When Books Went to War (7 page)

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 before 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.

If momentum continued to build, it seemed possible that the campaign's goal would soon be met. Turning to the White House for help, the VBC requested that Friday, April 17, 1942, be designated Victory Book Day. The president obliged. At a press conference, he “asked the cooperation of all citizens, newspapers and radio stations to make [it] a success.” When reporters asked President Roosevelt what types of books should be donated, he responded jokingly: “Anything except algebra,” before stating simply that the public should give the same books that they had read and enjoyed.
The Army and Navy were composed of civilians, and their reading tastes were no different from the home front's.

The president, who described himself as a “reader and buyer and borrower and collector of books” for all his life, held the VBC and other book organizations in high esteem, for he sincerely believed that books were symbols of democracy and weapons in the war of ideas. Shortly after he declared April 17 as Victory Book Day, Roosevelt released a statement on how books played an essential role in the fight for freedom:

 

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons.

 

With the president's Victory Book Day declaration, Connor worked volunteers into a frenzy to prepare for the final charge to meet the campaign's goal of ten million volumes. Librarians were impressed by the public's response. Stories of citizens and businesses going the extra mile proliferated. A man in New York City's Chinatown painstakingly went from one apartment to the next collecting books in a rickshaw. Milkmen collected books from their customers' doorsteps. Libraries prominently posted thermometer charts that tracked book donations. Even children got involved. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts pounded the pavement, collecting books through door-to-door solicitations in their neighborhoods. One Boy Scout troop collected an astounding ten thousand books in a single day. Around the nation, heaps of books were piled into donation bins. Nearly nine million books had been collected by the end of April 1942.

 

One million to go. As most commencement ceremonies for colleges and universities were held in May, the VBC decided to ask American universities to protest Germany's book burnings—which had begun at its universities—by assembling books for donation. Letters were mailed to every college and university in the United States proposing this idea. The letter urged that books be exhibited in a conspicuous place, such as at the center of graduation festivities. It would be a powerful contrast: American colleges collecting piles of books for donation to the services to memorialize the piles of books collected by the Nazis for burning. In the event that universities wished to remark on the significance of the books collected, the VBC recommended a passage from Milton's
Areopagitica:
“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

Although the VBC's letter was not sent until the beginning of May 1942, many schools organized last-minute collections to coincide with graduation festivities. Among them were the University of Arkansas, Tougaloo College, the University of Denver, the University of Kansas, the University of Scranton, and Bowdoin College. Several universities used the VBC's suggestions as a blueprint for their own book ceremonies, right down to reading the passage by Milton.

 

The VBC was not the only organization to think back to the 1933 book burnings that May. With the passage of nine years and a formal declaration of war, the book burnings were cast in a new light: a warning of the destruction that would follow. In nine years' time, cities were destroyed, millions of lives were lost, and devastation had spread across Europe like a plague. As one newspaper remarked, “Hunger, forced labor, imprisonment, concentration camps, unarmed crowds of fleeing citizens slaughtered from the skies, nations murdered without cause”—these “are the spectacles that have succeeded those bonfires of books.”

One of the most acclaimed book-burning memorials of 1942 was the radio program
They Burned the Books
, by Stephen Vincent Benét, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Renowned for his epic poem
John Brown's Body
, and the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Benét was known for his ability to intertwine history with fable in striking prose.
Aired by the Columbia Broadcasting System,
They Burned the Books
was such a sensation that copies of the script were immediately printed and sold in book form. Over the next four years, this program would be retransmitted over the airwaves countless times.

They Burned the Books
begins with a stark warning: “Justify the enemy. Appease him. Excuse him. Pardon, condone or accept him. And, by any intelligent process of thought, you will arrive at the diabolical, tortured, debased world of Germany and her Axis partners.” A bell then tolls nine times, after which the Berlin book burnings are reenacted for listeners. The narrator introduces several of the authors whose works were destroyed, and recounts the reasons given by the Nazis for throwing their books into the flames. One was the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, whose well-known poem “The Lorelei” had been famously set to music by Friedrich Silcher: