patrolling Atlantic sea lanes and engaging in special operations. George Enos Jr.'s destroyer is nearly sunk in an engagement near Japanese-held Midway due to lack of sea-borne air power. However, when two escort carriers manage to reach Oahu, the tide begins to turn. In a climactic battle, George's fleet sinks a Japanese carrier guarding Midway. In this history, the Pacific War against Japan is treated as essentially a sideshow, getting only a trickle of resources - since the US are facing a dangerous invasion of their industrial heartland. Strategic aims in the Pacific are confined to recapturing Midway to remove the threat to the Sandwich Islands, and characters consider the idea of conducting an island-hopping war all the way to the Japanese home islands (as the US did in World War II) as an unrealistic fantasy. Also, in this history, the Philippines and Guam are long-standing and recognized possessions of the Japanese, which they had wrested from Spain during the Hispano-Japanese War between the late 1800s and early 1900s and to which the US laid no claim. The CSA have pressured their weak ally, Emperor Francisco José II of Mexico, into reluctantly providing troops to reinforce the Coalscuttle attack. Under cover of an early November storm, General Morrell leads an armored breakthrough against the poorly equipped Mexicans protecting Patton's flank. Joining up with another salient coming out of West Virginia, he traps the bulk of Patton's army, and drives deep into Ohio. Featherston, beginning an apparent descent into madness, gives the trapped army maniacal orders to hold its ground rather than attempt a breakout. When the promised resupply by air fails, Patton is ordered to escape by air and CSA resistance near Pittsburgh collapses. The sequence of events is similar to that which led to the destruction of the German Sixth Army in Battle of Stalingrad during our timeline's World War II. Jonathan Moss spends most of the book as a frustrated POW held at Andersonville, Georgia, under conditions unpleasant but far more tolerable than of the infamous War of Secession POW camp of the same location. He and others manage to escape after a tornado blows down the camp's fences. He and another escaped POW join a black guerrilla band whose capable leader took up the nom de guerre Spartacus. During a raid on Plains, Georgia, Moss kills Jimmy Carter, a young Confederate naval officer on leave, in front