To be sure, it is not a simple answer, and perhaps not a complete one, but the causes were many, diverse, and far from obvious. These two books finally gave me an answer.
How was it possible? How could the leadership of Germany ever have conceived such a plan, much less implemented it? How could the citizens of Germany have permitted it? And how, finally, could the Jews have submitted to it? I have struggled with these questions for years. Six million people! It staggers the imagination. If we were to take all the fans who crowd into Fenway over the course of two seasons – 37,000 men, women, and children for 81 games a year, for two years – and murder them all, we would have killed approximately as many people as the number of Jews who died under the oppression of Nazi Germany. The stadium is sold out for every game the Red Sox play there. Can anyone really grasp how many people that is? Consider this: the Boston Red Sox play their home games at Fenway Park, which seats about 37,000. The exact number is impossible to know with certainty, but six million is a reasonable estimate. Six million is the most commonly accepted figure for the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War II. I have to digress for a minute to talk about that number. The primary reason that I picked up The Winds of War in the first place was that I was hoping to find the answer to a question that has troubled me for years: How could the political and military leaders of one of the most culturally advanced and educated people in Europe have systematically slaughtered six million people in what we know today as The Holocaust? It is a story of extraordinary scope, and while some aspects of the war are described in greater detail than others, the result is a picture of this immense conflict that feels complete. Through their experiences, Wouk undertakes to tell nothing less than the entire story of World War II – in both Europe and the Pacific – from beginning to end, as well as the Holocaust that laid waste to European Jewry. Throughout this story, Wouk focuses on the Henry family: career naval officer Victor “Pug” Henry, his wife Rhoda, and their three children: sons Warren and Byron – together with Byron’s wife Natalie and her uncle, Aaron Jastrow – and their daughter Madeline.
The two books tell one story, published in two volumes for no reason other than its length. You will miss too much of value if you do. Although, as Wouk (pronounced “woke”) writes in his foreword to the second volume, “ War and Remembrance is a story in itself, and can be read without the prologue,” it would be a serious mistake to skip The Winds of War.
Together, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978) make up Herman Wouk’s epic two-volume novel of World War II.
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