John Wiley & Sons Inc. 358 pp. $29.95

"Without antifreeze, the panzers wouldn't start; without salve, gun breeches were frozen solid; 200,000 Germans became casualties of frostbite; men died when their anuses froze while defecating; and self-inflicted wounds became common. Overnight, the Germans lost their mobility and firepower," former Morgan Stanley chairman Barton Biggs writes in his engrossing new book Wealth, War & Wisdom.

With this volume, Biggs has provided legions of avid readers of histories of World War II with a fresh reason for revisiting that inexhaustible subject. Although he does not bring much new information to the fore about the war era, he provides a surprising analytical dimension that adds value to the book for investors.

Biggs finds that the world's stock markets correctly discerned pivotal changes in the war and ultimate outcomes far in advance of political leaders, strategists and shapers of public opinion.

"The London stock market deduced in the early summer of 1940, even before the Battle of Britain at a time when the world and even many English despaired, that Britain would not be conquered. Stocks made a bottom for the ages in early June, although it wasn't evident until October that there would be no German invasion in 1940 and until Pearl Harbor 18 months later, that Britain would prevail," Biggs writes.

Before the deep thinkers of the media grasped the importance of two major naval confrontations in the Pacific, Biggs notes, the markets exhibited their prescience.

"The New York stock market recognized that the victories at the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in May and June of 1942 were the turn of the tide in the Pacific, and from the lows of that spring never looked back, but I can find no such thoughts in the newspapers or from the military experts of the time," Biggs writes.

He cites several experts on the wisdom of crowds to advance the proposition that the collective judgments of crowds are superior to those of purported experts. He borrows the term "complex adaptive system" to explain the prescience of the aggregations of investors that constitute markets.

Individual agents, Biggs maintains, can provide little worthwhile help on the working of the market. He advises listening to the market at crucial turning points and ignoring the pontifications of the experts.

In advancing his proposition, Biggs offers a plethora of charts and graphs to illustrate what the markets were doing at various points during the war and the postwar era. He inserts those graphics and analytical digressions adroitly and does not detract from the flow of his narrative of the war in the process.

That narrative recapitulates the major events of the war and profiles the lives of the major players: Sir Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto and others.

Biggs does not offer this highly readable tome merely as escapism for history buffs. His ultimate purpose is to advise investors on how to diversify their assets for surviving major upheavals and to admonish them to pay attention to the markets to discern ahead of time their ultimate disposition during turning points in history.