When Books Went to War (23 page)

Although morale was severely challenged in the island battles, the Pacific theater, especially in the later years of the war, was not devoid of amusements for those out of the line of fire. Few newspapers and magazines gave credit to the important work done by the Special Services Division on behalf of the servicemen deployed in these remote regions. Once an area was secured, servicemen were given wide latitude to Americanize the islands to the extent possible. They built baseball diamonds “set in jungle glades to the specifications of Abner Doubleday,” and signs were posted next to ponds or lakes used for swimming, reading “Jones Beach,” or “Old Swimmin' Hole.” By 1944, Guadalcanal was unrecognizable to those who had landed there in 1942: vegetables grew on former battlefields, an ice-cream factory churned out two hundred quarts of ice cream a day, hundreds of musical instruments were available for playing, 150 movie theaters (consisting of “coconut logs or oil drums in front of an outdoor screen”) showed C-grade films, and athletic venues hosted boxing matches and other sports contests. Across the Mariana Islands, theater stages were built, volleyball and basketball courts were erected, boxing rings were installed, and thousands of radios were distributed.

But radio was a double-edged sword. It allowed the men to listen to their favorite music and hear the news, but just as Europe had Axis Sally, the Pacific had its own favorite propagandist: Tokyo Rose, a persona attributed to Iva Toguri, an American citizen living in Japan. Rose's broadcasts were rarely of the caliber of Axis Sally's hauntingly accurate and unsettling pronouncements, but she had her moments. She always seemed to have credible information on American casualties, and her manner of delivering this news was cruel. “Well, you boys in Moresby, how did you like that ack-ack last night over Rabaul?” she asked during one broadcast. “Your communiqué didn't say anything about losing those two Fortresses, did it? But you fellows know, don't you? You know what did not come back,” she taunted.

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 keeping 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.”