Wouk's accounting of World War II lives after him

This post was first published in The Wilson Times May 25, 2019.

Herman Wouk died last week just days from his 104^th birthday. That’s exceptional, but what is extraordinary is the fact he was working on another novel when he died in his sleep.

Still working at his craft at 103! I was amazed to find out from a news article a few years ago that he was still writing well into his 90s. Writing fiction is not a physically demanding occupation, but it is a challenging, difficult and exhausting calling, especially to be writing with Wouk’s attention to detail and development of credible, memorable characters. A fiction author juggles multiple characters, avalanches of emotions, wholly invented scenes, and, often, a background of historical events. It’s a real challenge for even a youthful brain to keep all these matters straight. Imagine what it would be like for someone in his 90s.

It was Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of World War II, “The Caine Mutiny,” that first intrigued me. Wouk took his experience as a junior officer on a minor ship in the Pacific theater and turned it into a thrilling, intriguing novel examining personalities and relationships. Its naval setting had a special appeal to me as a former Coast Guard officer. From the Caine, I went on to “Winds of War” (1971) and “War and Remembrance” (1978).

Those two novels, which together comprise nearly 2,000 pages filled with historical and fictional characters, follow the adventures, difficulties and tragedies of the Henry family. At the beginning of the first novel, “Pug” Henry is a Navy commander assigned to a desk job in Washington. By the end of the second novel, Henry has earned the rank of admiral, has been involved in every theater of World War II, from London to the South Pacific, and has met Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. That would seem impossible in the hands of many authors, but Wouk’s narration dissolves doubts.

My illustration of how captivating a good book can be goes like this: My last act before leaving for a new job in a new city was to return the Danville library’s copy of “War and Remembrance.” One of my first acts of my first day in Wilson, our new home, was to go to the Wilson library, get a library card, check out “War and Remembrance,” then find the page where I had left off days before.

For a number of years, I have owned my own hardcover copies of the two novels, and I reread them not long ago. They hold up well; I was captivated all over again. Just as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” has been called the best history of the Napoleonic Wars, I think Wouk’s two novels give readers the most comprehensive report of what World War II was like for Americans. His up-close account of the Battle of Midway, perhaps the key battle of the Pacific war, is awesome and inspiring.

Wouk steps aside from his novel and lists on three pages the names of the pilots and gunners in each squadron from the three American aircraft carriers involved in the battle. From the Yorktown, he lists 21 killed and three survivors. From the Enterprise, 18 killed and 10 survivors. From the Hornet, 29 killed and one survivor. Each name is accompanied by the flyer’s hometown, showing how widespread was the cost of the war in American lives. In only a few minutes of combat on June 4, 1942, they stopped Japan’s plan to rule the entire Pacific.

Anyone who prefers fiction over non-fiction and seldom reads histories, will find Wouk’s account of World War II too scintillating to put down while also providing intriguing details about the war and the people who fought it. Wouk makes FDR come alive with his expressive, eternal optimism and his cheerful friendliness. In my reading of biographies and histories of the fictionalized characters, it appears that Wouk has fairly captured their roles and personalities in these novels.

One subplot in both novels is the Holocaust. The girlfriend, then wife of one of the Henry boys spends hundreds of pages looking for a way to escape Nazi Germany’s “final solution.” Through her eyes, the reader sees the cruelty and the happenstance of the Nazis’ mass murder machine.

To make history close and intimate, to honor the courageous airmen of Midway, to show Nazi cruelty as repulsive and random as it was takes an extraordinary writer. Herman Wouk has captured the facts of World War II and shown them to readers better than any author I can think of, better than Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead”), Joseph Heller (“Catch 22”) or Kurt Vonnegut (“Slaughterhouse Five”).

An obituary I read said that perhaps the most amazing thing about Wouk’s literary record is that at the time of his death, all of his books were still in print. An Amazon search listed 17 books by Wouk, including less known novels such as “Marjorie Morningstar,” “Youngblood Hawke,” “A Hole in Texas,”and “Beneath a Scarlett Sky” as well as two theological books about his Jewish faith.

Maybe the next Wouk book I should read is “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-year-old Author.” Something more to aspire to.