The Winds of War

pocket paperback, 1047, wraps, covers creased and small edge tears, text somewhat darkened, top corner front flyleaf cut off. A novel about an American naval family caught up in World War II. Herman Wouk (May 27, 1915 - May 17, 2019) was an American author best known for historical fiction such as The Caine Mutiny (1951) which won the Pulitzer Prize. His other major works include The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, historical novels about World War II, and nonfiction such as This Is My God, an explanation of Judaism from a Modern Orthodox perspective, written for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. His books have been translated into 27 languages. The Washington Post called Wouk, who cherished his privacy, "the reclusive dean of American historical novelists". Historians, novelists, publishers, and critics who gathered at the Library of Congress in 1995 to mark Wouk's 80th birthday described him as an American Tolstoy. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Wouk joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1942 and served in the Pacific Theater during World War II, an experience he later characterized as educational: "I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans." The Caine Mutiny went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A bestseller, drawing from his wartime experiences aboard minesweepers during World War II, The Caine Mutiny was adapted into a Broadway play called The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Columbia Pictures released a film version with Humphrey Bogart portraying Lt. Commander Philip Queeg, captain of the fictional USS Caine. In the 1970s, Wouk published two monumental novels, The Winds of War (1971) and its sequel, War and Remembrance (1978). He described them, which included a devastating depiction of the Holocaust, as "the main tale I have to tell." Both were made into successful television miniseries, the first in 1983 and the second in 1988. Although they were made several years apart, both were directed by Dan Curtis and both starred Robert Mitchum as Captain Victor "Pug" Henry, the main character. The novels are historical fiction. Each has three layers: the story told from the viewpoints of Captain Henry and his circle of family and friends, a more or less straightforward historical account of the events of the war, and an analysis by a member of Adolf Hitler's military staff, the insightful fictional General Armin von Roon. Wouk devoted "thirteen years of extraordinary research and long, arduous composition" to these two novels, noted Arnold Beichman. "The seriousness with which Wouk has dealt with the war can be seen in the prodigious amount of research, reading, travel and conferring with experts, the evidence of which may be found in the uncatalogued boxes at Columbia University" that contain the author's papers. The Winds of War is Herman Wouk's second book about World War II, the first being The Caine Mutiny (1951). Published in 1971, it was followed up seven years later by War and Remembrance; originally conceived as one volume, Wouk decided to break it into two when he realized it took nearly 1000 pages just to get to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The novel features a mixture of real and fictional characters that are all connected to the extended family of Victor "Pug" Henry, a fictional middle-aged Naval Officer and confidant of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The story arc begins six months before Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939 and ends shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the United States and, by extension, the Henry family, enters the war as well. Wouk interspersed the narrative text with epistolic "excerpts" taken from a book written by one of the book's fictional characters, German general Armin von Roon, while he was in prison for war crimes. Victor Henry translates the volume in 1965 after coming across Von Roon's German version. While the texts provide the reader with a German outlook on the war, Henry occasionally inse.…