The Winds of War + War and Remembrance

Maynard recommends these wonderful historical novels about World War II

I admit I tilt towards fiction. Should I feel embarrassed about this? On one hand, a rational, intellectual creature (such as I pretend to be) should do the hard work to absorb raw data. On the other hand, the human experience is too complicated to be conveyed through facts alone. The facts are merely the threads from which a greater tapestry is woven. We must attempt to view that tapestry in its entirety. A novel, sticking to true events but taking dramatic liberties as necessary to create dramatic structure, will help convey the big picture.

We look back on the Second World War with the clarity of hindsight, but the view was anything but clear at the time. The Europeans wanted “peace in our time” and the Americans wanted no part of the European conflict, and every side wanted an advantage, and everyone was wary of everyone else. Many of the German demands of the 1930’s (such as the desire to be rid of the more onerous restrictions of the Versailles Treaty) seemed not entirely unreasonable, and in fact might have been appropriate had the German government not been planning its war of aggression.

Herman Wouk wrote two sweeping novels, which are basically a continuation of the same story. The first, The Winds of War, carries us from the late 1930’s to Pearl Harbor, and War and Remembrance picks up with the American entry into the War. These are thick books, but I couldn’t put them down.

What is particularly fascinating is to see the War unfold in its uncertainty of the moment. As I noted, our hindsight is quite clear. But the arguments of the day were intense and confusing, and remind me a lot of our modern heated debates. Before the Nazis became the universal metaphor for evil, there were many people who were sympathetic to the Nazi causes, just as many Americans were (and still are) sympathetic to the Communists. Hadn’t the Great Depression proved the failure of the free market? Wasn’t Russia taking care of its workers and building its economies with a vigor that the capitalist economies couldn’t muster? Hadn’t Hitler put the Germans back to work, and brought them “strength through joy”? And don’t forget that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Intellectuals of the day argued, and with great conviction, that the only factor that kept the Nazi and Communist societies from being paradises were the powerful business interests backed up by force of arms. (You hear some people say the same thing about Communist Cuba.) The muddle of the times is drawn with great clarity in these books.

Of course, now we know and acknowledge the evil at the core of Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and Stalin. But the lag in achieving that clarity cost countless millions of people their lives. We aspire to do better in the future, but clarity is always elusive. For example, we moved into Vietnam on the theory that these brushfires should be battled while they are still small, lest they start a chain reaction and grow into a Hitler-sized menace. In retrospect, whatever you may argue about the merits of American involvement in the Vietnam War, its loss to the bad guys has not had the global impact comparable to the rise of the Axis Powers. But we must not have missed the mark entirely, because we ultimately triumphed in our struggle with Communism, and did so without igniting another World War. Today we face a similar evil global challenge from the radical Islamists, and again we quest for the optimal path through treacherous terrain.

Anyway, pick up Wouk’s amazing, and very readable, novels. By the way, I should mention that these were also made into a pair of mini-movies, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. I haven’t seen these movies, and I don’t care to. I figure it’s impossible to pack a thousand pages of book into a movie, so I’ll stick with the text.

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  1. Hi Tammy,

    Thanks for letting us know about these two books. The World War II period (mid ’30s thru 1945) is one of my favorite periods of history to read about. If you enjoy history non-fiction, read “The Borrowed Years 1938-1941, America on the Way to War” by Richard M. Ketchum. I just finished it and loved it.

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