When Books Went to War

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When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

Molly Guptill Manning

 

https://www.amazon.com/When-Books-Went-War-Stories/dp/0544535022/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483898916&sr=1-1&keywords=when+books+went+to+war

 

(The images here are from Molly Guptill Manning's website: http://www.mollymanning.com/author/museum/ There are additional photos on this topic there as well.)

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We tend to think of World War II as battles fought with tanks, ships and aircraft. But what is often overlooked is that it was also a battle of ideas and the concept of personal freedom. The physical manifestation of these were the books of the world.

While many of the terrors of the growing Nazi machine remained hidden in the early years, the world was given a foretaste of its horrors by the spectacle of public book burnings in 1933, all the more horrific as they were done at the hands of students at prestigious universities. The image of pyres of burning books sent a shockwave, especially to librarians, academics and publishers. Well before the shots were fired, a war of ideas and intellectual freedom had begun.

 

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Aside from these overarching ideological issues, there were the practical matters of maintaining the morale of thousands and later millions of servicemen who were mobilized in the early 1940’s. Many were finding idle time at poorly equipped training camps with very little to do.

There had been precedents for using books to fill the gap. During World War One there were book drives sponsored by librarians and organizations such as the YMCA. But even where these collections survived, they had become depleted and out of date.

 

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As the war clouds gathered, committees formed and book drives began, eventually coming under the sponsorship of the Victory Book Campaign. The voluntary organization relied heavily on the libraries and librarians of the country. Posters and flyers went up in every corner of the country urging that books gathering dust at home be donated to relieve the boredom of the troops.

The campaign would eventually collect an initial 10 million books by mid-1942, and by any measure was a success. But it also developed its own problems as well. Since the donations were random, they required sorting and the logistics of moving them from collection points to the training camps and ships. The great majority of books were hardbound, as that was the dominant publishing mode of the time. As such, they added weight to the soldiers knapsack or sea bag and were not easily handled in the field. Additionally, well intentioned donors often gave away books that provided little or no interest to the troops that received them, including even children’s titles. (Many of these were shunted over to libraries and civic organizations.)

 

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Building on the lessons of the VBC, it was followed by an industry and government cooperative called the Council on Books in Wartime. Remarkably, key competitors within the publishing community came together to answer the Army and Navy’s decision to buy suitable books direct.

Along with this mandate can new specifications. The books had to be smaller, small enough and light enough to fit into the pocket of a fatigue uniform. Paper had been highly rationed to begin with, with the industry only receiving about 45% of its prewar allotment. Industrial processes had to be changed to suit paperbacks, which had only been small portion of the industry up to this point.

Editorial decisions were made. It was decided that abridged or highly edited decisions were not acceptable. On the ideological front, full and complete texts were deemed essential to living up to the ideal of the freedom of ideas. With that said , titles that were overly controversial, divisive or counter to war aims were not included. However, several books that were literally “banned in Boston” did make the list due to their overall popularity, as well as books that challenged social issues of the time.

 

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Titles were deliberately chosen for a broad range of interests, including both fiction and nonfiction.
Topics included sports, life at home, history both of the US and the world (especially the wartime theaters), mysteries, Westerns, biographies, and a host of technical subjects. As the war wound down, they eventually included titles on how to adjust back to civilian life.

The books were mass produced at a rate of 20 to 40 titles each month. Sets of these titles were bundled together and then shipped off to units around the world. Eventually more than 1300 titles were published between 1943 and 1947.

Because of the mass distribution, certain titles that may have languished became well read classics, including The Great Gatsby, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Forever Amber. With books in short supply, soldiers and sailors often found themselves reading titles they would never have previously looked at, and unwittingly broadened their reading interests. In the end, US forces were transformed into one of the most literate military forces in the world. . Millions of returning vets built upon their wartime reading to pursue further education through the GI Bill.

 

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Ms. Manning’s book not only details the efforts to get books and magazines to the troops, but also their heartfelt feedback sent both to the committees and specific authors. (Some individual authors became so popular, they received dozens of requests for autographed photos.) She also does a very good job of framing this story against the background of the events and progress of the war. She fully documents how these books were not mere entertainment, but by words of the soldiers who read them allowed our troops to maintain their sanity and their connection with home.

 

For collectors who might be interested in the Armed Services Editions, she has provided a full list of the wartime series, as well as the seven titles that were published in 2002 in a modern day distribution effort. As noted in the Afterword of the book, an estimated 100 million books were destroyed during the war. The Council on Books in Wartime distributed over 123 million Armed Services Editions to our troops, allies, and liberated lands. An additional 18 million books had been collected and redistributed by the Victory Book Campaign. For all of the books that Hitler burned, we produced more.

 

Over all, the book is an easy read and a well documented recounting of an often overlooked, but significant and uniquely American contribution to the war effort and eventual victory. This book adds an account that is essential in fully understanding the life of the World War II GI’s, as well as the overall impact of a successful government program on society. It is well worth the read.

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Follow up note:

 

I sent a note to the author telling her how much I liked her book and how it could also serve as a collector's guide. She replied with the following:

 

"How I wish the bookshop you described (from the 1970's) still stocked ASEs and the other books printed during WWII! It has become much harder to find ASEs since my book was published (I think your collector's instinct is right--the book seems to have caused many people to buy ASEs, as their prices have gone up on eBay and the supply has gone down). But, it is that much more thrilling to find a copy of an ASE that you have been searching for."

 

If you are finding them, they are worth adding to your collection!