The title of this novel alludes to Wouk's primary source for his study: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869).

Wouk wishes to do for his century and for World War II what the Russian author did for his era and the Napoleonic Wars. Wouk is also indebted to two classical sources to which he refers in the narrative and which also tell of the heroics of national heroes in times of national crises: Homer's Iliad and Thucydides' The History of the Peleponnesian War. Wouk indicates in the afterword that he also relies on the tradition of the romance, in which authors freely mix historical fact with fiction; in this novel, the mixture involves the use of fictional characters to influence the course of historical events.