Twenty years after the publication of The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk returns to the sweeping epic of World War II, with a novel grander in scope and more profound and stirring in theme than anything he has ever written.
The Winds of War has the planet itself for a stage, and the adventures of a dozen characters for its central action. Thrown together in the vortex of war are the Henrys, an American naval family; Natalie Jastrow, an American Jewish girl living in Europe with her uncle, a famous expatriate author; and Alistair Tudsbury, a British war correspondent, and his WAAF daughter, Pamela. Around these main figures, and the people close to them, swirl scores of sharply defined minor players in a vast ever-mounting tide of human spectacle and drama.
Framed in this multi-paneled tale of voyages, battles, encounters, loves, and disasters—and in the sharply controversial commentary of a German general, giving the view from the other side—The Winds of War encompasses the world conflict from the ominous rumblings of Hitler's Germany in 1939 to the end of 1941 and America's plunge into the war. Vivid portraits of famous men—Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin among them—add an extra dimension of reality.
The Winds of War produces in the reader an intimate feeling of participation, an eyewitness's tingling consciousness of living through great and terrible days, an overpowering sense that "this is how it was." In Herman Wouk's already distinguished career, this novel is a crowning work.
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