The Winds of War

The Winds of War is Herman Wouk's second book about World War II (the first being The Caine Mutiny). Published in 1971, The Winds of War was followed up seven years later by War and Remembrance; originally conceived as one volume, Wouk decided to break it into two volumes when he realized it took nearly 1,000 pages just to get to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The book was adapted into a highly successful miniseries in 1983. In 2020, a new miniseries adaptation was announced. Overview 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 inserts notes as counterpoints to some of von Roon's statements.