Axis/Axes to Grind studies various political themes in American World War II novels of three decades. These themes include "big picture" novels that interpret the war's meaning and predict the postwar political climate (The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions) and novels that dramatize rebellions against military authority (From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny and Catch-22). "Political" also includes conflicts between various minorities and the dominant socio-political culture (White, Christian and heterosexual). Racial conflicts appear in If He Hollers Let Him Go, And Then We Heard the Thunder and Guard of Honor); subversive gay themes inform The Gallery; anti-Semitic conflicts appear in several novels, particularly the Holocaust novel Point of No Return.

War novels written well after the war tend to see the war through the lens of the author's own times. Thus, the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war inform the pacifism in Slaughterhouse-Five. And in Gravity's Rainbow, the transnational cartels that enable the V-2 rocket attacks against England prefigure the military-industrial complex of Pynchon's time.