When Books Went to War (15 page)

Smith once estimated that she received approximately four letters a day from servicemen, or about fifteen hundred a year. She responded to almost all of them. Servicemen were shocked when they received a note from her, sometimes accompanied by an autographed photograph (a common request). Without fail, these mementos became treasured possessions. From a hospital, one man wrote to Smith: “Thanks—
thanks
—[for] your letter.” It had come at the perfect time, for he had “a tough week coming up. Every doctor in the place wants his cut. I don't know what they'll do with what remains of me after the carvings done. Pour gravy on me and put an apple in my mouth, I guess.” Smith's letter would give him courage through the surgeries he faced.

“When I received [your] letter,” one man wrote to Smith, “I thought, well, Betty has sent a Christmas card like the usual celebrities thinking they were doing something for the boys, but lo and behold, there is Betty Smith herself! I'm still bragging about it. I told the fellows it was my first wife, because they are not as familiar with your picture as I.” After carrying Smith's photograph with him from Germany to Belgium, the same man, who kept a regular correspondence with Smith, was forced to ask for a new one. “I am going to need another because I've carried this one around in snow, rain, mud, and combat, until it looks like it's been through a war,” he said.
Another regular writer to Smith also found great comfort in her photograph. “You helped inspire me during some of my most trying days of battle, and battle fatigue [and] depression. The picture I carried of you—that helped me remember the one I love [referring to his wife] and inspired me to carry on for the better things in life that I was fighting for.” He added: “Your tiny picture helped give me the sincere happiness and joy I needed while I was on what might have been the last limb of life.” Months later, after this man was wounded in battle, he wrote to Smith as he convalesced in a medical unit, again insisting what a difference she had made in his life. He and his wife planned to have a child when he returned home, and if it was a girl, they would name her Betty Smith.

Smith and the council were so inundated with letters about
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
that the council decided to reprint the book. “I think it's wonderful that the armed services edition is going into a second edition,” Smith told a friend. “Most of my mail is from servicemen overseas and without exception, they say that everything in [
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
] seems so true that it's not like reading a book—it's like being home in Brooklyn again.” “Some letters bring tears to one's eyes,” she admitted. “I am very much touched by the service men away from home thinking so much of the book. I feel that I have done some good in this world.”

Rosemary Taylor's
Chicken Every Sunday
was another surprise favorite among the men. The narrator of
Chicken Every Sunday
is an adolescent girl who gives an amusing account of her mother's experience running a busy boarding house, appeasing a long list of zany characters and serving mouthwatering dinners each night. Its wholesomeness and wit captured everyday happenings with such feeling that many servicemen could not help but grow sentimental.

A first lieutenant wrote to Taylor to express his “thanks for the joy you have given me and to many other officers and enlisted men out here in New Guinea.” He said that
Chicken Every Sunday
gave them “the refreshing sense that the way of life which we have temporarily left behind is a rich and delightful heritage that awaits our return.”
Another man wrote to Taylor from China, as
Chicken Every Sunday
was his favorite book and Taylor's description of her mother's cooking reminded him of his own mother, “cooking without measuring, the seasoning, the timing.” It brought back such rich memories of his own home that he compared reading the book to taking a leave. “It took me home for a couple of hours. It alleviated my homesickness. I really forgot about the war, and laughed and lived for a little while back in that marvelous house with all those wonderful people.” His only complaint was that Taylor's “graphic, tantalizing descriptions of [her] mother's baked potatoes, the slivered green beans, salads, desserts—were almost more than this human flesh can bear. Even the mention of ice water is enough to set us all aquiver over here,” he quipped. He closed by asking Taylor to write more books like
Chicken Every Sunday
because “we need 'em.”

From the Aleutian Islands, a soldier wrote Taylor that he could not “resist the temptation to write you how thoroughly your book ‘Chicken Every Sunday' is being read and enjoyed by an audience for whom in all probability it was not intended.” In fact, he said, he was “not speaking for
one
or
two
when I said it is a book for soldiers, for I have watched it travel from bunk to bunk in my own particular hut and have listened to bursts of abdominal laughter from the owners of the abdomens, followed by quote-unquote passages for the whole crowd to share.” And there were “reverberations from neighboring huts on at least two sides.” This soldier recalled that, when one man “took ‘Chicken' to work with him,” he “could barely contain his enthusiasm when he returned that night.” The book was the hottest commodity on the post. Because reading was one of the only forms of recreation available to those stationed in the Aleutians, this soldier said that he and his friends had become pretty discriminating in their reading tastes. He explained that the reason
Chicken Every Sunday
resonated with him and the men around him was because the characters in that book were “home folks and every GI Joe who reads about them . . . nostalgically recalls their counterparts back home.” “On behalf of the lot of us,” he said, “let me thank you for many hours of swell fun.” “We all hope there'll be more books by Rosemary Taylor.”
And there were. The council printed Taylor's
Ridin' the Rainbow
.

 

As these early testaments demonstrate, books played a special role at war. They soothed troubled minds and hearts, and they achieved these feats where other pastimes failed. Books were the saving grace for many men facing combat, as accounts from all fronts confirm. As one scholar on the role of books in wartime observed, men gratefully turned to books because they “remind[ed] them of home or express[ed] their own moods and thoughts, which had to stay dammed up, for the most part, in the noisy commonplaces and promiscuity of barracks life.” The therapeutic role that books played in allowing men to process their own circumstances by reading stories about others kept them wanting to read more and more. Books of humor made them laugh when there was nothing funny about their circumstances. Tales of life back home transported them to the places they missed and hoped to see again. By reading, the men received the closest thing to a respite from war. As one private wrote from France, “Books are often the sole means of escape for GI's” and “I have seen many a man who never before had the patience or inclination to read a book, pick up one of the Council's and become absorbed and ask for more.”

Lieutenant Colonel Trautman tried to explain why books were so popular among servicemen. He observed that the average soldier in World War II was a civilian who had an eleventh-grade education, and whose previous use of books was largely confined to required schoolwork. Most of the soldiers did not go to the library in their home communities, and their reading habits focused on “printed matter equivalent to a three-hundred-page book each week”—ranging anywhere from comics to newspaper and magazine articles. With the war underway, these men were sent to all parts of the world, including many places where there was nothing to read in English; where there were no newspapers, and every magazine and book had to be transported thousands of miles. Next to letters from home, these books and magazines were treasured because they allowed the men to tap into the life they had left behind in America.
Some men received such comfort from seeing a book in English or a familiar magazine that they were transformed into readers for life.

If there was any doubt about the value of the ASEs, the summer of 1944 would put them to rest. As Americans trekked across France to Paris and leapfrogged from one Pacific island to the next, they would be surrounded by nothing but the war, and comforted by little apart from their books.

SEVEN

For days I've been hunting through our service club, bothering the Red Cross, scanning our library shelves and hunting unrelentlessly through the barracks—for what???? G-183! G-183! G-183!

 

—
SERGEANT B. S
.

 

A
S THE ALLIES
marched toward Paris, a very different war was being fought in the Pacific. Beginning just north of Australia and moving toward the shores of Japan, the Allies slowly made progress capturing one island after another from the Japanese. Assigned to perhaps the deadliest theater in the war, the Americans stationed in the Pacific faced a succession of suicidal assaults. Morale continually dipped as these men, lucky to have survived one amphibious invasion, were shipped out to another island to do it again, knowing full well what was in store. Over time, the Pacific developed notoriety for the savagery of the fighting and the horrendous conditions of island life. Men admitted feeling an incredible sense of loneliness and isolation as they fought for islands that seemed insignificant and uninhabitable. It was difficult for them to fathom why any country had an interest in territory as undesirable as some of the islands they invaded.

If ever there was a place where the troops needed an emotional lift, it was on the islands they compared to hell. To offset the barbarity of the conditions and warfare, recreational items and amusements were essential. In the early days of an invasion, books were one of the few diversions that were small enough to be carried by the men without being a burden. And escaping into a book, even for only a few minutes, could do wonders for their well-being. Come hell or high water (and there were both), Special Services officers did their damnedest to get books onto these islands as quickly as possible.

One of the early battles that initiated Americans to island warfare was for Guadalcanal, which came on the heels of the Allied victory at Midway. Guadalcanal—described by a war correspondent as “a steaming, malarial ‘green hell'” with “no value in itself” apart from a strategically important airstrip—was fiercely defended by the Japanese. Conditions on the island were extreme. After a long day of rigorous fighting, sleep was nearly impossible. Incessant bombings and night raids kept Marines tumbling from their bedrolls to foxholes and back again, as if they were subject to the ebb and flow of a warped tide. A weepy tropical rain ensured their bedding was soggy, and mosquitos pursued the Americans with almost as much vigor as the Japanese. Snipers swarmed after sundown, keeping the Marines on alert at all hours. When a man tried to catch a few winks while a friend kept watch, he was lulled to sleep by the incessant buzzing of pestilential insects, punctuated by shooting and shrieking mortars. “The nights are passed in wet chill and discomfort and the days in mud and filth,” one man said. In the words of a war correspondent: “Guadalcanal's greatest pleasure is . . . still being alive.”

As the Marines suffered on the island, sailors in the United States Navy fared no better offshore. In what has been described as the “worst defeat in a fair fight ever inflicted,” the Imperial Japanese Navy sank four cruisers and chased a fifth away in a mere thirty-two minutes on August 9, 1942, in the Battle of Savo Island, sustaining only minor damage in return. Over the next several months, the Navy would continue to endure grievous losses. By the time the battle for Guadalcanal ended in February 1943, so many ships had been torpedoed, damaged, and sunk that the body of water between Guadalcanal, Savo, and the Florida Islands earned the nickname Ironbottom Sound.

Each battle that followed Guadalcanal proved more deadly than the last. Those who survived some of the Pacific's most extreme fighting found themselves poised to invade Saipan in June 1944. The first waves of troops to arrive faced a stream of death. The Japanese created a false sense that the invasion would be easy, patiently holding their fire until Marine amphibious tractors were within a thousand yards and then unleashing an avalanche of fire on the Americans. Dead and wounded men covered the beach. Those who survived the violent landing experienced unfathomable brutality. Two days into the invasion, Japanese tanks ripped through American lines and drove back and forth over the Marines' foxholes. “It was a case of keeping your head down while Jap tanks crunched over the slit trenches and foxholes . . . hoping they would straddle your position instead of running the tread in your hole,” one Marine said. “A tank ran over my hole,” a dazed platoon sergeant reported. After the tank passed, he “lit a fuse and tossed a whole pack of demolition charges on top of the damn thing.” Casualties mounted with ferocious speed. Over fifteen thousand Marines were wounded, killed, or missing by the end of the one-month battle, making Saipan the bloodiest battle of the Pacific—up to that point.

To temper the stress of battle and provide an escape from the death that surrounded the men, recreation and rest periods were critical. The Special Services Division worked miracles to try to get morale-boosting equipment onto each island in record time. Within four days of the first American landing on Saipan, the Marines were greeted with a boatload of books. Three days later, a library was established. Even if they could only steal a sliver of time to themselves—to read a passage from a book of humor or an excerpt from a western—a brief distraction could go a long way. When shipments of ASEs arrived, they were eagerly grabbed, stowed away, and taken into battle. Some never made it out. As one Marine on Saipan shared with the Council on Books in Wartime: