Literature / Destroyermen

"Wherever we are, we're still Americans."

Oh, it's roll, and toss, and pound and pitch
And creak and groan
You son of a bitch
Oh, Boy
It's a Hell of a life on a destroyer!

Destroyermen is a long-running Alternate History series by Taylor Anderson. The series centers around the crew of USS Walker, a World War II destroyer, who end up catapulted to an alternate world after a disastrous Allied defeat at Java. The new world is right out of prehistory: dinosaurs roam the lands, and the oceans are home to swarms of man-eating fish and giant reptiles. They've also gone from one war to another, for here two very different species have just started up a fight for survival again after several thousand years. On the one side are the Lemurians (or 'Cats, as the Americans call them), lemur-like sea-goers who have lived a rather peaceful existence until now. On the other side are the Grik, savage raptor-like creatures hell-bent on hunting the 'Cats to extinction.

Walker and her crew side with the Lemurians and join the struggle against the Grik. They're outnumbered and outgunned—but that part hasn't stopped them yet.

The main series consists of 15 books.

Books in the series

• Into The Storm
• Crusade
• Maelstrom
• Distant Thunders
• Rising Tides
• Firestorm
• Iron Gray Sea
• Storm Surge
• Deadly Shores
• Straits of Hell
• Blood in the Water
• Devil's Due
• River of Bones
• Pass of Fire
• Winds of Wrath

A spin-off series called Artillerymen was later announced and will cover the formation of the New United States with the first book, Purgatory's Shore, released on September 21, 2021, and the second book, Hell's March, released on September 27, 2022.

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The Destroyermen series provides examples of the following tropes:

• Action Prologue: The first book opens with the Second Battle of the Java Sea, which details Walker's escape from the pursuing Japanese fleet into the Squall.
• Adipose Rex: Several.
  • The Grik Celestial Mother is so fat she physically cannot leave her throne (or her throne room, for that matter).
  • King Fet-Alcas of Aryaal.
  • Nakja-Mur is fairly obese as well, though he's one of the good guys.
• A Father to His Men: Many, many examples. Captain Reddy is the most obvious one, but Keje and Nakja-Mur also qualify, as do a solid majority of the Alliance heroes.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Invoked. Reddy is initially reluctant to involve his crew in the Grik-Lemurian conflict but eventually decides it's the right thing to do (and that Walker realistically won't be able to survive in the alternate world without help). While modern technology does give them an edge in the war against the Grik, some Lemurians express disappointment that they can probably never return to their old way of life due to the heavy industrialization required.
• Aliens Speaking English:
  • The Grik use written English as their "scientific tongue", having copied it from the East Indiamen they captured centuries ago. They don't actually speak it, mostly because they don't have the lips necessary to pronounce a lot of the sounds (though the Sa'aarans and Khonashi manage a passable imitation).
  • Once Baalkpan begins to ramp up its war production, Nakja-Mur orders all of its citizens to learn English. Not out of favoritism for the Americans, as some accuse, but because the Lemurians don't have words for a lot of the technology they have to use and construct.
• The Alliance: The Grand Alliance of all Allied powers united beneath (or beside) the Banner of the Trees. Originally formed out of necessity by the Lemurian Homes (floating nation-states) and the "American Clan" (i.e. the destroyermen), it is later joined by land-based nations such as Baalkpan, the Fil-Pin Isles, and B'mbaado. After some time, new allies are found such as the Empire of New Britain, the Shogunate of Yokohama, the Republic of Real People, and a number of Grik-like peoples.
  • In Deadly Shores, delegates from Alliance members lay the foundation for a single united nation, called the United Homes. Not all member nations join, but most of the Lemurian ones do.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Grik initially come off this way, being a Horde that attacks in swarms with seemingly no regard for self-preservation. Gradually subverted as many of their Hij begin to grow into characters in their own right, some of them even defecting to the Alliance or at least becoming Worthy Opponents.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • "Maelstrom" features Amagi and the Grik attacking Baalkpan in by far the most epic battle in the entire series.
  • The Dominion invades the New Britain Isles in "Rising Tides".
  • And in "Deadly Shores", Walker herself is boarded by the Grik after getting stuck on a sandbar, and only a desperate defense combined with timely air support prevents her from being overrun.
• Alternate History:
  • The Lemurian world is an alternate prehistory. The K-T extinction event that killed the dinosaurs in our universe didn't happen there, and the dinosaurs and their contemporaries have continued to evolve as a result. Indigenous humans don't seem to exist, but the Grik and Lemurians evolved independently in Africa and on Madagascar, respectively.
  • A number of other alternate histories have begun to bleed into the series via other Squalls; see The Multiverse below.
• Ambition Is Evil: Lord Koratin treats his addiction to power in a way somewhat analogous to alcoholism, believing that being given any real power will only see him try for more and destroy all in his path getting it. Thus he refuses to accept any official rank beyond Sergeant Major, though ironically, since he's Sister Audrey's primary advisor/bodyguard, in practical terms he really does hold quite a lot of power.
• American Accents: The destroyermen tend to be from all over the US, including California, Oklahoma, Chicago, Brooklyn, and various parts of the South. The audiobook's reader tries to do them justice, such as Matthew Reddy's Texas drawl. This becomes a plot point in Storm Surge when Fred Reynolds is convinced that the man who rescued him is an Imperial spy based on his British-like accent; later, the man reveals that he is descended from other Americans who crossed over during the Mexican-American War and, thus, has an accent closer to the modern British one.
• America Saves the Day: Yup, it happens... in every single book...sort of. The Americans are no stranger to being Big Damn Heroes, but the 'Cats aren't exactly helpless, either. Most of the "saving" is done indirectly, too: the Americans cannot do the lion's share themselves, so they work with the 'Cats as much as lead the effort. It's also made very clear Matt and his crew wouldn't stand a chance if the 'Cats weren't helping them out, too.
  • An interesting case in Storm Surge, when a spy gives Fred Reynolds crucial intelligence about Dominion forces. The spy turns out to be an American who is descended from the crew of three US ships who crossed over in the 19th century and formed a new United States in this world.
• And That's Terrible: Any time the Dominion is brought up, either a character or the text will make a point of saying how it's a "dark perversion" of actual Catholicism.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the final chapter of "Winds of Wrath", Silva has no idea what to do with himself now that the war is over, but Lawrence and Pam Cross assure him that there's still plenty of world to explore and that there'll always be something that needs killing. On a more somber note, several characters opine that the Alliance and League of Tripoli will likely come into conflict again someday, and the war isn't over so much as on pause.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • So far, we've seen a lot of characters get buried at sea. Dowden proved that Anderson isn't messing around. Same with Nakja-Mur.
  • However, Taylor Anderson already confirmed certain primary characters can not be killed off due to plot reasons, such as Chack Sab-At or Captain Reddy. Whether or not this information is accurate remains to be seen, but it is unlikely some characters will be biting the dust.
  • Subverted with Tony Scott, whom everyone presumes dead for about 2 years until he turns up in Storm Surge.
  • Played straight with Fitzhugh Gray, who throws Matthew clear when a tide of Grik is about to overrun Walker's top deck in Deadly Shores. Also Irwin Laumer, who leads a strike force to take out the Celestial Mother only to be Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by one of her bodyguards.
  • Also played straight with Simon Herring in Straits of Hell, who is stabbed by a spear when helping to defend the captured Grik City from a horde of "old-style" Grik. He has time to tell Reddy how much he has grown to admire the man and reveals most of a deadly secret before expiring.
  • Also played straight in Devil's Due with Adar, who is killed during the prisoner escape attempt on Zanzibar (if only Silva attacked ten minutes sooner!), and Stuart Brassy, who is shot by Contre-Amiral Laborde during the raid on Savoie's bridge. And then there's Kurokawa himself, shot by Sandra and infected with the Yap island kudzu by Silva.
  • Winds of Wrath, the final book in the series, gleefully drops the Plot Armor and kills off quite a few major characters — Alan Letts, Bolton Forester, Mark Leedom, Muriname, General Ign, Orrin Reddy, Spook, Perry Brister, Paul Stites, Sister Audrey, Sean Bates, Earl Lanier, Chief Bosun Jeek, Gilbert Yeager, General Kim, Paddy Rosen, Sonny Campeti, Bernie Sandison, and Ed Palmer all bite the dust before it settles. Tamatsu Shinya, Pete Alden, Spanky, and Matthew Reddy are seemingly killed, but are revealed to have survived in the final chapter. Capitano di Fregata Ciano is implied to have died, but it isn't confirmed.
• Artistic License – Biology: Downplayed. Taylor Anderson goes to great lengths to make the altEarth ecology plausible. There are some (not too many) convenient plot devices, but even these don't seem unrealistic, and none of them are invokedtoo convenient.
• Artistic License – Ships: None of the ships that cross to the alternate Earth actually fought in World War II. This was intentional: Anderson didn't want to disrespect any actual sailors who did.
  • As explained in the afterword to the first book, the HIMS Amagi depicted was badly damaged by an earthquake while under construction and scrapped in 1922. (There was an Amagi that served in WWII, but she was a carrier.) The real USS Walker was scuttled seventeen days after Pearl Harbor, while USS Mahan was scrapped in 1931.
    • Many Wickes class destroyers saw action throughout WWII. USS Ward, the ship that fired the first shots at Pearl Harbor, was a sister ship of Mahan and Walker.
    • In-universe, HIMS Amagi was completed as planned, except with her main battery being downgraded to 10-inch guns, likely to exploit some loophole in the Washington Naval Treaty. This armament is not quite up to battleship standards, but still much more powerful than any contemporary cruiser.
  • This continues when a more modern Japanese destroyer crosses over, HIMS Hidoiame described as the 20th of the Kagerō class. In Real Life, there were only 19 destroyers of that class, although three ships were also listed on the roster but served as the dummy budget for Yamato-class battleships. Possibly, in this 'verse, one of these really was built as a destroyer.
  • Ditto for USS S-19. In our history, the submarine was decommissioned in 1934 and sunk in 1938. In the novel 'verse, it continues its service into World War II before being transported to the Lemurian/Grik world. Acceptable, as dozens of the old S-Boats were in service with the Asiatic Fleet at the start of the war, and some were still fighting as late as 1944.
  • In all other areas, studiously averted: Anderson is a historian by trade and does the research, and apologizes in the afterword of Into the Storm for any mistakes that may have slipped through.
  • This can be initially assumed about SS Amerika, a German passenger liner converted into an armed troop transport during World War I. However, according to its crew, they fought a battle against an Entente converted transport before being swept up by a storm in the night. The Real Life Amerika was seized by American forces and converted into a troop transport as part of the US Navy (being renamed America). It never fought a battle in the war and served well after the war's end. This is confirmed by Captain Reddy and serves as proof that Amerika didn't come from the same world as the destroyermen. Additionally, according to the ship's crew, the United States remained neutral during the war.
  • A strange case with the French submarine Surcouf that briefly shows up in Deadly Shores. It fought in World War II, but this version appears to be from a world where the sub's crew "turned Vichy" instead of remaining on the side of Free France. In fact, the sub comes from a different reality, where France turned fascist and joined the Axis Powers, or the Confédération États Souverains, as they're known in that world, along with Spain. Word of God is that she's not the Surcouf but a Surcouf-type submarine..
  • A Nazi French battleship from the same universe as the above-mentioned sub appears in Deadly Shores to threaten the Republic in breaking off their ties with the Alliance. It's called Savoie, and Garrett even recognizes the name. However, there is no Real Life ship matching the name and the time period. The closest match would be Lorraine or the fourth unfinished Bretagne-class battleship, which was originally ordered by the Greek Navy and was to be christened Vasilefs Konstantinos. After World War I, the French considered finishing her under the name Savoie but ultimately scrapped her. Savoie's description in the book matches the post-refit design of the Lorraine.
  • The Nazi submarine U-112 is stated to be a Type XIB. In our world, a single Type XI was laid down but subsequently scrapped. In that world, 4 such subs were built.
    • In our world interestingly enough, according to this: Uncompleted U-boat Projects, there actually were only 4 Type XI U-boats originally planned in which one of them was to be christened U-112, showing that Anderson truly did the actual research on it.
  • Same can be said for the Italian Leone-class destroyer Leopardo, introduced in Blood in the Water and playing a larger role in River of Bones. In the real world, 5 ships of the class were originally planned while only 3 were built with the other 2 being canceled (of the two that were canceled, one of them was to be christened Leopardo with the most likely candidate being the fifth and final ship of the class). Of course, Anderson's Leopardo is from the Confédération États Souverains's universe, so the real-world history of the class need not apply. However, this once again shows that Anderson actually does the research rather than just shoehorning it in for convenience.
  • Ditto for Ramb V, introduced in Winds of Wrath. Only four RAMB refrigerator ships were produced in our world (they ended up being converted into troopships, auxiliary cruisers, and hospital ships when the war came). Presumably, the fascist Italy of that world builds at least one more.
  • Same for the Lyon-class battleship Tourville. The Lyon-class battleship was never built in real life. Four were planned but all were canceled once World War I broke out. It's even mentioned in the book the Lyon-class was never built in the real world. Of course, this one is from a very different world.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: At the start of the series, Zerg Rush is basically the only tactic the Grik are capable of. With the influence of Amagi's crew, they're starting to innovate. At the end of River of Bones, First General Esshk finally realizes that his "Final Swarm" has failed and that the Grik must now switch from attack to defense, something he doesn't know how to do. He's smart enough to know that his subordinate and the new cadre of officers he's been training are trained in the new way of fighting and will be instrumental in keeping the Alliance from simply rolling over Grik Africa.
• Axe-Crazy: Kurokawa gets more and more unhinged as the series progresses. When Madras gets flattened by Alliance forces in Storm Surge, Kurokawa (who's suffering a nasty Villainous Breakdown) ends up ordering every Grik he encounters to kill themselves on the spot just because doing so amused him.
• Badass Boast: As Walker charges toward Amagi in "Into the Storm", Matt is reminded that the rest of the Japanese fleet is still pursuing them. His response? "Good, let `em watch."
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: This is standard practice for the Doms called Cleansing, which involves using torture to force non-believers to turn to their "one true faith", which praises pain and suffering. Of course, the Doms themselves believe that Cleansing makes a person good. This appears to work on Ensign Fred Reynolds, captured by Dominion forces after his scout plane crashes, to the point where he doesn't care of his Lemurian co-pilot Kari-Faask lives or dies. He is even taken in by Don Hernan as the blood cardinal's protégé and is brought before their Messiah/Emperor. This turns out to be a ruse, as Fred manages to successfully keep his wits through the Cleansing while convincing everyone he has converted, while making plans to rescue Kari and run away.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Countless examples of Alliance personnel either Taking You with Me or charging into certain death when cornered, all justified since being captured by the Grik or the Dominion both count as a Fate Worse than Death.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While it's a stretch to call Isak Reuben "nice", he's definitely a quiet one. Which makes his behavior in Deadly Shores all the more surprising when he goes utterly berserk on some Grik and even hacks the Celestial Mother to pieces before presenting her dead head to the Grik.
• BFG: In Distant Thunders Silva MacGyvers a "Super Lizard Gun" (also called the Doom Whomper) out of a salvaged antiaircraft gun from Amagi. It's a flintlock rifle that shoots a quarter-pound, 1-inch-diameter (that's 100-caliber) minie ball, which he built to kill the allosaur variant that is Borneo's top predator. The recoil is enough to knock him over the first (and only) time he fires it in any posture other than prone. While hunting, he makes a game of seeing how many "rhino-pigs" he can kill with one shot. It's surprisingly precise, and Silva even manages to use it as a sniper rifle a few times, despite the gun lacking a scope. The author, being a dedicated man to say the least, has built a lifesize model of the Doomwhomper and it shows just how LARGE a man Silva actually is, with the gun being almost 6 feet long.
• Big Bad:
  • First General Esshk and General of the Sea Kurokawa are the primary antagonists of the Western Front. Sometimes they work together, sometimes not.
  • On the Eastern Front is Don Hernan De Divino Dicha of the Dominion, who initially directs the war effort against the Alliance before falling back to the capital city.
  • And then there's the looming threat of the League Of Tripoli, the primary antagonist of whom appears to be Capitaine de Fregate Victor Gravois.
• Big Good: Captain Matthew P. Reddy, CINCAF — "Commander in Chief of All Allied Forces". In practical terms, he leads his own "Navy Clan" and the combined Allied military forces (despite having turned down pretty much every title anyone can think of below "God"), but also serves as a vital symbol that the Grik, and other enemies, really can be defeated.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: At least one per book. Some highlights include:
  • In Maelstrom, the Grik "Invincible Swarm" invades the Alliance's capital on Borneo while Walker slugs it out with Amagi in the bay.
  • In Rising Tides, the Dominion make their presence known by launching a Dawn Attack on the New Britain Isles, landing a sizable number of troops and taking over the island of New Ireland (which is re-taken in the following book, "Firestorm").
  • In Deadly Shores, Alliance forces mount a daring raid on the Grik capital of Madagascar, which unexpectedly turns into an actual invasion, one they hadn't planned for at all, thanks to Poor Communication Kills combined with Suicidal Overconfidence. Notably, Walker herself is boarded and very nearly overrun by the Grik after getting stuck on a sandbar.
  • In Devil's Due, the Alliance finally takes down Kurokawa's forces on Zanzibar with a massive land, sea, and air campaign.
  • Pass Of Fire has two extended sequences so long that they take up the entire latter two thirds of the book - the Battle of the Pass of Fire in the East, and the battle in/near Soffesk in the West. Both take place on land, air and sea, and are shown from a combined dozen or so perspectives.
  • Winds of Wrath, the final book, has multiple big battles in Grik Africa, the Dom capital, and at and nearby League-held Martinique. The massive naval battle between the Alliance and the League guts both fleets, but the Alliance wins by virtue of being the only side with ships still afloat and not surrendered. The culmination of the battle is a massive torpedo launch by both sides that accounts for most of the losses that night. While League torpedoes are faster, more powerful, and better overall, the Alliance fleet compensates by launching nearly 70 of them at once. The Republic battlecruiser task force is late to the party but helps by forcing a League battleship to surrender. And, of course, there's the final engagement between three Alliance destroyers and a converted Grik dreadnought against two League destroyers and an auxiliary cruiser, with Walker facing off against Leopardo.
• Big "NO!": Captain Kurokawa in Maelstrom, and again in Iron Gray Sea. Sandra in Blood in the Water, right before SMS Amerika is destroyed by the League of Tripoli.
• Boarding Party: Since the Grik initially lack any ship-to-ship weapons except for primitive catapult-launched firebombs, and the Lemurian ship-to-ship weapons are limited to ballistae, it's very common for the Grik to try to board the Lemurian Homes with warriors. In the first novel, Captain Reddy decides to capture a Grik ship in order to find out more about their enemy. Walker's guns destroy the masts, and a boarding party made up of Reddy himself, a few Destroyermen, and a group of Lemurian marines (trained by an actual US Marine) drop a corvus (a boarding bridge of Roman design) that Reddy had the Lemurians make in order to secure the Grik ship. Unfortunately, the corvus is made from bamboo and breaks when the second party tries to follow.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Silva to the nth degree.
• Break the Haughty:
  • The best example is Captain Kauffman, a US Army Air Corps P-40 pilot who was among the passengers picked up by Walker in Surabaya before they cross over into the alternate world in Into the Storm. Kauffman is insufferably arrogant and thinks he should be in charge, despite the fact that he knows as much about seamanship and naval combat as he does about brain surgery. He tries throwing his weight around on the ship and is insulted when the Navy men aren't impressed. He even tries to intimidate Captain Reddy, addressing him by his rank (Lieutenant Commander) rather than his official title of "Captain," despite the fact that Matt outranks him either way. Matt simply points out that a destroyer crew has no use for a fighter pilot if that pilot is not actually flying a plane, and assigns both pilots to carry ammo for the four-inch guns, to Kauffman's chagrin. After the squall, Kauffman is transferred to Mahan, where he incites a mutiny against Acting Captain Ellis, accidentally shooting him in the process. When they encounter the Grik, Kauffman abandons fellow pilot 1st Lt. Mallory, Lt. Brister, and Petty Officer Palmer in a derelict PBY found on the beach (they escape with the plane and find Walker). He runs the ship into deep water, where they narrowly escape being sunk by a Mountain Fish, then turns them around, increasingly aware of how far in over his head he is. He and some of his co-mutineers are soon captured by the Grik on a small island west of Java, allowing Ellis to regain control of Mahan. Kauffman is made to watch while the Grik eat the men with him. The Grik decide to keep him as an exotic trophy, and eventually hand him over to the Japanese. Kauffman is reduced to a whimpering shell of a man long before it's over. He gets a Heroic Second Wind during the Battle of Balkpaan when he realizes that Kurokawa and the Grik are screwed, and dies trying to kill the Japanese captain.
  • Commander Simon Herring. After being recovered by the Alliance, he immediately tries to usurp power from Reddy, since he, technically, outranks him (Reddy's official rank is Lieutenant Commander, below a full Commander). However, Herring is hardly commanding officer material, having been a Naval Intelligence officer in our world. Plus, no one even considers replacing Reddy with Herring. Eventually, he mellows out, after realizing that Reddy is definitely much more suited for command, and is made the Chief of Strategic Intelligence, which is his preferred field anyway. Eventually, he grows to admire Reddy almost to the point of hero worship. He is mortally wounded during a battle on Madagascar and fails to tell Reddy some critical information before expiring.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • The "Mice", whose oddities are offset by their competence both as boiler-room operators and as former oilrig workers.
  • Later, Tabby, a Lemurian female, starts working in the boiler room and not only learns fast from the original two Mice but also adopts their odd mannerisms and Southern drawl (although her Lemurian-accented English returns when excited), to the point where she's considered a full-fledged Mouse.
• Camp Cook: Ship's cook, actually, but Lanier still fits the trope in every other way. It's noted repeatedly that his "station" during combat operations is hiding in the toilet... until he calmly, without flair turns into a badass in Firestorm by emerging from belowdecks and hosing down a Grikbird with a tommygun at face-to-face range.
  • One of his traditions is eating fried fish once a week. He continues that on this world, except the fish here tend to have big teeth and a nasty temper. It doesn't stop him from going fishing late at night, although the crew is none too happy once they find out.
• The Captain: Captain Reddy. Overlaps with Majorly Awesome, given that Lieutenant Commander<sup>note</sup> his original rank; he's addressed as Captain due to being Walker's CO is the Navy equivalent.
• Cargo Cult: To a small degree. The Lemurian Sky Priests guide their giant ships using the ancient scrolls, which they don't show to anyone else. Those scrolls? They're charts given to them by a man who came over on an East Indiaman centuries ago. The sacred tongue in which the scrolls are written is Latin. For a while, every time a Sky Priest sees a chart, he bristles that it is shown so freely.
  • Exaggerated when they find out that the Grik have charts of their own, in English this time.
• Cat Folk: The Lemurians, although it borders the scale to Funny Animal since they evolved from lemurs.
• The Chains of Commanding: A common theme amongst the various Allied commanders, from Captain Reddy to captains of individual ships to infantry company commanders on the ground. War Is Hell, victory costs lives, defeat means extinction, and the costs weigh heavily on those who have to make the decisions.
• Character Development: The Grik as a race get this. At first, they are treated as a Horde of Alien Locusts whose only tactic is the Zerg Rush and who go into full panic mode if it doesn't work. Now under competitive pressure from the Alliance and with help from the Japanese, they have developed an officer class capable of thinking tactically, even strategically. Also, some have learned to surrender and others seem to be developing a capacity for loyalty as opposed to instinctive blind obedience. One, a Hij general, has even developed an Odd Friendship with a Japanese general, an emotion supposedly alien to his race.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Discussed in Straits of Hell, only to be shut down by Greg Garrett, who points out that there's nothing wrong with the French fighters from their own world, whose main problem was stupid leaders.
  • Taylor Anderson is right about this. The French Army of WWI held off the Germans for almost three years, despite Field Marshals Joffre, Nivelle, and Mangin refusing to recognize that Napoleonic infantry tactics don't work so well against entrenched machine guns and artillery with real-time fire control. By 1918, the French Army was in a well-justified state of mutiny against the incompetence and callousness of their high command, with the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force being the only thing that prevented total collapse. In WWII, Field Marshal Petaín had repeated the mistakes of his predecessors by focusing France's entire defense on the Maginot Line, then becoming a collaborator when that failed, leaving France's large and capable field army paralyzed in front of the advancing Germans.
• A Child Shall Lead Them:
  • Saan-Kakja, the queen of the Fil-pin Islands.
  • Safir Maraan, the Orphan Queen of B'mbaado, became a ruler at a pretty young age.
  • In Iron Gray Sea, Princess Rebecca Ann McDonald of the Empire of New Britain, who becomes Governor-Empress after her parents are killed in a bombing.
• Cold Sniper: By Storm Surge, a PTSD-stricken Bekia Saab-At at least claims herself to have become this, spending her days on the front-lines in the trenches, sniping anyone, particularly officers, she can. She's largely able to snap out of it once she leaves India, however.
• Colonel Badass: Tamatsu Shinya.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Silva has no problem Faking the Dead or headbutting a Worthy Opponent in order to win.
  • Captain Reddy has also won the duel with Reed’s assassin using "unsportsmanlike" means, although still technically legal.
• Cool Boat: USS S-19. Against all odds, it survives a tidal wave created by an erupting volcano, although it's determined that it can never dive (voluntarily, that is) again. It's rebuilt as a torpedo boat and ends up dealing some damage to Grik ironclad ships before being rammed and sunk.
  • The League submarine Surcouf also qualifies, despite being a villainous variant. On the other hand, it is fairly easily sunk by Walker after being forced to surface.
• Cool Ship:
  • USS Walker, although the coolness is largely circumstantial. She's a "Four-Stacker" (so called because of the distinctive four funnels) Wickes-class destroyer built in 1917. By 1942, she's woefully obsolete, worn-out, held together with duct tape, and completely outclassed by anything and everything in the Japanese Navy. But to the Lemurians, she's a near-magical marvel capable of slaughtering the once-unstoppable Grik without breaking a sweat. Despite her age, she's a tough, dependable ship that doesn't let her crew down.
  • On the villain's side, there's the Amagi, which is newer, larger, and more heavily armed than Walker.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Both the Grik and the Dominion are experts on this.
  • Grik who are perceived to have endangered the Empire, directly or indirectly, suffer the Traitor's Death: they are tied down, teeth and claws torn out, and Eaten Alive by dozens of hatchlings. Tsalka goes out this way following the events of "Firestorm".
  • The Dominion embrace these as a means of ensuring battlefield discipline: soldiers who retreat in battle are crucified, and officers who do the same are Buried Alive. POWs are horribly tortured as a conversion technique (see Being Tortured Makes You Evil above for more) and skinned alive once no longer useful.
• Cool Versus Awesome: WWII-era military versus dinosaurs and sea monsters.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Every high-up member of the New Britain Company.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Most of Walker's battles against the Grik are fairly one-sided, especially in the early books where the Grik don't have any significant ship-to-ship weapons. Even Kurokawa's ironclad dreadnoughts are fairly easy for the destroyer to wipe out once Baalkpan starts producing torpedoes.
• Dawn Attack:
  • As part of the standard operating procedure in dangerous waters, Captain Reddy requires that every morning the crew of USS Walker go to battle stations for two hours until sunrise. In our world, this is because this time is perfect for submarine sneak attacks (the subs' lower profile makes them nigh-invisible in pre-dawn darkness). Reddy maintains the procedure in the new world, as the Grik and any other enemy can pull the same stunt (minus subs).
  • The Holy Dominion stages a surprise attack at dawn on the capital of the Empire of New Britain, timed with a public duel and a simultaneous sneak attack on the Governor-Emperor. Naturally, both Matthew Reddy and Harvey Jenks are smart enough to know something like this is coming and take precautions (like sending out a plane to scout out the surrounding area).
• Death by Irony: In Pass of Fire, Lord Koratin is forced to kill a number of brainwashed Dom children who simply won't back down. He does it himself with artillery so his friends don't have to, then suicidally charges into a melee against the Blood Drinkers the children were protecting. Children were his great love in life, and he'd devoted himself to helping them, even in his days as an Evil Aristocrat.
• Death Seeker: The Lemurian Saak-Fas, recovered from the holds of a Grik ship, becomes this by Maelstrom. He gets his wish, and takes a big chunk of Amagi's hull with him.
• Death World:
  • The alternate Earth, but this is zig-zagged somewhat: it's sure as hell dangerous, with dinosaurs alive and well and of course the Grik, but it's not so horrible as to prevent organized societies.
  • The seas are even more dangerous than the land. In addition to its normal dangers from our world, the continental shelf is infested with "flashies" (basically piranhas IN SALTWATER!), and the deep water has "mountain fish" that can eat ships.
  • As if that wasn't enough for you, they're in the Pacific Rim so there's a risk of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Finally, the relative lack of humans burning fossil fuels means global warming hasn't happened so the weather patterns are very different, which results in hurricanes, called strakkas, that can be worse than those on our Earth.
  • A more localized example is Yap/Shikarrak Island, which is home to carnivorous kudzu and amphibious sea monsters that migrate there once a year. Silva, Rebecca, Lawrence, Sandra Tucker, and several others are marooned there for much of Rising Tides.
• Decapitation Presentation: Isak Reuben and Lawrence do this to the Celestial Mother after Isak, of all people, kills her. However, it has the opposite effect, throwing the remaining Grik in the capital into a frenzy.
• Defector from Decadence: Increasingly common as the series progresses and word of the benevolence (particularly with regard to the treatment of prisoners) and power of the Allied Forces spreads. By the end of Pass of Fire the list of defectors includes the Grik Celestial Mother.
  • While Okada refuses to join the fight at first, he later returns to formally ask for membership in the Grand Alliance after a modern Japanese destroyer arrives and his new people are slaughtered by them. Okada sees how low his beloved Japanese navy has sunk, as the tide of World War II is turning.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Where characters display their 1940s views on racism and religion. One character in particular, Sister Audrey, a Catholic nun, initially looks down upon Courtney Bradford for being an "evolutionist", especially when he reveals that he's also Catholic (in her mind, the two are incompatible). Whereas nowadays the Catholic Church accepts "theistic evolution" (the idea that Christianity and the Theory of Evolution are compatible), this was not the case in 1940s, when the Church had no official position on the issue.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Reddy threatens this against Aryaal should they ever desecrate or tamper with the graves of his men in front of their city. To make it clear he's serious, he assures them that if they ever deface the graves, he will return and level the city to the ground.
  • Silva has a habit of dealing out a ridiculously appropriate (and often over the top) lesson and/or punishment to anyone he thinks needs one. For example: Machinist's Mate Dean Laney is mocking Coxswain Tony Scott, who has become terrified of the sea since arriving in the new world (for very good reason, and Scott continues to do his job despite being humiliated by his own fear). Silva's response? To pull the pin on the chain Laney was leaning against, leaving him to go tumbling over the side and only save himself by grabbing the chain. Afterward, he's afraid of the water.
• Descriptively-Named Species: The Lemurians, because they're descended from lemurs. Perhaps fittingly, it's a name that Courtney Bradford coined. Likewise the more colloquial "monkey-cats" and "cat-monkeys" (eventually shortened to just 'Cats).
  • The Lemurians refer to themselves as "Mi-Anaaka" which roughly translates to "the people", which is suitable seeing that they are deemed people by the humans very quickly.
  • At the same time, they do not like to be called "ape-folk", even though they've never seen an ape. However, the first time the term was used, they picked up from the tone that the term was derogatory. The Imperials quickly learn to refer to them as Lemurians, especially after seeing them in battle.
• Disney Death: Walker is sunk in Maelstrom, but re-floated and repaired in Distant Thunders.
• Do Not Go Gentle: The crew of Revenge certainly doesn't. Neither do Flynn's Rangers in Iron Gray Sea. Hell, just about any character death counts as this, since nobody wants to be taken alive by the Grik or Doms.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought:
  • Under Kurokawa's guidance, the Grik start building a fleet of ironclad battleships called the "ArataAmagi-class" (named after Kurokawa's lost Amagi) which the Allies often refer to as "dreadnoughts". Armed with 100lb cannons and some smaller secondaries, the dreadnoughts are far more powerful than the Allies' Wooden Ships and Iron Men, but due to their size and Crippling Overspecialization towards surface actions, they're extremely slow and so top-heavy that any significant damage below the waterline (i.e. a torpedo attack) will cause them to capsize.
  • By "River of Bones", many of the surviving ArataAmagi-class ships have been converted into true dreadnoughts with all of their guns replaced with 400lb cannons. Upon realizing this, Captain Russ Chappelle notes with some alarm that if the Grik have improved their fire control, and especially if they figure out how to rifle their cannons, these new dreadnoughts might be too dangerous for Alliance ships to engage at any range.
  • A literal dreadnought appears in the form of the League superdreadnought Savoie.
  • The Dominion is moving in this direction, too — in "Pass of Fire", Admiral Hibbs' battle line is mauled by Dom liners that are sheathed in iron and have removed most of their smaller guns to keep their weight down. Luckily, their smaller frigates are not yet armored.
• Duel to the Death: Part of Sir Harrison Reed's Batman Gambit in "Rising Tides" involves Reddy and Jenks dueling separate opponents at the same time in the immediate prelude to the Dominion's invasion of New Britain.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • During the climactic battle in "Maelstrom", Mahan rams Amagi, then Saak-Fas ignites a bunch of depth charges in Mahan's bow; the explosion cripples the battlecruiser. A well-placed HE shell from Walker coupled with a lucky break is enough to finish the thing off.
  • There are other examples across the series, usually involving a character destroying as much of the enemy as possible before finally being overwhelmed.
• Eagleland: Could be called "Eagleland: The Series". While both sides are represented (often at the same time), it leans far in favor of the heroic variant.
• Eats Babies:
  • The second book opens with Grik Regent Tsalka sitting with a Grik infant on his lap, idly stroking the child. So is this a Pet the Dog moment for the Grik, earlier billed as Always Chaotic Evil? Nope, because before the scene is over, Tsalka casually pops the infant into his mouth and chews. For extra Squick, it's mentioned that the baby's struggles tickle the roof of Tsalka's mouth.
  • The Celestial Mother is also shown doing this. The Squick factor is even more evident here, as those are rejects from her own litter. The practice is stopped when it's discovered that the "rejects" are, in fact, the Grik Empire's best chance of survival as they lack the Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality.
• The Emperor:
  • Governor-Emperor Gerald McDonald of the Empire of New Britain is, actually, a Reasonable Authority Figure. In fact, New Britain is more like the kingdom than The Empire, although it does have colonies in far-away lands.
  • The Celestial Mother is definitely this to the Grik. She rules with an iron claw, orders bloody executions left and right, and happily eats her own young who don't share the Grik Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality.
  • His Supreme Holiness, the Messiah of Mexico, and, by the Grace of God, Emperor of the World, is the religious and political ruler of the Holy Dominion. Like all the other Dominion Popes, he is kept in perpetual bliss by alcohol, drugs, food, and sex. Most Dom pops spend their reign completely out of it and are unable to make any decisions. The current Pope is actually able to keep his wits about him while in this state.
  • The Caesar is the ruler of the Republic of Real People, an ancient (dating back at least 1000 years) human/Lemurian nation based in South Africa and periodically "infused" by new arrivals from our world who wash up at the cape. However, the Caesar is more like a benevolent despot than this trope. He's also a Lemurian.
• The Empire: The Grik Empire, especially with Imperial Japan helping them. Also the Holy Dominion, a theocracy in the Americas derived from Spanish conquistadors having mixed Catholicism with Mayincatec religious beliefs. Subverted with the Empire of New Britain, which is really the kingdom with a little One Nation Under Copyright for flavor. The League of Tripoli also applies in the sense that they have conquered much of the Mediterranean region using the sizable task force that was transported to this world along with pieces of their city of Tripoli.
• ET Gave Us Wifi: Inverted. Grik warships are based on the design of an East Indiaman they captured centuries ago.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • The crew of Amagi are out to kill the Americans, and are working with the Grik. They still hate the lizards, though; even the Axe-Crazy captain admits this. However, while much of the crew hates the Grik for being despicable and evil, the captain seems to hate them for the same reason he hates Americans... they're not Japanese.
  • Tsalka and General Esshk both agree that Kurokawa is an asshole.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: On land, you've got carnivorous dinosaurs and other reptiles with too many teeth, as well as Grik-like aborigines. One island has a sapient amphibian race that doesn't take kindly to intruders. Another has a kudzu-like plant that sprouts roots inside critters that get scratched by it. You're also in the Ring of Fire, so there's occasional earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. At sea, there are any number of voracious predatory fish species, mountain fish that can eat ships, and hurricanes that can be worse than those on Earth. And we haven't even gotten to the Grik and Holy Dominion yet.
• Expy: Silva, with his short-cropped hair, scraggly beard, bulging muscles, and violent streak could easily be a whole character Shout-Out to Bluto. Only as a good guy.
• Fantastic Caste System:
  • The basic Grik mooks are the barely sapient Uul. If they live long enough to become intelligent they may be elevated to Hij, various castes of which do pretty much everything that requires more than a dozen brain cells.
  • The Lemurians had a guild system before the onset of the war with the Grik. It was thrown out the window by necessity.
• Fantastic Racism: While mostly averted with the destroyermen and the Lemurians, who quickly learn to respect each other (with one glaring exception), the Imperials, at first, treat them as sub-humans and refer to them as "ape-folk". The Dominion is even worse in this respect, calling them "creatures" or "animals". The Republic treats humans and Lemurians as equals but frowns upon Half-Human Hybrids.
• Feed It a Bomb: In Deadly Shores, Isak Reuben of all people does this to a triceratops-like creature by first getting the beast's attention and then tossing a grenade down its throat and diving away as the lizard is going after him. Mountain Fish can also be dealt with this way if you have depth charges.
• Field Promotion: A lot of that has been going around in the series.
• Finagle's Law: In Maelstrom, the Baalkpan Lemurians note that the American philosophy in this regard is to "hope for the best, but plan for the worst". During the same conversation, the Queen of B'mbaado quotes Marshal Helmuth von Moltke's maxim that "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" almost to the letter.
• Flat World: Subverted. The seafaring Lemurians know the Earth isn't actually flat, but since gravity pulls down they naturally assume that it's possible to fall off by straying too far from the "top" of the globe. Walker's voyage to Hawaii in book five neatly disproves this theory.
• Foregone Conclusion: The fifth book, Rising Tides, opens with a quote from a book Courtney Bradford will evidently publish in 1956. His survival for the next twelve years is therefore guaranteed, unless it gets published posthumously.
• Foreshadowing: Early in book two, it's mentioned that many Lemurians wanted to torch the captured Grik ship Revenge so that the souls of the `Cats Eaten Alive inside might find rest (cremation being their usual custom after death). Captain Rick Tolson ends up blowing up the ship to keep it out of Grik hands halfway through the book, taking a lot of lizards with him.
• Four-Star Badass: General Alden, Rolak, General Esshk.
• Fowl-Mouthed Parrot: Petey, the flying lizard (the alt!Earth equivalent of a parrot) that takes a liking to Silva during his wanderings in the islands of southeast Asia. He calls it a "stupid shit" and things go downhill from there.
• French Jerk: Pretty much any Frenchman in later books, since they're all fascists from an alternate world.
• Friend to All Children:
  • Lord Koratin believes this to be his only genuine redeeming feature, and clings to it as part of his concerted efforts to become a better person. While it was certainly true during his days as an aristocrat, as the series progresses it's increasingly clear that it was merely proof of the good person he genuinely is. Cruelly subverted in "Pass of Fire", when the Blood Drinkers use a bunch of children as Human Shields — Koratin, seeing that Blas and Sister Audry can't bring themselves to shoot them, fires the cannons himself before making a suicidal Self-Destructive Charge into the Dom lines.
  • Dennis Silva, of all people, discovers this to be the case for him during his time marooned with the young Governor Empress.
• Front Line General: The entire high command of the Alliance is guilty of this. In some cases, like Alden, it's because they were low-level troops who still act that way, despite being given commands. In others (Jenks, Reddy, etc) it's because they take A Father to His Men just that seriously. Others have always been that way (Rolak, Safir, etc). A few take it to Leeroy Jenkins levels, with ordinary troops literally begging their superiors to return to the rear so they don't have to worry about protecting them.
• Generican Empire:
  • The Republic of Real People.
  • The Grik Empire is known internally as the Celestial Realm.
  • The Holy Dominion.
  • The United Homes, the Lemurian nation that grows out of the Alliance.
  • The New United States (this one doesn't even have the "of America" clarification).
• Genocide Dilemma: Averted. It's made clear that the only real way to win is to exterminate the Grik. Though this is zig-zagged in later books; particularly when a contingent of Grik warriors surrender to the Allies.
• Giant Flyer:
  • Dragon-like flying lizards ("Grikbirds") are found on an island not far from Hawaii. They frequently harass passing ships, swooping down and grabbing crewmembers or dropping rocks on decks. Captain Reddy speculates that some of them may have crossed into our world in the past, resulting in myths about dragons. Ditto for other creatures such as Mountain Fish. It's later revealed that the Dominion has tamed a good number of them and use them as an air force of sorts.
  • More are found in Deadly Shores on an island near Africa. These smaller Grikbirds are the local aerial version of the flasher-fish, swarming in and tearing apart anything that gets close to the island, while the large flying lizards near the center of the island nest on mountains and begin to chase the PBY Nancy sent to scout the island. However, they don't attack the Nancy, as the plane happens to match the blue-and-white coloring of the lizards, initially appearing to the lizards as another of their number, albeit large and loud. Two of them begin to race the plane before spotting the Lemurian pilot and gunner.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom:
  • Two of them in book five. Walker encounters a rogue wave that nearly capsizes her during her voyage to New Britain, and the Talaud volcano's two eruptions also cause tsunamis that wipe out Tagran and several other islands in the Pacific ocean.
  • In Winds of Wrath, an enormous Grik-made one is created when General Esshk blows up the ancient locks holding in Lake Galk. The result is an obscenely large tidal wave almost big enough to wipe out a city as large as Sofesshk, and does kill thousands at a minimum of forces on all sides for miles around.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: The destroyermen give the Lemurians pretty much any piece of advanced technology they can figure out how to make, including radio. It helps that the Lemurians get to watch and participate in the destroyermen building things from memory (or technical manuals). In fact, many humans observe that, unlike many primitive human tribes, the Lemurians don't fear the unknown and don't instinctively associate it with magic or evil spirits. For example, when the radio from the PBY is destroyed by a Japanese air raid, a few primitive spark-gap transmitters and crystal receivers (the latter don't even require power) are hastily constructed with the help of the locals. Later, batteries are built to allow for more powerful radios aboard Lemurian airplanes.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Grik ships are painted red, while Dominion ships have red sails. Walker being the exception, Allied ships are painted black with a white stripe along the gunnery deck(s), as was the standard for the US Navy in the Age of Sail. Also, the Grik are black or brown while their more pleasant cousins the Tagranesi are orange and brown striped.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Who exactly Colonel Svec is getting his orders from is unclear, but Pass of Fire finally sees him admit, in vague terms, that the Czechs in this world have leadership who at least militarily supports the Allied Forces. As of the end of that book, they have yet to directly appear and may be keeping a low political profile to avoid attracting the attention of the League of Tripoli, to whom they're probably geographically close. While one of the League officers mentioned there were British, Russians and Turks living around the Black Sea, it is not clear if that is where the Czechs came from.
• Greater-Scope Villain: "Deadly Shores" teases (and "Straits of Hell" introduces) the League of Tripoli, a fascist empire that grew out of a French/German/Italian/Spanish fleet from yet another Alternate Universe. Their goal at the moment is to ensure that the conflict between the Alliance, the Grik, and the Dominion is mutually destructive enough to ensure no faction becomes powerful enough to challenge them.
• Green Rocks: Polta fruit is starting to have some shades of this, though nothing really outlandish. You can eat it straight, and you can make seep (the Lemurians' alcoholic drink of choice) with it. The paste leftover from making seep is used as an antiseptic and analgesic. Later on, the humans discover that the partially-fermented polta paste has properties similar to battery acid, allowing for portable power sources to be constructed.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: The conflict between the Lemurians and Grik fully qualities, at first. The latter see the former as nothing more than prey to be hunted and consumed, and the `Cats have never had any opportunity - or desire - to take any Grik alive. Sandra speculates that this may be the result of their evolving on a Death World:
  "Like everything else we've observed in this world, there's no compromise between total victory and total defeat. You win or you die. [...] In spite of the Grik being the Ancient Enemy, the Lemurians don't know a lot about them. They just know that when the Grik come, the Grik attack. It's the way of things. They fight like maniacs and they don't take prisoners, so neither do the Lemurians. I'm not sure they even understand the concept of surrender."
  • Later in the series, when it becomes clear that some Grik are willing to surrender, the Grand Alliance starts to make efforts to avoid extermination of the Grik.
• Gunship Rescue: In Firestorm, the crews of a beached Allied task force are being constantly assaulted by Grik forces and are taking steady losses. They manage to retreat in a square formation to a new fortification on the beach and are preparing for a final Grik rush. Then several Lemurian air wings show up and firebomb the hell out of the Grik horde, causing the typical "Grik rout". Specifically, the survivors knew the fleet was coming but thought it was days away.
• Gutted Like a Fish: Rasik-Alcas suffers this fate in "Distant Thunders". Colonel Jask later does this to an incompetant Grik general who squandered most of his troops and then tried to pull rank on him.
• Half-Human Hybrids: The Gentaa in the Republic are supposedly descended from Chinese explorers who hooked up with Lemurian females in the ancient past, although Bradford suspects (and Meek all but confirms) that they're actually a separate species that used their resemblance to both species to pose as hybrids, using their "parent" races' collective guilt to improve their status in the Republic.
• Handicapped Badass:
  • Sean "O'Casey" Bates. He loses a hand when their ship is destroyed by a Mountain Fish but is still able to kick plenty of ass from Baalkpan to Scapa Flow.
  • Silva loses an eye to a piece of shrapnel during the Battle of Baalkpan Bay, which barely slows him down other than messing up his depth perception a bit.
  • In "River of Bones", Risa Sab-At loses a leg during the siege of U.S.S. Santa Catalina, and goes right back into battle after having it amputated and patched up. Subverted however as she's rather quickly overwhelmed and killed by the Grik, albeit after killing a good number of them.
  • Pass of Fire ends with Safir Maraan losing an eye, along with her (and Chack's) unborn child. While this does remove her as an Action Girl for the rest of the series, she still maintains her fiery spirit and even becomes Chairwoman of the Grand Alliance after Alan Letts is assassinated in "Winds of Wrath".
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Russ Chappelle opines in "River of Bones" that war is always going to be a part of human nature, and that trying to end it forever is futile.
    "I'll settle for licking our current enemies and staying strong enough to fend off any more we run into."
  • Overall, the series' answer to What Measure Is a Mook? boils down to "They might not deserve to die, but they'll still kill us if they get the chance, so we can't give them that chance."
• Here There Be Dragons: Grik charts mark deep bodies of water with similar glyphs. Garrett even lampshades it.
• Heroic BSoD: Reddy completely freezes up as he watches Amagi destroy Neracca Home with seven thousand people aboard in "Crusade". Luckily he recovers before too much damage is done to Walker.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Quite a few.
  • The first one occurs at the beginning of Into The Storm, during the Battle of the Java Sea. With the entire Japanese Navy pursuing them, and Amagi blocking their escape ahead, the surviving crew of USS Mahan make a suicidal charge at the battlecruiser while signaling Walker to sneak past while they have the chance. Reddy ultimately chooses to join the charge instead, and in the ensuing chaos, both destroyers manage to slip into the squall.
  • When he discovers an attempt to sink Walker with an improvised bomb in a rowboat, CPO Donaghey climbs into the boat and rows it away, ignoring the calls of his shipmates to come back. Instead of a fuse, the saboteurs set the whole boat on fire, so he's burning alive as he does this.
    All he knew, as the flesh on his face and hands began to sear and his vision became a red, shimmering fog, was that he had to row. Nothing else in the entire world mattered anymore except for getting that crazy, stupid bomb the hell away from his ship.
    He made it almost forty yards.
  • In "Crusade", Mahan rams Amagi, then detonates a shitload of depth charges and blows a huge hole in the battle cruiser's side.
  • There are also a number of other, albeit brief, instances during the battles. One notable example is a lone Lemurian gunner at Aryaal killing herself by spiking a cannon full in order to buy her comrades time and to prevent the Grik from getting their hands on artillery.
• Historical In-Joke:
  • It's speculated a couple of times that if Walker and Mahan hadn't been swept into the alternate world, they would have eventually been scrapped by the US Navy and used as target practice. That's exactly what happened to those ships in the real world, although neither of them actually fought in World War II.
  • When Walker faces off against Hidoiame, the former tries to bluff the latter by identifying herself as a cruiser (which fails). At pretty much the same time as Walker. Mahan, Pope, and the two Royal Navy vessels were battling Amagi during the Battle of the Java Sea, one of their Clemson-class cousins, USS Edsall, was taking on multiple IJN surface vessels south of the island of Java, having been misidentified as an Omaha-class light cruiser (USS Marblehead was one of the few ships larger than a destroyer in the Asiatic Fleet at the start of the war). From a distance, Omaha-class cruisers really did resemble four-stacker destroyers at first glance.
• History Repeats: In the first chapter of "Into the Storm", Mahan makes a suicide run against Amagi to give Walker time to escape. Reddy chooses to join the charge instead, and in the ensuing chaos both destroyers manage to escape. When facing the battle cruiser again in "Maelstrom", and the torpedoes are depleted, Walker attempts to ram Amagi ... only for Mahan to beat them to the punch.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: When Kurokawa brings out his new ironclad fleet, he is able to easily blow through The Alliance's wooden ships but takes a pounding from the refitted Salissa using the guns taken from his own Amagi.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • The unnamed Japanese crewman who saves Shinya's life, and refuses to surrender even in the middle of an ocean while clinging to the underside of an overturned boat, having just watched the rest of his crew being eaten by what can best be described as tuna-piranha hybrids. He gets eaten by a plesiosaur, but only cries out in pain, not terror.
  • After Okada surrenders to the Grand Alliance, he gives them valuable intel about the Grik (whom he hates) but refuses to join the war outright because America and Japan are technically still enemies. Shinya lampshades it after failing to convince him to reconsider:
    "I fear for you, Commander Okada. I fear that someday your misjudgement will fade and the honor I still see in you will rise within your heart and demand a reckoning. Because of the blood we spill on behalf of you and uncountable others, you will die a tortured old man, who missed his opportunity to be honorable by mistakenly trying to do the honorable thing."
  • Lieutentant of the Sky Ando in "River of Bones" plays it completely straight: he knows the Grik will eat him and his men once they've oulived their usefullness, but continues to help them anyway because he promised them he would.
• Hopeless War: Captain Reddy points out that the war with the Grik must not be allowed to drag on for much longer, as the Grik are rapidly closing the technological gap and are learning better tactics. If they manage to close the gap, then it becomes a war of numbers, which the Alliance simply can't win. The only way to prevent this trope is to decisively crush the Grik in the shortest amount of time possible.
• Humans Are Special: Only the arrival of Walker breaks the Grik and Lemurians out of Medieval Stasis. However, a few books later it's Lemurians who are doing most of the innovations, having taken the Americans' lessons to heart.
• Humans Are White: First justified with Shinya and Juan (Walker's Filipino steward) as the Token Minorities, then averted later. Initially the only humans known on the alternate Earth are Walker's crew, who are white because the US military wasn't desegregated until 1947 and it's only 1942. Averted after Amagi shows up, and averted again when they meet up with the Empire, and Holy Dominion, who are mixed-race peoples of Caucasian and Central American descent and all Ambiguously Brown. Then there's the Republic, which averts it even further with people being descended from Koreans, Romans, various Africans... it's a long list. Also justified with the League of Tripoli, since it's made up of European fascists from an alternate World War II.
• I Am a Humanitarian:
  • The Grik kill and eat one another all the time. They don't make exceptions for other races either. In fact, they like to make their captives watch their comrades cooked and eaten before doing it to them.
  • In "Firestorm", we're introduced to the crew of a Japanese destroyer, who are more than willing to kill and eat their Allied prisoners. Naturally, this makes not only the Americans sick, but also Shinya and Okada (who has a personal score to settle with them, as they killed his newly-adopted tribe of Lemurian samurai).
    • Even worse? It's based on a true story from World War II.
• In Name Only: Grik-built ArataAmagi-class battleships have nothing to do with the original Amagi and are instead derived from the basic design of the CSS Virginia, only much larger, with four stacks, and with the casemate covering only 3/4 of the ship. Ditto for the Azuma-class cruisers, whose design is modeled on Japan's first ironclad, and has nothing in common with the Real Life cruiser Azuma.
• In Spite of a Nail: There's a discrepancy as to exactly when the East India Company ships came to the alternate world, but it was at least two hundred years before the 1940s — meaning more than twenty years before, in our world, there was a settlement in California named "San Francisco." Still, the New British build a city at the same good harbor ... and name it "St. Francis." The region we'd call San Jose is also known as the St. Joseph Plain.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Matt Reddy and Sandra Tucker become attracted to one another in the early books, which leads to Shipper on Deck from some Walker crew members, but they initially refuse to act on it on grounds that it could cause discipline problems to see The Captain getting some when the crew largely can't (there being only about five human women, all of them Sandra's fellow nurses, for a hundred-plus men). After they make contact with the Empire of New Britain, one of the early deals leads to formerly-indentured women being invited to live in Baalkpan, effectively ending the "dame famine".
• Interspecies Romance:
  • This may or may not be happening with Silva and Risa. It's halfway to My Species Doth Protest Too Much when everyone on both sides keep assuring themselves that Risa and Silva are most definitely just friends, honest. Silva eventually hooks up with Pam Cross by the latter half of the series.
  • Tabby is hopelessly in love with Spanky McFarlene, though it's one-sided in this case: he sees her as more of a surrogate daughter than a romantic partner.
  • There's a brief Ship Tease between Fred Reynolds and Kari-Faask in "Pass of Fire", when he wonders if she's jealous of him for going on a date.
• Insistent Terminology: The Empire of the New Britain Isles doesn't enslave women. Instead, the women are under obligations that must be paid off with work.
• Kangaroo Court: Billingsly plans to have 70 men, including the captain of HIMS Ajax, executed for following orders he gave them by claiming they acted on their own. It's heavily implied that these are commonplace in the Empire of New Britain thanks to the Company running things.
• Kill Him Already!: With Reddy and Sir Harrison Reed, where Reddy shoots him after he puts his gun down.
• Kraken and Leviathan: Among the sea creatures in this world is the "mountain fish" (apparently actually a kind of enormous whale), so big it can wreck a steamship — by biting it. At one point, it's stated that the locals' massive city-ships known as "Homes" are almost as big as mountain fish — and a Home is the size of an Essex-class aircraft carrier. And that's the average sized mountain fish... they do come in bigger sizes. The Imperials actually call them Leviathans.
  • From the way they're described as moving (basking, gradually picking up speed, able to move very fast for short periods of time), mountain fish may be the descendants of "Predator X".
  • In Firestorm, Captain Reddy suggests that some of these creatures may have crossed over to our Earth in the past, creating myths of said creatures. He comes up with the idea after finding out from Jenks about the existence of clever dragon-like creatures. This completely kills Bradford's theory about metal content being a requirement for crossing over.
  • Deadly Shores reveals that the Dominion’s (relatively) tamed man-eating grikbirds are "lesser dragons," and drops a teasing hint about the Dominion army having a "greater" breed in captivity. These beasties make their appearance in Straits of Hell during the assault on Fort Defiance: enormous Allosaurian creatures wrangled by “dragon monks” (a few of whom become appetizers when the things are released into battle) able to shrug off anything short of field artillery. Even the elephant guns used by the Imperial St. Francis Volunteers are ineffectual against them. As Captain Blas-Ma-Ar observes, “We just pissin’ it off!”
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: The "real world" the destroyermen left behind is treated this way. A lot of the ships depicted in the series either never existed or had very different histories; see Artistic License – Ships above for more detail.
• Long-Running Book Series: Fifteen novels in all with Winds of Wrath being the final novel.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming:
  • Kurokawa is very much a sadist, so much that it unnerves the Grik. He actually had to refrain from laughing as he watched Tsalka's execution via the traitor's death.
  • The Dominion practices blood sacrifice on a truly ludicrous scale, believing that torture and pain are the best way to be blessed by God.
• Low Culture, High Tech: The Grik rarely innovate, preferring to capture and reverse-engineer technology from others. This changes with the influence of the Japanese and, after the Grik-Japanese alliance is broken, General Esshk ensures that the Grik continue to innovate, having realized the importance of innovation in war.
• Medieval Stasis: The Grik and Lemurians were in stasis for centuries. Due to a stratified guild system, the last time the Lemurians advanced much technologically was to escape the Grik by developing sea travel. The Grik meanwhile are technological locusts that don't innovate on their own, but are very good at reverse-engineering stuff. Somewhat less so with the island Lemurians who were entering the Iron Age when Walker appeared, while the seagoing Lemurians were still in the Bronze. It's only the arrival of humans that enables either side to break the stasis. However, just 2 years after the arrival of Walker, the Lemurians are making near-identical copies of the ship, as well as cannons, airplanes, radios, and automatic weapons. That's a huge leap.
  • Zigzagged with The Empire of New Britain, which is improving but at a very slow rate. This is lampshaded in Maelstrom when it's observed that they still use muskets. Their ancestors crossed over in the 1740s, and have advanced to a roughly 1840s-level on their own, having independently developed steam engines.
• Misguided Torpedo: Subverted. In Storm Surge, Walker and Mahan make a full-speed torpedo run at Kurokawa's Grik-built battleships despite Sandison warning Reddy that they tend to be unpredictable at high speeds. The run is successful... until a torpedo, assumed to be one of Walkers that went off course, blows Mahans bow off, nearly destroying the ship. However, it turns out that it was actually one of the League of Tripoli's submarines that torpedoed Mahan, in order to make the Allies' recent victory at Madras less one-sided.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: At the end of River of Bones, the entire crew of the U-112 surrenders to Walker, after being written off by the League and left to fend for themselves. Apparently, the French- and Italian-dominated League is gradually marginalizing the German contingent, with the Spanish being next. Also a case of Because You Were Nice to Me, as Oberleutnant Walbert Fiedler convinces the sub's crew to mutiny, after being treated with respect by Captain Reddy, unlike his League superiors. He knows Reddy to be a man of honor. For a bit of humor, they've been trying to surrender for quite a while now, but Alliance ships kept shooting at them.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: The Grik eat each other all the time. They prefer eating other species to preserve their numbers, but they won't hesitate to send a handful of Uul (or incompetant Hij) to the cookpots if nothing better is available.
• Mooks:
  • The Uul, the barely sapient Grik foot soldiers.
  • Standard Dominion soldiers, who (unlike the Grik) rarely rout or retreat. Being religious fanatics, and having the very real fear of painful punishment hanging over them, keeps them in line.
• Moral Myopia: Kurokawa frequently saves his own skin by sailing separately from his fleet, thus escaping its destruction. He knows that anyone else doing that would be a Dirty Coward, but since Despotism Justifies the Means, he's merely living to fight another day.
• Mugging the Monster: Halfway through Into the Storm, a Grik warship makes the mistake of launching firebombs at Walker. Not only does the destroyer effortlessly blow it apart in retaliation, but the attack is what finally convinces Reddy to help the Lemurians.
  Captain Reddy: "...Did they just throw those balls of fire at us?"
• The Multiverse: In Deadly Shores, Courtney Bradford reveals his theory on the nature of the mysterious squalls coupled with the existence of the Republic of Real People, composed of descendants of various arrivals whose histories differ from both ours and each other’s. He proposes that the Lemurian/Grik world acts as a sort of "dumping ground" for a multitude of other parallel worlds. The most recent arrivals, the German crew and British prisoners of the SS Amerika (a German transport converted into a warship during World War I) claim to have fought a battle with another converted transport before being swept up by a storm. Reddy explains that, according to the history he studied, the SS Amerika didn't fight during that war and was converted into a troop transport under an American flag (and it didn't disappear). Most of Courtney's audience leaves halfway through his presentation, being utterly confused. Others who understand are still having trouble grasping the idea of an infinite number of universes, despite the fact that there are clearly at least two parallel worlds.
  • The attack on the fleet by the French submarine Surcouf, which was in our history controlled by the Free French but appears to be under the control of the Vichy France further supports Courtney's theory. This is confirmed in Straits of Hell, which reveals that Surcouf comes from a universe where much of Europe became fascist as a reaction to Bolshevism (which was quickly wiped out) and where Germany, France, Italy, and Spain united to conquer the Americans, the British, the Russians, and the Chinese. A large fleet sent to conquer British Egypt in 1939 crossed over into the other universe and has since established a new faction, the League of Tripoli, in the Mediterranean region.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: "Maelstrom" reveals that there's a Grik offshoot race called the Tagranesi that acts nothing like them. The Khonashi on Borneo also qualify.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Grik call the Indian Ocean "the Terrible Sea". Given the presence of humongous mountain-fish (which itself fits this trope), they dare not go through it, preferring to navigate closer to the African coast. The stated statistic is that no more than 1 in 20 ships make it through the ocean.
• Negative Space Wedgie: The Squall. As of Distant Thunders, Courtney Bradford's latest theory on it is that frequency of passage to the alternate Earth is directly proportional to ships' metal content. By Deadly Shores, his theory has evolved into believing in the existence of The Multiverse, where their current world acts as a sort-of radio receiver for others. In ''Pass of Fire'’, it's revealed that the anomaly also operates close to shore, as the fleet that became the League of Tripoli was transported while moored at the city of Tripoli along with a sizable chunk of the city. All they then got dumped on another city that already stood in the same spot on the Lemurian world.
• Never Found the Body: Tony Scott turns out to be alive and (sort of) well in Storm Surge as the king of the Khonashi, a tribe of Grik-like lizards and humans. Apparently, the Khonashi saved him from the allosaur that was presumed to have eaten him in Crusade.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer:
  • Used from time to time, and almost always lampshaded. In one instance Reddy assumes it's because the person summoning him wants him to see the situation from the same perspective, which a simple report might not do justice.
  • An inversion occurs in "Storm Surge", when Laney (by now Santa Catalina's engineering officer) goes all the way up the bridge to give a damage report... and Captain Russ Chappelle angrily chews him out for leaving his post mid-combat instead of just using the radio.
    Chappelle: What are you doin' here, Laney?
    Laney: Why, uh, there's water comin' in.
    Chappelle: We sinkin'?
    Laney: Not when I headed up here, but it was gettin' worse, and who knows now...
    Chappelle: You should know, you puffed-up, self-centered boar's tit!
• Noble Demon:
  • Commander Sato of Amagi, and later Lieutenant of the Sky Muriname as well. They despise the Grik, and believe negotiating with the Americans is a viable option...but this is more due to Amagi's captain being a complete lunatic than anything else.
  • General Ghanan Nerino grows into this, after his rather unimpressive initial performance. Unfortunately for him, he suffers a Heel–Face Door-Slam courtesy of Don Hernan after failing to take Fort Defiance.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • Dennis Silva may be a drinking, swearing, pranking, fighting giant of a man, but he's smarter than he lets on. He quickly realizes that Becky isn't who she claims to be about the same time as The Captain.
  • Billingsley's Number Two, Linus Truelove, is the same way. Both Silva and Truelove know the other is hiding his true nature.
• Ocean Punk: Pretty much the entire setting. It's a sailor's wet dream. You have vessels from both world wars, 19th-century vessels of the New British Empire, as well as a few for the Alliance, and 17th-century warships used by the Grik — armed with catapults. Two of the weirder examples are Spanish galleons with paddle wheels strapped to the sides of their ships and giant wooden aircraft carriers powered by steam that are also home to Cats.
• Oh, Crap!: An exceptionally well-deserved one from Billingsly, when he realizes that Silva has rigged his ship, Ajax, to blow up.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Courtney Bradford, though he's a far more realistic instance of this trope: originally working for Royal Dutch Shell as a geologist, Bradford (who calls himself a "naturalist") has a wealth of knowledge of prehistoric flora and fauna, as well as the sites of oil reserves in the East Indies. He's not really an expert in anything, though; as he puts it, "I know a little about a lot."
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • EM1 Rodriguez's hair caught fire when Walker took a hit during an engagement with Amagi. His new nickname: Ronson, after a popular cigarette lighter brand.
  • Ensign Fred Reynolds attacked an enemy ship in his unarmed PB-1B Nancy seaplane, firing his .45 out of the cockpit in the absence of better options. His first six rounds at least hit the enemy ship. The seventh punched a hole in the nose of his own plane. His Lemurian deck crew patched the hole, but instead of painting over it, they circled it and wrote a big "NO" where he can see it from the cockpit.
• One-Federation Limit: Mostly played straight. The major factions thus far are: the United Homes, the Grik Celestial Realm, the Empire of the New Britain Isles, the Holy Dominion, the Regency of India, the Republic of Real People, and the League of Tripoli. Inverted in the case of the New United States, which is usually abbreviated to NUS to avoid confusion with Reddy's United States Navy.
• Patricide: In book two Prince Rasik-Alcas murders his father and becomes king of Aryaal.
• Peace & Love Incorporated: The Honorable New Britain Company. Not only are they entirely run by Corrupt Corporate Executives, but in Rising Tides they turn out to be in league with the Dominion, outright helping the Doms launch a sneak attack on the Empire of New Britain.
• Person as Verb: More like "Place as Verb": A salvage operation in "Distant Thunders" and "Rising Tides" is overlooked by a volcano on a nearby island that's starting to act up. The people worry that it might be about to "pull a Krakatoa". It does. It's also pointed out that the statement is invalid in this world, as this world's Krakatoa has never blown its top.
• Piranha Problem: Falling into the sea is pretty much a death sentence thanks to the ubiquitous presence of flasher fish, or "flashies", which are essentially tuna-sized saltwater piranhas. Danny Porter gets a rather brutal death by flashy in Storm Surge after pulling a Heroic Sacrifice:
  He hated not knowing how it would all turn out, but his certainty was growing that, of all S-19's surviving crew, he was going to get off the easiest. At least that's what he thought until the first flasher fish tore a baseball-size hunk out of his side. Another hit his left leg. Even as he flailed, screaming in the water, the hits became continuous and the water frothed around him. Oddly, he never really felt any pain; the attack was too fast, too traumatic. Flasher fish are greedy things, and very good at what they do.
• Points of Light Setting: Destroyermen is set in an alternate 1940s in which the K-T extinction never happened, and the dinosaurs and their contemporary species have continued to evolve.
  • The seas are teeming with predators (including "flashies", essentially tuna-sized saltwater pirannhas; and "mountain fish", carnivorous whales large enough to swallow ships whole), which have largely prevented plants and animals from migrating to different landmasses, allowing for a wide variety of evolutionary paths to take hold.
  • Living among this Death World are the Grik (an empire of Lizard Folk, heavily implied to be descended from raptors), scattered populations of Lemurians (Cat Folk who evolved on Madagascar but had to pull an Homeland Evacuation when the Grik invaded), and the occasional community of humans who got stranded in this world after getting pulled through a Squall. Not all of those humans are from the same universe, either.
  • Over the course of the books, The Alliance started by the crew of USS Walker to fight the Grik explores this alternate world and gradually becomes a Space-Filling Empire; however, much of its territory consist of islands or coastlines, and as late as Devil's Due (the eleventh book out of fifteen) Greg Garrett doubts more than 5% of the globe has actually been explored yet.
• Politically Correct History:
  • Averted. The entire crew of USS Walker is shown to be at least mildly racist, from an incidental Values Dissonance standpoint if not actively. Many of them are very open-minded for the forties, but terms like "Jappo," "Jap," and "Nip" fly freely.
  • One character is described as an openly "Kard-Karrying Klansman" who would do impersonations of Al Jolson (and reacted to the common knowledge that Jolson was openly Jewish with shocked denial) and perform little shows in blackface, which greatly amused everybody. Silva (who is from Alabama) notes that while he enjoyed the shows immensely himself, he disliked how the local Filipino workers would be treated after them. This guy later dives across the Moral Event Horizon and gets his comeuppance at the hands of Silva and fellow Alabaman Bosun Gray.
• Political Officer: The Empire of New Britain's warships have officers whose main loyalties are to the Honourable New British East India Company instead of The Emperor.
• Precursors: There are ruins scattered across Africa and India that point to the existence of a civilization that fell a long time ago. It's hinted that they might be the "Vanished Gods" the Grik worship.
• Puppet King: Governor-Emperor Gerald McDonald was one to the Honourable New Britain Isles Company until the intervention of Walker and her crew. Entirely averted by his daughter Governor-Empress Rebecca Ann McDonald, despite her young age. Kurokawa speculates that the new Celestial Mother is likely to be one, with General Esshk and the Chooser running the Grik Empire in her stead, in stark contrast with the previous Celestial Mother.
• Putting on the Reich: The Confédération États Souverains from a parallel world, where France and Spain became fascist after World War I and joined with Italy (as well as Germany as a minor ally), declaring war on the UK, US, and Russia (which never became communist). A large fleet sent by the fascists to take British Egypt was swept up by a squall and taken to the Lemurian/Grik world, where they established the League of Tripoli. As expected, they treat Lemurians as little more than animals.
• Pyrrhic Victory / Was It Really Worth It?: The end of Deadly Shores. Most of Madagascar is in the hands of the Alliance, but the losses they suffered - and the fact that it was originally supposed to be nothing more than a raid - cause Reddy to lament that they probably didn't deserve to win. After the battle, Reddy rightly puts the blame for this squarely on Adar's shoulders for publicly supporting the raid plan while giving obvious hints to everyone that he wanted the island taken, resulting in underprepared troops doing what they weren't supposed to be doing.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • USS Walker's crew is portrayed as this. Captain Reddy notes at the beginning of "Into the Storm" that the entirety of the Asiatic fleet had this reputation.
  • The end of "Iron Gray Sea" reveals a whole nation of these, made up of Lemurian refugees from the time of the Exodus and various humans who have crossed over in the Atlantic since then. It's not clear how old the Republic is, but Romans arrived there in the 10th century to join others who settled South Africa. The latest arrivals are a World War I-era German ship full of British PoWs.
• Ramming Always Works: Mahan does this to Amagi during the Battle of Baalkpan in "Maelstrom", detonating a load of depth charges for maximum effect. Amagi survives, but suffers heavy damage.
  • A Grik dreadnought accidentally sinks S-19 this way in "Storm Surge".
  • In "River of Bones", Aracca's fate is sealed when a Grik cruiser plows into her side in the Zambezi river. Then a doomed airplane crashes into her, starting a fire that her crew don't even bother trying to fight.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Brutally invoked in "Crusade" with Blas-Ma-Ar at Aryaal. She never fully recovers, as evidenced by her attitudes to Chack Sab-At (a figure she respects a lot and who helped her out after the incident). The perpetrator is executed for this action.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Many Lemurian chiefs, as well as Governor-Emperor Gerald McDonald of the Empire of New Britain. The end of Book 7 also introduces a Lemurian with the title of Caesar, the benevolent despot of the Republic of Real People.
• Recycled In Space: The Lemurians' backstory is basically Battlestar Galactica ON THE SEA and in an alternate prehistory.
  • The experience of the US Asiatic Fleet in the opening months of the war can be compared to both the Lemurians and BSG, as they started the war outnumbered and outgunned on worn-out ships, constantly hunted by an implacable and overwhelming enemy force as they retreated from the Phillipines to Borneo to Java to Australia.
• Red Shirt: Unnamed Lemurians are often killed while accompanying the main characters on missions. One example is during the aerial battle in "Crusade", where the Catalina's unnamed side gunners are both killed while Mallory, Palmer, and Tikker all survive.
• Red Shirt Army: Averted. The Lemurian forces do take serious losses in the books' various battles, but they inflict far worse losses on the Grik.
• Religion of Evil: The perverted version of Christianity mixed with Mayincatec blood sacrifices as practiced by the Holy Dominion.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Zigzagged. The Grik, who are described as fuzzy raptors, play this straight. Then in "Firestorm" some other Grik-like races have been found that prove to be valuable allies. They're still somewhat distrusted for their appearance, but they're still good friends to have. And then, thanks to the Grik promoting intelligence in the ranks out of necessity, some of them turn into Worthy Opponents while for others, Defeat Means Friendship.
• The Republic: The Republic of Real People is discovered in South Africa at the end of "Iron Gray Sea" by a Japanese officer. It's a Roman-style republic ruled by a benevolent despot (a Lemurian to boot) known as the Caesar. It is also quite advanced, up to World War I standards.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: How do General Pete Alden and Lord Muln-Rolak respond to the offer of a Grik general to join the Grand Alliance in their "hunt" and then casually mentioning eating another tribe of Grik? By slaughtering every Grik in sight except for a civilian Grik who is taken prisoner.
• Rousing Speech: Despite his protestations to the contrary, Reddy is actually very good at these, as well as pretty much any other kind of rousing/threatening/comforting speech you could ask for.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • The Orphan Queen of B'mbaado. Not only a fierce and capable warrior in her own right, but when she says something like "I will be the last of my people to leave" or "I will not stop until I've brought everyone home," she means it. She has ended up behind enemy lines and has personally lead her army to battle on a number of occasions.
    • On one occasion, Chairman Adar (the leader of the Grand Alliance) orders her to evacuate aboard a plane. Her reply is brilliant in its refusal: while General Safir Maraan would happily follow Chairman Adar's suggestion, Queen Safir Maraan will not abandon her forces.
  • Lord Rolak, while not technically a king, qualifies as he is very much the last remaining royalty "figure" for Aryaal itself and, is a Colonel Badass, despite technically being a general.
  • Lord Koratin counts as well. At first, he's just a scheming Aryaal courtier. Later, he joins the Alliance marines and proves himself extremely capable. In fact, when later offered command over his own regiment, he refuses claiming that his place is on the front lines. He's also one of the first Lemurians to adopt Catholicism.
• Schizo Tech:
  • Hoo boy. You've got World War I- and II-era tech with the destroyers and a Japanese battle-cruiser, 18th-century tech with the Grik's ships, and roughly Bronze Age (leavened with some Iron) tech with the Lemurians...who the Americans train to fight in a Roman shield wall. Supported by bronze cannons. And this is just the first two books...
  • The Empire and Dominion have roughly Civil War-era tech: wooden ships powered by sail and coal-fired steam.
  • The ultimate expression is the conversion of the carrier-sized wooden Home ships (sail-powered) of the Lemurians into actual steam-powered carriers for their new planes.
  • The Grik respond (with Japanese help) by adding iron cannons to their ships, as well as use field artillery to support their mindless horde. Shortly after, they unveil their zeppelin bombers and ironclad warships based on early American (CSS Virginia) and French-built (Kotetsu) ironclads.
    • Those zeppelin bombers later sport anti-air defenses and drop glider bombs piloted by kamikaze Grik.
    • Those battleships are later converted into carriers, and General of the Sky Muriname succeeds in creating Kurokawa's own air force with Grik-piloted fighters and bombers.
• Science Marches On:
  • Used in-universe - the human characters are stuck with a mid-20th-century understanding of dinosaurs and evolution whilst interacting with dinosaurs and lemurs written with an early 21st-century understanding of dinosaurs.
  • One of the more subtle examples is the fact that the Grik have feathers, despite supposedly being lizards. We now know that raptors, from whom the Grik are likely descended, had feathers and may have been the ancestors to modern birds. Bradford also keeps insisting that Grik are birds and not lizards based on their internal structure (e.g. hollow bones).
• Sequel Hook: "Winds of Wrath" ends the series, but leaves a few plot threads hanging for future books to potentially pick up:
  • The League of Tripoli and its fascist Triumvirate are still intact, and several characters expect hostilities to resume within a generation or so.
  • Don Hernan and Gravois escape the fall of New Granada, and venture south to reform the Dominion and strengthen its ties with the League. Although Reddy doesn't expect them to have much success at that, Don Hernan is not someone to be underestimated...
  • Two large explosions are sighted at Japan, hinting at further crossovers with alternate worlds.
  • Silva, Lawrence, and Courtney Bradford plan to reform the Corps of Discovery and continue to explore the still-mostly-uncharted world.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Anderson neglects nothing when it comes to keeping a Wickes-class tin can running. Food, fuel, ammunition, lubricants, spare parts, glass, uniforms, paper, and the infrastructure to supply them are all addressed. Chief Gray's first concern after they cross over, which is both well-justified and fully explained, is a lack of paint.
  • The strange void-place-thing within the squall is described as a strange vacuum in which water droplets are suspended in place. When Walker reaches it, Reddy briefly hears/feels the engines screaming as the screws (which are no longer submerged) run away. Spanky also catches it and quickly stops the engines, preventing catastrophic damage.
• Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility: Type II. While some creative liberties are taken (justified, considering the point of divergence was apparently millions of years ago) the story is generally well-researched. The author discusses the reasoning behind some of the changes in the afterword of Into the Storm.
• Sociopathic Hero: Silva - my god, Silva. If no other passage seals it, one paragraph in Into the Storm defines the entire character of Dennis Silva and is possibly the most clear-cut example ever of the entire trope of a Heroic Sociopath.
  He'd killed a lot in his life, before the War even started. Bar fights and back alleys in China, mostly - although there'd been that pool shark down in Mobile too. Most had it coming, by his definition, though he might have been hasty a time or two. The Japs had it coming, and he guessed he'd killed some of them with his number one gun. But that was a team sport. He'd never killed anybody because he was "good" and they were "bad". They'd just been "badder" than he was. And sometimes Dennis Silva could be a bad man. But now he felt good because the creatures he killed were indisputably bad. [...] He felt like the big mean dragon in the story that everyone was scared of, who swooped down and ate the evil king. Sometimes it felt good to be "good".
  • If that's not enough for you, originally Silva described himself as having only four moods (happy, hungry, horny, and mad, albeit this changes over time somewhat), considers war to be the best fun he's ever had, and by the time of "Firestorm" has been described (by Sandra no less) as being valuable to the fleet specifically because when put in a bad situation he will take the utmost pragmatic and effective course with no regard for morals or ethics. His mission on Earth seems to be to kill as many of his enemies as is humanly possible, and boy does he love his mission.
  • However, Silva does have a tender side that he rarely reveals. He's also extremely loyal. If somebody threatens the people he cares about, well...
• Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: In "Distant Thunders" Silva inflicts this fate on Billingsley by setting Ajax's powder magazines up to explode. Good riddance.
• Sssssnake Talk:
  • As expected, the Grik speak in this manner. It's not clear if their cousins the Tagranesi do the same.
  • A Tagrenesi named Lawrence speaks English fairly well, except for his inability to form any sounds requiring lips.
• Space-Filling Empire:
  • The Grik Empire controls at least (the exact extent is unknown) India, southern Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Persian Gulf, and most of the eastern coast of Africa.
  • Meanwhile, the Dominion controls Mexico, Central America, and South America from what's Colombia in our world down to the northern half of Chile.
  • The Alliance is heading in this direction, controlling the Philippines, parts of Indonesia and Australia, and most recently, Japan and the Hawaiian Islands (voluntarily) and India (by conquest). By the end of "Deadly Shores" they also control Madagascar and are mounting an invasion of Grik Africa. However, as Greg Garrett notes in "Devil's Due", most of these holdings consist of islands or coastlines, and he doubts more than 5% of the globe has actually been explored yet.
  • It now looks like North America has at least two more countries, one of which (the New United States) pushed the Dominion out of Mexico for a time and their rivals on their other border.
  • And one led by some Czech guy that's north of Grik-controlled India.
  • Most of the Mediterranean region is firmly in the hands of the League of Tripoli.
• Spoiler Cover: The cover of Firestorm depicts Grik zepplins bombing Alliance ships, which doesn't happen until almost the end of the book.
• Stars Are Souls: A core part of the Lemurian religion, at least among the "Sea Folk".
• Storming the Castle:
  • In "Deadly Shores" the Celestial Mother's palace is stormed by a small group during the invasion of the so-called "Grik City" on Madagascar, while a battle rages on outside.
  • The Sofesshk campaign in "Pass of Fire" features the Allied invasion of the Grik capital city.
• Stranded with Edison:
  • The crew of two US naval destroyers just happens to have some engineers who have worked in oil fields so that they can drill new oil wells for fuel. Other experts are in abundance (pilots that can design planes), to the point that know-how isn't usually a problem, just materials, and facilities. Only once or twice does someone mention they don't actually know how to make something they need, but it's sort of shrugged off with "We'll figure something out."
  • Justifiable for several reasons. In the 1930's, people tended to have a broader (if less advanced) knowledge of their respective fields. As well, it is worth noting that the misfits of the Navy (aka the most ingenious, if least conventional) are the ones assigned to the Asiatic Fleet. Further amplified by the fact there have been logical reasons set forth early on as to WHY they can make the advances that they do, instead of relying on Only the Author Can Save Them Now.
  • One invention, in particular, is made by the Lemurians based on Captain Reddy's former fascination with ancient naval combat. When boarding a Grik ship, he has the Lemurians build him a corvus, a boarding bridge of Roman design that embeds itself in the other ship's deck, allowing boarders to cross. Unfortunately, the Lemurians build it out of bamboo, and it collapses under the weight. Of course, Reddy forgets that the corvus is not only unusable but dangerous to both ships in rough seas. That's why the Romans stopped using them.
  • By Storm Surge, though, it's stated that all major improvements are being done by Lemurians with humans just shaking their heads in a "why haven't we thought about it?" way. The Lemurians just needed a push in the right direction to get things started.
  • In "Deadly Shores", the Lemurians finish building two Walker-type destroyers using steel salvaged from Amagi, and there are ideas being put forward for building Farragut-class destroyers and cruisers next.
  • Unfortunately, the same is true for the crew of Amagi, who managed to help the Grik increase their technical knowledge and tactics. Furthermore, "General of the Sky" Muriname pretty much single-handedly builds Kurokawa a powerful air force that rivals that of the Alliance, despite the fact that Amagi was a battlecruiser, not a carrier. It's hinted that, even without Kurokawa and his officers, General Esshk has realized the importance of innovation over brute force and will continue to develop the Grik technology and tactics.
• Summon Bigger Fish: In "Pass of Fire", Second Fleet sics hundreds of mountain fish toward a Dominion fleet using depth charges and air-dropped bombs, literally crushing the Dom ships in the ensuing chaos.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: It happens. The most sudden and senseless has to be Seaman Ray Mertz. In the midst of the Battle of Baalkpan, he's making sandwiches for the rest of the crew when a 10-inch shell from Amagi guts the galley. There's not enough left of him to bury. A steam frigate is later named in honor of him.
• That's No Moon: During a scout over the Java Sea, Tikker is surprised to see what looks like an island below him, one not marked on the maps. Upon taking a closer look, he realizes those "sandy beaches" are actually the white sails of hundreds of Grik ships on their way to invade Aryaal and Baalkpan.
• A Thicket of Spears: When the Americans start training and equipping the Lemurians to more effectively fight the Grik, they start out by reinventing the Greek phalanx with spear and shield for lack of resources to do anything else. This quickly evolves into shot-and-pike with the spears eventually supplanted by muskets as they're able to gradually reproduce more advanced Earth weaponry with the available resources, with the shields evolving into portable cover for musketeers.
• Those Wacky Nazis: The League of Tripoli comes from an alternate world where fascist France and Spain are members of the Axis Powers, or Confédération États Souverains (Confederation of Sovereign States), as they're called in their universe. Unfortunately for the Alliance, they have come through with a full invasion fleet. Their current goal appears to be preventing any one power from dominating the world. This includes both the Alliance and a possible Grik/Dom Villain Team-Up.
• Token Good Teammate: Sato of the Amagi crew.
• Tranquil Fury: Matt slips into this when sufficiently angry. It's...unsettling. And things usually end very, very BADLY for whoever made him mad.
  • Truly push Matt over the edge (for instance, kidnap Sandra like Billingsley did), and Matt will go into this and Unstoppable Rage at the same time.
• Vehicular Turnabout: A good percentage of the Alliance's United States Navy consists of captured Grik ships converted into troop transports, destroyer escorts, ammunition ships, and so on. As of "Pass of Fire" they've added the League battleship Savoie and the defecting submarine U-112 to their ranks, though neither are combat-ready yet.
• Villainous BSoD: Kurokawa experiences one witnessing his beloved ArataAmagi-class battleships being destroyed one-by-one by P-40s.
• Villain Team-Up: Happens several times throughout the novels.
  • First, there is Kurokawa and the Grik, although that alliance ends in later books when Kurokawa flees to his own island base.
  • The Holy Dominion eventually discovers the existence of the Grik and their war with the Alliance. Despite their hatred for such creatures, they send a delegation across the Atlantic to Africa to contact the Grik and try to establish an Enemy Mine situation. The delegation is intercepted by the League of Tripoli.
  • The League of Tripoli makes overtures to Kurokawa following the end of his alliance with the Grik.
• Villains Want Mercy: Played for Black Comedy in Maelstrom. Captain Kaufman has Kurokawa at his mercy and is about to smash his head with a broken piece of conduit, until Kurokawa cries, "Wait!" Kaufman does. Kurokawa shoots him.
  Kaufman: Goddamn sneaky Japs. *dies*
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Silva and his Tagranesi sidekick Lawrence.
• Void Between the Worlds: The inside of the Squall.
  The sea was gone. Down as far as he could see, past the boot topping, past the growth-encrusted red paint of the hull, into the limited greenish-black nothingness below, were only uncountable billions of raindrops suspended in the air.
• War Is Glorious: The Aryaalans and B'mbadans are among the very few 'Cat nations that regularly fought wars prior to the Grik conflict, and are Proud Warrior Race Guys through and through.
• War Is Hell: So far the total of deaths is in the millions. The total losses incurred by the Lemurians are implied to be around 20,000 to 25,000 by the end of "Firestorm" (not counting civilian casualties before the war officially started), and the Grik sustaining no fewer than 300,000 losses. That is just the first 3 books; the end of Pass Of Fire casually references an off-page conflict between combined forces of nearly half a million Grik in Arabia, as Halik rampages towards northern Africa. On-page deaths are utterly uncountable.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction: In "Storm Surge", Chairman Adar commissions the secret development of two methods of killing hordes of Grik without a lot of Alliance casualties. One is mustard gas. Captain Reddy vehemently opposes using the gas. Not because it's immoral to kill Grik that way but because the Grik (thanks to their Japanese allies) are liable to start lobbing gas shells of their own, and the furry Lemurians would not be able to make gas masks with a tight enough seal to protect themselves. Reddy is reminded that, if Kurokawa makes mustard gas first, he will use it without hesitation, as he couldn't care less about his Grik underlings. The other is much more heinous and threatens to make the Eurasian and African continents on this world completely uninhabitable if it goes out of control. Specifically, they have weaponized the kudzu-like parasite plant found on Yap island. Courtney Bradford especially protests against the latter, as it is bound to completely destroy ecologies unprepared for the plant.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Averted... at first. With the Grik practically knocking on Balkpaan's front door in the first three books, there's very little opposition to forming The Alliance to push them back. As the war begins to move away from Balkpaan, however, political in-fighting starts to heat up on the home front as the threat grows less urgent. Alen Letts speculates that this is due to all the Reasonable Authority Figures being deployed overseas, leaving the Sleazy Politicians to take their place for the duration of the war. It got to the point that in '"Winds of Wrath"', several of them began to secretly make a separate peace with the League and threatened to compromise the war effort in the East.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • All Walker crew members killed in the first few chapters of Into the Storm, such as Doctor Stevens.
  • The rebuilt S-19 is sunk for good at the end of Storm Surge, having been launched only a few weeks earlier.
• Weird Weather: There's a rare green storm that picks up any vessel that drives into it and deposits them in a parallel world. Walker and Mahan ran into one while trying to escape Amagi. Bradford hypothesizes that it's summoned by the presence of large masses of metal on the sea, but this fails to explain previous crossovers by wooden ships, or how Svec and his Czech Legion crossed over in the middle of Asia.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Played with all over the place. In the first book's climax, Reddy finds Lemurian skulls hung up as decorations in a Grik ship, he's outraged and remarks to himself that Lemurians are people and should not be treated like trophy animals. But it's only when he sees a human skull among them that he descends into Tranquil Fury and makes the decision to kill them all. He later realizes the hypocrisy of this reaction in the second book. However, he has no issues with exterminating the Grik. It helps that most of them are little more than mindless beasts with only one thing on their mind: the hunt. They don't know when or how to stop. It's the Hij, the Grik who are old enough to gain a form of intelligence, who consciously direct the others to exterminate this and that species. They particularly want to kill the Lemurians because the Lemurians are the only "prey" to have ever escaped them.
  • The fourth book has Billingsly, a Politically Incorrect Villain who views Lemurians as a lesser species of "ape-men" and orders the captain of HIMS Ajax to destroy two Lemurian ships because they dared to speak to him, moreso because it was a female Lemurian.
  • The Dominion considers Lemurians to be intelligent animals at best, and demons at worst.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Rising Tides". Walker reaches the New Britain Isles (Hawaii) and helps them fight off a Dominion invasion, earning a powerful new member of the Alliance but also opening up a second front in the war. Sandra, Silva, Lawrence, and Rebecca manage to survive on, and escape from, Yap Island before being rescued by S-19, which itself had very narrowly avoided being destroyed by the eruptions of the Talaud volcano.
  • "Deadly Shores". Walker is besieged, boarded, and very nearly overrun by the Grik; Laumer, Gray, and the Celestial Mother are all dead; and Madagascar is under Alliance control (though it's kind of a Pyrrhic Victory). And there's another hostile civilization operating in the Indian ocean, one that has modern warships at its disposal and is holding the Republic of Real People hostage.
  • "Pass of Fire". Sofesshk falls to the allies, the new Celestial Mother joins the Grand Alliance, General Esshk's forces become a Renegade Splinter Faction and retreat to the north, and a fleet of modern League warships set off to retake the Pass of Fire from a very depleted Second Fleet.
• White Man's Burden:
  • Discussed with the Lemurians and ultimately zigzagged. It's demonstrated innumerable times that the 'Cats are an intelligent race with a vibrant culture and a rich history, and Reddy and his crew are very careful not to impose on the 'Cats beyond what is needed to win the war with the Grik (which mostly amounts to sharing their modern technology and helping them reorganize their economy and industry to support the war). On the other hand, the vast majority of the Lemurians flock to join Reddy's United States Navy rather than create their own military, and gleefully embrace American culture in all its forms, giving the impression of unintentional colonialism on the part of the destroyermen.
  • Played much more straight with the Empire of the New Britain Isles, who've mostly been stuck in an early 19th-century civilization since their own arrival, with Reddy and others wasting no opportunity to point out how inferior their technology and ways of doing things is compared to theirs. To further reinforce the trope, the Imperials are Ambiguously Brown, as their original British crews have intermixed with Mayincatec women from the Dominion.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Sir Harrison Reed challenges Captain Reddy to a sword fight. Reddy drops his rifle... and then shoots the bastard with his 1911 Colt.
• Why Won't You Die?: Courtesy of Dennis Silva, to Amagi near the end of the Battle of Baalkpan Bay in Maelstrom. At this point, the battlecruiser has taken two torpedoes, a Japanese dive-bomber crashing into her third turret, a third torpedo, being rammed by Mahan, who then had her remaining ammunition detonated, and every single shell that Walker had left to dish out except one.

Goddamn! Why won't that unholy bitch just sink?

• Wooden Ships and Iron Men: The Empire and Dominion are on their way out of the Age of Sail; their ships are steam/sail hybrids. At the same time, the Dominion still relies heavily on sail-powered "liners", large galleons with many cannons.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Amagi blows the crap out of Walker each time they meet, much to the surprise and horror of any Lemurians present.
  • The Dominion manages to lure Walker into a trap that nearly cripples her during their first battle in '"Rising Tides", demonstrating that this new enemy is much smarter and more versatile than the Grik.
• World of Badass: Scroll through the Characters tab and you'll soon notice a pattern. Captain Reddy and his people were already a Badass Crew before going through the Squall, and with the Lemurians learning from their example, combined with the pressure of fighting a Guilt-Free Extermination War on a Death World, badass exploits abound.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Most Lemurian societies live on a barter system. Gold is treated as a pretty but useless trinket until the destroyermen convince them to create a more stable economic system and use gold as the standard. Even then some things are treated as more valuable than gold: when Silva and "Moe" (an old Lemurian hunter) find a downed Japanese bomber, Moe rejoices, claiming that he'll be the richest Lemurian ever from all the aluminum that makes up the plane. This is justified, though, as aluminum is desperately needed to make better planes.
• Worthy Opponent: Linus Truelove sees Silva as this, although it isn't mutual. His last words when he realizes how Silva has killed him? "Bravo!"
• Would Hurt a Child: The Grik happily kill and eat their young, at least those who are perceived as "prey" (i.e. those who don't exhibit Attack! Attack! Attack! qualities). When attacking Ceylon, the Grand Alliance quickly learns that the Grik young are feral beasts who can be just as dangerous as their adult versions. It's not long before all Grik young are shot on sight.
• You Have No Idea Who You're Dealing With: Spanky says it almost word-for-word when Billingsly and his Company goons abduct Princess Rebecca, LT Tucker, and Sister Audrey. The conniving bastard really should've listened.
• You No Take Candle: Some of the Lemurians like Aviation Machinist's Mate Jeek talk this way in English. Justified, as their native tongue is completely unrelated to English and some learn new languages better than others. It also becomes less common as both groups get more immersion with each other. It's also implied that the Americans sound this way at first when they start learning Lemurian.
• You Shall Not Pass!: At the end of "Devil's Due", with the news that the new Grik army is making their way down the Zambezi river in hundreds of galleys, far too many for the Alliance to destroy before they reach Madagascar, Russ Chappelle opts to park his Santa Catalina in the middle of the river and physically block them from progressing. By the end of "River of Bones", the cruiser has been reduced to a shattered, irreparable hulk, but she held the line long enough for First Fleet to arrive.
• Zeppelins from Another World: The Grik answer to The Alliance's air force, seeing as how it would be near impossible to build a cockpit that could comfortably seat a Grik or even teach one to pilot a plane.
• Zerg Rush: The Grik's "strategy" revolves around this. "The Grand Swarm" is essentially a Zerg Rush using warships.
  • Justified in that most of the Grik are little more than mindless beasts. Good luck teaching them to fight in formation. The Hij, the older Grik who are in charge, don't mind sending countless of their younger kin to die.
    • In fact, a few Grik are taught to move and stand in formation and fire muskets. However, this is now all they do. They don't even bother to defend themselves when attacked up close.
    • Later, this is changing, to the horror of the humans and the Lemurians. The "new" Grik are more tactical and no longer experience the so-called "Grik routs". However, the majority are still the same mindless horde.

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