The title has a double meaning. The guerrilla war in which MacDonald participates is in effect the last word which the Americans left on Earth would ever say before passing out of history (Stirling's later book discloses that the Draka conquerors would wage a decades-long genocidal war throughout North America, and that the few surviving Americans would be quite literally bombed back into the Stone Age). But there is also a more personal last word, with the captured MacDonald defiantly telling his captor that while the Draka army was expending its energy on crushing the last resistance in America, the Americans who escaped into space would establish themselves outside the solar system and carry on the war from there (which would indeed come to pass and be described in detail by Stirling).
Notes[]
An obvious influence on the story's plot and theme is the classic "America has fallen" novel Sixth Column (1941), which Robert A. Heinlein wrote under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald. Heinlein is tuckerized by Turtledove as the Commodore.
Turtledove used similar themes in the standalone story "The Phantom Tolbukhin," which deals with an overwhelmed Sovietresistance force which remains hopeful in a clearly lost cause, following a German victory in World War II.
