Winds of War: Is it relevant to today?

Several months ago I watched an interview with Jon Meacham conducted by Shilo Brooks. Brooks asked Meacham to recommend what he felt was the finest book on a historical period. Meacham chose Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Remembrance as that selection. Although we are talking here about two books, both at or more than a thousand pages, they do constitute a single story of World War Two. According to Meacham, it is so carefully researched and written that historians actually use it as source material.

I had read the two books sometime back in the 1970s when they were published originally. I loved them at the time, and felt that Wouk was certainly among the finest of American authors. I had since read several of his other books, and loved all of them as well. However, at the mention of Winds of War/War and Remembrance and what Meacham felt were its strongest points, I concluded that I had not really grasped them as well in my late twenties as I might with the benefit of further education. Over the intervening years I have read extensively into WW2, the Holocaust, and biographies of many of the leading actors of the period, including Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The Holocaust literature also made up a large portion of my reading of that period. I felt that given how much more I knew now as opposed to what I knew back then, it was likely that I would both enjoy and learn much more from rereading Wouk’s magnum opus.

I set out on that mission, and I am currently only a short distance from finishing the second volume. In it Wouk spends a good deal of his time writing about the Holocaust and using two of his lead characters as witnesses to the camps so that we can see and feel what it was really like. Unlike many of the autobiographical studies I have read by survivors, this creates a sense of immediacy and terror that an actual firsthand account cannot. Wouk’s characters don’t know — nor does the reader — the outcome of their particular situation. These two characters are stuck in German hands for four years, being moved or moving from one situation of captivity to another, each more restrictive and threatening as they await rescue by elements of the United States Department of State. They are Jews, and they are also American citizens caught staying too long in what became Axis territory.

D. H. Lawrence wrote somewhere that everyone is a prism. We show a different face to each person we meet. Wouk creates his characters very much in that vein. Through the novels we see his characters from the perspectives of numerous other characters as well as the author’s own. They are all multi-dimensional. They are all very real individuals. Multiple storylines are running simultaneously, each character living out his/her pathway, be that of a naval officer, wife, son, daughter, all part of the core family about whom the novel is built, or the ancillary characters who interface with that family. The richness of the story, its depth and adherence to the world-changing events of that period, make Manichaeans' judgments about the choices of major leaders and individual characters far more complex while simultaneously making the situation of the two Jews caught in the web of the Final Solution far more emotionally compelling.

I do not yet know how all of this will be resolved in the end. I know that, obviously, we won the war, that Germany and Japan were both defeated. Many Jews survived. The original goal of exterminating 11 million European Jews fell far short of its goal, and of the fortunate who survived, many ultimately made it to Palestine and recreated the Jewish state of Israel. It is easy to take comfort when thinking of the many, but Wouk won’t let you do that. The many are made up of individuals, individuals like Natalie Jastrow and her uncle Aaron, two American Jews with whom we have become very familiar, and through them many whom they have come to know during their sojourn through Nazi captivity, some of them already shipped east to the death camps.

Natalie is married to Byron Henry, the son of the lead character, Victor “Pug” Henry, a captain in the United States Navy and an occasional adjunct to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, through whom he comes in contact with Churchill and Stalin, as well as important historical figures in the Roosevelt administration. Aaron Jastrow is a successful American author of Polish Jewish roots. Byron Henry is a submariner serving in the Pacific while his wife and young son are caught in German hands. The web of complex relationships gives meaning and importance to the lives of all of these characters.

Having said all of that, I have to bring up something more personal. Reading this book at a time when the upwelling of antisemitism worldwide, but particularly in this country, makes it all particularly poignant. I am not unfamiliar with antisemitism. My father was what during the Inquisition was called a Converso, a Jew who converted to Christianity. My mother was raised a Catholic. My brothers and I were raised as Christians, but we lived in a community that was in the 1940s and 1950s distinctly hostile to Jews or anyone perceived to be Jewish. So we were, and so my awareness of the oft-considered oldest prejudice was pretty acute. I experienced it throughout my childhood in relatively mild form, but enough to know very clearly that it existed. I heard casual snide comments made in reference to Jews by people who did not know my family history. It was a sort of background radiation that many failed to notice, but to someone sensitive to it was ever present.

In the 1960s it seemed to recede. I heard fewer and fewer references. Although I did know of several situations where Jews were denied membership in clubs and other organizations, even that was pretty much gone by the mid 1970s. There were bigger fish to fry by then. There was the desegregation of schools and greater and greater integration of blacks and other minorities into everyday life. There was affirmative action. These ultimately led to the coming out of gays and lesbians, and most recently what we now think of as alphabet people. I don't mean this term to be derogatory. It is simply a way of dealing with the continual introduction of new letters to the list.

In all of this social turmoil, the Jews seemed to have disappeared. Many of my Jewish friends and acquaintances have nearly forgotten history, begun to think that the United States was as much a haven for Jews as Israel. For me, it was far too difficult to forget the things I heard said casually in conversation which betrayed, if not a hatred, at least an intolerance — a kind of aversion to their presence. The old cliches still slipped out occasionally. Other than in black ghettos in which I worked, it was rare to hear antisemitic remarks made openly.

Then came October 7th, 2023.

It was a sort of Kristallnacht, a sudden flowering of a weed we had long thought was dead. For the Jews of Germany who had had nearly a hundred years of tolerance in Europe, the sudden pogrom of 1938 was likely parallel in some ways with the events that took place in cities and, especially on college campuses, in the United States immediately in the wake of the Hamas attack over the border into peaceful towns and particularly into the Nova Music Festival. The news of more than 1,200 dead Israelis and hundreds taken back into Gaza not only failed to elicit sympathy and support but was twisted into a justification for releasing all of that dammed up hatred that had long been suppressed.

We are now in 2026, and things have not gotten any better. An extremely well-financed movement, which very likely was begun well before 10/7/23, was put into motion — and for many Jews things are beginning to look a lot like 1938 Berlin. What follows is uncertain, but for those complacent German Jews of that period it wasn’t all that long before they found out.

The vilification of the Jews by the Nazis is not that different from the current attempt to make the Jews once more the scapegoat for everything that is going wrong: high oil prices, war with Iran, the absurd change of genocide in Gaza, and any other situation which is seen as disfavoring. It is far too alarming to consider where all of this is heading. After all, even if we deem apocryphal the famous quote, that those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it, it is hard to deny that it is in fact true. If you don’t have a perspective on the past, you have no way of knowing how particular trends tend to end up.

It is far too easy to excuse what has happened since October 7th as a passing phase. I am sure a lot of Jews in Europe did in the 1930s. It wasn’t — and Wouk’s description is a pretty painless way to gain historical perspective. It is beautifully written. A wonderfully easy read that holds your attention and doesn’t want to be put down. At the same time it is both an accurate account of what happened and a pretty good predictor of what can happen again. Keep in mind that the political party that, for many, many years was seen as the home of the Jews is now openly antisemitic. Its current most powerful leader, Chuck Schumer, is a Jew who seems unwilling to go against the tide of his party. We can see similar characters in Wouk’s book, and it was written somewhere around 50 years ago.

I hope I am wrong. I hope that history neither repeats itself nor rhymes. I am not sanguine. The presence of such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, both formerly aligned with the conservative movement, now something very different, is very disconcerting. The old horseshoe concept of extremes of both sides bending towards a middle where their common interest meet is a bit scary. With the apparent majority of Democrats seemingly moving toward that theoretical joining point, we are talking now of potentially half the country becoming radicalized. How many Germans were members of the Nazi party? I think you get the gist of what I am saying.

Wouk is well worth the read. I recommend his work highly.