War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk

First published: 1978

Type of plot: Historical chronicle

Time of work: From 1941 to 1945

Locale: Siena, Italy; Pearl Harbor; Auschwitz, Poland; Manila, the Philippines; London; Singapore; Washington, D.C.; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Marseilles, France; Burma; Moscow; Leningrad; Stalingrad; El Alemain, Egypt; Corsica; Baden-Baden, Germany; Prague; Imphal, India; and Teheran, Iran

Principal Characters:

• Victor (Pug) Henry, the protagonist, a naval officer and presidential envoy
• Rhoda Henry, Pug’s estranged wife
• Warren, the Henrys’ brilliant son, a naval aviator killed at Midway
• Byron, Warren’s younger brother, a submarine officer
• Madeline, the Henrys’ only daughter, who has an affair with radio personality Hugh Cleveland but settles down to marry a naval officer working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos
• Aaron Jastrow, a successful academic and famous writer trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe
• Natalie, Jastrow’s niece and Byron’s wife, who shares Jastrow’s predicament and growing understanding of the Holocaust
• Alistair Tudsbury, a popular British broadcaster and friend of Victor Henry
• Pamela Tudsbury, Alistair’s daughter, who assists her father and who falls in love with Victor Henry
• Werner Beck, a German diplomat and former student of Aaron Jastrow
• Leslie Slote, an officer in the foreign service who quits over his government’s unwillingness to help the doomed European Jews
• Armin von Roon, a German general whose memoirs of Adolf Hitler and of World War II are edited by Victor Henry

The Novel

The action of War and Remembrance follows with great fidelity the major events of World War II. The novel begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and ends with the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. All major battles on land and sea are covered. Japanese, American, and German war aims are fully explored and analyzed, including the development of the atom bomb and of the concentration camps. Domestic life in the United States during the war, the acute suffering of the Soviet people during the German invasion, and the collapse of the British Empire in the Far East all receive significant attention. As a result, the global dimensions of the war become the primary concern of the novel.

War and Remembrance is divided into seven parts that evenly distribute the emphasis that Wouk places on the private lives of his characters and on the public events in which they participate. Part 1, “Where Is Natalie?” shows the United States gearing up for war as Pearl Harbor is bombed and the British are defeated at Singapore. American submarines test their power in the Pacific while events in Europe are governed by the spread of a seemingly invincible Nazi empire. Byron Henry, with the help of others, tries to save his Jewish wife, Natalie, and her uncle, Aaron Jastrow, who are stranded in German-occupied Europe.

Part 2, “Midway,” concentrates on an exciting dramatization and analysis of the decisive American victory over the Japanese navy and air force that checked their power in the Pacific. Part 3, “Byron and Natalie,” juxtaposes the different fates of the husband and wife as the brash and utterly self-confident Byron locates his wife and son in hiding in Marseilles. Natalie, who has slowly begun to realize that her Jewishness is more important to the Nazis than her American citizenship, refuses to run the risk of escape by a railroad journey, as Byron proposes.

Part 4, “Pug and Rhoda,” follows the fortunes of the Henrys’ dissolving marriage and of the dissolution of Western civilization. Pug is deeply hurt over his wife’s infidelity and is sorely wounded by Warren’s gallant death. Reports of concentration camp atrocities are ignored or discounted as governments and their citizens attempt to maintain the fiction that humane values prevail.

Parts 5 (“Pug and Pamela”), 6 (“The Paradise Ghetto”), and 7 (“Leyte Gulf”) bring the global war and the private lives of the novel’s characters to a climax and resolution. Pug realizes that his marriage cannot be repaired even as the Nazis, clearly having lost the war, continue to murder the Jews and to fight on all fronts. The desperate Japanese attack at Leyte Gulf, the awesome power of the bomb, the gassing of Aaron Jastrow and his cremation in an Auschwitz oven, and Natalie’s harrowing survival in the camps point to the author’s conclusion: “Either war is finished or we are.”

The Characters

At the center of War and Remembrance are the characters of Victor Henry and his family. Pug, as his friends call him, is a rather old-fashioned type who respects all the traditional values of marriage and patriotism. These values are challenged, however, when he is attracted to Pamela Tudsbury, a bright woman much younger than his wife, Rhoda. In keeping with his character, rather than thinking only of his personal ambitions, he sacrifices his desire for a command in order to serve as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the Soviet Union. As several characters point out, Pug is “incredible” in his devotion to duty and to a personal moral code.

Byron is a close second to his father in demanding that friends, fellow officers, and family obey exacting moral standards. He breaks up his sister Madeline’s romance with her married boss, Hugh Cleveland; disapproves of his submarine captain’s shooting of Japanese soldiers who are the helpless survivors of a disabled ship; and is cool to his father when he correctly suspects that Pug has had an affair with Pamela.

These upright male Americans seem almost quaint in a world that is overthrowing civilized standards of behavior. Pug and Byron are clearly meant to counterpoint characters such as Aaron Jastrow, who must, to some extent, collaborate with the Nazis to save Natalie’s life. A different kind of collaborator, the German diplomat Werner Beck, shrewdly deceives his former teacher, Aaron Jastrow, into believing that he can accept German protection without becoming implicated in the very racial policies that have resulted in the detention of himself and his niece.

In addition to brief but vivid vignettes of historical figures such as President Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Admiral Raymond Spruance (the victor of Midway), several characters serve to fill out both the historical and the cultural background of the war. Alistair Tudsbury is a vivid representative of British bluster and blindness to the country’s weak position in the Far East at the outset of the war. Leslie Slote exemplifies the well-meaning but ineffective efforts of a few in the American foreign service to ascertain the truth about the concentration camps and to make it an important consideration in war strategy. Armin von Roon is Wouk’s brilliant fictional creation of a German general who expresses the racial biases, if not the fanaticism, of Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Excerpts from his memoirs, which Victor Henry translates and upon which he comments, constitute a fascinating way of critiquing American character and war plans.

Critical Context

A sequel to The Winds of War (1971), War and Remembrance has met with mixed critical response. On one hand, reviewers extol Wouk’s sure grasp of military and political history and the exciting manner in which he presents the major theaters of war, particularly Midway. The characterization of Armin von Roon, the fictional German general, has been singled out for particularly high praise, revealing as it does an extraordinary ability to get within the mind of a character who is utterly alien to American ways of thought. On the other hand, Victor Henry has been called a “prig” who is all too perfect, always in the right place at the right time, and most of the other fictional characters have been dubbed stereotypes with little depth or color.

It is true that Wouk runs the danger of stereotyping by presenting rather ordinary characters such as Pug’s wife, Rhoda. Compared to the exciting historical events that Wouk dramatizes so crisply, her affairs seem dull and prosaic. Yet she seems a valid marker of precisely those areas of American life that were largely untouched by a war that did not take place on American soil. It is easy for characters such as Rhoda to maintain their illusions, to ask “What’s WRONG with illusions?” Indeed, von Roon has this typical kind of obliviousness in mind when he speaks of Americans lacking “the European sense of the past, and writers of broad culture.”

More troubling for reviewers, however, is Wouk’s honoring of American history. Unlike Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), which explores the incipient roots of Fascism in the American mentality, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), which exposes the absurdity of war, War and Remembrance argues that the war was worth fighting, that nothing short of a global conflict could have preserved genuine American values. Wouk concedes various American faults—anti-Semitism, individual acts of atrocity, the conflicting feelings over the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, and so on—but he steadfastly maintains that “there were differences” between America and its opponents. The Nazis, after all, pursued an ideology that mandated the Holocaust—even at the expense of German armies that could have been supplied by the very trains that were diverted to transport Jews to concentration camps.

Wouk writes, in other words, as a veteran of the war who unabashedly identifies not only with the fighting men but also with the flawed political system that survived the war. While his novel is critical of several wartime decisions—especially of Roosevelt’s unwillingness to help the Jews—it is also historically accurate in demonstrating how difficult it would have been to broaden public awareness of the Holocaust.

Unlike many other American novels, War and Remembrance does not project the bitterness of the postwar world back onto the war itself. In Wouk’s view, the war was a time when civilization itself seemed to be held in the balance, when America and its allies were facing what Aaron Jastrow calls “the problem of senseless evil.” Many sound explanations of German and Japanese war aims are given in the novel, but, as Jastrow concludes in a lecture on the Book of Job to a group of Jews bound for Auschwitz, there is a “missing piece” of the universe that Job cannot understand, that human beings have not fathomed. Jastrow insists, however, that human beings—such as Job—are the answer, in the sense that only human beings can put the question of “senseless evil” to themselves. Toward the end of War and Remembrance, Jastrow’s journal and von Roon’s memoirs become more and more closely intertwined, leaving the reader with the clash of profoundly different sensibilities, political and theological antinomies that account for a world at war with itself.

Bibliography

Gerard, Philip. “The Great American War Novels.” World and I 10 (June, 1995): 54-63. Gerard notes that World War II was “the last public event that defined a generation of novelists.” In this essay, he looks at the works of many of them, including Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Although Gerard does not address War and Remembrance directly, his comments can be extended to Wouk’s other war novels.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Herman Wouk. New York: Twayne, 1994. A collection of critical essays that explores various aspects of the works of Herman Wouk. Includes an index and bibliographical references for further reading.

Shapiro, Edward S. “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity.” American Jewish History 84 (December, 1996): 333-351. Shapiro explores similarities between American identity and Jewish identity in the works of Herman Wouk, which portray the Jew as the defender of American institutions and values. Shapiro also notes that Wouk viewed the history of the American West and Israel’s struggle for independence as analogous.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, eds. Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. The entry on Wouk’s life includes major works and themes, an overview of his critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.