Multitudes II

By -- Mayo Mohs

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE by Herman Wouk

Little, Brown; 1,042 pages; $15

In The Caine Mutiny, the novel that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1952, Herman Wouk created a character named Tom Keefer. Lieut. Keefer was an officer on the Caine, but his preoccupation was the great war novel he was writing: Multitudes, Multitudes. Now Wouk has written a novel that would have daunted even Keefer: World War II with the original cast. The author began his story with what he calls a "prologue," The Winds of War, an 885-page novel published in 1971. In that book the action was carried on the square shoulders of a Navy career officer named Victor ("Pug") Henry, whose pre-Pearl Harbor experiences swept him through Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Churchill's Britain before the U.S. joined the war.

For a global war one needs a global family, and Pug Henry's circle of relatives, friends, lovers--and relatives of friends and lovers--expands in this book to meet the need. Pug's immediate family is Navy all the weigh: at the Battle of Midway, Victor Henry commands the cruiser Northampton, while his son Warren is a dive-bomber pilot who helps to wound one of the Japanese carriers in that decisive victory at sea. Son Byron is in submarines. Daughter Madeline is in wartime show business, but she takes up with a young officer who just happens to be working on a Navy effort to enrich uranium. Pug's wife Rhoda, pining at home in Washington, starts her own chain reaction with an Army colonel.

Pug's romance with Pamela Tudsbury, daughter of a British radio correspondent, began in Moscow in Winds of War. Here it advances the action on other fronts: the losing battle to keep Singapore from the Japanese, the winning campaign to take Africa back from the Germans. For the war's most painful and harrowing catastrophe, the Nazi destruction of Europe's Jews, Wouk employs the deepening distress of Natalie Jastrow Henry, Submariner Byron's Jewish wife. With her baby and her uncle Aaron Jastrow, a famous American Jewish author, Natalie is caught in Italy when the U.S. declares war. The trio's journey, a war-long struggle to escape, is dramatically paired with the agonies of Cousin Berel, a Polish Jew, in the concentration camps. The intertwining tales allow Wouk, a devout Jew, to measure the Nazi persecution.

Wouk takes the remembrance part of his title seriously, and in his self-styled "historical romance," the images of atrocity are all the more striking. His concern for history, moreover, does not end there: he clearly intends his work to be an education as well as drama. Historical characters, from Roosevelt to Admiral "Bull" Halsey to General Eisenhower's good friend Kay Summersby, are drawn with lively precision. To outline the war's broad strategies, he again employs an unusual device, an invented history called World Holocaust, written from the enemy's viewpoint by a German general and translated, after the war, by Pug Henry himself. As for the fictional characters, their private adventures take place against explicit historical back drops. The novel's involvement with the complicated struggle to build an atomic bomb includes a conversation on pioneer nuclear physics that is a masterpiece of layman's clarity. The Navy's little-remembered but terrible defeat at the Battle of Tassafaronga is described more vividly by Wouk than by the late naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

Wouk is still at his best when his feet are firmly astride a swaying deck: the battles at sea provide the novel's swiftest and most knowing passages. Yet for all the exhilaration his warriors display in combat, Wouk knows the bitter price of valor. Here and there he lectures too self-consciously. But even as a preacher the author can be effective. Through the voice of Pug, Wouk writes that the world's destiny rests on a pathetically simple hope: "Most people, even the most fanatical and boneheaded Marxists, even the craziest nationalists and revolution aries, love their children, and don't want to see them burn up." Those who lived through World War II can most fully appreciate the resonances in this uncommonly readable book. But it is clearly meant -- and recommended -- for those who did not.

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