I was not a fan of "Winds" at the time. I expected the usual slam bang war movie and I got something quite different. So I was not one of the 80 million. But I came across the book a few months ago for the right price (free) and found I quite liked it. But this time around I was prepared to accept it on its own terms. And for what it was instead of what I thought it was supposed to be it was quite good.
It was based on the 1971 book of the same name by Herman Wouk. He was intimately involved in the production of the TV series so it was faithful to the book. The book and the miniseries were one part of a "two parter". The second part was called "War and Remembrance" and it too started out as a book (published in 1978) that was eventually also made into a miniseries (broadcast in 1988 using essentially the same cast as "Winds"). It too was successful but not quite as successful as "Winds". And Wouk always considered them to be a single work. He just had so much to tell that it wouldn't fit into one book. So now that I have stalled around for a while what were they given that they were not yet another war story.
Together (but I am going to focus mostly on part one) they constituted a meditation on World War II. Part one ("Winds") covered 1939 through 1941. Part two ("Remembrance") covered 1942 through 1945. In both cases they followed the fictional Henry family, the most important member of which was "Pug", the father. The basic structure was a "family drama" soap opera with the war as the background. And Pug or a member of his extended family just happened to end up present at many of the critical events of the War. So we got to see the War through their eyes as they observed what was going on around them.
And, although the structure was a soap opera the soap aspects were not the most important thing going on. There was enough family drama to allow us to get to know and like the various family members. And Wouk did this aspect to the books well enough that it captured and maintained our attention. And the fighting and dying that constitute the bulk of the typical war movie were also not the main point. The main point was to understanding the thinking of the various groups of players involved in the War. If you know what and how people think you can understand why they did what they did. That was Wouk's main objective with the books and he did it very well. This sort of thing is harder to pull off in a miniseries than in a book. So it doesn't come through as strongly in the miniseries but it does come through there too.
Wouk did this very well and I thought that was the main point and the principal benefit of the exercise. One or more of the extended Henry family would interact with various characters. Various speeches or writings or musings were incorporated naturally into the action. This allowed a representative of each of the various groups to say what was on their mind. This "data dump", as we now call it, is very hard to pull off without boring the reader or viewer. Wouk does a great job.
To give you an idea how hard this is to do compare how the same problem is handled in the "Game of Thrones" TV show. They use a technique fans have dubbed "sexposition". Beautiful people are engaged in a variety of sex acts while someone is giving a long speech explaining something the audience needs to understand. The sex keeps the viewer engaged while they are learning what they need to know. Wouk did not have access to that particular trick. And that makes his achievement all the more impressive. So what were the various groups thinking?
Wouk focuses primarily on Europe so Japan gets short shrift. But we do get a brief look inside the minds of the Japanese. We get a much better look inside the minds of the US, the British, the Germans, and the Russians. Let me start with a few background remarks on the Russians.
The Russians were a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". For a number of reasons the US didn't like the Russians or, if you prefer, the Communists, or technically the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), before the war. And the relationship went south quickly after the war. But the War was a close run thing particularly in the early going. So if the Russians could be enticed to fight on our side it made it easier (and some would say possible) to defeat the Germans. And there is a simple reason the Germans were our enemy. They declared War on us.
The Germans, Japanese, and Italians were allied as the "Axis Powers". The Germans declared War on us because we were at War with the Japanese as a result of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese were their ally The Italians also declared war then later changed their minds. (It's complicated. Read up on World War II history if you want the details.) Getting back to the Russians, they were at War with the Germans when we entered the War.
And the fighting on the "Eastern Front" between the Germans and the Russians was by far the fiercest of the War. So it was a simple tactical calculation to connect up with the Russians during the War then do what we needed to to keep them in the fight. They were suffering horrific losses but also inflicting horrific losses on the Germans. Most people know little about the Eastern Front and Wouk does a great job of covering it. The greatest tank battle of all time by far happened on the Eastern Front. Battles resulting in hundreds of thousands of soldiers being taken prisoner by the winning side happened not once, not twice, but several times on the Eastern Front.
The fighting on the Eastern Front was as viscous or more viscous than at say Guadalcanal, or Iwo Jima, or anywhere else on any of the other fronts. And the numbers of soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front was also far greater than elsewhere. But after the War is when the books come out. And by that time the Russians were back to being our enemy. And on top of that the Russians were very secretive. So the focus stayed elsewhere and anyone who isn't a history buff typically knows little about what went on there.
So what were the Russians thinking? By not very credible contrivances Wouk gets Pug into Moscow where he meats Stalin a number of times and manages to wangle a trip out to the front where he can talk to Russian soldiers and see for himself what's going on. And there is a clear story. The Russians had an inferiority complex while simultaneously being full of pride. This seeming contradiction is actually quite common and not at all confined to the Russians.
But in particular the Russians had been invaded by a western power when Napoleon invaded in the early 1800s and when the Germans invaded in World War II. In the middle, World War I was an embarrassment for the Russians. And they got effectively invaded shortly after the end of World War I. The west strongly supported an effort to roll back the Russian Revolution just after World War I. So the Russians had good and sound reasons for having little or no trust for anyone in the west.
So they did the "Poland" deal (see below for more details) with Hitler in the run up to the War. Then they were surprised when Hitler reneged and invaded them. Once the War was on it was on. But the cost to Russia was horrific and it frequently crossed Stalin's mind that he might also get back stabbed at some point by the British and the US. So he was thin skinned and always on guard. Roosevelt countered by giving the Russians vast quantities of every kind of supply through "Lend Lease" and publicly talking them up. This was followed on by the US State Department initiatives on Roosevelt's specific orders.
But that didn't stop various Republicans from attacking many State Department officials after the War for being "soft on Communism". Wouk does a great job of showing how and why all this played out as the War progressed. And he shows how these actions were the right thing to do at the time and actually had nothing to do with any love for or support of Communism. Anyone who was knowledgeable about military or diplomatic issues of the period would know all this. But many people who knew better ignored all this because they could gain political advantage by doing so. On to Germany.
The conventional wisdom is that Nazi Germany was somehow special. This resulted in the Germans being accused of doing things that "are just not done by civilized people". But are the Germans, and especially the Germans of this period, really different from people like the French, British, or especially Americans? Wouk spends a lot of time on this. Here are some quotations from the books:
How come he is their leader? Haven't they read his book [Mein Kampf]? How come they don't put him in a padded cell?Or:
This able and resolute homicidal maniac used modern Germany as his murder instrument, directly caused between twenty-five and thirty-five million human deaths. . . Had the German people shut this strange individual away in an insane asylum, instead of setting him up as their adored leader and throwing their full strength behind him for twelve years, these deaths and this waste would not have occurred.Or:
On the historical record Adolf Hitler was certainly the worst liar, double crosser, destroyer, and mass murderer in the world's annals.Or:
Why the Germans committed themselves to him remains a historical puzzle. They knew what they were getting. He had spelled it all out in Mein Kampf. He and his National Socialist cohorts were from the street gang of recognizable and very dangerous thugs. But the Germans by and large adored and believed in these monsters right up to the rude Stalingrad [a giant German defeat on the Eastern Front] awakening, and even long afterward.This represents the conventional wisdom. The Germans should have recognized what Hitler was from the beginning and rejected him. Or they should have figured out that they had made a terrible mistake and rectified it well before the end of the War. But is the conventional wisdom true? I don't think so.
The historian Barbara Tuchman goes into the political and cultural climate that preceded World War I in her book "The Proud Tower". She covers the start of World War I and the first few weeks of the fighting in her book "The Guns of August". Her conclusion (and that of pretty much anybody else who has seriously studied the situation) was that Germany did nothing unusual nor particularly wrong in the run up to World War I. Nor did Germany do anything particularly wrong in how she behaved during the War.
But Germany lost. And the leading British (Lloyd George) and French (Clemenceau) politicians had made promises to their respective publics before and during the war. And in each case the promise boiled down to "they will pay". So when the Treaty of Versailles, the document that sealed the peace after the War, was drawn up it imposed massive "reparation" payments by Germany to France and Britain.
Germany ended up with a democratic political system after the War. But there was no way that Germany could meet her Versailles obligations. So she didn't. But the effort to do what she could ravaged the German economy. And this was during the "Roaring Twenties" when most economies were doing very well. The Great Depression just made thing worse. The British and French now needed the reparation money even more than before. And the Germans were in an even worse position to deliver. This resulted in a literally intolerable situation in Germany.
Hitler promised that if he was put into power he would repudiate Versailles and he did. He gambled correctly that neither Britain nor France would be in a position to do anything meaningful about this. This repudiation immediately took pressure off the German economy. So business interests were happy because business conditions immediately improved. And this in turn led to hiring, which in turn led to an improvement pretty much across the board for Germans at all economic levels. Hitler was widely seen within Germany as having delivered on his promises.
Hitler then moved on to phase two. Versailles mandated that Germany be limited to having a small military. With the treaty repudiated Hitler was able to build up the military, which he did. This made the military and their supporters like what we now call the defense industries very happy. It also resulted in still more economic activity, which was good for almost everybody else Again, Hitler was delivering on a promise.
And that led him to move on to phase three, military adventures. He started slowly by overtly intervening militarily in the Spanish Civil War. He gambled that the British and French would again be too weak and distracted to take effective action. And he won his gamble again.
The loss of World War I and the subsequent penalties assessed against Germany had caused Germany to lose a tremendous amount of stature on the world stage. The Spanish Civil War got them a small amount back. And Hitler's gamble had worked so well there that he saw no reason not to engage in more risky military adventures. So he did and they worked. His calculation that there would be no effective response turned out to continue to be true. And each adventure added to Germany's stature on world stage. Germans now felt free to feel good about themselves and their country.
I am not going to go through all these adventures. But there were a number of them. They kept getting bigger and bigger but Hitler kept pulling them off. And each adventure was often preceded by many predictions by many of Hitler's opponents that "it may have worked last time but you'll never get away with it this time".
This string continued all the way until 1939. Hitler did a deal with Stalin to split Poland in half with the western part going to Germany and the eastern part going to Russia. This was a key to success. With Russia taken care of it meant that Germany could embark on yet another military adventure (invading Poland) confident that it would succeed and suffered little or no loss. This victory, like the ones that preceded it, were cheap in terms of German blood and treasure. And by this time Hitler had proved his detractors wrong over and over.
But Poland was the last straw for Britain and France. They both declared War on Germany. So Hitler is finally in trouble, right? No! He launched a "blitzkrieg" offensive into France that was wildly successful. France folded up like a piece of prop furniture in a movie fight scene and the Brits were forced to live through the humiliating events portrayed in the recent movie "Dunkirk".
So where are we at this point? The German public for the most part has every reason to be quite happy. The economy is humming along. Hitler has delivered victory after victory at little or no cost. Germany now controls most of Europe and can legitimately claim to be what we would now call a superpower. And this has all happened in less than ten years. What's not to like?
Well, if you are a Jew there is a lot not to like. The worst of the abuses of Jews is yet to come but things are already bad enough. They have been blamed for everything short of dandruff and the common cold, all unfairly and with no serious justification for the accusations provided. They have been rounded up and forced into ghettos and the bulk of their possessions have been stolen. Civil liberties for everyone, not just the Jews, are non-existent. So opposition political parties, newspapers, etc. no longer exist and a goodly number of political prisoners have been locked up on trumped up charges. And the Nazi controlled media is cranking out "feel good" news and suppressing the depressing kind so why not just go along?
If you follow orders (relatively easy for most people to do) and don't make waves it's all good. Most, say 90%, of Germans have good reason to believe that things are much better than they used to be and, given Hitler's track record, that this is likely to continue into the future. Hitler has made all these seemingly outrageous promises. The people who are supposed to be experts have been saying he will fail. But he has consistently succeeded instead. So why should any of that change now? And what if a few Jews got roughed up and treated badly? And what if a few rabble rousers had mysteriously disappeared or ended up in jail? They were a bad element that we "good Germans" never liked or trusted anyhow. "Everybody I know is doing just fine."
So the behavior of the German people is all too understandable. And it doesn't seem abhorrent to me. People are good at being selectively blind when it is to their advantage. By being selectively blind the German people did very well for themselves until it was too late to easily extricate themselves.
The Germans then invaded Russia and initially it looked like it would be yet another quick and easy victory. One contributing factor was that Stalin had systematically purged most of the senior members of the Russian military in the '30s. This meant that when the invasion finally happened much of the best talent was dead and those that survived tended to run scared. This is not a good recipe for producing generals who will know how to fight back effectively..
There is a theory that Stalin cynically did the Poland deal with Germany to give himself time to build Russia up so that it could better deal with a German invasion. Wouk uses the eyes and ears of his various characters to show that if that was the plan it was implemented very badly. Russia was only slightly better prepared to deal with Germany when they actually invaded than they had been when he signed the treaty. So why did Russia prevail in the end?
Wouk does an excellent job of walking us through this. First of all, Russia is a very large country measured either by land mass or by population. It is far larger than Germany, even a Germany swollen by all its conquered territories. Second, Stalin changed his behavior immediately after the invasion. He immediately halted the purges and he turned out to be a good talent spotter. He quickly identified military people like General Zhukov and supported them.
He also wrapped himself in the Russian flag even though he was actually from Georgia. (Similarly, Hitler was Austrian, not German.) The Russians call World War II "The Great Patriotic War" and they do because Stalin worked the "motherland" angle for all it was worth. And finally, the US did flood vast amounts of equipment and supplies into Russia. This made up for the poor condition of Russian industry and meant that in the later stages of the War the Russian armies were well supplied and equipped.
The Russian claim "We did it all by ourselves without any outside help" is just as hollow as others who make the same claim. But the combination of all these factors resulted in a Russian victory. And it is a victory that was won at horrific cost. The Germans applied a "scorched earth" policy to western Russia the most populous and productive part of the country. The cost to Russia in blood and treasure was only exceeded by Germany. And remember, Russia was on the winning side.
After the early easy successes on the Eastern Front things went wrong, badly wrong, for the Germans. Literally millions of German soldiers were lost on the Eastern Front. Fantastic amounts of equipment was destroyed. And in the later stages of the war Germany was subjected to horrific and eventually very effective bombing by the west. And armies on both the Eastern and Western fronts wrecked havoc on Germany when the fighting moved onto German soil late in the War. And it was during the late stages of the War when Germany should have had other more important things on her mind that substantial resources were diverted from the War effort and devoted to the mass extermination of Jews.
And beyond that there was the whole slave labor thing. Remember, millions of Russian soldiers were captured in the early years on the Eastern Front. The Germans excelled in short sighted thinking, especially late in the War. Long term thinking tells you that you want to keep your work force in good shape through all of their working years so that they can work at peak efficiency the whole time. But if you engage in short term thinking it is better to literally work people to death. You can get more productivity out of them for perhaps a year that way. And that's what they did with Russian prisoners of war. And they deliberately removed Jews from the work force resulting in absolutely no production out of what had been a highly productive group.
They worked large segments of the populations of the countries they captured, particularly on the Eastern Front, literally to death. Most estimates of the number of people worked to death are greater than the number of Jews they gassed. By the end of the War Germany had very little work force left. German men were in uniform and large populations of other men had been either gassed or worked to death. If Germany had been able to maintain their territorial gains late into the War they would literally not had enough workers to man all their factories.
The above argument is an economic one. I have focused on it while seemingly ignoring the moral issues to highlight that what the Germans did was awful no matter how you look at it.
I am now going to move on to bad behavior by others. I have laid out some examples of bad behavior (a polite phrase that doesn't begin to cover the actual actions) engaged in by Hitler and Stalin. There are lots more in both cases. And Japan comes in for a lot of blame for their bad behavior. So let me go into some of it.
The biggest example is one that most in the west know little or nothing about. Japan invaded China in a naked attempt at imperialism. They wanted China's resources. This invasion started years before the 1939 "official" start to World War II. And they engaged in horrific behavior. Google "Rape of Nanking" for an example of Japanese behavior at its worst. But this was seen in the west as a fight between two groups of non-white people so it was not considered important. It was specifically not important enough to enable the political support necessary to make western intervention a possibility. So it ended up a story for which details were sketchy and even those details appeared in the back pages of only a few newspapers.
The western "rules of war" say that when you are beat you surrender and you will be treated reasonably well. This comes under the general rubric of "giving quarter". When it came to the Chinese the Japanese gave no quarter. But in their defense, they expected no quarter in return. It shocked the Americans when at places like Guadalcanal and Bataan the Japanese treated their prisoners horribly.
Since they expected no quarter Japanese soldiers tended to fight to the last man. This resulted in truly horrific events like Iwo Jima where only a few Japanese survived out of the over 30,000 present at the start of the battle. It wasn't an unwillingness of the US to take prisoners. It was an unwillingness of the Japanese to surrender even when their position became clearly hopeless. US soldiers behaved better than the Japanese with respect to this sort of thing but there was a lot of bad behavior on the US side too.
The other oft quoted example of Japanese bad behavior are the Kamikazes. Airplanes were rigged up with large bombs. Instead of trying to drop the bomb and get away Kamikaze pilots would try to fly the whole plane into an American ship. This was supposed to inflict maximum damage but it also meant the pilot had no chance to survive. And it turned out to be relatively ineffective. Very few planes were actually able to hit an American ship. This behavior was characterized as being somehow aberrant. But it is just an officially sanctioned version of falling on a grenade to save your buddies or suicidally charging a machine gun nest.
So the conventional wisdom is that our side was the civilized one and the other side were the uncivilized ones. But Wouk also includes examples of our side behaving in less than civilized ways too. The most commonly cited example of this is the bombing of Dresden Germany. Tens of thousands of "Innocent civilians" were killed by the bombing and subsequent fire storm. Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote a book called "Slaughterhouse Five" about Dresden. He was a POW there and one of the few survivors. There is also the long standing debate about using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But lost in that debate is that the death toll from the conventional bombing of Tokyo was higher.
The idea that "we're the good guys and we are 100% good and they are the bad guys and they are 100% bad" is nonsense. And it is nonsense even if applied to the Germans or the Japanese. I think a case can be made that we did more good and less bad than the other guys. But War is about winning and ultimately you do what you have to do to win. And that always involves doing a lot of bad things like killing a lot of people.
In western society we want to make a distinction between the military and civilians. It is somehow okay to kill military people but not civilians. But an argument can be made and often is that civilians bear responsibility to a greater or lesser extent and, therefore, are fair game. And inevitably civilians get killed. Sometime a lot of civilians get killed and other times only a few do. And whoever wins likes to pretend that they didn't kill anybody unnecessarily but the truth is different.
World War II happened three quarters of a century ago. But it was the "last good war" and it was fought by the "greatest generation". So there is always an interest in getting back to those days. And people want to associate their side with the good guys and their opponents with the bad guys so they do. The "greatest generation" screwed a lot of things up but we tend to skip over that. Similarly, it seems like such a good idea to try to create an association between one of the principal bad guys of the period with anybody you don't like. And in this "go negative" era that happens a lot.. So we all too frequently see an argument made that "X" (sometimes a group, other times an individual) is "just like Hitler" or "just like Stalin".
Whatever their flaws, and they were numerous and terrible, one flaw neither Hitler and Stalin had was being incompetent at their jobs. They knew how to run a country. They had both studied politics and the use of power extensively before either of them came to power. Stalin was a dedicated Communist from a early age. He had a reputation for competence when the Germans shipped him to Russia before the end of World War I. And he succeeded in doing what the Germans wanted him to do, namely take Russia out of the War. He became the dictator of Russia more than a decade later. By the time World War II started he had spent a decade running the country.
Hitler's depth of experience was not quite as extensive. He didn't become politically active until after the end of World War I. But he was a leading influence within the Nazi party almost from the start. And he famously wrote Mein Kampf while in jail for Nazi related political activities during this period. So he had roughly a decade of political experience when he became chancellor of Germany in 1933.
In both cases Stalin and Hitler were part of well organized and well established political movements. So they had a network of like minded people that they knew and could surround themselves with. That meant they had a large pool of people they were used to working with that they could put in charge of all the things necessary to run the government of a powerful country. Also, in both cases they were authoritarian leaders. They were able to use extralegal methods to refashion the political system they led. This is only somewhat true of Stalin but completely true of Hitler.
Calling someone "another Hitler" or "another Stalin" means you are associating not just the worst but also the best qualities of these people. This is a charge frequently leveled by various Republicans against President Obama. And they are correct to the extent that Obama was part of a well established political movement, the Democratic establishment. Obama leaned heavily on these people. He had a generally harmonious time in office because there was a great deal of shared values. So he shares this attribute with Hitler and Stalin.
But another part of the calculus is the whole authoritarian thing. Obama where possible tried to use legislative tools to achieve his objectives. And he was successful when he commanded Democratic majorities. When the Republicans took over he resorted to Executive Orders. But this is also typical behavior for Presidents. All Presidents of both parties use Executive Orders. Some of Obama's were challenged in court. He had some wins and some losses but that too is the norm. So his record of authoritarian behavior is conspicuous by its absence.
Then there's the whole "remaking the system" thing. In terms of the machinery of politics and government power Obama changed nothing. There have, however, been a number of social changes that happened on his watch. But the courts, a branch of government not under his control, were the most responsible for these changes. So Obama flunks the "like Hitler/Stalin" test.
Going the other way the same charge has been leveled against President Trump. Here too I believe it fails but for entirely different reasons. President Trump is nominally a Republican. But he does not have a close affinity with the party. This means that from a practical sense he is not imbedded in a well established political movement. So he does not have a large pool of people he trusts to draw on for appointments. Instead he has a small circle of trusted associates, a pool that seems to number in the single digits. This severely limits his ability to govern. He literally can't wield the many levers of executive power because he doesn't know enough people he trusts implicitly to man the myriad levers.
Then there's the experience factor. Both Hitler and Stalin had a great deal of experience when they attained power. Trump has none. So he is literally incapable of making a canny political move because he lacks the background and experience to know what the move would be and how to make it. Now Trump is definitely an authoritarian-wanna-be. And Republican elected officials seem ready and willing to help. But he is just too ignorant and incompetent to be successful. But he is a master propagandist. And he is deploying his propaganda skills to attempt to refashion our political system. It is an open question at this point how successful he will be.
Finally, I want to address the question of whether the Germans or the Japanese were unique in some way and, therefore, susceptible to going wrong in a way that others, particularly Americans, are not. The easiest issue to address is the whole Kamikaze thing. This was supposed to be unique to the Japanese culture and personality. But, ignoring the whole "heroic western soldier" thing I talked about above for the moment, we now have suicide bombers.
You can come up with any rule you want as to who they are and where they come from but there will always be exceptions. It turns out you can find at least a few people in every culture who can be talked into becoming a suicide bomber. It's definitely not just a Japanese thing. And the "enhanced interrogation" techniques employed by the US, while they are supposed to differ from how the "bad people" do it, actually don't. And we drop bombs from drones on civilians. And people will keep fighting "to the last man" in lots of lots of circumstances in lots of cultures.
And while I argued above that Trump is not another Stalin/Hitler there are a lot of parallels between the attitudes and ways of thinking of Germans who supported Hitler and Americans who support Trump. Hitler's message can be paraphrased as "Make Germany Great Again". For most Germans Hitler delivered on his promise until late in the War. Trump's base is sticking with him so far in spite of the fact that he has failed so far to deliver on any of his major promises.
If Trump keeps failing to deliver for his supporters how long will that support continue? If Trump's record of failure continues, the longer they stick with him the more his supporters will be indistinguishable from Germans late in the War. And his supporters comprise a substantial portion of the US population. If he keeps failing and they stick with him anyhow it would be wrong to say that those Germans were different than a lot of modern day Americans.
