…for six cents per volume
Sailor in his bunk
aboard USS Capelin
in WWII
I began to write about what the people on the Homefront were reading while their loved ones or even strangers were out on the frontlines fighting for our freedom. Not everyone had a TV back then. Research gave me a couple of articles that were quite informative. Before I go on, think about this first: The bullets weren’t flying out from their rifles or other apparatuses in their arms 24/7, fortunately. So, in their downtime, they needed something to occupy their minds when not chatting with the stranger next to them – at the times permitted, of course. Then, again, there was only so much to talk about while – and I hate to say it – they were defending their lives and killing the enemy, as they were taught to do. They got bored. Many of them had letters to read over and over again from home – some of them did, that is. And, yes, those written words kept them happy, made them homesick, or sent them into a deep depression. But many of our military personnel needed something to keep their intellectual cells fed and at peak performance, learning either about the goings on in the world or about the fictional characters others were creating.
The government was concerned with the mental state of all their soldiers, their sailors, paratroopers, and people they sent abroad. Here’s what happened during WWII that I just discovered I would like to share with you.
During WWII, the U.S. Army and Navy distributed nearly 123 million newly printed paperback copies of 1,322 different books to our service members around the world. They wished to keep those who received them entertained. This practice did tremendously well; these readers were now entering trade schools, colleges, and universities as a result of reading about new things in the books now in their hands. Those books ended up transforming America’s literary culture in ways that those WWII publishers hardly foresaw. You must realize that receiving those paperbacks was not a luxury to them but a real necessity! Let me repeat: They needed something to read in their off hours – even on the battlefield.
One of the things the government neglected at the time of WWII was The Army Library Service. Fortunately, this was noticed. So, there was a national drive, a Victory Book Campaign, it was called, and by mid-1942, the government collected 10 million donated books. The Homefront people pitched in – all sorts of clubs had drives, given by those at work to Boys and Girls Scouts, too. However, it was too bad that many of these books were unwanted and of no interest to the service people; and, on the other hand, these books were bulky and way too heavy to distribute to our protectors overseas.
As a result, a civilian organization, the Council on Books in Wartime, published compact, oblong, two-column-wide paperbacks that were designed to slip easily into uniform pockets. This is what was sold to the military for six cents per volume. Did it end here, folks? Nope, we are talking about the U.S. Government, remember? And the books could end up being weapons in the hands of our enemy. They had to keep American democracy in mind (without banning or burning all the books) and imposing a tremendous censorship burden. Still, one managed to come into existence. The government hired readers who highlighted offensive, discriminatory, or passages not for the enemy eyes, which were reviewed again by the Army and Navy. Experts later reviewed these items.
In 1939, Pocket Books offered a solution to this great problem to the U.S. armed forces, and these smaller, light-weight books were finally shipped in September of 1943. Here’s a list of what they received, and it also answers my initial question of what was being read on the Homefront:
“About 155,000 crates of books were subsequently distributed each month. Each crate contained between 30 and 50 new titles that fell into one of the following categories:
- Mysteries, thrillers, and Western novels by such popular writers as Max Brand, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, W.R. Burnett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, and Luke Short.
- Bestselling “blockbuster” novels, such as Henry Bellamann’s Kings Row, Edna Ferber’s So Big, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, many of which had been or would soon be turned into movies.
- Collections by humorists and writers of light verse, including five titles by Robert Benchley, six by James Thurber, and three by Ogden Nash.
- War-themed books like Bill Mauldin’s Up Front and Ernie Pyle’s Brave Men.
- Biographies, histories, memoirs, and other nonfiction titles, including Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Virgil Thomson’s The State of Music, and Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin.
- Classic novels and poetry, some easily accessible (David Copperfield, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), others less so (Moby-Dick, Vanity Fair).
- A modest but not exiguous complement of “serious” modern novels, short stories, poetry, and plays, most of them representative of then-current mainstream taste (Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men) but some of which were decidedly recherché (Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet)”
(List courtesy of Commentary, a Military magazine.)
These books, as you can easily imagine, passed the time for the homesick, the anxious and bored men and women we sent to fight for us. One soldier wrote home saying “they are as popular as pin-up girls.” The Armed Services Editions of the Council on Books at Wartime motivated many GIs to go on to higher education. I’ve said this already, but statistically speaking, approximately two million veterans, those who probably never would have continued studying after the war, found themselves signing up for a free college education.
In 2002, the Legacy Project revitalized the ASEs and sent pocket-sized books to Americans serving around the world. Today, the Navy is distributing E-readers already pre-loaded with popular books, so service members always have hundreds of books for their uniform pockets. Too bad this technology wasn’t available in the previous wars for the non-readers, wouldn’t you agree? If you think about it, in many cases, even those injured on the battlefield didn’t have medics at their side. So, thank goodness for our concern for their mental health, providing these books for much less than six cents per volume to our military during their service far from home is one of the best of our governmental services.