When Books Went to War

by Molly Guptill Manning

  Households were also asked to donate paper, rags, metal, and rubber. Families learned to think twice before throwing anything in the garbage. Paper was used to package everything from fuses to antiaircraft shells. Rags, such as old draperies and bedsheets, were needed to wipe clean the engines, power plants, and gun mechanisms in battleships to keep them smoothly operating. Rubber was so essential that when the United States faced a crippling shortage in the summer of 1942, the chairman of the Petroleum War Council announced that there was “not enough nonessential rubber outside the stock-pile to make an eraser for a lead pencil.” President Roosevelt begged Americans to donate any item made of rubber to help the nation overcome this crisis. Once again, the home front did not disappoint. In two weeks, more than 218,000 tons of rubber were collected nationwide, and at the end of the drive, the average contribution was approximately seven pounds of rubber for each man, woman, and child.

  In his January 1942 State of the Union address, the president optimistically said that America’s “workers stand ready to work long hours,” to “turn out more in a day’s work” and “keep the wheels turning, the fires burning twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week” to supply much-needed war material. Ironically, just as millions of Americans took jobs in the defense industries and were paid handsome wages, consumers were asked to curb their spending so factories could focus their efforts on war production. “Life under a war economy will be like living at the depth of a great . . . depression,” the Wall Street Journal reported, to many a worker’s chagrin.

  Rationing was another hardship on Americans. From cooking stoves and sugar cubes to rubber and gasoline, many items were in short supply. Instead of new automobiles rolling off assembly lines, there came vehicles for the war. General Motors manufactured planes, antiaircraft guns, aircraft engines, and diesel engines for submarines. Ford produced bombers, jeeps, armored cars, troop carriers, and gliders. Chrysler built tanks, army trucks, and mine exploders. Gone were the days when families would pile into their jalopies and go pleasure driving; the rationing of cars, gasoline, and rubber put an end to that. Pleasures grew simpler, as people spent more time at the movies, entertaining at home, playing board games—and reading.

  Some adjustments were easier than others. As rationing was extended to even the most common goods, hysteria occasionally crept in. Within a couple of years, sugar, coffee, butter, cheese, canned goods, meat, paper, and clothing were all added to the list of restricted goods. By the end of the war, almost every food, with the exception of fruits and vegetables (which were often grown in backyard victory gardens), was rationed or unpredictably stocked. The appearance of even the most basic items on a store shelf could cause unbridled elation. Even years after the war, one man would never forget the spectacle his mild-mannered neighbor made, running down the street, screaming at the top of her lungs that, at long last, toilet paper was available at the local supermarket. While the director of the Office of Civilian Defense kept a chipper tone about these restrictions (“Whether or not we have more than one cup of coffee a day, or more than one spoonful of sugar in it, has little effect on us, though it may have a large bearing on the outcome of this war”), some found it difficult to take rationing in stride. A mere rumor of a new restriction could set off a stampede as people rushed to stores to stock up before an item was gone for good. When the Office of Price Administration announced civilian consumption of rubber products would be slashed by about 80 percent, one of the greatest buying rushes ever recorded in the sale of sporting goods occurred, as men flocked to stores to buy tens of thousands of golf balls. Women grabbed handfuls of corsets, girdles, and brassieres (the elastic threads used for undergarments were made, in part, from rubber). Panic trumped patriotism, and hoarding became such a problem that even retailers denounced it. “If it is news when a man bites a dog, it is certainly news when a merchant urges a customer not to buy,” one newspaper quipped.

  President Roosevelt occasionally reminded Americans that rationing, supply drives, volunteer activities, and defense work were necessities in fighting total war. In one April 1942 fireside chat, the president maintained that the price for victory was not too high. “If you don’t believe it, ask those millions who live today under the tyranny of Hitlerism. Ask the workers of France and Norway and the Netherlands, whipped to labor by the lash,” Roosevelt said. “Ask the women and children whom Hitler is starving whether the rationing of tires and gasoline and sugar is too great a ‘sacrifice.’” The president gravely concluded, “We do not have to ask them. They have already given us their agonized answers.”

  Considering the myriad ways that the public was asked to contribute to the war effort, that the VBC did not collect ten million books overnight was understandable. Instead, a steady stream of books flowed into the campaign’s donation bins as the drive inched toward its goal.

  As late February gave way to March, Althea Warren’s four-month term as director of the Victory Book Campaign neared an end, with the goal of ten million books far from reached. Warren turned to publishers for help, asking for large donations of newly printed titles. Tens of thousands of new books were shipped to the VBC as a result. The VBC also asked publishers to advertise the need for readers to donate books after they finished reading them. Pocket Books did its part by printing a full-page notice in its paperbacks, asking readers to support sailors and soldiers by bringing their books to a local library for donation, or mailing them to one of the addresses provided (one was for Army libraries, another for Navy libraries).

  By early March 1942, 4 million books had been collected. Yet VBC sorting centers rejected 1.5 million of them as unsuitable for the training camps. Many of the early pleas for books did not mention the (seemingly obvious) need for the public to provide books specifically suited for young men in the services. In some instances, it seemed that the public may have confused the book drive and the waste paper campaign. Newspapers had a field day reporting some of the titles donated. How to Knit, An Undertaker’s Review, and Theology in 1870 were among the million and a half books that would not be sent to the servicemen.

  The VBC did what it could with these titles. It sold decrepit books to the waste paper drive and used the proceeds to purchase textbooks or other highly desired books that were not frequently donated. Children in need benefited from 5,679 juvenile titles, via the VBC and the Save the Children Federation. Books that were topically off-kilter for young men were sent to overburdened libraries in war-industry areas. (Palatial war factories were built in many small towns, causing thousands of people to migrate to them to secure employment; but there was often a shortage of homes, food, and resources to support these burgeoning populations. Libraries in these areas could not meet demand, and the VBC’s donations were greatly appreciated.) Valuable books, such as first editions or extremely rare tomes, were sold and their proceeds were used to purchase books requested by the camps.

  While the VBC did not waste a single book, it could not continue to act as a clearinghouse for all unwanted books in the United States. Newspapers assisted the campaign by publicizing the types of books that Americans in the armed forces would want most. Books “musn’t be dirty, worn or juvenile,” and the “soldier’s preferences are for fiction, biography, history and technical works in that order,” one newspaper instructed. The Red Cross suggested: “Be sure they are of the kind your own son would want to read if he were in the service.”

  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans were leaving training camps and going to war. By the early spring of 1942, American warships were deployed in the Atlantic, Arctic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, and American troops were stationed in South America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Americans were scattered around the world.

  They faced a mix of hardship, exhaustion, boredom, and fear. The infantry who served in North Africa slept on the ground every night, and quickly developed the survival instincts of soldiers. Almost
reflexively, the slightest hum of an airplane sent dirt flying. “Five years ago you couldn’t have got me to dig a ditch for five dollars an hour,” one man said. “Now look at me . . . Any time I get fifty feet from my home ditch you’ll find me digging a new ditch.” Besides developing a penchant for foxholes, the infantry acclimated to months without bathing, weeks without clean socks or clothing, and long periods of eating unsavory rations out of tin cans and packets. They were always filthy, tired, and overburdened. There were times when the men marched all night, could not move a muscle during the day (or risk being detected), and “lived in a way that is inconceivable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” as war correspondent Ernie Pyle described. The infantry—or “the God-damned infantry, as they liked to call themselves”—“had no comforts, and they even learned to live without the necessities,” he added.

  The amount of time spent twiddling thumbs, waiting for something to happen, was almost as miserable as when the fighting started. As Private First Class H. Moldauer complained: “Monotony, monotony, all is monotony. The heat, the insects, the work, the complete absence of towns, women, liquor . . . The irregular mail, which has become regular in its irregularity.” He even found himself resenting “the monotony of prefixing the name with those three little—awfully little—letters: pfc.” While most accounts of war focus on battles, skirmishes, and combat, the everyday life of a soldier consisted of far more waiting than fighting. And there was perhaps nothing that weighed so heavily on the mind and body as waiting. In the words of war correspondent Sergeant Walter Bernstein, war “is nine-tenths ordinary grind with no excitement and a great deal of unpleasantness.” But when excitement came, “it is mostly the loose-boweled kind that you would just as soon be without.”

  When a battle began, the fear of death overwhelmed almost all else. Artillery and mortar fire were terrifying. Their deafening noise was only a precursor to the appalling destruction they unleashed. At their worst, they could atomize a man’s body, sometimes resulting in near-obliteration. A man might be talking to a friend one minute and be unable to recognize him the next. Shells and flak ripped through flesh, limbs were severed, and explosions threw mangled body parts into the air and covered the ground with human carnage. Besides the dangers from above, the earth underfoot was riddled with German mines. One wrong step could change a life. This lurking danger became so ingrained in men’s minds that, even years after the war, veterans would think twice before walking across a patch of grass, preferring to instead traverse an asphalt or concrete pathway.

  Being exposed to a stream of death changed the way the men understood the war and their own role in it. Just as they felt they had checked their individuality at the training-camp gates, in combat the men came to the depressing realization that they were mere cogs in the military’s machine. Like broken equipment that was exchanged for new gear, the Army sent in fresh troops to take the place of those wounded or killed in battle. But the very concept that human beings were treated as replaceable—casting off one man after his life was lost or his body incapacitated and plugging in another who might also be replaced down the line—brought on the uncomfortable feeling that the military viewed men as expendable. According to E. B. Sledge, who served in the First Marine Division on Peleliu and Okinawa, this realization “was difficult to accept.” “We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness,” Sledge said.

  The discomforts, dangers, and stressors of war were a brutal yoke to bear. Lacking relief from the strain, some men inevitably reached a breaking point. As Lieutenant Paul Fussell explained, the soldier “suffers so deeply from contempt and damage to his selfhood, the absurdity and boredom and chickenshit” of military life, “that some anodyne is necessary.” While rest periods provided a temporary relief from the fighting, they offered no escape from the servicemen’s surroundings. Letters from home and books were favorite items because they could be carried anywhere and retrieved whenever one needed a moment of solace, even on the frontlines. Yet overseas mail service was notoriously irregular and painfully slow. Americans in North Africa reported going months without mail. Misunderstandings and frustrations abounded. War correspondent Ernie Pyle reported that one soldier in his unit, who had gone three months without a single letter from his wife, became so disgusted by her remissness that he wrote her of his plans to get a divorce. After mailing this letter, the same man received one huge batch of fifty letters covering the entire three-month period. He immediately sent a telegram to his wife to take back his divorce threats.

  In the absence of mail delivery or diversions afforded by sports equipment and movies, books were often the only entertainment the men had. And they were treasured. According to one Army chaplain, books gave the men “something worthwhile to occupy their minds and make it possible for them to more easily keep their minds on something constructive rather than dwelling too much on the destructive aspects of the war itself.” In addition to merely distracting the men, studies dating back to World War I concluded that books had a therapeutic quality, enabling humans to better process the difficulties and tragedies they endured. Army psychiatrists agreed that books helped divert the mind, providing relief from the anxieties and strains of war. Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: “When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs, goals, defenses, and values,” and a reader will “introject meaning that will satisfy his needs and reject meaning that is threatening to his ego.” From books, soldiers extracted courage, hope, determination, a sense of selfhood, and other qualities to fill voids created by the war.

  Many men who were injured in the war found hope and healing in the books they read as they recovered. Charles Bolte, who was wounded in Africa, hospitalized, and distressed over his future as he faced the amputation of his leg, remembered a momentous day. A friend (who was being treated for a bullet wound) walked up to Bolte’s bed, triumphantly waving a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, which he had found in the hospital library. Bolte found comfort in a story about a hero who discovered that crying relieved the pain in his broken leg. Until then, Bolte had never dared cry. The story convinced him to cover his head with his blankets and give it a try. “It helped me, too,” Bolte said. Although he endured multiple amputation surgeries, Bolte turned to reading throughout his hospitalization and credited books with helping him mend and move forward. “What happens during convalescence from a serious wound can sour or sweeten a man for life,” Bolte remarked. For him, the latter occurred. “It was the first time since grammar school that I’d had enough time to read as much as I wanted to,” he said. While there were many things that helped him heal, Bolte placed the dozens of books he had read as among the most important. Tens of thousands of men would share Bolte’s experience over the course of the war, finding in books the strength they needed to endure the physical wounds inflicted on the battlefield, and the power to heal their emotional and psychological scars as well.

  The therapeutic effect of reading was not a new concept to the librarians running the VBC. In the editorial Warren published on the eve of commencing her tenure as director, she discussed how books could soothe pain, diminish boredom or loneliness, and take the mind on a vacation far from where the body was stationed. Whatever a man’s need—a temporary escape, a comforting memory of home, balm for a broken spirit, or an infusion of courage—the librarians running the VBC were dedicated to ensuring that each man found a book to meet it.

  They needed more of them. Training camps’ stores were being depleted as men were encouraged to take a victory book with them when they left for overseas service. Thousands of donated books were loaded onto Navy ships embarking on a mission. It was not an uncommon sight for piers to be lined with boxes of victory books; servicemen would grab a title b
efore they boarded ship. These journeys could last weeks, and were notorious for their tedium and emptiness. Books were an ideal way to pass the time. As millions of volumes accompanied men as they shipped out overseas, millions more were needed to replenish training camps and keep up with demand.

  In March 1942 Warren left the campaign, replaced by her close friend John Connor, who had served by her side as assistant director. Connor had degrees in business administration and library science, and had worked as an assistant librarian at Columbia University before joining the VBC. He passionately opposed censorship during wartime and was a champion of civil rights. Despite his strong opinions (which were not always popular), his personable manner made him well-liked. As one colleague described Connor, “He was always there with a smile, a handshake, and a kind word.”

  Under Connor’s direction, librarians went into overdrive during the early spring of 1942 and were rewarded with an upswing in book donations. They harped on the types of books soldiers wanted, advertised the books that were most popular, and reminded (and begged) the public to give. Sorting centers happily reported that these efforts impacted not only the quantity of contributions but the quality of books received as well. By April 1942, book donations had climbed to 6.6 million volumes.