The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

French Jew, Julien Benda: Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind. In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.

Such is war: to the victor, the spoils; to the defeated, the costs.

“Mr. President, the quality of mercy is mightiest in the mightiest.”

The German plan for conquering Poland, Case White, provided the scenario for what ensued. They had many such plans, like Case Green, the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which they never had to use), and Case Yellow, the attack on France. Color-coded master plans for smashing other countries, far in advance of any quarrel with them, were a modern military innovation of the Germans. All advanced nations came to imitate this doctrine. The United States, for instance, by 1939 had a Plan Orange for fighting Japan, and even a Plan Red for fighting England; and it finally entered the war under Plan Rainbow Five.

The mark of the amateur in any field is to lose one’s head when the going gets hard. What marks the professional is his competence in an emergency, and almost the whole art of the soldier is to make sound judgments in the fog of war.

By the common verdict of historians, even most German ones, Hitler was a ruthless adventurer bent on conquest and plunder, while Churchill was a great defender of human liberty, dignity, and law.

“… You ask, what is our policy? I will say, it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror… I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men…”

Hegel’s World Spirit

For Hegel, the purpose or goal of history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Progress is rational in so far as it corresponds to this development. This rational development is the evolution of Geist attaining consciousness of itself, since the very nature of spirit is freedom. Hegel also refers to Geist as the ‘world spirit’, the spirit of the world as it unveils itself through human consciousness, as manifested through a society’s culture, particularly its art, religion and philosophy (Hegel calls this triad the expression of the ‘absolute Spirit’). As Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), spirit is the “ethical life of a nation.” For Hegel, then, there is rational progress in history only in so far as there is progress of the self-consciousness of the spirit of the world through human culture in terms of the consciousness of freedom. It is crucial however that Hegel does not mean by ‘freedom’ merely the unrestricted ability to do whatever we like: in the Philosophy of Right (1820) Hegel calls that type of freedom ‘negative freedom’ and says it’s an intellectually immature way to understand freedom. What Hegel means by freedom is instead closer to Immanuel Kant’s idea, in which a free subject is someone who self-consciously makes choices in accordance with universal principles and moral laws, and who does not merely pursue personal desires. Hegel claims that if the individuals of a nation merely pursue their own gratification, this will lead to the eventual collapse of the nation

Till we meet, till we meet Till we meet at Jesus’ feet Till we meet, till we meet God be with you till we meet again

mankind’s destiny now hung on flying machines. Of these there were only a few thousand on the planet. The propeller war-planes of 1940 were modestly destructive, compared to aircraft men have built since. But they could shoot each other down, and unopposed, they could set fire to cities far behind battle lines. Massive bombing of cities from the air had, for some years after the First World War, been considered war’s ultimate and unthinkable horror.

It’s strange we hear so much of the horrors of trench warfare and chemical warfare in WWI but the war in the air is glossed over.

“this idea that the Nazis are a culmination of German thought and culture. Hitler got his racism from Gobineau, a Frenchman, his Teutonic superiority from Chamberlain, an Englishman, and his Jew-baiting from Lueger, a Viennese political thug. The only German thinker you can really link straight to Hitler is Richard Wagner. He was another mad Jew-hating socialist, and Wagner’s writings are all over Mein Kampf. But Nietzsche broke with Wagner over that malignant foolishness.

“We created Hitler, more than anybody. We Americans. Mainly by not joining the League, and then by passing the insane Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, during a deep depression, knocking over Europe’s economy like a row of dominoes. After Smoot-Hawley the German banks closed right and left. The Germans were starving and rioting. Hitler promised them jobs, law and order, and revenge for the last war. And he promised to crush the Communists. The Germans swallowed his revolution to fend off a Communist one. He’s kept his promises, and he’s held the Germans in line with terror, and that’s the long and short of it. Why, there isn’t a German in a thousand who’s read those books, Briny. It’s all a thick cloud of university gas. Hitler’s a product of American isolation and British and French cowardice, not of the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche.”

‘The German revolution will not prove any milder or gentler because it was preceded by the Critique of Kant, by the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte. These doctrines served to develop revolutionary forces that only await their time to break forth. Christianity subdued the brutal warrior passion of the Germans, but it could not quench it. When the cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the frantic Berserker rage. The old stone gods will then arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries. Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.’ ” Slote made an awkward, weak gesture with a fist to represent a hammerblow, and went on: “ ‘Smile not at the dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and the other philosophers. Smile not at the fantasy of one who foresees in the region of reality the same outburst of revolution that has taken place in the region of intellect. The thought precedes the deed as the lightning the thunder. German thunder is of true German character. It is not very nimble, but rumbles along somewhat slowly. But come it will, and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world’s history, then know that at last the German thunderbolt has fallen.’ “Heine—the Jew who composed the greatest German poetry, and who fell in love with German philosophy—Heine wrote that,” Slote said in a quieter tone. “He wrote that a hundred a...

“I don’t know,” Pug remarked to Burne-Wilke, “maybe the only thing you can say for democracy is that all other forms of government are even worse.”

The President said with almost boyish gratification, “Oh, a politician has to borrow the virtues of the elephant, Pug. The memory, the thick hide, and of course that long inquisitive nose! Ha ha ha!”

“If is the longest two-letter word in the language.”

“Well, Lindy’s the type of the new man, isn’t he? Flying an ocean by himself in a single-motor plane! He pointed the way to much that’s happened since.” “He’s not a liar and murderer.” “Only the bosses need be, Henry. The rest, including the scientific and mechanical geniuses like Lindy, and the wheelhorses like me, merely have to obey. That’s obviously what’s been happening in Germany.”

Nanking in ’37? We were so steamed up about their sinking the Panay, we hardly paid attention. Why, they ran amuck. They raped twenty thousand Chinese women, so help me, and butchered most of ’em afterward. I mean butchered—just that. Women’s thighs, heads, and tits, for God’s sake, were strewn in the streets! This is the truth, Pug. And they tied Chinamen together by the hundreds and mowed ’em down with machine guns. They hunted kids in the street and shot ’em like rabbits. They murdered maybe two hundred thousand civilians in a few days.

“When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface,”