When Books Went to War

by Molly Guptill Manning

  Regardless of whether men were stationed on secured islands or were fighting for the next one, they all turned to books and magazines. Even on the remotest islands men could rely on receiving their reading ration. War correspondents who reported on the Pacific theater were often amazed at how zealously men read. “In these South Sea isles and waters, known principally to Americans from the books of Melville and Stevenson, it seems fitting that reading is the universal pastime of all the services,” Major Frederick Simpich Jr. reported in an article for National Geographic. “What they read and how much is limited only by the pile of books and magazines available,” he said. Stranded on an island with little to do, men who had avoided reading as civilians found themselves poring over anything they could get their hands on. When one dubious Marine was given Herman Melville’s Typee, he reluctantly started reading it out of sheer boredom. Once he started, he was hooked. His review: “Hot stuff. That guy wrote about three islands I’d been on!”

  As disgruntlement over redeployment spread throughout the services, the Army and Navy turned to the council for help. They faced a morale crisis of serious proportions, and there was only one surefire way of dealing with it: books.

  In 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Trautman attended the council’s annual meeting and stressed just how badly more books were needed. Though thankful for the council’s increase in ASE output over the prior year—from twenty million to fifty million volumes—Trautman insisted that there still were not enough. “There should have been 5 times as many to really go around,” he said. “When a soldier with a monthly pay of $55 is willing to pay 500 francs or 10 American dollars for the privilege of being next in line to read a particular Council Book they are pretty scarce.”

  To make his point, Trautman described his experiences in Europe. One thing that impressed him was how quickly the ASEs fell apart under combat conditions. “A man reads a book to death very quickly while standing in the rain or snow without any shelter to keep the pages dry.” When there were more men than ASEs, it was “not unusual for a man to tear off the portion of a book he had finished to give it to the next man who doesn’t have a book to read saying—‘I’ll save my pages for you.’” Trautman had intended to bring examples of books in “a state of combat exhaustion” to show to the council, but the servicemen had resisted. “‘You wouldn’t take our books away, would you? We can still read them,’” the men had said to Trautman. “So I haven’t any examples of book casualties to show you,” Trautman unapologetically remarked to council members.

  During his tour of the European theater, Trautman saw the ASEs everywhere. On Christmas Day at a Belgian hospital, he spotted an ASE on the floor of the operating room—it had blood on the cover and red smudges on nearly every page for two-thirds of the book. On a visit to a platoon of combat engineers who had gotten separated from the rest of their company, Trautman noticed a pile of about ten ASEs; they were all the books the unit had. They were considered so precious that the platoon commander had ordered the men to read in groups to reduce the wear and tear of multiple handlings. In Nazi prison camps, Trautman watched as ASEs were distributed through the International YMCA; they were one of the most important items in making life bearable for prisoners, he said. While on a tour through Holland, Trautman discussed how he cautiously parked his vehicle near a military police station for safekeeping. Overnight, his car was burglarized anyway. Of all the valuables inside, the only thing that had been taken was a carton of thirty-two ASEs. Although it seemed that the books had reached units in every cranny of the world, and were treasured by the men who read them, Trautman said there was one resounding complaint: “There just aren’t enough of them.”

  Joining Trautman’s plea for more books were the soldiers stationed in the Pacific. For example, a member of the United States Infantry wrote the council in May 1945, stating that the ASEs had provided “many hours of precious relaxation not easily obtainable by servicemen stranded in a foreign country with a military unit.” At the time he wrote, he was “enjoying somewhat of a respite before once again plunging into the routine of war.” But “off-duty pleasures remain pretty much a personal problem with the individual soldier,” he said. Under the circumstances, the men hungered for books and other reading materials. “Our appetite is unquenchable,” he declared. “Our recreational problem is at present extraordinary,” and if the council saw fit “to answer this request with a supply of books, I promise you they will be distributed equitably throughout the company, in whose behalf I am writing.”

  Another source of pressure for more books was the Special Services Division. Burdened with the responsibility of providing morale-boosting reading material to Americans stationed around the world, Special Services officers feared they would not be able to meet the demand for books as servicemen faced redeployment. At a 1945 meeting of two hundred Special Services officers, it was estimated that more books were needed to the scale of one new book per man per month in combat areas. In the words of General Joseph Byron, who headed the division, ASEs were “the most important morale work done by the Special Services Division.” One Special Services officer who had worked with combat troops for over two years grew so worried about the men he supplied that he wrote the council begging for more books. He insisted there just “never seems to be enough,” and that combat troops were “STARVED” for titles by Thorne Smith, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, H. Allen Smith, Tiffany Thayer, Sinclair Lewis, and Lloyd Douglas. The men also never stopped asking for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Chicken Every Sunday, Forever Amber, and Strange Fruit.

  Even letters from servicemen’s family members emphasized that troops in the Pacific needed books more than ever. In one particularly frank letter, a woman pleaded with the council to help her brother and his entire unit; their sanity hung in the balance. Her brother and his Marine battalion had just finished some very tough fighting and a recent letter from him stressed how desperate they were for good books. “You see,” she said, “my kid brother has been fighting for 14 mos . . . and right now things are quieting down for them.” But, “they had just received the bad news that they must spend 24 to 30 mos. in [the Pacific] before they can be replaced and it seems as though the boys are pretty depressed and clamoring for some good reading matter.” She closed: “P.S. If you make it a practice to send out different books at regular intervals, please keep these fellows on the mailing list. These ‘Leathernecks’ are fighting not only Japs, but the elements and disease and believe me, if they don’t get something to take their minds off their surroundings, they’ll most surely crack up.”

  In early 1945 Philip Van Doren Stern met with Army officers to brainstorm. How could more books be produced? Stern reported back to the council that the Army was considering asking the War Production Board to compel printers to manufacture ASEs. While the government was contractually obligated to supply the council with paper for ASEs, when Stern learned of an opportunity to buy 141 tons of paper outside the amount provided by the government, the executive committee authorized Stern to make the purchase. The U.S. Army and Special Services Division also worked to drum up resources to ensure that the maximum number of books could be produced.

  Despite these efforts, there was one missing ingredient to bolster production: money. In May 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Trautman reported that the Army had no funds to pay for any additional production costs for council books; the only way to print more ASEs would be to somehow reduce the cost of each book. “If enough funds were available,” Trautman told the council’s executive board, “the Army could increase their order for ASE books by about one third or approximately 160,000 to 175,000 books” per month. But Trautman was out of ideas on how to secure the funding he needed. After he left the meeting, the executive board had a discussion about trimming all waste from the production cost, including the controversial one-cent royalty factored into the price of each ASE. From the beginning, some authors and publishing companies opposed receiving any royalty from the ASEs, but the council insisted on keep
ing its contracts uniform, binding all authors and publishing companies to identical terms to avoid drafting hundreds of individual contracts tailored to the whims and preferences of each party. Now, with the need for ASEs greater than ever, the council reversed itself, reasoning that the benefits flowing from the elimination of the royalty outweighed the need for uniform contracts. Authors and publishing companies would be given the option of waiving the one-cent royalty.

  There was an additional supply-side problem, however. The council’s editorial committee complained to Philip Van Doren Stern that they were “scraping the bottom of the barrel to secure new titles.” They wanted to reduce the number of books in each series—from forty to twenty-eight—to avoid recommending lackluster titles. Although Stern opposed this idea, he was sympathetic to the committee’s dilemma. Because of the war, the number of titles being published for the civilian market each year had dwindled. In 1942 there was a 10 percent decline when compared to 1941, and the number continued to fall each ensuing year. At the same time, the number of manuscripts submitted to publishing companies drastically fell. Many established and aspiring authors had joined the services or devoted themselves to war work—they were not writing books. As one newspaper remarked, “even if the adage about the comparative mights of pen and sword is still true, the draft boards find nothing about it in their rules of procedure.”

  Ultimately, Stern offered a compromise. At an executive committee meeting, he proposed that the council increase the number of reprints each month. The committee endorsed Stern’s plan—it was recommended that twenty-eight of each month’s titles be new (meaning, never before printed as ASEs); the remaining titles could be composed of reprints or “made” books (the latter referred to council compilations of stories, radio scripts, poems, and the like). In the end, ninety-nine titles were reprinted and seventy-three books were made, which helped alleviate the burden on the editorial committee. Examples of the council’s made books include The New Yorker Reporter at Large, Five Western Stories, The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales, Love Poems, Eugene O’Neill’s Selected Plays, and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Lyrics and Sonnets.

  Even while fighting his frontline battles with economics and supply and demand, Stern faced a rearguard action with one formidable ally: Isabel DuBois, the head of the Library Section of the Navy. Just as with the VBC, DuBois had strong opinions about the council’s work and never restrained herself from voicing them. Throughout June 1945, she penned countless letters to “My dear Mr. Stern,” grumbling about various mundane issues with the ASEs. She loathed titles that began with the word “Selected,” that is, “‘Selected Short Stories of ________,’ or ‘Selected Poems of ________.’” She thought they sounded dull. DuBois also complained about the T-series of ASEs because “not any of them have the staples through the covers”; they were glued together. In private memoranda, council members grew increasingly annoyed with DuBois. As one publisher said, she had an amazing penchant for making “a huge issue of a triviality which no one else ever troubled about.”

  Stern, whose greatest virtue must have been patience, responded to each of DuBois’s concerns. DuBois was assured that the council would try to avoid “selected” titles in later editions. In the matter of staples versus glue, Stern explained to DuBois that, in the beginning, when there were print runs of only 50,000 copies of each book, stapling the books was possible. However, as the project ballooned to print runs of 155,000, printers had become overly burdened, and adding staples had become an impossibility. Stern added that the council had “not received one single complaint from overseas after the distribution of more than fifty million books,” which suggested “the water-proof glued on covers must be working satisfactorily.” Stern’s boldness was a tactical mistake. DuBois made sure to get in the last word. She clarified that her prior letter “should be taken as a complaint,” and she believed ASE covers were prone to becoming detached and “steps should be taken to make the covers . . . more secure.”

  Even the council’s printers seemed to resent working with the Navy. When the council was forced to change the packaging for the ASEs out of necessity, some naval inspectors threw a fit and took out their frustration on the printing companies that delivered these packages. The situation grew so heated at the Street & Smith printing firm that its manager threatened to “no longer print any books for the Navy because of the general attitude” of one cantankerous inspector. The council had to intervene to pacify all parties involved. Through the professionalism of Stern, these headaches and complaints never slowed the production of the ASEs.

  As the council intensified its efforts to print books for the Pacific, its ASEs in Europe continued to make an impact. In the summer and fall of 1945, preparations were made for the prosecution of dozens of Nazi Germany’s most prominent political and military leaders at Nuremberg. They were charged with conspiring against peace, planning and waging a war of aggression, and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The men charged included Hermann Göring, a senior Nazi official, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germany’s minister of foreign affairs.

  After spending several weeks interrogating war criminals, with a copy of Henry Hough’s Country Editor tucked in his pocket, one major, who was a veteran of both world wars, finally had a chance to write to Hough in September 1945. Whenever he had a chance, he would read a few pages about Hough’s life as an editor and contributor to a small newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard. He cherished every page. “When one is far from home and from a past which treasured a boyhood in an old Massachusetts town, the years roll back easily and a mere closing of the eyes brings it all near again.” He especially appreciated being reminded of simpler times, considering the historic task he had just completed.

  Just two weeks ago at Nuremberg where I was interrogating some of those men who brought suffering to millions of innocent people, von Ribbentrop asked if I were finished with it. Those men are reading books of this type given them by the Red Cross. I wish every one of them there could read Country Editor. It tells more eloquently than a recitation of America’s strength and greatness—the simple formula that has made us the envied nation of the whole world. The obese and irritable man next door in a plain cell room in marked contrast to his former homes was reading the Bible. Because Göring wears glasses, a guard was in his cell to take them from him when he finished reading.

  Reflecting on his war experiences and then Nuremberg, this major found himself pondering the question “What makes America great?” He gave his answer to Hough: it was “because there are the people such as you write about in the Country Editor.”

  TEN

  Peace at Last

  My old division was one of several whose only rest seemed to come when they were waiting for boats to carry them to other lands where the language was different but the war was the same. These amphibious creatures have seen so much action that when they land back in the States they will, just from force of habit, come off shooting and establish a beachhead around Coney Island. There they will probably dig in and fight until demobilization thins their ranks and allows the local partisans to push the survivors back into the sea.

  —BILL MAULDIN

  WITH ONE FRONT collapsed, and the full strength of the Allies bearing down on Japan, those serving in the armed forces began to think about their futures. Over time, the war had stolen from them the details of what home was like, and some men wondered whether it would measure up to the ideals they had projected onto it. As one serviceman explained: “Home had faded from us. Home had become an irreality, a blurred recollection where the names, the faces and voices of all but the closest and dearest ones were lost. They were forced from us by the guns, the planes, the mines and bombs.” The one place that should have felt familiar did not. Where would they live after the war? What would home be like? Would it be difficult to become a civilian again?

  Finding a job was a major concern. When they had joined the Army or Navy, the economy still had not fully recovered from
the Great Depression. As late as 1940, unemployment lingered at an estimated 15 percent. Plus, during the war, women and minorities had entered the workforce, taking jobs that were traditionally filled by white men. There was concern that if these new workers remained employed, there would be few jobs for returning veterans. Some soldiers also wondered whether they could find employment that utilized the skills they had developed while at war. In the course of training, many servicemen enrolled in educational courses and spent long hours studying mathematics, science, and technical books to pass examinations and climb the ranks. They did not want this knowledge to go to waste.

  The council began to include in each monthly ASE series practical nonfiction for those mulling over their futures. Several titles that were selected for this purpose were ultimately published after the war ended. Darrel and Frances Huff’s Twenty Careers of Tomorrow discussed how the war affected employment, and provided information about a range of occupations—including working in plastics, fabrics, recycling, aviation, refrigeration, publishing, television and radio, education, medicine, market research, and the automobile industry. Another useful title printed at the behest of the Army was You and Your Future Job, by William G. Campbell and James H. Bedford. This book provided information on how to choose a vocation, with specific advice for those who had become disabled during the war, people who were over forty years of age, and women. For those looking for pointers on how to make money no matter what profession they chose, there was John Wharton’s The Theory and Practice of Earning a Living.