I recently discovered a forgotten masterpiece: Herman Wouk’s 40-hour epic retelling of World War II. It only made me realize how lame WWII movies being made today really are, and how most of them only wish to show the brutality and violence, but never reveal the emotional costs faced by all sides.
I was vexed to discover that most of the series is impossible to find online except for dubs taken from VHS tapes. So I ordered a used copy of all the DVDs and began transferring them with the help of my iPhone. Making these transfers has become my 2026 420 ceremony. The final episode will be posted on April 19, 2026.
Perhaps you weren’t alive in 1983 when the entire series was shown on prime time television. Or maybe you just missed all the hoopla. If so you are in for a real treat, as well as perhaps the longest binge-watch of your life.
Before you dive in, however, here’s a message from the creator:
“War and Remembrance, both as a novel and as a long film serial, is intended in the first instance as entertainment on the grand scale. In this my models have been classics like Les Miserables and the historical romances of Dumas and Stendhal.
It may grieve the judicious that the great public learns much of its history from entertainment. But such is the case. A writer like myself, living in the present moment an uncanonized by generations of readers, is well advised to make the history unimpeachable by the highest scholarly standards. Although only one reader in a hundred, and one viewer in a thousand, may know or care, that is what I have done to the best of my powers, in the sixteen years of arduous research for War and Remembrance and its predecessor, The Winds of War.
World War II was actually the first global war, and — failing world suicide — almost certainly the last. It had the dramatic structure of a manhunt. The worst monster in human history, Adolf Hitler, sprang out on the international stage and led the German nation to commit unprecedented crimes. For a while, with his formidable ally, militaristic Japan, he threatened to achieve a world empire.
The black night of barbarism that would have descended on a Hitlerite world is beyond imagining, as the barbarism he actually executed in destroying the Jews of Europe is to this day beyond fathoming. Barely in time, the rest of the world laid aside its differences, and united long enough to smash Hilter’s Germany and do the monster to death. America and Russia, with their allies, accomplished this together; one cannot say either could have done it alone, so powerful was Hitler’s vast engine of war.
Today it is an easy thing for thinkers to assert that Nazism was a fraud, a forged check on human nature, doomed to fail. We who lived through the global manhunt, and fought in it, know what a close-run thing it was.
I have done my best to make these great and terrible days live again, graphically and truthfully, in War and Remembrance. To do so, I have portrayed not only the famous battles — Midway, Stalingrad, Normandy, Kursk, Leyte Gulf — but what we now call the Holocaust. For that insane and tragically successful assault on an entire people was at the white-hot core of Hitler’s feral attack on world civilization. If I were not Jewish I would still have to tell the same story, if with less grief and passion than I have done, in order to delineate the world manhunt as it truly happened.
The motto of the film is the same as that of my book.
The beginning of the end of war lies in remembrance.”