Shadows

Last summer, with endless hours in hospital waiting rooms, UCSF shuttles, and hooked up to IVs (I'd say "hours to kill", but that's a bit morbid, in context), I gingerly began leafing through pages of Winston Churchill's magnificent, exhaustive, 6-volume History of World War II.

Wide-ranging in scope, astonishing in detail, intuitively prophetic in political repercussions, strategically masterful, intimate, unforgivingly and proudly British, and above all, rewardingly well-written, this exhaustive personal account propelled me, week after week, through its 4000+ pages and 10 years of tumultuous world events.

I never got as far as WWII in school history classes. Anyway, it would have been American-biased and blinkered, only from December 7, 1941, onward. Iwo Jima and Normandy and the atom bomb. My historical knowledge was generally confined to old war movies, the Diary of Anne Frank, and familial horror stories of the Holocaust. As a teenager in East London, my dad had lived through the Blitz, but claimed to remember only a few highly selective, polished, gems of sanitized stories from the long onslaught. Churchill's detailed history gave me new inroads, new insights, new questions to ask my father, provocative enough to elicit little vignettes nobody in the family had yet heard. Trips to Lake Geneva as a child, dodging Nazi guards. Blacked-out windows on Tube trains. Air-raid shelters dug in London backyards. Peace in our time.

I'd made it to Volume IV when we set sail back in January. Perhaps it was inevitable, given the strategic reach of the Britannic Empire's naval power, but I slowly realized that our deployment was retracing (though, admittedly, out of order) the great naval battlefields of WWII. We began in Pearl Harbor, where we moored for fuel just across from the USS ARIZONA memorial. We sailed through contested Pacific islands, through the Filipino Straits of Surigao (Battle of Leyte Gulf), stopping in Malaysia and Singapore; where on the US Naval base, there is a memorial to the great British sea battle for the fortress. Sailing across the Indian Ocean, port calls in India and Pakistan unsettlingly revealed how steeped those countries' naval forces were, still, in British colonial tradition.

I asked my father to mail me the last three volumes of the series. It seemed fitting to read them as we sailed these waters, redolent with history. The Free French were being installed in Madagascar as we anchored in the Maldives. The air war raged in Iraq and Persia and critical convoys sailed the Red Sea while we patrolled in the Gulf. I sat at a chokingly formal Indian reception, devoured by mosquitoes, while Churchill and Roosevelt debated Indian independence and Mahatma Gandhi refused to eat. The British swept into Athens to flush out Greek communists while I crawled around abandoned gun mounts on a wind-swept Santorini. We steamed through the Straits of Messina just after the Allies' great amphibious assault, wandered through a Rome unscathed from surrender, stared searchingly at Pius XII in the Basilica, and scrambled to the top of the great Rock of Gibraltar to look out, at last, on unfettered Allied control of the Mediterranean.

In between, we watched episodes of Band of Brothers.

And we stopped in Tobruk. Tobruk has great personal meaning for me. Two of my father's cousins, fighting with a South African brigade, were captured there and spent the remainder of the war as Italian, then German, POWs. I'd tracked down one of them, still alert and in his 90s, in South Africa this past fall, to elicit incredible tales of a displaced farm boy whose sweetheart waited patiently on the Cape Town pier, years notwithstanding, for her hero's return.

We were the first American warship to stop in Libya in over 40 years. The local political delegation apologized that all Tobruk had to offer us was a long tour of battlefields, cemeteries, and memorials, but that was what I sought: that was why I'd come, I guess. (Tobruk wasn't even on our initial schedule; Tripoli was.) I wandered around in the blistering heat and touched the gravestones - English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Czech, Greek, Jewish, South African, Free French, Polish, Indian, African. Not forgotten. On top of one of the gravestones was a red paper poppy, the sort they sell in England for memorial days, with the name of a South African soldier, unknown to me, who'd been taken in Tobruk, survived the war as a POW, and passed away in the fulness of life, surviving nearly into the 21st century. Requiescat in pace.

There are no just wars, only justifications for wars. Still, as we sailed homeward across the convoyless Atlantic, cleared at last of U-boats, headed at the close of Churchill's final book into an uncertain post-war modernity, I was left dangling in the great abyss between past and present, ideal and reality, war and politics, posturing and progress. Somewhere, that indomitable spirit yet lurks; the sleeping giant only dozes; the moralist hasn't forgotten. The Empire - tarnished, dusty, and transferred - still stands, a string of lights flickering around the world's oceans, waiting only for electrification.