Books: Multitudes, Multitudes!

THE WINDS OF WAR by Herman Wouk. 885 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

Somewhere between the perspectives of history and the warmth of personal recollection, the American experience of World War II lingers on in a peculiar compartment of the mind. For most people under 30, that war may already be one with Bull Run and Thermopylae. But anyone 40 or above is likely to remember it—whether in horror or in heroism—as the shaping experience of a lifetime. Despite ambiguities and reservations laid down by the revisionists, it was, after all, a struggle in which it was still easy to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys—and the good guys won.

The torrent of words raised in celebration or regret has necessarily dealt in fragments. The scope of the war, the vast numbers of lives involved, make any whole accounting of it impossible. In some ways, the best hope for a unified dramatic impression lies in fiction. Yet American war novels so far have ranged from broad-gauged pop, with legions of far-flung participants (Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, 1948), to hysterically myopic, if sometimes heartbreakingly funny indictments of war as madness (Catch-22, 1961). In between, slogging platoons and companies (led by Sergeants Mailer and Jones) glumly pressed military microcosms into the service of an important but dreary message: combat is sheer hell.

Literary Logistics. Now comes Herman Wouk with serious intentions, a book more or less the size of War and Peace, and an opening dedication to his two sons marked with the single Hebrew word zachor (remember). Cynics might have been forgiven for thinking that with The Caine Mutiny Wouk had already written his World War II novel and moved on more or less permanently to such subjects as the plight of the Jewish princess defending her virtue (Marjorie Morningstar), or creeping decadence in the Caribbean (Don't Stop the Carnival). Not so. A thoughtful man, an Orthodox Jew and a methodical, ambitious writer, Wouk has just poured some seven years of his life into The Winds of War and its yet to be completed sequel. His aim: nothing less than to do for the middle-class American vision of World War II pretty much what Tolstoy did for the Battle of Borodino.

The literary logistics involved are, to put it mildly, colossal. Winds begins in the Washington of 1939, in the mind of Commander "Pug" Henry, an upright WASP of the old school who is about to be posted to Berlin as the new U.S. naval attaché. The book ends a few days after Pearl Harbor. By that time Henry has served Franklin Roosevelt as a special observer in Germany, Britain and Russia, acquired a pregnant Jewish daughter-in-law who is still trying to escape from Nazi Europe, refused to give his foolish, flighty wife a divorce, and seen his first battleship command, the U.S.S. California, blasted by Japanese torpedoes before he can even go aboard her.