This special archive document includes both parts of this story, which ran on March 7 and March 14, 1997.

Part One

Man is a bubble, and all the world is a storm.

—Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying (1651)

My father owned a gorgeous porcelain tiger about half the size of a house cat. He kept it on a shelf in our family den, where for years when I was a kid it roared down at us—unappeasably furious (or so I always thought) at being trapped up there on its high perch, with no company except some painted beer mugs and a set of purple glass swizzle sticks. Then one day it got broken; I don't remember how. Probably my brother and I were having a skirmish and a shot went wild. I thought my father would be furious, but he didn't say a word. Carefully, almost reverently, he wrapped up the tiger and the shards of its shattered leg and put them away in a box in the basement.

A long time later, years after my father died, my mother and my wife found the box when they were clearing out some old family junk. My wife knows how much I like big cats and all other varieties of predators and raptors, and she painstakingly glued the tiger back together and gave it to me as a present. It's roaring at me again as I write this: it stands on a shelf in my study, surrounded by what I hope is more congenial company—grimacing wind-up monsters, maddened dinosaurs, a couple of snarling dragons with their wings outspread, and a sullen rubber shark opening wide to take a bite at passersby. The tiger seems to fit right in, but I sometimes suspect it feels shanghaied. My father hadn't got it because he was fond of tigers or because he had any interest in nature. He'd bought it in Korea, where he'd been a bomber pilot during the Korean war; his squadron had been called the Flying Tigers.

My wife hadn't known that; I barely remembered it myself. My father didn't like telling war stories. He'd accumulated fistfuls of medals over there, and he kept them stashed in an anonymous little plush case at the back of his closet, where they went unseen for decades. That was all part of the past, and he had no use for the past. He used to wave off any question I asked about the world before I was born, irritatedly dismissing it as if all of that were self-evidently too shabby and quaint to interest a modern kid like me. "It was a long time ago," he'd always tell me, which was as much as to say, "It's meaningless now."

And yet every night, whenever he'd sit down in his easy chair, he'd be confronted by the tiger glaring at him. What did he think about when he saw it? Did it remind him of the distance he'd traveled from that war, or of how incongruously bland and safe his life was now, now that he'd amassed a commercial-perfect suburban family in the depths of the American heartland? I don't know, because he wouldn't say. Whatever patina of private associations the tiger had for him is gone for good.

If my wife hadn't rescued the tiger it would have been cut loose to make its own way in the world—to languish in rummage-sale boxes and end up with new owners who'd never suspect how far it had wandered through the world to reach them. But I have the feeling my father wouldn't have minded that; he never liked other people knowing his business.

That's the common fate of mementos. They're never quite specific enough. No matter what their occasion was, they sooner or later slip free and are lost in a generic blur: a Day at the Carnival, a Triumph at the State Finals, a Summer Vacation, My First Love. It's particularly true, I think, of the mementos of soldiers, because nobody other than a soldier remembers the details of any war once it's safely over. What really happened in Korea? I don't have the slightest idea; war just isn't an experience I'm up on. I was barely young enough to miss the Vietnam draft, and I'm old enough now that the only way I could figure in a future war is as a victim. The tiger can't preserve the memory of the bombing missions my father flew. Its odd rippling surface doesn't correspond to the landscape of North Korea, terrain my father knew by heart—which had once saved his life: on one mission his plane malfunctioned, and he'd had to find his way back to his base with no instruments, no radio, and fuel fumes filling his cockpit. Nor does that frozen roar speak to the complex of murky policies that had sent my father into battle in the first place, thousands of miles from home. To me, the tiger is just a platitude—if it means anything, it's a symbol for all the violence in life I've been spared.

People my age and younger who've grown up in the American heartland can't help but take for granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of life. War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic by-product of America's capitalist military system—one more covert and dishonorable crime we commit in the third world. All my life I've heard people say "war is insanity" in tones of dramatic insight and final wisdom, and it took me a long time to realize that what they really meant was "war is an activity I don't want to understand, done by people I fear and despise."

But there've been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the perversion. The Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons: grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer's heroes would see the peaceful life of the average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.

In our own culture the people who know what war is like find it almost impossible to communicate with the children of peace. In the last election Bob Dole was defeated in large part because of World War II—what he thought it meant, and what he didn't see it meant to people of a later generation. To Dole, World War II was a teacher of positive values: courage, self-sacrifice, respect for authority, dedication to a common goal—values he thought were signally absent in the soft and cynical selfishness of Clinton's generation. But it was just that cynicism that Dole couldn't crack. Everybody knew that if those values had ever really existed in America, they were only the result of some Norman Rockwell collective delusion. We're smarter now—smart enough to see through war, anyway. We think it's a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything good.

Out of idle curiosity, I've been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war—war stories they've heard from their families, facts they've learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn't interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.

I figured people had to know the basics—World War II isn't exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. Other than the black death of the Middle Ages, it's the worst thing we know of that has ever happened to the human race. Its aftereffects surround us in countless intertwining ways: all sorts of technological commonplaces, from computers to radar to nuclear power, date back to some secret World War II military project or another; the most efficient military systems became the model for the bureaucratic structures of postwar white-collar corporations; even the current landscape of America owes its existence to the war, since the fantastic profusion of suburban development that began in the late 1940s was essentially underwritten by the federal government as one vast World War II veterans' benefit. (Before the war there were three suburban shopping centers in the U.S.; ten years after it ended there were 3,000.)

Then too, World War II has been a dominant force in the American popular imagination. In the mid-1960s, when my own consumption of pop culture was at its peak, the war was the only thing my friends and I thought about. We devoured World War II comic books like Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock; we watched World War II TV shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Rat Patrol; our rooms overflowed with World War II hobby kits, with half-assembled, glue-encrusted panzers and Spitfires and Zeroes. I think I had the world's largest collection of torn and mangled World War II decal insignia. We all had toy boxes stuffed with World War II armaments—with toy pistols and molded plastic rifles and alarmingly realistic rubber hand grenades. We refought World War II battles daily and went out on our campaigns so overloaded with gear we looked like ferocious porcupines. Decades after it was over the war was still expanding and dissipating in our minds, like the vapor trails of an immense explosion.

So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names—Pearl Harbor, D-day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn't provoke a glimmer of recognition; they might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. I started getting the creepy feeling that the war had actually happened a thousand years ago, and so it was forgivable if people were a little vague on the difference between the Normandy invasion and the Norman Conquest and couldn't say offhand whether the boats sailed from France to England or the other way around.

What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and—inevitably—Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the "fatal five minutes" on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all.

Is it that the war was 50 years ago and nobody cares anymore what happened before this week? Maybe so, but I think what my little survey really demonstrates is how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace. One of the persistent themes in the best writing about the war—I'm thinking particularly of Paul Fussell's brilliant polemic Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War—is that nobody back home has ever known much about what it was like on the battlefield. From the beginning, the actual circumstances of World War II were smothered in countless lies, evasions, and distortions, like a wrecked landscape smoothed by a blizzard. People all along have preferred the movie version: the tense border crossing where the flint-eyed SS guards check the forged papers; the despondent high-level briefing where the junior staff officer pipes up with the crazy plan that just might work; the cheerful POWs running rings around the Nazi commandant; the soldier dying gently in a sunlit jungle glade, surrounded by a platoon of teary-eyed buddies. The truth behind these cliches was never forgotten—because nobody except the soldiers ever learned it in the first place.

I think my own childhood image was typical. For me, the war was essentially a metaphysical struggle: America versus the Nazis, all over the world and throughout time. I couldn't have told you anything about its real circumstances; those didn't interest me. The historical war was just a lot of silent newsreel footage of soldiers trudging, artillery pumping, buildings collapsing, and boats bumping ashore—fodder for dull school movies and the duller TV documentaries I was reduced to watching on weekend afternoons when our neighborhood campaigns were rained out. My war was a dreamy, gliding epic, a golden tidal wave of eternally cresting triumph: it was filled with Nazi spy satellites and commando missions behind enemy lines to blow up the gestapo's new hydroelectric dam; Hitler had a supercomputer, and SS headquarters was a ziggurat looming in my nightmares like the wicked witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz. Real battles like the Coral Sea made it into my reveries only for their poetic value: I thought they were as alluring and turbulent as the oceans of the moon. I think I was an adult before I fully grasped that Guadalcanal wasn't a battle over a canal; I'd always fondly pictured furious soldiers fighting over immense locks and reservoirs somewhere where they had canals—Holland maybe, or Panama.

Granted, children always get the child's version of war. But the child's version is the only one readily available. It's no problem of course, if you have sufficient archaeological patience, to root out a more complicated form of historical truth; bookstores offer everything from thumpingly vast general surveys to war-gaming tactical analyses of diversionary skirmishes to maniacally detailed collector's encyclopedias about tank treads. The best academic histories—such as Gerhard L. Weinberg's extraordinary A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II—document and analyze in depth aspects of the war that even the most fanatical buff may not have heard of before: the campaigns along the Indian border, for instance, or the diplomatic maneuvering about Turkish neutrality. But reading almost all of them, one has the sense that some essential truth is still not being disclosed. It's as though the experience of war fits the old definition of poetry: war is the thing that gets lost in translation.

When I was taking my survey a friend told me that he was sitting with his father, a veteran of the European campaign, watching a TV special on the 50th anniversary of D-day. My friend suddenly had the impulse to ask a question that had never occurred to him in his entire adult life: "What was it really like to be in a battle?"

His father opened his mouth to answer—and then his jaw worked, his face reddened, and, without saying a word, he got up and walked out of the room. That's the truth about the war: the sense that what happened over there simply can't be told in the language of peace.

But is it really impossible to get across that barrier, even in imagination? Mementos of war surround us, and people surely wouldn't keep them around if they retained nothing of their truth. Sometimes when I've stared too long at the porcelain tiger on my bookshelf, I do get the sense that I'm looking into something deeper and more mysterious than a gaudy statuette that was once hawked to a departing soldier looking for souvenirs. I can almost hear behind its silent roar another sound, a more resonant bellow—as though war were a storm raging through an immeasurable abyss, and this little trinket preserved an echo of its thunder.

One somnolent Sunday in Chicago the hush of an old brownstone apartment building was disturbed by a woman running down the hallway knocking on doors. Everybody came out to see what she wanted: back in those days people actually responded when they heard something wrong. At first they couldn't make out why she was so excited. But once they understood, they all lingered in the hallway talking to one another. More and more people emerged from their apartments to find out what the fuss was about. Soon a tense and confused clamor was spreading in the woman's wake—more noise than the building had heard in years, more noise maybe than there'd been in all the decorous decades since its construction. It was December 1941, and the woman was asking everybody if they were listening to the radio.

My mother told me that story when I asked her what she remembered about the war. This is the sort of story everybody who was around in those days could tell; it was a defining moment in their lives, the way the Kennedy assassination would be for a later generation—where they were when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. They remember stopping by an isolated roadside diner to find it in an uproar, or coming into their corner grocery and seeing a worried knot of customers gathered around the cash register, or hearing a rumor racing through the crowd outside a nightclub, or falling into conversation with a stranger in a snowbound train station, who asked if they'd heard what had just happened in Hawaii. The news went fanning out everywhere, in millions of unforgettable flashes of dread: it was as though the entire country was being jerked awake by the same backfiring truck.

So great was the shock of that moment that even now Americans think of Pearl Harbor as the real beginning of World War II. Maybe it's a sign of how invincibly provincial we are, how instinctual is our certainty that the war, like every other big event in the world, was something that happened mainly to us. The truth was that by December 1941 the rest of the world had had enough of the war to last the millennium.

In any orthodox history you can find the standard autopsy of the causes. Germany was falling apart after the decades of social and economic chaos that followed its defeat in World War I. Japan's growing dependence on foreigners to keep its industrializing economy going was leading to widespread and deepening feelings of humiliated anger and outraged national pride. In both countries extremely racist and xenophobic parties had come to power and begun an explosive military expansion: throughout the 1930s the Germans and Japanese built up huge new armies and navies, amassed vast stockpiles of new armaments, and made lots and lots of demands and threats.

All of this is true enough, yet there's something faintly bogus and overly rationalized about it. The approaching war didn't seem like a political or economic event; it was more like a collective anxiety attack. Throughout the 30s people around the world came to share an unshakable dread about the future, a conviction that countless grave international crises were escalating out of control, a panicked sense that everything was coming unhinged and that they could do nothing to stop it. The feeling was caught perfectly by W.H. Auden, writing in 1935:

From the narrow window of my fourth-floor room I smoke into the night, and watch the lights

Stretch in the harbor. In the houses

The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.

And all sway forward on the dangerous flood

Of history, that never sleeps or dies,

And, held one moment, burns the hand.

For instance, in China—to take one arbitrary starting point—a war had been going on since 1931. This was a nagging turmoil at the edge of the world's consciousness, a problem that couldn't be understood, resolved, or successfully ignored. When the Japanese army invaded the city of Nanking in December 1937 they killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians—some say hundreds of thousands—in the space of a couple of weeks. It was one of the worst orgies of indiscriminate violence in modern times, and as the news of it spread around the world everybody began saying that Nanking would be remembered forever, just as the Spanish civil war's Guernica (the first town to be bombed from airplanes) would be: shorthand landmarks for our century's most horrible atrocities.

But that just shows how little anybody really understood what was happening to the world. Nobody outside of China remembered Nanking a couple years later when the German Reich began its stunning expansion through Europe. The Wehrmacht stampeded whole armies before it with its terrifyingly brutal new style of tank attack (the European press called it "blitzkrieg," and the name stuck), and rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories—wholesale deportations and systematic massacres, like a vast mechanized replay of the Mongol invasions. A story solemnly made the rounds of the world's newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, "Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!"

It was in September 1939, in the wake of the German invasion of Poland, that the phrase "the Second World War" began turning up in newspapers and government speeches. The name was a kind of despairing admission that nobody knew how long the war would go on or how far the fighting would spread. Over the next two years the news arrived almost daily that battles had broken out in places that only weeks before had seemed like safe havens. By the time of Pearl Harbor the war had erupted in Norway and Mongolia, on Crete and in the Dutch East Indies; the Italian army had marched on Egypt, and the German army was pushing into the outskirts of Moscow; there had been savage fighting in Finland north of the Arctic Circle and sea battles off the coast of Argentina. The United States was one of the last secluded places left on earth.

But the depths of that seclusion were still profound. This is one of the things about America in those days that's hardest for us to imagine now: how impossibly far away people thought the problems of the world were. It's not just that there was no TV, and thus no live satellite feed from the current crisis zone. America didn't even have a decent road system back then. Any long trip across the country was a fearsomely ambitious undertaking—and foreign travel was as fanciful as an opium dream. People grew up with the assumption that anything not immediately within reach was inconceivably far away. It wasn't unusual for them to spend every moment of their lives within walking distance of the place where they were born—and to die thinking they hadn't missed a thing.

They weren't wholly oblivious. But the news they got of the outside world came in through newspapers and radio—which is to say, through words, not images. This imposed even more distance on events that were already as remote as the dust storms of Mars. Their sense of heedlessness wasn't helped by the style of journalism reporters practiced in those days, which was heavy on local color and very light on analysis. The war as it appeared in the American press was a gorgeous tapestry of romance and swashbuckling adventure—frenzied Nazi rallies, weird religious rites in Japan, hairbreadth escapes on overcrowded trains teetering along mountain ravines, nights sleeping in haystacks in the backcountry of France after the fall of Paris, journeys in remotest Yugoslavia where the reporter "spent hours watching the army, with its wagons, horses, and guns, file past the minareted village in the moonlight." (I'm quoting, here and elsewhere, from the Library of America's excellent anthology Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946.) It convinced people that there was no more glamorous job in the world than foreign correspondent, but it also convinced them that the war was just a lot of foreigners going exotically crazy—nothing for Americans to bother their heads about.

Still, by early 1941 most Americans had come to understand that they couldn't stay unscathed forever. Even in the most remote towns of the heartland, people had some hint of the world's collective terrors: by then the local schoolteacher or minister had come back from a European trip still shaken by the sight of a Nazi book burning, or a neighbor had received a letter—battered, heavily postmarked, and exotically stamped—from a long-forgotten cousin, pleading for help getting out of the old country. A Gallup poll taken in the summer of 1941 showed that a large majority of respondents agreed that America was bound to be drawn into the war eventually; a slightly smaller majority even agreed that it was more important to stop the Nazis than to stay neutral. (Japan wasn't mentioned; even then nobody thought of Japan as a likely enemy.)

Yet "eventually drawn in" really meant "not now." That was what routinely stunned travelers returning to America from the war zones, even late in 1941: how unworried everybody in America seemed. Crowds still swarmed heedlessly on undamaged streets; city skylines still blazed at night, like massed homing beacons for enemy bombers. But if you'd even mentioned the possibility of an air raid out loud, you'd have been laughed at. New Yorker reporter A.J. Liebling wrote a piece that summer about coming back to Manhattan after the fall of France and discovering just how impossible it was to get his friends to take the thought of war seriously: "They said soothingly that probably you had had a lot of painful experiences, and if you just took a few grains of nembutol so you would get one good night's sleep, and then go out to the horse races twice, you would be your old sweet self again. It was like the dream in which you yell at people and they don't hear you."

It all changed of course, with a knock on the door, that weekend day in December.

There's a phrase people sometimes use about a nation's collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor—war fever. We don't know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the gulf war was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action. World War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, recruitment offices all over America swarmed with long lines of enlistees; flags and patriotic posters popped up on every street and store window; wild and hysterical cheers greeted the national anthem at every rally and concert and sporting event. Overnight the war was the only subject of conversation in the country; it was the only subject of the movies you could see at the local theater (Blondie and Dagwood were absorbed into the war effort in Blondie for Victory; Sherlock Holmes came out of retirement to chase Nazi spies in Sherlock Holmes in Washington). War was the only acceptable motif in advertising: for years after Pearl Harbor every manufacturer of spark plugs and orange juice routinely proclaimed that its product was essential to an Allied victory.

In an earlier time poet Rupert Brooke had written that people hurried into war out of the moral griminess of civilian life "like swimmers into cleanness leaping." In World War II the leap was perfect, complete, and profound. To the end there were none of the signs of disaffection we've come to expect from Americans over the course of a long war: no peace rallies, no antiescalation petition drives, no moves in Congress for compromise or a negotiated settlement. Men who appeared able-bodied found themselves harassed on the street by strangers demanding to know why they weren't in uniform; baseball players who hadn't yet enlisted, godlike figures like DiMaggio and Williams, were loudly booed by the hometown crowd when they came out on the field.

Why? You'd have a hard time figuring out the answer from reading the nation's press. From the beginning the issues of the war were discussed only in the dreariest of platitudes. "America is the symbol for freedom," Life magazine patiently explained to its readers—as though there might have been some confusion about whether the other side was the symbol for freedom. But Life firmly refused to be drawn into a debate about what "freedom" might mean: "Freedom is more than a set of rules, or a set of principles. Freedom is a free man. It is a package. But it is God's package."

End of discussion. Hard to believe anybody was moved to go to war by such tripe, but it was typical. When they're consumed by war fever, people don't need considered rationales for the use of military force; they don't even bother with the appearance of logic. As it happened, a purely cynical and cold-blooded calculation of the world crisis could have suggested to Americans that they could easily have stayed out. There were no treaties compelling the nation into the war, no overwhelming strategic or economic pressures; it was self-sufficient in food and raw materials, and it was geographically impregnable. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans would ever have been able to mount an invasion—and, in fact, neither ever seriously considered the possibility; Hitler at his most expansive still thought any transoceanic war was a century away. But none of that mattered. The war was about the furious, implacable determination to destroy America's attackers—and behind that, a kind of half-articulated patriotic poetry: "A green meadow stretching down from a whitewashed barn to the brook that bubbles through an American valley; an elderly man climbing up a ladder in a ripe American orchard; a stout, gray-haired woman pulling out of the oven an American apple pie; a red setter asleep on the sunny porch dreaming of American birds . . . "

Life magazine again, reporting an inventory it took of the soul of the typical American soldier. I've cut it down quite a bit—the original rhapsodizes on for several more pages—but the drift should be clear. The war wasn't about ideas, or principles, or history, or culture. The U.S. was going to war to defend some kind of untranslatable primal experience available only to citizens of the heartland.

It's one of the constants of war: a conviction that the people on the other side don't have the same soul we do. Evidently those Nips didn't give a damn about the fruit orchards of Japan, and you'd never find the pet dogs of kraut soldiers dreaming about local prey. When the Germans and Japanese looked across the ocean at America, what they saw was no more flattering: to them America was a nation of weaklings and cowards, with no honor or fighting spirit. One of the reasons behind the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—apart from the obvious military necessity of taking out the American fleet so that the Japanese military could conquer the western Pacific unopposed—was the unshakable conviction that Americans would collectively fold at the first sign of trouble; one big, nasty attack would be enough to get a negotiated settlement, on whatever terms the Japanese would care to name. In the same way Hitler and his inner circle were blithely sure that America would go to any lengths to stay out of the fight. Hitler's catastrophic decision to declare war on America three days after Pearl Harbor was made almost in passing, as a diplomatic courtesy to the Japanese. To the end he professed himself baffled that America was in the war at all; he would have thought that if Americans really wanted to fight, they'd join with him against their traditional enemies, the British. But evidently they were too much under the thumb of Roosevelt—whom Hitler was positive was a Jew named Rosenfeldt, part of the same evil cabal that controlled Stalin.

As fanciful as that was, it shows the average wartime grasp of the real motives of the enemy. It was at least on a par with the American Left's conviction that Hitler was an irrelevant puppet in the hands of the world's leading industrialists. Throughout the war all sides regarded one another with blank incomprehension: the course of the war was distinguished by a striking absence of one of the favorite sentimental cliches of the battlefield (which was afterward said to have marked World War I)—the touching scene in the trenches where soldiers on opposed sides surreptitiously acknowledge their common humanity. For the soldiers, for the citizens at large, and for all those churning out oceans of propaganda, the enemy was a featureless mass of inscrutable, dishonorable malignity.

This wasn't a good time in America to be thought a foreigner. The great rage against Japan was what prompted the 1942 roundup of more than a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans on the west coast into internment camps—an unconstitutional and flagrantly racist act, since nobody proposed setting up similar camps for German-Americans (though thousands of German and Italian nationals were interned). But internment may have saved some people from being lynched, given the venom about the camps displayed throughout the war by newspapers and politicians. The view was routinely offered with outraged assurance that conditions in the camps were too soft, that the internees were being coddled, that they were getting rations denied to "real" Americans. (About a quarter of the internee families were quietly released from the camps and resettled in places where anti-Japanese bigotry wasn't thought to be as strong.) One celebrated newspaper cartoon carefully explained how round, friendly Chinese faces could be distinguished from narrow, insectoid Japanese faces—the assumption being that real Americans had an ongoing, urgent need to know, for when they got the lynching party together. Children across the country began playing a new kind of sidewalk game, a version of hopscotch with overtones of an exorcism: they would draw foreign faces in chalk on a pavement square, leering Japanese devil masks, scarred and monocled Nazi beasts, pastel gargoyles of Tojo and Hitler—and then take turns stamping them into smudged ruins.

Meanwhile, their older brothers were enlisting or being swept up in the draft. Millions of young men poured into the military—and most everybody not signing up was hiring on at some new war-related industry. (The American economy grew by almost half during the war; unemployment was wiped out, and skilled workers were in such short supply that wages began a steep upward spiral.) But it was the soldiers who became the natural focus of the nation's sentimental refusal to wonder about what it was doing, as though they were a kind of collective vector for war fever. In the press and the popular imagination the whole American military was merged into one archetypical meta-soldier: the singular emblem of the mass noun "our boys." This soldier was decent, soft-spoken, down-to-earth, and polite; he was shrewd, but he was honest; he was clever, but he wasn't an intellectual. When asked what the war was all about he would scratch his head and slowly drawl that he guessed the Jerries and Japs had started this fight and they had to get what was coming to them. When asked what he himself most wanted to have happen he'd look sincere and say softly that he wanted to get the job done and go home.

In one of his pieces for the New Yorker A.J. Liebling caught the soldier's style in a single word. He describes how he found a typical American soldier passing time before a battle by reading Candide—which (Liebling carefully noted) he said was by some "fellow" named Voltaire. There it is: the soldier has never heard of Voltaire but is smart enough to read a good book if he wants to. Liebling evidently never met a soldier who'd read Voltaire before the war—much less read him in French. (Nor, for that matter, would Liebling ever admit, to the troops or to his readers, that he himself had studied French literature at the Sorbonne: that was the sort of confession that could get you into trouble, like the spy caught out because he could quote poetry but didn't know who'd won the World Series.) Our boys weren't bothering their heads with culture or history when they were out there in foreign parts; they were going to win the war and come back as untouched by the outer world as their dogs still were, waiting loyally behind, dreaming of American birds.

As the war darkened over the years, the figure of the soldier eventually darkened as well. In magazine illustrations later in the war—where a soldier contemplated the memory of breakfast cereal or reflected on how rubber cement saved his platoon—he looked a little wearier and his face was harder, his jaw not always clean-shaven, his eyes more nakedly homesick. But his soft-spoken manner was unruffled—though in feature stories and ad copy from around 1943 on he'd sometimes coyly admit to having fudged his birth date on his enlistment forms. The reason did him nothing but credit, of course. He had to make sure he got overseas and into combat "before it was all over."

You'd think nobody would have had to worry about that: after the first flush of enthusiasm everybody knew the war wasn't going to be over for a long while. (The government even asked Hollywood producers not to make movies implying there was any antiwar sentiment in the Axis, because they didn't want people to get the idea that there would be any easy resolution to the war.) But at the same time, people in America remained consistently vague about what the real status of the war was—how soon victory would come, what our boys were going through. The ordinary sources of information were closed, and not just because the news was sanitized by the government. Draftees in those days didn't get to serve out a specified time and then go home—at which point they could tell everybody their war stories. They were in "for the duration"—that is, until the war ended or they were killed. They were swallowed up by the service and were gone, for months and then years, with only a fitful stream of officially censored letters fluttering back from the remoteness of the world to say that everything was still OK. New recruits in the later years of the war were going in essentially as innocent of the realities of combat as enlistees had been before Pearl Harbor.

During basic training, it's true, some of them did begin to wonder what being in a war really meant. That was when they met real soldiers for the first time—combat veterans who'd been rotated home to serve as instructors. There was something odd about them. One marine enlistee later said they all had "an intangible air of subdued, quiet detachment . . . as though lost in some sort of melancholy reverie." But the recruits didn't stop to wonder what might have prompted it. They were too caught up in the glory of being soldiers, in the urgency of their imminent departure overseas, in the certainty that they were part of an unimaginably vast tide of victory.

They soon invented a ritual to be performed as soon as they were fitted with their new uniforms. They'd rush out to photographers' studios and document the occasion for their proud families. The mantels and nightstands of America were strewn with these relics—soldiers posed with quiet dignity against a studio backdrop, half turning to face the camera with an expression both grave and proud. Some guys couldn't help clowning and left photos that baffle people to this day: foreheads furrowed, jaws clenched, eyes fixed and furious—tinted by the studio not ordinary pink but a belligerent orange rose, like a Halloween mask. When you see these photos now, they look like antique novelty items from carnivals, or illustrations for Ripley's Believe It or Not: "The Angriest Soldier in the World." We don't remember the pride behind them, the innocence, the mysterious and happy ferocity—the warning to all enemies of just how tough the American soldier would be when he got into the war.

Nobody had to be told that the German soldier was tough. From the beginning the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had acquired a reputation for implacable savagery. Around the world they were known as the sadists, the storm troopers, the Nazi beasts, the stone-faced Aryan enforcers of the Thousand Year Reich. So Nazi propaganda tended to go the other way, to show what nice, normal guys they really were—unyieldingly fierce when it came to the fuhrer's enemies of course, but otherwise kind, decent, tenderhearted, proud, dedicated, respectful, and honest: the showpiece of Aryan virtue, the young flower incarnating the eternal nobility and valor of Nordic culture.

One such product of Nazi propaganda was a movie that came out in Germany in 1942, a war melodrama called Stukas. It's about a wholly representative German soldier, the equivalent of one of "our boys": he's handsome, thoughtful, troubled by the morality of war, and given to quoting Hölderlin. Tragically, he's shell-shocked in battle and given no chance of recovering—unless, or so his doctors solemnly conclude, he undergoes "a profound emotional experience." He's in luck: he receives an invitation from the fuhrer himself to attend the world-famous Richard Wagner festival, held every summer in the provincial German town of Bayreuth. In the touching final scene he sits hopelessly in the front rows of the opera house, but gradually recovers his will to live and his faith in the German cause during a rousing performance of Siegfried.

Stukas wasn't a hit. But much of what went on in it was true to life. The Wagner festival was (and is) as described. During the war convalescing soldiers were given free tickets as a special treat. A mystique really had been built up around Bayreuth in an attempt to fix it as one of the sacred events of the new Aryan culture. And, hard as it may be to believe, the big climax wasn't just a creation of Nazi kitsch; some of the real soldiers who attended the festival did experience something profound and transformative at performances there.

But then, isn't that more or less what's supposed to happen when people see great art? Recordings and photographs have survived from the wartime festivals, and they show that the productions were indeed spectacular. Bayreuth had the cream of Germany's operatic talent, it had some of the best conductors and musicians in Europe, and it had the money to make all the sets and costumes lavish and dazzling. Who wouldn't have been impressed? Everyone who went to the festivals in those years agreed that they'd never witnessed anything like them in their lives. It's even possible for us now—from studies of Germany during the war such as Richard Grunberger's The Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany and more specialized works such as Frederic Spotts's excellent Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival—to work out just what a singular experience it must have been.

First off the festivalgoers were greeted with a scene from a sinister fairy tale. The peaked medieval rooftops of Bayreuth, glinting romantically in the depths of the summer countryside, swarmed with thousands of Nazi flags. Bunting in Nazi colors—red, white, and black—was heaped in furious abundance down every narrow cobblestone street. Everywhere you looked were pictures of Hitler—on lampposts, on walls, behind gold-leafed storefront windows: Hitler in uniform regarding the viewer with stern exasperation, Hitler addressing wildly cheering crowds, Hitler inspecting mountain ranges, and, most striking of all, Hitler (distinctly ill at ease) in a suit of armor, preparing to joust with the evil hordes threatening the Reich. Big banners hung across all the streets proclaiming "Wagner's City Welcomes the Fuhrer's Guests."

But the fuhrer wasn't there to greet his guests. At one time he would have been: Wagner's operas were among his deepest enthusiasms; only Mozart moved him more. He'd been a faithful attendee at Bayreuth since the 20s, and the Wagner family, who still ran the festival, had been among his earliest and most devoted backers. It had been one of his first acts after assuming absolute power to make sure the festival received a generous state subsidy. But, to his lasting regret, he'd had to stop coming after the war began. He had no choice; he was away full-time in the east, at his military command posts in Central Europe, where he was directing the invasion of the Soviet Union. His entourage too regretted his absence; his visits to Bayreuth, Albert Speer observed in his memoirs, were the only times anybody ever saw him relax.

The other prominent leaders of the new Reich were also no-shows. But they had a different reason: they loathed Wagner. They paid lip service to him as the patron saint of Aryan culture, but the truth was that they hated all culture, Aryan or otherwise. Their aesthetic was set out by the hero of a celebrated Nazi play: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I unlatch the safety on my automatic." They particularly detested Wagner's operas for being so long, so boring, so arty, and so downbeat; party theorists thought these qualities were unpatriotic. They looked upon the Wagner festival itself with deep suspicion—if for no other reason than that it had always attracted so many foreign tourists and, worse, foreign performers, which made it a hotbed of "internationalist" (i.e., Jewish) influence. They would gladly have shut the festival down; in fact, they wanted to burn the opera house to the ground and ban performances of Wagner's works everywhere in Germany. And they would have done it too if the fuhrer hadn't been such a fan.

Hitler professed to being appalled at the philistinism of the party faithful; he'd always hoped they'd be as transported as he was by the fire and the majesty of the Wagnerian myth. But he excused them from Bayreuth, and instead made sure that the festival was attended by people who would know what was required of them. That was why admission during the war years was by invitation only. The "fuhrer's guests"—soldiers, nurses, workers who'd won productivity drives at war factories—arrived by chartered train and were issued coupons entitling them to meals, a beer ration, and one opera performance. They were marched to and from the opera house in formation. The SS were present in force in the aisles to ensure that audience members were displaying the proper degree of enthusiasm.

Can there have been a worse way to see an opera? It sounds like a school field trip where the teachers are armed. But audience accounts of the performances—even some official reports filed by the SS—show that there was at least one production where the fuhrer's guests responded exactly the way Hitler wanted them to. They were enthralled, they wept openly at the climax, they greeted the final curtain with salvo after salvo of deafening applause. It was the July 1943 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg—which means the audience was profoundly, heart-shudderingly moved by a four-hour light opera about a medieval singing contest.

Maybe this is a cultural divide we can't hope to cross, but the truth is that even under less freakish circumstances Die Meistersinger can have an unpredictable effect on audiences. It's a mystifying work—odd among Wagner's operas, odd among operas generally. It's billed as a comedy, and by comparison with Wagner's normal mode of cosmic tragedy, it can fairly be called lighthearted. But it doesn't have much in the way of laughs; the funny scenes are so enormous and diffuse they're like slapstick performed by cumulus clouds. It's also sometimes called Wagner's one realistic opera, and in fact it isn't set in that strange mythological twilight realm of Der Ring des Nibelungen or Tristan or Parsifal: nothing magical or supernatural happens, and the setting is as close to documentary as Wagner ever got (there really were guilds of mastersingers in late medieval Nuremberg, and the hero, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, is based on a real person). But the realism keeps fading away into dreaminess. None of Wagner's other operas seems so much of a fairy tale: the plot about the winner of the contest marrying the mayor's daughter is straight out of the Brothers Grimm. And the tone isn't Wagner's normal metaphysical gloom; it's miraculously sunny and serene, as though there's no darkness in the world deeper than benign melancholy. And yet when it's done right—as it was at Bayreuth that year—it leaves an audience in tears.

Die Meistersinger can really only be understood in relation to Wagner's overarching masterpiece, Der Ring des Nibelungen. In fact, Wagner composed Die Meistersinger as a pleasant little interlude in the midst of his 25 years of labor on the larger work. It's deliberately airy and inconsequential where the Ring is inexorable and dark. It's a deliberate turning away from the death of gods and the fate of worlds to more humble and earthly concerns: the happiness of young lovers, the sadness of approaching age, the evanescence of a summer's day and the loveliness of its twilight. Its brightness and gentleness stand out in Wagner's universe like a line of sunny rooftops against a blackening thunderstorm.

The Nazis who hated Wagner had a point: he really was morbid. He intended the Ring to be not just his masterwork, but a summation and final accounting for Western culture—a vision of its foundational myth and a prophecy of its coming collapse. That was always the mystery about the Ring. He composed it at the height of a civilization greater than any since the fall of Rome: the colonial empires of Europe controlled most of the land surface of the earth, and their ships carried the traffic of every ocean. Yet all Wagner could see ahead of him was its ruin and decline. He found among the ancient legends of the Teutons and the Vikings the epic story of the cursed ring of the Nibelung and the fall of the noble house of the Volsungs, and he saw it as a vast parable of the rot eating away at the foundations of the contemporary world. The ring represents avarice and the lust for power; it will give dominion over the whole earth to anyone who renounces love—but the gods can see no danger of that, since how could there be a being, mortal or immortal, who would ever renounce the glory of love for the paltriness of mere power? Wagner looked around him and knew there would be no shortage of takers.

In his earliest plan for the Ring, the old world of the gods would be destroyed and a new human utopia free of the ring's curse would arise to replace it—but he eventually dropped that idea. The more he worked on the Ring the less good he could see ahead, following the wreck of his civilization. So when he came to compose Die Meistersinger he offered a utopia not of the future but of the past. He retreated to a time and place where the doom hanging over Europe wouldn't yet seem inescapable, where people could pass their whole lives in a dream of contented peace, where they really could care who won a singing contest. He created the textures of this paradise with lavish concreteness. No other opera is so casually exact about its location, its sights, its atmosphere; each scene is so deeply realized, you can even tell what the temperature is. The first act is touched by the slightly clammy coolness of a stone cathedral on a sultry morning; the second is filled with a humid, lilac-scented night breeze drifting down a cobblestone alley; and the last act overflows with the hot, lush air of a sunlit meadow in the depths of the untouched German countryside.

The 1943 production brought these qualities to life with extraordinary fidelity. Surviving stills show that the backdrop of cathedral walls was painted with such care you could almost see the beads of dew on the stone. The view down the back alley was a marvelously steep twilight clutter of ancient tiled roofs and sinuously worn pavement. And the meadow was a kind of stage poem to a summer day, dominated by a majestic flowering tree, with the town glittering contentedly in the hazy distance. The Bayreuth opera house, itself so soothingly cool in the heat of those July afternoons, must have seemed to its astonished audience like a window into the mysterious peace at the heart of the fatherland.

How could they not have been moved? The orchestra played as if possessed, the soloists tore into every one of the immense arias as though this was the last time they would ever be allowed to sing music this beautiful, the chorus (filled out, by the fuhrer's special order, with the best amateur singers from a local division of the SS) roared and bellowed their way through the chorales in a kind of primordial joy of discovery. Each scene played out to lingering stillness, savoring the nuances of joy and renunciation in an ecstasy of achingly sweet nostalgia. And the final aria—in which Hans Sachs sings of his hope that even if Germany itself is destroyed, the greatness of German art will survive—was like a rapturous prayer of deliverance.

"German art." Of course Wagner thought the greatest art in the world was necessarily German—that was a commonplace in those days. Germans, Japanese, Americans—people of every nation profoundly believed in their innate cultural superiority. Wagner was wholly typical of Germans, for instance, in his loathing of the French: he was enraged during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 that the German army didn't burn Paris to the ground. Then too he was contemptuous, like most German intellectuals, of what he thought of as a Mediterranean contamination of the true, Teutonic soul of Europe—"Mediterranean" encompassing everything from Italian opera to Christianity. And he was typical of Germans, and of Europeans generally, in his furious detestation of Jews. Back then, cultured men in Europe and America, from Degas to Kipling to Henry Adams, all took particular pleasure in cultivating lurid varieties of anti-Semitism. The curse of the ring, which Wagner himself couldn't see, included hatred and cultural paranoia.

But in the feverish atmosphere of the war years nobody could have remained blind to what was really at stake. The country was swarming with secret police, there were mass arrests and deportations of everybody thought even remotely undesirable, there were daily triumphant announcements of the latest spectacular military victory obliterating all those decades of national humiliation, and there were an awful lot of patriotic parades. The Bayreuth festival was typical of those years in its frenzied glorification of the Nazi state. Every public occasion, no matter how trivial, was turned into a riot of patriotic enthusiasm. Every week brought a new stadium-filling rally, a lurid night of bonfires, a solemn torchlight procession. The Nazis could make the groundbreaking for a new highway an excuse for another spectacular searchlight-swarming, band-thundering all-Hitler gala event. The message was everywhere: the war was about the survival of Germany itself. Either there would be a victory so great that its rule over its enemies would last a thousand years or there would be a defeat so bottomless that nothing, no hope or joy or scrap of song, would survive.

This was the message that was seeping through Wagner's dream of happiness on those summer afternoons in 1943. It was a stronger dose of the message that has always hurried nations into war. Our land is more precious than that of our enemies, our joys are sweeter than theirs, our losses are more deeply felt. The soldiers in that auditorium apparently believed—or almost believed—in the rightness of their cause and the urgency of victory, to the point of anguish. And the performance told them that this was what the music had always been intended to say: if only the ecstasy of song lasts we will be saved; if only we can hold on to this heartbreakingly beautiful vision of our true heritage, then everything we are doing in its name will be redeemed.

"You folks at home must be disappointed at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia. So are we over here." That was how wire-service reporter Ernie Pyle began a dispatch in February 1943. A few days before, at Kasserine Pass, in the desolate mountain ranges fringing the Sahara, American troops had had their first major encounter with the Germans. The Americans had been undertrained and overconfident; confronted by the ferocity of an artillery barrage, they'd panicked and run. Pyle sounds like he was breaking the news that the hometown swim team had lost at the state finals.

That was pretty bold by the standards of the time. From the beginning of the war any little setback like Kasserine had been veiled in impenetrable layers of vague regret and consolatory wisdom. "No one here has the slightest doubt that the Germans will be thrown out of Tunisia," Pyle goes on to say almost immediately. "It is simply in the cards." That was a lucky thing, because right then there was no compelling military reason to expect an Allied victory. Pyle then adds this remarkable bit to the mythology of "our boys": "As for the soldiers themselves, you need feel no shame nor concern about their ability. I have seen them in battle and afterwards and there is nothing wrong with the common American soldier. His fighting spirit is good. His morale is okay. The deeper he gets into a fight the more of a fighting man he becomes."

Which is as much as to say that the actual result of the battle shouldn't be allowed to dent the myth. This is where the falsification of the war began—not in the movies and not in government propaganda, but in the simple refusal of reporters in the field to describe honestly what they were seeing.

American soldiers early on grew accustomed to the idea that the truth of their experience wasn't going to be told to the folks back home. They knew the score: despite the drone of triumph surrounding their every deed, the American entry into the war was a gory fiasco. The military had been caught wholly unprepared and was rushing troops into battle all over the world with a minimum of training and a maximum of chaos. To this day, if you ask any veteran for war stories, what you're likely to hear first is some appalling epic of American military incompetence. Every unit rapidly accumulated its share of grim legends. There was the arrogant lieutenant fresh out of officer school who was assigned to lead troops into battle and turned coward under fire or was fatally befuddled by ambiguous orders. There was the murderous stupidity of a supply clerk up the line who contemptuously mishandled an urgent request for emergency provisions—on Guadalcanal, for instance, desperately needed drinking water arrived in used oil drums nobody had thought to wash out first. And there was the almost daily occurrence of the routine patrol turned into a nightmare by friendly fire. Friendly fire was a worse problem in World War II than in any other American war before or since. American troops on the ground were so frequently bombed by their own planes that they were known to shoot back with their heaviest guns.

The folks at home learned none of this. The news was being censored of course: American reporters in the field, like those of every combatant nation, had to submit all stories for official clearance, and reporters who tried to describe the war honestly would quickly find their stories going unapproved and their press credentials in doubt. But the First Amendment was still in force back home; unlike the newspapers of the Axis, which were wholly given over to government-enforced fantasies of imminent global triumph, American newspapers were still free, at least in theory, to publish whatever they liked. Some of them did so: the Library of America's Reporting World War II anthology contains reasonably honest and critical pieces from major newspapers and magazines on conditions in the internment camps, on the lack of enthusiasm for the war in African-American ghettos, and on the institutionalized racism of the military. But when it came to what was happening on the battlefields themselves the unbreakable silence closed in.

Part of it was the deep reluctance of the American military to approve stories that suggested—as A.J. Liebling put it—that American soldiers might "die in an undignified way." Part of it was simple patriotism: the reporters were under no obligation to be neutral; they wanted America to win and weren't going to risk hurting home-front morale by writing honestly of the terror and desperation of the battlefield.

But there was another reason as well: a kind of psychological block. There was something essential about the battlefield that reporters didn't tell the folks back home. They weren't being censored exactly; they probably could have published it if they'd wanted to. They just didn't know how. In any anthology of wartime journalism (it happens constantly in Reporting World War II), you can find instances of reporters coming up against the fundamental truth of the war and being unable to say what it was. Instead they resorted to a curious verbal tic, almost an involuntary distress signal, to mark the place where their verbal abilities left off and the incommunicable reality of what they were witnessing began.

Here's a typical example, from Ernie Pyle's Tunisian reporting: "One of our half-tracks, full of ammunition, was livid red, with flames leaping and swaying. Every few seconds one of the shells would go off, and the projectile would tear into the sky with a weird whang-zing sort of noise."

That seems unexceptionable enough. Like most of what Pyle sent in over the wire, it has a striking visual vigor and simplicity, down to the comic-book sound effects—put a grinning American soldier in the foreground, and you've got a perfect Norman Rockwell war poster. But compare it with this, from John Hersey's reporting of the Guadalcanal campaign for Life magazine: "But weirdest of all was the sound of our artillery shells passing overhead. At this angle, probably just about under the zenith of their trajectory, they gave off a soft, fluttery sound, like a man blowing through a keyhole."

This seems to be out of another universe of literary style: compared with Pyle's report, this is a sinuously Jamesian prose poem. But it has an unexpected point of resemblance. Hersey, like Pyle, calls the sound of a shell in flight "weird."

That word and its cognates recur countless times in American war reporting. The war was weird. Or it was haunted, or spectral, or uncanny, or supernatural. Battle zones were eerie; bomb craters were unearthly; even diplomatic conferences were strange and unreal. Here's an elaborate example, from Edward R. Murrow's famous radio broadcasts from London during the German air raids of September 1940. Murrow was standing on a rooftop at night, looking out on a blacked-out roof-scape lit up by flashes of antiaircraft fire and distant swarming searchlights. His eye was caught by an odd detail: "Out of one window there waves something that looks like a white bed sheet, a window curtain swinging free in this night breeze. It looks as though it were being shaken by a ghost. There are a great many ghosts around these buildings in London."

It's worth following the implicit logic here in some detail. There's an obvious meaning you would expect Murrow to find in the sight of a white sheet waving in the middle of an air raid: it's a flag of surrender, a pathetic gesture of submission made to the unseen forces thundering across the night skies overhead. But that's exactly what Murrow doesn't say. There was a straightforward reason: he was passionately pro-British and wasn't about to suggest that anybody in London was about to surrender—even metaphorically. But then what did the sheet look like? Now we get to that short circuit: another reason it didn't look like a white flag was that a white flag was something you'd see in a battle—and this wasn't like a battle. It was much too strange for that. It was more like a haunted house: some kind of border zone where the barriers between this world and the next were dissolving, and ghosts came fluttering up out of nothingness. It was certainly not a place where the traditional language of warfare had any meaning. As Murrow himself put it directly: "There are no words to describe the thing that is happening."

So what was this "thing" these reporters were seeing? Is there any way for us now to get a sense of what they were seeing?

There was a battle soon after Pearl Harbor that may, better than any other, define just what was so strange about the war. Unlike most of the war's battles, it was contained within a narrow enough area that it can be visualized clearly, yet its consequences were so large and mysterious that they rippled throughout the entire world for years afterward. It happens that no American reporters were around to witness it directly, but it has been amply documented even so. From survivors' accounts, and from a small library of academic and military histories, ranging in scope and style from Walter Lord's epic Miracle at Midway to John Keegan's brilliant tactical analysis in The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare, it's possible to work out with some precision just what happened in the open waters of the Pacific off Midway Island at 10:25 AM local time on June 4, 1942.

In the months after Pearl Harbor the driving aim of Japanese strategy was to capture a string of islands running the length of the western Pacific and fortify them against an American counterattack. This defensive perimeter would set the boundaries of their new empire—or, as they called it, the "Greater Asia Coprosperity Sphere." Midway Island, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, was one of the last links they needed to complete the chain. They sent an enormous fleet, the heart of the Japanese navy, to do the job: four enormous aircraft carriers, together with a whole galaxy of escort ships. On June 4 the attack force arrived at Midway, where they found a smaller American fleet waiting for them.

Or so the history-book version normally runs. But the sailors on board the Japanese fleet saw things differently. They didn't meet any American ships on June 4. That day, as on all the other days of their voyage, they saw nothing from horizon to horizon but the immensity of the Pacific. Somewhere beyond the horizon line, shortly after dawn, Japanese pilots from the carriers had discovered the presence of the American fleet, but for the Japanese sailors, the only indications of anything unusual that morning were two brief flyovers by American fighter squadrons. Both had made ineffectual attacks and flown off again. Coming on toward 10:30 AM, with no further sign of enemy activity anywhere near, the commanders ordered the crews on the aircraft carriers to prepare for the final assault on the island, which wasn't yet visible on the horizon.

That was when a squadron of American dive-bombers came out of the clouds overhead. They'd got lost earlier that morning and were trying to make their way back to base. In the empty ocean below they spotted a fading wake—one of the Japanese escort ships had been diverted from the convoy to drop a depth charge on a suspected American submarine. The squadron followed it just to see where it might lead. A few minutes later they cleared a cloud deck and discovered themselves directly above the single largest "target of opportunity," as the military saying goes, that any American bomber had ever been offered.

When we try to imagine what happened next we're likely to get an image out of Star Wars—daring attack planes, as graceful as swallows, darting among the ponderously churning cannons of some behemoth of a Death Star. But the sci-fi trappings of Star Wars disguise an archaic and sluggish idea of battle. What happened instead was this: the American squadron commander gave the order to attack, the planes came hurtling down from around 12,000 feet and released their bombs, and then they pulled out of their dives and were gone. That was all. Most of the Japanese sailors didn't even see them.

The aircraft carriers were in a frenzy just then. Dozens of planes were being refueled and rearmed on the hangar decks, and elevators were raising them to the flight decks, where other planes were already revving up for takeoff. The noise was deafening, and the warning sirens were inaudible. Only the sudden, shattering bass thunder of the big guns going off underneath the bedlam alerted the sailors that anything was wrong. That was when they looked up. By then the planes were already soaring out of sight, and the black blobs of the bombs were already descending from the brilliant sky in a languorous glide.

One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship. Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.

Meanwhile another carrier, the Kaga, was hit by a bomb that exploded directly on the hangar deck. The deck was strewn with live artillery shells, and open fuel lines snaked everywhere. Within seconds, explosions were going off in cascading chain reactions, and uncontrollable fuel fires were breaking out all along the length of the ship. Eight hundred sailors died. On the flight deck a fuel truck exploded and began shooting wide fans of ignited fuel in all directions; the captain and the rest of the senior officers, watching in horror from the bridge, were caught in the spray, and they all burned to death.

Less than five minutes had passed since the American planes had first appeared overhead. The Akagi and the Kaga were breaking up. Billowing columns of smoke towered above the horizon line. These attracted another American bomber squadron, which immediately launched an attack on a third aircraft carrier, the Soryu. These bombs were less effective—they set off fuel fires all over the ship, but the desperate crew managed to get them under control. Still, the Soryu was so badly damaged it was helpless. Shortly afterward it was targeted by an American submarine (the same one the escort ship had earlier tried to drop a depth charge on). American subs in those days were a byword for military ineffectiveness; they were notorious for their faulty and unpredictable torpedoes. But the crew of this particular sub had a large stationary target to fire at point-blank. The Soryu was blasted apart by repeated direct hits. Seven hundred sailors died.

The last of the carriers, the Hiryu, managed to escape untouched, but later that afternoon it was located and attacked by another flight of American bombers. One bomb set off an explosion so strong it blew the elevator assembly into the bridge. More than 400 died, and the crippled ship had to be scuttled a few hours later to keep it from being captured.

Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.

This was the Battle of Midway. As John Keegan writes, it was "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." Its consequences were instant, permanent and devastating. It gutted Japan's navy and broke its strategy for the Pacific war. The Japanese would never complete their perimeter around their new empire; instead they were thrown back on the defensive, against an increasingly large and better-organized American force, which grew surgingly confident after its spectacular victory. After Midway, as the Japanese scrambled to rebuild their shattered fleet, the Americans went on the attack. In August 1942 they began landing a marine force on the small island of Guadalcanal (it's in the Solomons, near New Guinea) and inexorably forced a breach in the perimeter in the southern Pacific. From there American forces began fanning out into the outer reaches of the empire, cutting supply lines and isolating the strongest garrisons. From Midway till the end of the war the Japanese didn't win a single substantial engagement against the Americans. They had "lost the initiative," as the bland military saying goes, and they never got it back.

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders—the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.

This was exactly what the witnesses to the war were finding so impossible to believe. The cliche in those days was that World War I had destroyed the old romantic notions about battle—after the slaughter in the trenches of Europe, it was said, nobody would ever again rhapsodize about the chivalry of jousting knights or the grandeur of a sword-waving cavalry charge. The reporters going out to cover World War II had prepared themselves to see battles that were mechanized, anonymous, and horrible. But they weren't prepared, not really. World War I had been a generation earlier, and the military industries of the great powers hadn't stopped their drive for innovation. The combatant nations of World War II were supplying their forces with armaments of such dramatically increased power they made those of World War I obsolete. The reporters got out into the war and discovered a scale of mass destruction so inhuman that cynicism and disillusionment seemed just as irrelevant as the sentimental pieties of the home front.

What were they supposed to say about what they were seeing? At Kasserine American soldiers were blown apart into shreds of flesh scattered among the smoking ruins of exploded tanks. Ernie Pyle called this "disappointing." Well, why not? There were no other words to describe the thing that had happened there. The truth was, the only language that seemed to register the appalling strangeness of the war was supernatural: the ghost story where nightmarish powers erupt out of nothingness, the glimpse into the occult void where human beings would be destroyed by unearthly forces they couldn't hope to comprehend. Even the most routine event of the war, the firing of an artillery shell, seemed somehow uncanny. The launch of a shell and its explosive arrival were so far apart in space and time you could hardly believe they were part of the same event, and for those in the middle there was only the creepy whisper of its passage, from nowhere to nowhere, like a rip in the fabric of causality.

Even the military powers themselves, which had spent so many years planning for the war, which had built up titanic armies and commissioned the factories to churn out wave after wave of advanced weaponry—even they didn't understand the furies they were unleashing. That's what had caused the disaster at Midway. Aircraft carriers were the most powerful ships ever to set sail; they were so large and strongly built they sometimes seemed to their crews not to be ships at all, but floating cities of metal, floating industrial districts delivering destruction to their enemies on the other side of the world. But nobody had stopped to consider just how vulnerable they'd be in a combat zone. Midway was the first major naval battle involving aircraft carriers, and in those few minutes the sailors on board suddenly realized the fundamental defect in their design. For all its appearance of self-sufficiency and invulnerability, an aircraft carrier really was an immense oilcan stuffed with explosives, floating in the middle of an inhospitable ocean.

In the obsolete days of naval warfare Midway would have been different. An old-fashioned attack fleet would have been carrying less-powerful explosives and far less fuel (and the American planes wouldn't have been equipped with such large bombs); its ships could probably have survived the attack at Midway with only moderate damage. But the Japanese carrier attack force was on the hair trigger of total catastrophe—ready not only to self-destruct in an instant, but to cause a vast, unpredictable, and wholly uncontrollable wave of secondary disasters. It took only a couple of fluke hits to trigger the cataclysm; the Japanese empire was lost at Midway in five unlucky minutes.

There's another military phrase: "in harm's way." That's what everybody assumes going to war means—putting yourself in danger. But the truth is that for most soldiers war is no more inherently dangerous than any other line of work. Modern warfare has grown so complicated and requires such immense movements of men and materiel over so vast an expanse of territory that an ever-increasing proportion of every army is given over to supply, tactical support, and logistics. Only about one in five of the soldiers who took part in World War II was in a combat unit (by the time of Vietnam the ratio in the American armed forces was down to around one in seven). The rest were construction workers, accountants, drivers, technicians, cooks, file clerks, repairmen, warehouse managers—the war was essentially a self-contained economic system that swelled up out of nothing and covered the globe.

For most soldiers the dominant memory they had of the war was of that vast structure arching up unimaginably high overhead. It's no coincidence that two of the most widely read and memorable American novels of the war, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, are almost wholly about the cosmic scale of the American military's corporate bureaucracy and mention Hitler and the Nazis only in passing. Actual combat could seem like almost an incidental side product of the immense project of military industrialization. A battle for most soldiers was something that happened up the road, or on the fogbound islands edging the horizon, or in the silhouettes of remote hilltops lit up at night by silent flickering, which they mistook at first for summer lightning. And when reporters traveled through the vast territories under military occupation looking for some evidence of real fighting, what they were more likely to find instead was a scene like what Martha Gellhorn, covering the war for Collier's, discovered in the depths of the Italian countryside: "The road signs were fantastic. . . . The routes themselves, renamed for this operation, were marked with the symbols of their names, a painted animal or a painted object. There were the code numbers of every outfit, road warnings—bridge blown, crater mines, bad bends—indications of first-aid posts, gasoline dumps, repair stations, prisoner-of-war cages, and finally a marvelous Polish sign urging the troops to notice that this was a malarial area: this sign was a large green death's-head with a mosquito sitting on it."

That was the war: omnipresent, weedlike tendrils of contingency and code spreading over a landscape where the battle had long since passed.

It was much the same in the U.S. The bureaucracy of war became an overpowering presence in people's lives, even though the reality of battle was impossibly remote. Prices were controlled by war-related government departments, nonessential nonmilitary construction required a nightmare of paperwork, food and gas were rationed—any long-distance car travel that wasn't for war business meant a special hearing before a ration board, and almost every train snaking through the depths of the heartland had been commandeered for classified military transport. The necessities of war even broke up the conventional proprieties of marriage: the universal inevitability of military service meant that young couples got married quickly, sometimes at first meeting—and often only so the women could get the military paycheck and the ration stamps.

The war was the single dominant fact in the world, saturating every radio show and newspaper. Every pennant race was described on the sports pages in the metaphor of battle; every car wreck and hotel fire was compared to the air raids that everyone was still expecting to hit the blacked-out cities on the coasts.

But who was controlling the growth of this fantastic edifice? Nobody could say. People who went to Washington during those years found a desperately overcrowded town caught up in a kind of diffuse bureaucratic riot. New agencies and administrations overflowed from labyrinthine warrens of temporary office space. People came to expect that the simplest problem would lead to hours or days of wandering down featureless corridors, passing door after closed door spattered by uncrackable alphabetic codes: OPA, OWI, OSS. Nor could you expect any help or sympathy once you found the right office: if the swarms of new government workers weren't focused on the latest crisis in the Pacific, they were distracted by the hopeless task of finding an apartment or a boarding house or a cot in a spare room. Either way, they didn't give a damn about solving your little squabble about petroleum rationing.

It might have been some consolation to know that people around the world were stuck with exactly the same problems—particularly people on the enemy side. There was a myth (it still persists) that the Nazi state was a model of efficiency; the truth was that it was a bureaucratic shambles. The military functioned well—Hitler gave it a blank check—but civilian life was made a misery by countless competing agencies and new ministries, all claiming absolute power over every detail of German life. Any task, from getting repairs in an apartment building to requisitioning office equipment, required running a gauntlet of contradictory regulations. One historian later described Nazi Germany as "authoritarian anarchy."

But then everything about the war was ad hoc and provisional. The British set up secret installations in country estates; Stalin had his supreme military headquarters in a commandeered Moscow subway station. Nobody cared about making the system logical, because everything only needed to happen once. Every battle was unrepeatable, every campaign was a special case. The people who were actually making the decisions in the war—for the most part, senior staff officers and civil service workers who hid behind anonymous doors and unsigned briefing papers—lurched from one improvisation to the next, with no sense of how much the limitless powers they were mustering were remaking the world.

But there was one constant. From the summer of 1942 on, the whole Allied war effort, the immensity of its armies and its industries, were focused on a single overriding goal: the destruction of the German army in Europe. Allied strategists had concluded that the global structure of the Axis would fall apart if the main military strength of the German Reich could be broken. But that task looked to be unimaginably difficult. It meant building up an overwhelmingly large army of their own, somehow getting it on the ground in Europe, and confronting the German army at point-blank range. How could this possibly be accomplished? The plan was worked out at endless briefings and diplomatic meetings and strategy sessions held during the first half of 1942. The Soviet Red Army would have to break through the Russian front and move into Germany from the east. Meanwhile, a new Allied army would get across the English Channel and land in France, and the two armies would converge on Berlin.

The plan set the true clock time of the war. No matter what the surface play of battle was in Africa or the South Seas, the underlying dynamic never changed: every hour, every day the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Europe. They were stockpiling thousands of landing craft, tens of thousands of tanks, millions upon millions of rifles and mortars and howitzers, oceans of bullets and bombs and artillery shells—the united power of the American and Russian economies was slowly building up a military force large enough to overrun a continent. The sheer bulk of the armaments involved would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. One number may suggest the scale. Before the war began the entire German Luftwaffe consisted of 4,000 planes; by the time of the Normandy invasion American factories were turning out 4,000 new planes every two weeks.

The plan was so ambitious that even with this torrential flow of war production it would take years before the Allies were ready. The original target date for the invasion was the spring of 1943—but as that date approached the Allies realized they weren't prepared to attempt it. So it was put off until the late spring of 1944. But what would happen in the meanwhile? A worldwide holding action. The Red Army would have to hang on to its positions in Russia, the Americans would go on inching their way into the Japanese empire, and the Allies everywhere would commit their forces to campaigns designed only to keep the Axis from expanding further. In the years between Pearl Harbor and the Normandy invasion the war around the world grew progressively larger, more diffuse, less conclusive, and massively more chaotic.

Those were desperate years. The storm center then was in Russia, where the German army was hurling attack after overwhelming attack at the Soviet lines. To this day, most Russians think World War II was something that happened primarily in their country and the battles everywhere else in the world were a sideshow. In August 1943, for instance, in the hilly countryside around the town of Kursk (about 200 miles south of Moscow), the German and Soviet armies collided in an uncontrolled slaughter: more than four million men and thousands of tanks desperately maneuvered through miles of densely packed minefields and horizon-filling networks of artillery fire. It may have been the single largest battle fought in human history, and it ended—like all the battles on the eastern front—in a draw.

The American military, meanwhile, was conducting campaigns that to this day are almost impossible to understand or justify. What was the point, for instance, of the Allied invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943? None of the reporters who covered it could figure it out. It was poorly planned and incompetently commanded, and its ultimate goal seemed preposterous: even if it had gone perfectly, it would have left a large army in northern Tuscany faced with the impossible task of getting across the Alps. Most baffling of all, Allied commanders up the line didn't even seem to care whether it worked perfectly—or at all. One reporter, Eric Sevareid, watched it go on for 18 months of brutal stalemate and wrote an essay for the Nation (it's the angriest and most honest piece in the whole of Reporting World War II) suggesting that its only real purpose was "to lay waste and impoverish for many years the major part of Italy."

Somewhere in the bureaucratic stratosphere, of course, there were people who did know the justification for it and for everything else the Allies were doing. They just didn't want to tell anybody what those reasons were. The Italian invasion, as it happened, was the result of a complicated attempt to appease the Russians, who were increasingly doubtful that their allies were serious about taking on Germany. It was intended as an expedient compromise—a direct confrontation with the Axis, in an area where defeat wouldn't be fatal. In other words, there was no compelling military logic behind it; it was just an arbitrary way of marking time while the buildup for the real invasion went on.

No wonder American combat troops in those years started calling themselves "G.I. Joe." Reporters passed the term back home as a charming bit of sentimentality; they didn't know, or chose to ignore, that it was really a despairing joke—"G.I." for "general issue," a mass-produced unit of basic military hardware. The soldiers knew the score: for all the halos of glory they were being heaped with in the press, they were nothing more than anonymous, interchangeable items in the limitless inventory of the war. No "politician" (as they called any noncombatant decision maker) gave a damn what they were going through; you'd never find one of them getting anywhere near an actual battle. For a politician, the combat zones were an abstract domain of hostile contact where the war's industrial bureaucracies impinged on one another. But for the soldiers who had to go into them, the combat zones were proving to be more horrible than their darkest imaginings. Victory or defeat in a campaign became irrelevant to them too when they found themselves in the worst place on earth.

"The infantryman hates shells more than anything else," Bill Mauldin wrote about the front lines in Italy. His phrasing makes it sound like the men were expressing an aesthetic preference, like a choice among distasteful rations. But "shells" weren't a few rounds of artillery floating in at odd intervals. They were deafening, unrelenting, maddening, terrifying. One fortified American position in the Pacific recorded being hit in a single day by 16,000 shells. In the middle of an artillery barrage hardened veterans would hug each other and sob helplessly. Men caught in a direct hit were unraveled by the blast, blown apart into shards of flying skeleton that would maim or kill anyone nearby. Afterward the survivors would sometimes discover one of their buddies so badly mangled they couldn't understand how he could still be breathing; all they could do was give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an "M" for "morphine" on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose. (One soldier marked with that "M" was Bob Dole, wounded in Italy in 1945; he wasn't released from the hospital until 1948.) Commanders came to prefer leading green troops into combat, because the veterans were far more scared. They knew what was coming.

"There was the brassy, metallic twang of the small 50mm knee mortar shells as little puffs of dirty smoke appeared thickly around us. The 81mm and 90mm mortar shells crashed and banged all along the ridge. The whiz-bang of the high velocity 47mm gun's shells (also an antitank gun) was on us with its explosion as soon as we heard it. . . . The slower screaming, whining sound of the 75mm artillery shells seemed the most abundant. Then there was the roar and rumble of the huge enemy 150mm howitzer shell, and the kaboom of its explosion. The bursting radius of these big shells was of awesome proportions. Added to all this noise was the swishing and fluttering overhead of our own supporting artillery fire. Our shells could be heard bursting out across the ridge over enemy positions. The noise of small-arms fire from both sides resulted in a chaotic bedlam of racket and confusion."

This is from a memoir by Eugene B. Sledge, a marine who fought in the Pacific. It was issued by the marines' own printing house, with prefaces by a couple of brigadier generals. That might lead it to be discounted as the usual party-line war-memoir whitewash, especially since Sledge does try to put the best possible spin on everything the marines did in the Pacific, finding excuses for every act of grotesque cruelty and softening the routine drone of daily barbarism. He even claims that marines said things like "all fouled up" and "when the stuff hits the fan." (To be fair, Sledge is an unusually kindhearted man, who records with great satisfaction the rescue of Okinawan ponies trapped in the combat zone.) But notice the connoisseurlike precision in this passage, the sense shared by writer and readers that each shell in a barrage sounds its own distinct note of lethality. And one may notice too that Sledge's whole memoir is free of reporters' words like "occult" and "eerie" and "ghostly." The adjectives that occur most often are "insane," "hellish," and "unendurable."

The major campaign Sledge fought in was Okinawa, which took place toward the end of the war. It was expected to be quick: one more island recaptured from a defeated enemy. But the Japanese withdrew deep into Okinawa's lush interior, where the rains and the dense foliage made the few roads impassable. The marines had to bring their supplies in on foot—carrying mortars and shells, water and food on their backs across miles of ravine-cut hills. Often they were so exhausted they couldn't move when the enemy attacked. The battle lines, as so often happened in the war, soon froze in place. The quick campaign lasted for months.

Conditions on the front rapidly deteriorated. Soldiers were trapped in their foxholes by barrages that went on for days at a time. They were stupefied by the unbroken roar of the explosions and reduced to sick misery by the incessant rain and deepening mud. They had to use discarded grenade cans for latrines, then empty the contents into the mud outside their foxholes. The rain washed everything into the ravines; the urine and feces mixed with the blood and the shreds of rotting flesh blown by the shell bursts from the hundreds of unburied bodies scattered everywhere. The smell was so intolerable it took an act of supreme will for the soldiers to choke down their rations each day. Sledge calls it "an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool."

He writes, "If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade."

The soldiers began to crack. As Sledge writes, "It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane." He catalogs the forms the insanity took: "from a state of dull detachment seemingly unaware of their surroundings, to quiet sobbing, or all the way to wild screaming and shouting." Sledge himself began having hallucinations that the dead bodies were rising at night. "They got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something." It was a relief to shake himself alert and find the corpses decomposing in their accustomed spots.

How could any commander have ordered troops into such an evil place? The commanders may not have known. Only gradually, as the debriefings and the casualty reports began filtering up the chain of command—only through the slow accumulation of years of data—did conditions in the battle zones become widely understood. The casualty figures from Okinawa were a demonstration that even at the end of the war the military bureaucracies of the combatant nations hadn't yet learned, or didn't care, what the combat zones were routinely doing to the soldiers who fought in them. Around 100,000 Japanese soldiers died on Okinawa—a few hundred were captured, mostly those who were too badly wounded to commit suicide. About 100,000 of the native inhabitants of the island died as well. Almost 8,000 Americans were killed or missing; almost 32,000 were wounded. And there were more than 26,000 "neuropsychiatric" casualties—more than a third of the American casualties in the Okinawa combat zone were soldiers who were driven insane.

Part Two

In the First Book of Maccabees it's written that Alexander the Great "made many wars, and won many strongholds, and slew the kings of the earth, and went through to the ends of the earth, and took spoils of many nations, insomuch that the earth was quiet before him." Uncharacteristically for the Bible, there is no moral judgment offered on the way Alexander chose to pass his time. Maybe this is because there couldn't be. There are certain people whose lives are so vastly out of scale with the rest of humanity, whether for good or evil, that the conventional verdicts seem foolish. Alexander, like Genghis Khan or Napoleon, was born to be a world wrecker. He single-handedly brought down the timeless empires of pagan antiquity and turned names like Babylon and Persia into exotic, dim legends. His influence was so dramatic and pervasive that people were still talking about him as the dominant force in the world centuries after he was dead. The writers of the Apocrypha knew that he was somehow responsible for the circumstances that led to the Maccabean revolt, even though he'd never set foot in Judea. The Romans knew that their empire was possible only because it was built out of the wreckage Alexander had left behind him in the Middle East. We know that Western civilization is arranged the way it is in large part because Alexander destroyed the civilizations that came before it.

But why had he done it? The author of Maccabees received no divine insight on that score. Nobody did. Even the people who actually knew Alexander were baffled by him. According to all the biographies and versified epics about him that have survived from the ancient world, his friends and subordinates found him almost impossible to read. He never talked about what he wanted or whether there was any conquest that would finally satisfy him; he never revealed the cause of the unappeasable sense of grievance that led him to take on the kings of the earth. Yet his peculiar manner led a lot of people in his entourage to think that he was somehow in touch with divine forces. He frequently had an air of trancelike distraction, as though his brilliant military strategies were dictated by some mysterious inner voice, and he had a habit of staring not quite at people but just over their shoulder, as though he were picking up some ethereal presence in the room invisible to everybody else. But even without these signs, people were bound to think that he was fulfilling a god's unknowable whims. After all, what he was doing made no sense in human terms: it was global destruction for its own sake, and what mortal could possibly want that?

In the late 1930s the people in the inner circles of power in Germany got into the habit of discreetly recording Hitler's table talk. He wasn't much of a conversationalist; unlike Alexander, who appeared to enjoy a nightly session of manly banter around the campfire, Hitler had only two modes at the dinner table: sullen silence and uninterrupted monologue. His followers preserved every scrap of these ramblings anyway—partly to document his greatness of course, but also because, like Alexander's entourage, they wanted to figure him out. They were as puzzled by him as the rest of the world—even more so maybe, becau