When Books Went to War (17 page)

Servicemen were sexually frustrated, but the idea of providing that catered to such books prurient interests flustered some of the council's staff. The controversy grew so heated that Philip Van Doren Stern was forced to raise the issue at a council executive board meeting, where he disclosed that certain members of the editorial committee “objected to having to give their approval on a number of . . . books that they consider of a trashy nature.” The executive board did not care what the editorial committee thought: “These books are supposed to serve a purpose regardless of what type they are.” The executive board meeting minutes continued: “If these books . . . give the boys overseas the kind of release from tension that they want, then the committee should be delighted to give their approval of the books.” As the council would do time and again, it erred on the side of providing a variety of reading material rather than limiting the types of books sent to servicemen.
As America's army fought to preserve freedom, the council stressed the need to provide unfettered access to a diverse set of titles—even trashy ones.

In due time, the council assured the servicemen who had asked that “
Forever Amber
and
Strange Fruit
will be published in Armed Services Editions.” Men around the world were grateful for the council's decision. The council's independence in selecting books, and willingness to print controversial titles, earned the respect of many servicemen. Some even wrote letters prodding the council to resist any pressures from religious organizations or other groups that might try to sway members against printing certain books. “Pay no attention, absolutely no attention, to whatever organization tries to influence your selection of books,” one infantryman urged. “If the legion of decency approaches you, please leer at them in your most offensive manner and tell them to stuff it,” he said. The servicemen did not have to worry. That even banned books would be printed as ASEs seemed to especially delight the council's director, Archibald Ogden, who managed to gloat as much to a Boston newspaper. Under the headline “Boston's Sons in Service Reading Those Awful Books,” he was quoted as saying, “It's beginning to look as if all an author has to do to get into the armed forces library is to be banned in Boston.”

 

Some of the most colorful letters received by the council described the extent to which reading was intertwined with battle. A man wrote from Luxembourg to report that he had just “literally crawled out of my wet and muddy slit-trench, that we refer to as a foxhole, for a breath of fresh un-American air, knowing that in a few minutes I will definitely have to dive back via a one and a half back flip to safeguard myself from that rain of death that [the Germans] quite frequently arch over.” He had been playing this cat-and-mouse game for days. Just earlier, as fresh rounds of artillery were being lobbed in his direction, he retired into his “heavily roofed, deeply carved-out fortress, and after praying feverishly, I started to read the Armed Services Edition of
C/O Postmaster
by Cpl. Thomas R. St. George, with the aid of a GI flashlight.” The “experience of the corporal held me in good spirits,” he said, despite the sounds of death that filled the air.

One commanding colonel felt a duty to share how
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
helped him and a group of his men keep their mental bearings while under attack. This colonel commanded a “light ack ack battalion,” which he defined as “anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-personnel.” He explained that:

 

not long ago I was down inspecting one of my batteries in a pretty tough position and was in a gun pit when some [Germans] started in on us with 88's. It wasn't very pleasant, waiting for them to come on in after their whistle first sounded and waiting for them to burst (elsewhere—you hope). Anyway, I noticed one GI reading in between bursts. I asked him what he was reading and he told us “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He started to read us a portion about “giving the baby the gussie”—a part of the book—and we laughed like hell between bursts. It sure was funny.

 

They all survived the German attack, and this commanding colonel decided to read the book for himself. He rummaged around to find a copy, and when he finally succeeded and began reading it, his unit again came under attack. “Our column got hit by a boche battalion holed up in some woods above a road and we hit the ditches and had a fierce fight.” The commanding colonel admitted that he could not help but feel a temptation “to read some more while they had us pinned down pretty tight, but I had to get up front and give a few orders and start them over the hill.” The fighting continued through the day, and although he was ultimately wounded, thoughts of the book's protagonist, Francie Nolan, and Brooklyn, New York, kept intruding. “I was thinking about that book even under pretty intense fire,” he said; “it was that interesting.” Although he was never much of a reader before the war (by way of background, he said that he had attended the United States Military Academy, and “never was in the West Point library except by order”), he liked
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. “I sit here in a dug in blacked out command post tent at the front somewhere and write this in sheer gratitude,” he said.

Another description of reading on the frontlines came from a private who explained that, just before he had gone to battle, essential supplies had reached him and his unit: cigarettes and books. He grabbed a copy of Lytton Strachey's
Queen Victoria
, read a few chapters, and then his unit was suddenly called into action. They slowly advanced through heavy artillery fire, and became “pinned down in a field by mortar and machine gun fire.” As bullets whizzed past him, this private began to panic because he saw no place to take cover. In an act of desperation, he dove into “what appeared to be a solid growth of brambles and bushes,” which gave way under his weight and sent him crashing into a deep ditch. He was injured in the fall and could hardly move in his cramped hole. As he wiggled his limbs, he felt “a lump in [his] pocket [that] turned out to be
Queen Victoria
.” Knowing it was “pretty ‘hot' above”—for “every once in a while a shell would burst” nearby—he could do nothing except wait for the shelling to end and help to come.

He began to read. “It was no use to stew and fret; events were completely beyond my control,” the private said. When he heard a shell explode a mere twenty-five feet from him, he felt as though the shell “might as well have been on top of me, but no action of mine could alter the result.” Instead, he “merely resigned to being completely at the mercy of chance” and escaped his surroundings by turning page after page of
Queen Victoria
. The book calmed and occupied his mind until the shelling lifted and he could be taken to a hospital. Days later, bedridden, he finished the book.

 

Although the bulk of the letters from servicemen sang the council's praises, there were also criticisms. Perhaps even more than notes of compliment, letters of complaint revealed how crucial books were to the quality of life of the men fighting overseas. One issue that plagued several ASEs stemmed from the two-up printing process. In the course of assembling the books, pagination problems sometimes occurred. One dilemma involved missing pages; sometimes upwards of twenty pages could be inexplicably absent from an ASE. A corporal griped that he had started reading John T. Whitaker's
We Cannot Escape History
“only to discover that pages 26 to 59 inclusive are missing whereas pages 59 to 90 inclusive are included twice.”

Another man, who had invested a great deal of time in the book he had been reading, wrote to the council: “If it is your mission in the war to cheer the lives of members of the Armed Forces by your Armed Services Editions, you may consider yourselves a failure as far as I am concerned. In short, I am greatly upset,” he said, and “that's putting it mildly.” This frustrated sergeant explained that the cause of his “great wrath” was that he had just gotten to the “most exciting part of the fine novel
The Gaunt Woman
when “at least twenty-five pages were missing.” He clarified: “Not torn out, mind you, but never put in the book during printing.” The book told a suspenseful tale of a Gloucester skipper whose ship, the
Gaunt Woman
, had to navigate around Nazi submarines in order to haul its catch to shore as a romance brews. When this sergeant discovered the missing pages, he became so livid that he “threw the book” away, not knowing whether the “hero ‘got the girl' or ‘got the works.'” To put things in perspective, he said that he was never one to write a letter of complaint, but “at a time such as [this] when good books are so hard to get, I feel you should have the opinion of one disgusted soldier.” He implored the council's printers to take better care in the future to ensure that such mishaps did not occur because, at least for him, it was the cause of great “mental anguish.”

In less than a month, the same man wrote a letter to Philip Van Doren Stern, expressing gratitude for the complete copy of
The Gaunt Woman
that the council had sent him. The sergeant admitted to feeling ashamed of his prior hot-tempered missive. He explained that “out here time hangs heavy on the hands and minds of we men who are ‘sweating out' this side of the war.” The ASEs were doing a world of good for him and those around him. This man felt that, due to the ASEs, he and his friends were “better informed [and would be] more intelligent . . . after the war.”

Another problem stemming from the two-up printings was that pages from one title could be haphazardly shuffled into another. A private first class wrote the council about one example. His unit had recently received a package of ASEs in the mail, which was often the source of “many happy and contented hours of reading.” After taking his time in selecting a book, as there were many tempting titles from which to choose, he began to read Ben Ames Williams's
The Strange Woman
. The book told a riveting story of a manipulative young woman who plotted against friends and lovers, reaping benefits at their expense until she became tangled in her own web of deceit. Once this soldier picked up the book, he could “hardly lay it aside”; “I became engrossed,” he said. However, “to my utter dismay, 16 complete pages were missing,” and in their place were “16 pages of the book
The Education of Henry Adams
.” As he was hanging on every word, he desperately searched for a copy of
The Education of Henry Adams
to see if the missing pages of
The Strange Woman
might have been misplaced within it. They were not. “I'm writing,” he said, “in complete hope of your organization rectifying this seemingly trifling matter.” The book, “in such condition as it is now, is worthless.”

When printing errors were reported, the council worked to mollify frustrated servicemen as swiftly as possible. Despite its policy of not sending books to individuals, the council always made an exception when it came to defective ASEs, and a perfect copy was promptly mailed along with a letter of apology.

While rectifying a book with missing pages was relatively easy, more subjective complaints proved difficult to remedy. This was especially true of criticism about the subject matter of certain books. Despite the precautions the council took to ensure that the titles being printed were befitting of the fact that there was a war going on, a few soldiers expressed their disbelief that some ASEs were allowed to be sent to the frontlines. One incensed private explained that he had finished reading
North Africa
and was trying “to discover the names of the fifth columnists on the Council.” He “violently” objected to its inclusion as an ASE, and was so shaken by the book that he asked the council to clarify: “What are we fighting for?” “What excuse can the Council offer for using precious paper to print, for the guidance of an American soldier, such a book as this?” he asked. “If no better could have been found, then the Council would have been better advised to have printed nothing,” he said.
The bulk of
North Africa
describes the geography, economy, and history of North Africa; the excerpt that this private found so offensive cast France's expansion into North Africa in the 1880s in a positive light (perhaps he found it too similar to Germany's quest for expansion in Europe).

William Sloane responded to this letter on the council's behalf, assuring the private that “there is no question of any fifth column in our ranks and yours is the only complaint which we have received about the book on these grounds, so far as I know.” Sloane promised that the council's staff would “be more meticulous in the future,” and expressed his hope that the private believed that the rest of the books the council had printed were acceptable. Although the bulk of the private's letter chastised the council, Sloane admitted to feeling some gratification that the ASEs had “done one thing which we hoped for, which is to keep the intellectual interests of the American soldier alive and growing.”

A milder letter of rebuke was received by the council regarding
The Iron Trail
, a western by Max Brand. In this book, an outlaw decides to lead an honest life when a local criminal completes a jewel heist, leaving clues that point to the former outlaw as the perpetrator. Although the book had no apparent pro-German message, the council received a letter asking, “Don't you think that might well be a German Book-of-the-Month selection?” Although the ASEs were “one of the greatest educational contributions—probably the greatest—of this war,” this soldier wondered whether there was “any responsible member of your Council” who had read
The Iron Trail
before producing it.

 

One notable omission in the responses to the council's
Stars and Stripes
request for feedback was any word from those serving in the Women's Army Corps (WACs) and the Navy's Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVEs). While special magazine sets were distributed to the WACs and WAVEs, consisting of female-oriented periodicals such as
Good Housekeeping
and
Ladies' Home Journal
, the absence of letters from servicewomen to the council confirms that ASEs were only provided to men. Since books were meant to serve the morale needs of those facing the horrors of battle, the Army and Navy perceived no need to provide portable paperbacks to the women who served in noncombatant positions. Plus, these women could be served by stationary libraries containing hardcover books. One wonders what titles would have been added to the twelve hundred ASEs if large numbers of women served in combat in World War II.