive for all Japanese forces: “Inflict casualties.” Only by bathing the Americans in blood could Japan hope to obtain tolerable terms for the ending of hostilities.

Above, U. S. landings at Okinawa, April 1945. The true last battle of World War II, Okinawa's conquest was also the bloodiest for both sides. Alfred Coppel extrapolates its toll in a hypothetical invasion of Japan's Home Islands.
Image from https://library.tamucc.edu/exhibits/s/hist4350/page/battle

What makes The Burning Mountain compelling is its author’s established skill as a writer of pulp fiction. Coppel knew how to excite a reader by setting up a dire situation, dangling enough hope to keep them invested, and then paying it off with a sharp, sudden ending. He layers on details like the smell of gasoline and the chop of the surf to invest his story with palpable realism. Add to that his engagement with Japanese language and culture, and it all works fine, to a point.

What makes The Burning Mountain a miss is its lack of a single, stitched-together plot or investable character arcs. Too many back-to-back instances of watching people getting drowned or decapitated to satisfy a national death wish is harrowing, sure, but also exhausting.

Were the Japanese so willing to kill themselves by the end of the war? History says yes, offering as examples the refusal of their soldiers to surrender in nearly all cases and the mass suicides of civilians at Okinawa, which in real life was the last contested battlefield and the only one on Japanese territory. In this alternate history, the war continues along conventional lines as the Japanese fight on and on.

The theoretical Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honsho and the area around Tokyo, becomes reality in Coppel's reimagined version of World War II. Operation Olympic, an earlier invasion of another Home Island is largely skimmed over but described as being unprecedented in its death toll.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

The picture painted by Coppel is so bleak it almost demands a denial. Certainly someone on that very large island should have done the cost-vs.-benefit analysis without a need for nuclear detonations. Yet such a ceasefire was not in the cards, and Coppel leans into the fanatic angle.

One Japanese woman, no less committed to death before defeat, has enough rationality to put it all in context: Whatever else we lack, Katsuko thought ironically, the Japanese people have a powerful sense of the fitness of things. We are expected to fight ferociously, like samurai, and then to die – but in proper form.

In one episode, a group of senior Japanese leaders gather for a secret meeting to discuss going to their Emperor and proposing surrender. But this turns out a very brief pause in the proceedings, ending in bloodshed.

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, is a remote figure in The Burning Mountain, depicted only briefly. His words to his troops appear often, however: "Be resolved that duty is heavier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather."
Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/emperor-hirohito-of-japan-195661

I paused on that moment after and wondered if there was a missed opportunity here, a novel where we have a rooting interest in members of both sides, one fighting for victory, the other struggling with their own countrymen to bring the senseless killing to an end. That might make for a more standard type of novel, the kind of potboiler that could have become a TV miniseries or some popular entertainment.

But Coppel isn’t writing that kind of story. Instead, you get this:

They lay piled on one another; in places the shells had stacked them seven and eight deep. The road was no longer the color of the volcanic soil. In those few places not covered with men and parts of men, the soil was bright red. Blood ran down the slope between the rocks. There was a kind of mass, swarming movement, as those who could do so attempted to crawl into whatever cover they could find. It was as though some mythical dragon had been minced into segments and yet found time to protest its own slaughter.

The book isn’t all gore. There is a lot of ordinance on display as well, capital ships and suicide subs and an American night fighter which is able to wipe out an enemy convoy by the glow of their headlights. 

An American P-61 "Black Widow" night fighter takes an unknowing central role in the Burning Mountain narrative. Its pilot, pleased to have inflicted no casualties to this point and hoping to get out of the war "clean" that way, becomes the catalyst of an unprecedented mass casualty event.
Image from https://planetags.com/blogs/planetags-blog/p61-a-black-widow-becomes-a-midnight-queen?srsltid=AfmBOoqGR3WnHE-EEsONrDBGeh5dpty-zfOBq8AfUJs2lhq80fGFEhLz

There are also brief capsule portraits of the main leaders: Tojo (in the novel, the closest we get to a true villain), Nimitz, Truman, and MacArthur, those latter two sharing a tense moment over the direction of the war.

By this point it hasn’t been going well for either side. Truman thinks he’s being reasonable when he talks about giving that invention of Oppenheimer’s another shot. [In The Burning Mountain, the first bomb is damaged by a freak lightning bolt.] MacArthur begs him to reconsider:

“What you are proposing to do is to change the nature of war for all time,” MacArthur says. “You will change, too, the nature of warriors, Mr. President. Neither of us will like the soldiers of the new age.”

In this and other moments throughout the novel, I felt Coppel was writing for his own time, specifically the early 1980s and the arms race. In 1982, the same year The Burning Mountain was published, nuclear holocaust was top of mind. New York City saw one of the largest anti-nuclear demonstrations of all time that June. Nukes were bad, people seemed to agree, and so was anyone who thought of using them.

June 12, 1982. More than half a million peace protesters march in Manhattan, chanting "No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis." Yet The Burning Mountain, published in the same year, presents an alternative much worse.
Image from https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/spirit-june-12/

Perhaps in that context, presenting a long series of graphic killings and suicidal ramblings served a clear role, of calling attention to what was going on and what the future held, not in the way of preventative medicine, but simply as a rumination on war and its inevitably bleak outcomes, radioactive or not.

Coppell ODs on the Japanese warrior ideal for the sake of a tough story, but it works incredibly well for a time. The one part of the story that sags from the beginning is what might be called the central narrative, of a U.S. Army Ranger named Seaver who grew up in Japan and, having returned, becomes pulled in by his childhood home.

For contrast, he pairs him with a second-generation Japanese-American who is mortified by what he sees, concluding “the Japanese were in love with death – the bloodier and more savage the better.”

Author Alfred Coppel as he appeared in a book jacket flap in 1972. During World War II he was a fighter pilot in the U. S. Air Force. His books were seldom best-sellers, but he was widely respected and popular enough to earn a healthy living as a writer of adventure and science-fiction stories.
Image from https://www.ebay.com/itm/312536778860

I saw something like this done in a Sam Fuller movie, The Crimson Kimono, only there the characters had real personalities, not set personas. Here we see Seaver eventually descend into a trancelike state, absorbed back into the bushido matrix or whatever. It leads to a bloody climax of sex and seppuku that for all its passion feels aimless and pat.

Coppel gives us only excerpts from the invasion, most of it stretched over a single day with dozens of U.S. infantry and Marine divisions hitting Honshu, just east of Tokyo. The novel begins with one part of the invasion already over and ends suddenly with much of the land battle left unfought.

What you are left with in The Burning Mountain is often engrossing, entirely gritty reading that leaves you imagining the smell of war on your clothes. Coppel manages to do a great deal as a writer, except make you care about the novel’s many tragic individual outcomes.