When Books Went to War (6 page)

 

Through the efforts of librarians, politicians, authors, teachers, and the media, Americans came to understand that the nation was going to war in the name of freedom, not only to vindicate their losses in Pearl Harbor. Liberty itself was menaced. Europeans who had fallen under Hitler's rule lost the freedom to read and discuss many ideas, and Americans began to realize the same could happen to them. The war began to feel less distant and more personal and immediate, especially as America's armed forces swelled in size, and seemingly everyone knew a young man who was being sent off to war. By early 1942, one out of every three men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four left home to serve the nation. Those left behind on the home front were stirred by the VBC's call for books. Not only would they try to meet the campaign's goal of donating more books than the number housed in the libraries of the five largest cities in the world, they hoped to exceed it.
After all, if Morley was correct, and wars were won first in the mind, American servicemen would need an awful lot of books.

 

Within two weeks of the campaign's start, 423,655 books were collected. By the end of January, 100,000 books were sorted, bundled, and loaded onto Army trucks and shipped to camps. The VBC volunteers were impressed by the public's response to the drive. “Although we realized that in setting our starting date we were giving scant time for preparation we rejoice [that though] we began half-cocked . . . we were ready to meet the requests . . . for books for troops in transit,” read the minutes of a January 1942 VBC board meeting.

Post librarians with empty bookshelves were overjoyed when shipments of victory books arrived. “It is hard for me to express my deep thanks for the very wonderful collection of books that the Book Campaign donated to our Post Library,” one library officer wrote to VBC volunteers. “Our library here is starting out from scratch,” and “I had spent days trying to figure out how I could get my shelves partly filled with the very limited funds that the Post Library had to spend,” he said. But the VBC had changed everything. This librarian reported that his shelves were now filled, and “I have had any number of people comment on the very fine choice of books.” Another librarian wrote, “You have started something here that I hope catches hold and spreads throughout the country, for these new and recent books are something that all the Army Camp Libraries are very much in need of.”
It would take time for all post libraries to receive books; alongside letters of earnest thanks came pleas from desperate librarians for help in filling their empty stacks.

Yet inevitably, the initial fanfare faded. Although one million books were collected in the campaign's first month, some felt this was nine million too few.

“Something's wrong somewhere,” began a February 1942 editorial in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, a widely read periodical at the time. “It seems incredible that a nation of 130,000,000 people, who frequently buy one million or more copies of a single book, and where approximately 750,000 hold memberships in book clubs, should be so sluggish and indifferent about contributing books for men in the services . . . The goal of ten million books should have been reached in the first week, instead of one-tenth that number in a month.” It was not for lack of publicity that the campaign was off to such a start, for newspapers, radio programs, and magazines cooperated in giving the campaign prominence. Posters were hung on every surface that could accommodate them. They were in libraries, stapled onto telephone poles, and plastered on the walls of train stations and schools. What was the problem? The editorial concluded that perhaps the sacrifice being asked seemed too inconsequential compared to some of the more significant demands being made of the public. “Is it possible that the national psychology emphasizing bigness has caused us to think only in those terms—to the detriment of the small things that have to be done if we are to win the war?”

To be sure, an overwhelming list of demands was made on the public. Collection drives for all manner of goods were held, and Americans were expected to do their part and contribute. When the nation faced a crucial shortage of aluminum in the summer of 1941, it seemed airplane production would grind to a halt. Frantically, the Office of Production Management threw together a two-week nationwide aluminum-scrap drive in July, with hopes that fifteen million pounds of aluminum would be donated, enough to manufacture two thousand planes. Americans turned their homes upside down searching for every last bit of the metal they could spare. As one historian described: “Enthusiastic householders, delighted at the call for service, hauled an astonishing collection of aluminum wares to their village greens—Uncle Mike's coffeepot, Aunt Margaret's frying pan, the baby's milk dish, skillets, stew pots, cocktail shakers, ice-cube forms, artificial legs, cigar tubes, watch cases, and radio parts.” Even when the unbelievable news was reported that no airplanes could be made from the donated aluminum (officials learned after the drive that only virgin aluminum could be used), the drive's success in uniting the nation remained a badge of glory.

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.