Dr. Peter Paret, military historian and author, was born in Berlin, Germany in 1924, and his youth and life were shaped by the political and economic milieu of the capitol. He was also "enormously influenced" by his parents, who were highly educated, and although they were very much alike in their interests, they were temperamentally quite different. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1932 but Paret's father remained in his life as long as he lived. His surname is of French extraction, the family having immigrated to Germany in the late 1680s from the Ardeche after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The patriarch of the émigrés became an advisor to one of the German princes along the Rhine [Annotator's Note: Rhine River]. The family prospered and settled in the Wurttemberg [Annotator's Note: Württemberg, Germany] area where they lived for the next two centuries. Every generation included a Lutheran clergyman and in the later generations, one of the descendants married into a great family of the district, and the Parets became involved in the Lutheran Church's relationship with the state. Paret's parents, who met in a philosophy seminar, took up residence in Berlin when they married.

Surrounded by books, the environment of Peter Paret's childhood amplified his aptitude for scholarship and informed his love of art. He learned to read early and remembers consuming a young person's illustrated "history of the world" at the age of six. He was taken to museums, and would study the catalogues. He visited Sans Souci, the summer palace of Frederick the Great at Potsdam, Germany. His mother's family was Jewish, and the situation in Germany became difficult for her, so she left Berlin shortly after her divorce, leaving Paret with his father. Paret recalled the posters for the national elections of 1932, and writing a little essay on their imagery and symbolism. In 1933, he joined his mother in Vienna, Austria. There he lived through the attempted coup, but said it had no particular impact on him. His mother remarried a man, an analyst, who turned out to be a "tremendous" stepfather. The man had connections in America, and the trio left Austria for the United States; within six months they were established in the new country.

After high school in San Francisco, California, Peter Paret entered the University of California at Berkley. He admitted to being a "very bad student" with a terrible grade average, but at the end of 1939, his teachers urged the university to accept him. He went into the Army after three semesters, returned to his studies when he came back in 1946, and graduated in 1949. Paret goes on to describe his professors and the subjects he studied.

Drafted into the Army in 1943, Peter Paret was thrown in with unfamiliar types, and became a fairly solitary man. His basic training took place at Mineral Wells, Texas, and although he could never complete the physically challenging exercises, the results of his IQ tests were persuasive enough to graduate him into a staff position in combat intelligence. Paret deployed to New Guinea, where he refused a desk job at headquarters on the principle that it was no way to fight the war. Paret was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, 6th Infantry Division and went on long-range patrols to "interfere with" the retreating Japanese. On one of these missions, he came upon an injured Japanese soldier and insisted on taking him prisoner, causing uproar among the other 11 men in his unit who wanted to shoot him rather than carry him back to camp. Later, on the second day after the Division landed on Luzon [Annotator's Note: Luzon, Philippines], Paret was forced to fire the only shots he spent in the war. The landing had been unopposed, but some of the Philippine natives came to headquarters to report a Japanese soldier hiding in the distance. Paret was sent with two sailors from the boats that brought them ashore into the open country that was dotted with thickets, and was shown where an "enormous" Japanese sergeant was prone in the bushes six or seven yards away. Paret motioned for him to come out, but the man refused to surrender. With a shout, the Japanese soldier reached into his belt and pulled out a hand grenade. Paret said he, "had to shoot the poor bastard," and put five rounds through him. Paret said it would have been suicide and worse if he hadn't done it. The two incidents balanced out in his mind.

As Peter Paret's battalion [Annotator's Note: 1st Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, 6th Infantry Division] moved down the peninsula of Luzon, where there were still some Japanese in holding out in caves, they would sometimes encounter artillery fire. At one point when Paret was in a long but shallow trench, he decided to scramble between volleys to a deeper foxhole. While he was making the move, he ignored a pop in his rear. When he undressed that evening, dried blood had glued his pants to his body. A medic gave him a shot, and he stayed the course with a little hole in his rump. Describing his broad view of the war in the Pacific, Paret said it made "entire" sense; the Japanese had to be stopped; Paret said that "we did it, and that was that." He said he would have fought in Europe if he had been sent there, even though his father was a decorated German veteran of World War 1.

After the war, Peter Paret attended King's College in London, England for graduate studies under Dr. Michael Howard, whose tutelage Paret said was not intellectually beneficial, but allowed him to work without restraint. Paret said his professional success came from "rather good luck," and described how, while researching at the Royal United Services Institute, he discovered a roughly bound volume under a stack of teacups. It turned out to be the register of a prison that had been organized the day after the attempt on Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] life, and contained information on people arrested, tortured, killed and released in connection with the incident. Based on that source, Paret wrote and published his first academic work, which led to other opportunities. When he graduated in 1960, Dr. Howard offered him a three year teaching appointment at King's College. He discussed the proposal with a good friend, and while he entertained doubts about working in the English academic world, another opportunity presented itself. Paret had met his future wife, and almost simultaneously they got job offers from America, hers from Yale [Annotator's Note: in New Haven, Connecticut], his from Princeton [Annotator's Note: in Princeton, New Jersey]. They left for America, and throughout their careers he was proud to say she earned twice the money he did.

According to Peter Paret, the great Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz tried to understand war with a prejudice that he possessed very early on: he totally rejected any firm system of thinking. That meant something to Paret, and his interest in the man began there. When, along with Michael Howard, he embarked on the epic translation of Clausewitz's work, he knew it would be a daunting task, but felt it worth doing. It doesn't mean as much to him as his own work, but Paret "feels pretty good" about its having become the standard. Paret has focused his scholarship on the years during which the French Revolution destroyed the political systems of Europe; he is captivated by the music, literature and art of the time. He endorses Clausewitz's contention that real strength lies in the individual, not in some system used to control the way people function; that notion of liberty and freedom has always attracted him. Paret argues that Clausewitz is timeless because war expresses a basic emotion apparent in all men, although he stresses that anyone looking to him for advice about winning a war would be lost. Interpretation, in Paret's opinion, is simply finding other ways of asking questions; there is no absolute truth. Paret feels it is important to teach World War 2 because it was the essential experience of an entire generation and gave the world another opportunity to straighten itself out. It failed, he said, largely, but not entirely, and may help man to see the next one coming.