Motivated by the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, champion swimmer Lee "Stump" Kelley is hell bent on becoming a Marine. Waylaid by a silver-tongued Navy recruiter he becomes a frogman instead. After blowing up under water obstructions all over the Pacific, at Tacloban he loses the first of his best friends in a gruesome explosion. A month later he loses the second in a freak encounter with a giant hammerhead shark at Manila Bay. Moving on to Okinawa with what's left of his frogman team, he suffers serious burns during the largest kamikaze attack of the war. At Guam a three star admiral asks his opinion on a prospective landing site for the invasion of Japan. As always, Stump tells it like it is. "Admiral... trying to march into Tokyo will cost a million American lives. And one of those lives is gonna be mine."
