The rewards of war In ‘Human Smoke,’ Maine writer Nicholson Baker shares his sometimes-troubling revelations about World War II

George Santayana had the right idea.

The American philosopher said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Nicholson Baker didn’t set out to prove Santayana right with his new World War II history, “Human Smoke,” but that was the end effect.

“Human Smoke” is an anecdotal history of events leading up to the United States’ entrance into WWII.

Hasn’t “The Greatest War” been done to death? The South Berwick novelist thinks there’s always room for more perspective.

“This is a war that everyone thinks about differently than any other war,” said Baker, 51. “It was the most brutal, most disastrous of any war in human history. Everyone has to make sense of it.”

What “Human Smoke,” culled from newspapers, diaries and other written sources, does is to provide context to events running from 1892 to 1942.

“You can’t live through something in your mind without lots of points of reference,” Baker said.

Baker got the idea for the book while writing his 2001 novel “Double Fold.” There was an old mill building on his property, full of old newspapers, and he began flipping through them.

“There was lots of stuff about World War II, and it gave me a different way of looking at the war,” he said.

He started “Human Smoke” in 2005, and worked on it off and on for two years, poring through all manner of publications.

“I wanted this book to be something anyone could do,” Baker said. “It’s not meant to be the work of a professional historian, but rather an interested bystander.”

Baker has been a longtime proponent of the value of historical newspapers. In 1999, he established a nonprofit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.

“In writing this book, I read maybe 1,500 New York Times articles, and I grew to have an enormous respect for the newspaper, which was, in the era before spy agencies, a kind of open-source intelligence service for the government and for the public,” he said. “You can sleuth out a lot of things just by reading what was in the news, especially some of the smaller articles in the back.”

In the book, British leader Winston Churchill came off as a man who craved violence. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent his wife, Eleanor, seemed somewhat anti-Semitic.

Among those who showed better were some of the many pacifists of the time, most prominently India’s Mohandas Gandhi.

“These were very different people, with different levels of pacifism,” Baker said. “They were realistic. They knew Hitler was bad. But is it going to make him any better to randomly destroy buildings in his country [through daily aerial bombings]? Emotions are ungovernable, and everything gets more violent [because of the destruction].”

As a nonhistorian, Baker said he was constantly surprised by what he learned through his research.

“The thing that kept hitting me is how terrible it was for the Jews in Germany, long before the war and long before Hitler came to power,” he said. “You have to trace it back through the ’30s to see what allowed Hitler to carry out his fantasy, what gave him power, what radicalized the people of Germany.”

He also was shocked to learn about the British naval blockade in the Atlantic Ocean, which limited supplies, including food, going to Europe.

“One big surprise was the use of hunger as a weapon, the decision on the part of the British and Churchill to starve people into a state of revolt,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how tremendous a decision that was, and what terrible consequences it had.”

Another bone of contention between the two sides was the Lend-Lease Act, through which the supposedly neutral United States “lent” war supplies to Britain.

“The Germans viewed America as a gigantic factory,” Baker said. “They saw America as part of the Jews’ war.”

Baker wants readers to draw their own conclusions from “Human Smoke.” So what lessons does he think can be learned from the book and applied toward America’s conflict in Iraq?

“Even in this case, when something is so evil, it’s possible that not waging war is preferable to waging war, if there can be some kind of negotiation,” he said. “It’s been proven time and time again that you can’t use the giant military machine to install an abstract like democracy.”