The Winds of War

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The Winds of War is fiction, and all the characters and adventures involving the Henry family are imaginary. But the history of the war in this romance is offered as accurate; the statistics, as reliable; the words and acts of the great personages, as either historical, or derived from accounts of their words and deeds in similar situations. No work of this scope can be free of error, but readers will discern, it is hoped, an arduous effort to give a true and full picture of a great world battle.

World Empire Lost, the military treatise by “Armin von Roon,” is of course an invention from start to finish. Still, General von Roon’s book is offered as a professional German view of the other side of the hill, reliable within the limits peculiar to that self-justifying military literature.

Industrialized armed force, the curse that now presses so heavily and so ominously on us all, came to full flower in the Second World War. The effort to free ourselves of it begins with the effort to understand how it came to haunt us, and how it was that men of good will gave — and still give — their lives to it. The theme and aim of The Winds of War can be found in a few words by the French Jew, Julien Benda:

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