I reread both of these novels nonstop for the first time since they were published back in the 70s, and they held up remarkably well. US Navy Commander Victor “Pug “Henry is on his way to Berlin, there to take up the post of naval attaché at the US Embassy. It’s not a job he wants, as he is certain it will derail his career, but he’s incapable of not doing his best at whatever job he is handed. It is a trait that takes him into the orbit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is on the lookout for men like Pug to give him the straight scoop on what is going on that the president can’t see with his own eyes. 

Over the course of two books, seven years and 2,000 pages Pug is front and center at events in Berlin during the invasion of Poland and the roll of Hitler’s Panzers over France, present at the German blitz of London where he joins a British air crew in a night bombing of Berlin, in and out of Japan immediately prior to and then to Hawaii the day after Pearl Harbor, on the front lines of Stalingrad and Midway, and maybe the only reason he wasn’t at D-Day was because by then he was finally commanding his own ship in the Pacific. He meets Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Churchill (who gets him his night flight over Berlin and thanks a bunch for that, Winnie), among others.

There are also his three children, Warren the pilot serving on an aircraft carrier, Byron the submariner, and Madeleine first a producer at a popular radio show in New York City and then a wife at Los Alamos. Just to dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s there is Byron’s wife Natalie, a Jew stuck in Europe who ends up in the worst of all possible places; Pug’s true love Pamela who is present at the fall of Singapore vs. Pug’s wife Rhoda who personifies what war does to marriages, and Warren’s wife Janice, daughter of an isolationist congressman in Washington, D.C., which explains everything you need to know about why it took until Pearl Harbor to get us into what may have been the only absolutely necessary war in human history.

Wouk’s craft hits all five senses in describing these experiences, most painfully so. In the air over Berlin:

A mass of orange and red balls lazily left the ground and floated up directly at F for Freddie. They came faster. They burst all around, a shower of fire, a barrage of explosions. Pug felt a hard thump, heard the motor change sound, heard a fearful whistling. Icy air blasted at him. Fragments rattled all over the plane, and F for Freddie heeled over in a curving dive. The plane shrieked and horribly shuddered, diving steeply. Both pilots were shouting now, not in panic but to make themselves heard, and through the frail plexiglass bubble Henry stared at the fabric wings, waiting for them to break off, flutter away, and signal the end of his life.

The scenes from the battle of Midway, told mostly through Warren’s eyes, are almost unbearable, as is Byron living through Japanese depth charges on his submarine.

A hideous ear-splitting BOG shuddered through the whole vessel, like the blow of a sledgehammer on a giant bell. The control room tumbled in nauseating earthquake motions; glass smashed, loose objects flew, and the lights blinked scarily, all in the roaring reverberation of a thunderclap. While the planesmen managed to cling to their control wheels, the plotting party went staggering, Chief Derringer falling to his hands and knees, the others toppling against bulkheads. Byron felt such sharp stabbing pains in his ankles that he feared they were broken. An instrument box sprang off the overhead and dangled on an electric cable, emitting blue sparks and the stinking smoke of burning rubber. Confused yells echoed through the vessel…BONG! This second metallic thunderbolt blacked out the lights and flung the deck bow-upward…A miss thirty feet off could finish the Devilfish. It was just a tube of nine long narrow cylinders joined together, a habitable section of sewer pipe. Its pressure hull was less than an inch thick.

Wouk’s greatest accomplishment is writing a history of World War II from the German perspective and attributing it to the fictional German General Armin Von Roon Pug meets mostly in passing. Roon gets 20 years at Nuremberg for war crimes and so has plenty of time to write it. Interspersed throughout the narrative, it is the most frightening part of both books.

In many places Wouk reads uncomfortably prescient.

“A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time. The old crowd was still strong enough to catch him and put him in a cage to die. But there’s nobody to cage Hitler.”

A lesson for our times, surely, and that’s just the first chapter. There were plenty of people who saw it coming but the speaker of these words? He goes to the gas.

In conclusion, after Eisenhower took the press into the concentration camps, Pug writes to Byron

For a long time Pamela’s been asking me, “What’s this filthy war all about? Why did your son have to die? What have we achieved?” Now it’s clear. The political system that could perpetrate such foul deeds had to be wiped off the planet. It was damned powerful, too. The combined strength of the Russians, the British, and ourselves barely contained the thing. It could have overrun the earth. Because the Japs made league with it, we had to crush Japan too. Warren died in a right and great cause. I know that now, and I will never think otherwise.

He concludes, “Either war is finished or we are.”

An engrossing, enlightening and too often terrifying read, whether you know anything about World War II or not.

Note: I reread these two novels because I stumbled across a television series on Youtube based on them. The script faithfully follows the plot of war and novels both but the series was woefully miscast. Pug isn’t even fifty at the start of the first book and Mitchum looks and acts like he’s eighty. I’d like to see a remake.

Book Review Monday Chatter Herman Wouk The Winds of War War and Remembrance