As Karakhan's multiracial army mounts its land invasion -- under a rainbow flag, no less, to symbolize its diversity -- the East and West Coasts take a pounding. Washington, D.C., is abandoned, with the government relocated to St. Louis, and Gibbons briefly indulges in a Michael Bay-esque trashing of Boston, a spectacle of the sort that the book could frankly use more of.
Although the miscegenation theme is clearly of paramount importance to Gibbons, his description of what actually happens in Occupied America is oblique to the point of absurdity, never coming out and saying what is obviously inferred about rape. Only in the book's earliest and final pages (set after the war) does Gibbons reflect unambiguously on the consequences of Karakhan's policy "CONQUER AND BREED" policy (yes, in all caps):
...the thousands of Eurasian, mulatto, mestizo children, half-yellow, half-black, half-brown, or half-red, born to white women in the wake of his conquering armies in Europe and the Americas, he holds that they constitute the lasting mark he has made upon the population of the world and calls them the first step toward the "deliverance of mankind from the curse of race prejudice."
Very little of this comes out in the account of the war itself, which is instead an endless list of engagements, battle orders, regimental movements, and the occasional name-dropping of politicians Gibbons particularly likes or dislikes. For good measure, America's beleaguered conscript force is aided by surviving military members of the Italian "fascisti" and the German Nazi Party, and other, you know, white guys.
In the end, Karakhan is defeated after a disastrous naval engagement made possible by a piece of espionage executed by the Gibbons character himself, a sequence that's just about as contrived and self-aggrandizing as it sounds. This leads to a chain of events that devastates the Red Army in far fewer pages than it took to build it up. The fictional Gibbons -- a journalist, mind you -- personally captures the fleeing Karakhan, bringing an end to the war.
Of course, victory comes too late for white people, who are left to cope with a world now thoroughly miscegenated. Oddly, Karakhan is sent to exile in Bermuda, rather than being tried for war crimes or at least imprisoned in Siberia.
While The Red Napoleon is far more overtly political than its Red Dawn descendants, it's not much more subtle or complex. Lefties, pacifists, and dirty foreigners are the problem, righties and whiteys are the solution. That's about as deep as things ever get, although Gibbons' solemn inscription at the front of the book suggests the author imagined he was being somehow constructive:
DEDICATED TO THE HOPE THAT IT WILL NOT HAPPEN
Um, mission accomplished?
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