When Books Went to War

by Molly Guptill Manning

  “Assignment: USA” made people talk. Some Americans were offended by Menefee’s characterizations and curt comments, while others felt that the episode discussed the nation’s problems with a refreshing dose of honesty. Magazines and newspapers jumped at the opportunity to cover the controversial program. Variety reported that if “Assignment: USA” had been broadcast earlier in the evening, “the phone calls would have burned the insulation off the wires of NBC.” The substance of the show “scorched the air [and] made your ears burn”; it was just the type of program the country needed. The New York Times deemed it “the boldest, hardest hitting program” of the year. As word spread, NBC was pressured to rebroadcast the show at an earlier hour when more people could tune in and listen. NBC acquiesced, and when the program was replayed, some cities—such as Boston; Springfield, Massachusetts; and Mobile, Alabama—refused to carry it. According to Time magazine, “Boston was not amused” at the rebroadcast and had “heard all it wanted to hear . . . when the program first went on the air.” Did the broadcast help in the war effort? Certainly it showcased the rigor of a free press and the right to dissent and raise a critical voice. The council was gratified by the segment’s popularity and felt a sense of accomplishment in producing a show that sparked discussion about the issues plaguing the home front. It achieved precisely what the council had hoped.

  While the council’s radio programs enjoyed wide popularity, council members were concerned that the quantity of books recommended each week might overwhelm the public. The council decided to start a new project to promote only those titles deemed extraordinary, that clarified why the country was at war, what values were at stake, and under what terms the war should be ended. A War Book Panel was created to nominate and choose titles that could be published bearing the council’s stamp of approval. Panel members included Irita Van Doren, editor of the New York Herald Tribune; Amy Loveman, associate editor of the Saturday Review of Literature; Lieutenant Colonel Joseph L. Greene, editor of the Infantry Journal; Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, retired; and J. Donald Adams, editor of the New York Times Book Review. The panel met periodically to discuss titles and vote on which would receive official endorsement. Selected books were republished and labeled “Imperative,” their front covers emblazoned with a large I. All council members were obligated to advertise these books as essential reading—even books published by rival companys. While they would certainly benefit monetarily by promoting the sale of books, never before had publishers collaborated so wholeheartedly as to advertise books published by their competitors. Posters were displayed in libraries and bookstores to help publicize the new Imperative book program and the selected titles.

  The first book branded Imperative was They Were Expendable, by W. L. White, which was chosen in November 1942. The book told the story of the servicemen who manned torpedo boats in the Philippines as Americans came under Japanese attack. Told from the perspective of four survivors (out of sixty men), the book did not shy away from the idea stated in the title: these men were considered replaceable and they knew it. “Suppose you’re a sergeant machine-gunner, and your army is retreating and the enemy is advancing,” one of the survivors proposed. He continued:

  The captain takes you to a machine gun covering the road. “You’re to stay here and hold the position,” he tells you. “For how long,” you ask. “Never mind,” he answers, “just hold it.” Then you know you’re expendable. In a war, anything can be expendable—money or gasoline or equipment or most usually men . . . They expect you to stay there and spray that road with steel until you’re killed or captured, holding up the enemy for a few minutes or even a precious quarter of an hour.

  Reviews pegged the book as the most significant personal war experience yet published. It was well deserving of the “Distinguished Service Medal, the ‘I’ for Imperative,” one newspaper said.

  About four months later, the council announced that John Hersey’s Into the Valley would be its next Imperative. Hersey told of his experience as a war correspondent on Guadalcanal, where he accompanied a company of Marines on a mission to take the Matanikau River from the Japanese in October 1942. According to Hersey, after a long march into the dense jungle, enemy snipers opened up, Japanese machine guns rattled off rounds, and mortars were lobbed—their shrill whistling gave a brief, terrifying warning that a shell was about to burst. Hersey watched as Americans were unable to set up their own machine guns quickly enough and were forced to retreat, carrying injured and dying men back to camp. Into the Valley provided a realistic account of what battle was like, describing acts of heroism on the part of the Marines without overly romanticizing their experience.

  In May 1943 the third Imperative was selected—Wendell Willkie’s One World. The book told of Willkie’s tour of Allied nations during the fall of 1942 as an American ambassador at large, and recorded his impressions of the leaders and people he encountered. Willkie urged Americans to shed their isolationist tendencies and recognize that countries needed to cooperate with one another to achieve peace and maintain it after the war. The fourth Imperative, announced in July 1943, was Walter Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy. This book argued that America’s failure to readjust its foreign policy to account for its acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and Germany’s aggression during World War I rendered it completely unprepared for war in 1941 and threatened its ability to make peace. Lippmann provided a brief history of America’s diplomatic relations and wars, challenged America’s fondness for isolationism, and urged Americans to recognize their commitments to the world. The book was lauded for making foreign policy accessible to the masses, and widening the area of discussion from small groups of intellectuals to hundreds of thousands of people.

  The fifth Imperative was another of John Hersey’s, A Bell For Adano, which was the only work of fiction endorsed under the program. This book challenged Hitler’s propaganda about America’s heterogeneity being its weakness. (In September 1941, Goebbels had declared that the “America of today will never be a danger to us. Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in the United States. No other country has so many racial and social tensions. We shall be able to play many strings there.” ) The hero of Hersey’s story is an Italian American GI who takes part in the invasion of Sicily and wins the trust of the Italian locals because of their shared heritage. Hersey advanced the notion that America’s armed forces had an advantage in the world war precisely because they represented a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities.

  The sixth and, as it turned out, final Imperative book was named in September 1944, Edgar Snow’s People on Our Side. Snow, a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, took a seventeen-country tour from April 1942 through the summer of 1943. Primarily focusing on his experiences in Russia, China, and India, Snow described the political, economic, and social problems that plagued these nations.

  It is not entirely clear why the Imperative program came to an end. Selection of a seventh book began, but the War Book Panel voted in equal number for two books, and it seems this tie resulted in a stalemate. In the spring of 1945, the panel selected Ralph Ingersoll’s The Battle Is the Payoff, but this title had already become a bestseller; it seemed unnecessary to crown as an Imperative a book millions of people were already reading. And at that point, the end of the war was in sight.

  Despite its modest number of titles, the Imperative program was a success. Indeed, as with Hollywood and the film industry, the war was good for reading and the book industry. Americans purchased about 25 percent more books in 1943 than they did in 1942. The new paperback format was a hit, as Americans craved simple pleasures in times of peril. This increase in book buying was indicative of an expanded market of book buyers. As Time magazine observed, by 1943, “book-reading and book-buying reached outside the narrow quarters of the intellectuals and became the business of the whole vast literate population of the U.S.” No longer were books linked to wealth and status: they had become a universal pastime and a fitting symbol of
democracy.

  The council’s greatest achievement was neither its radio programs nor its Imperative series. In 1943 it turned its attention to the book needs of U.S. servicemen. Publishers knew that soldiers, sailors, and Marines craved books, but hated the VBC’s bulky hardcovers. Although the council had reached out to the VBC to offer assistance in supplying the servicemen with books, the relationship between these two organizations never warmed. In fact, when council members Richard Simon (of Simon & Schuster) and John Farrar (of Farrar & Rinehart) met with VBC members in December 1942, Farrar cryptically described the meeting as a “fairly complicated one and inconclusive,” and then added: “I had best report on it orally.” The two organizations never meaningfully worked together.

  As of early 1943, no book existed that met the specific needs of servicemen stationed on the frontlines. It would have to be invented. As publishers puzzled over how to affordably produce small-sized paperbacks, a few men worked on a blueprint that would revolutionize the industry. After consulting with Lieutenant Colonel Trautman and graphic artist H. Stahley Thompson, Malcolm Johnson presented a proposal to the council to reconstruct the book—inside and out. Although they would leave the meeting with more questions than answers, the plan met a chorus of approval. The “Armed Services Edition” was born.

  Over the next several years, the production of these books would be beset with challenges. But with the cooperation of every major United States publishing company and the Navy and War Departments, the council championed the most significant project in publishing history. The organization in search of a project had finally found a lasting one.

  FIVE

  Grab a Book, Joe, and Keep Goin’

  Dear Sirs:

  I want to say thanks a million for one of the best deals in the Army—your Armed Services Editions. Whenever we get them they are as welcome as a letter from home. They are as popular as pin-up girls—especially over here where we just couldn’t get books so easily, if it weren’t for your editions.

  —PRIVATE W. R. W. AND THE GANG

  THE PUBLISHERS FACED a forbidding task: fashioning a new style of book suitable for mass production while operating under wartime restrictions. For starters, there was paper rationing. In 1943, publishers were allocated only 37.5 percent of the paper they used in 1939. Many found this constraint infuriating when the country was in the midst of a war of ideas. As a columnist for the Chicago Daily News said: “We don’t burn books in America, we merely slash the paper allotment. The motives are vastly different, but some of the results are the same.” But the government considered books a necessary piece of equipment; just as aluminum and rubber were funneled to factories to produce airplanes, the government agreed to provide nine hundred tons of paper per quarter year for the production of Armed Services Editions (ASEs).

  To maximize the number of books that could be printed with this supply, and to ensure that the ASEs best fit the servicemen’s circumstances, the council resorted to unprecedented formatting and manufacturing techniques. Of course, the council had to rely on paperbacks. This saved space and weight, and the books gained pliability so they could be tucked more easily into a pocket or full pack. Next, the size of each book had to be reduced. In the 1940s, a standard small hardcover book was five by eight inches and could be up to two inches thick. The ASEs would be produced in two sizes: the larger would measure six and a half by four and a half inches—similar to the mass-market paperbacks in drugstores—and the smaller, five and a half by three and three-eighths inches. The largest ASE was only three-quarters of an inch thick, and the smallest was less than an eighth of an inch thick. These measurements were not arbitrary. The council researched the pocket dimensions of standard military uniforms to ensure that the larger ASE could fit in the pocket of a soldier’s pants, while the smaller could be tucked away in a breast pocket. Even the longest ASE, which was 512 pages, could slip into a hip pocket. The smaller books were essentially the size of a wallet. Even soldiers on the frontlines could stow away or summon such a book in an instant.

  No book press existed that was capable of printing such tiny books. The council solved this problem by turning to magazine presses. Many benefits flowed from this decision. Perhaps the most important was that these presses used thinner paper than what was normally used for hardcover books. This helped keep ASEs incredibly light and slim. Thanks to their paperback cover, small size, and featherweight pages, the ASEs weighed one-fifth or less than their hardcover counterparts.

  Since magazine presses were not designed to produce pocket-sized publications, the council printed the books “two up”: two books were printed on each page, one above the other, and were then sliced into two by a horizontal cut. The magazine presses for Reader’s Digest were used to produce smaller books, and the larger were printed on pulp-magazine presses. One disadvantage to the two-up method is that it forced the council to yoke one book to another, requiring staff members to count pages, words, and characters in order to match similarly sized books. This was a chore that was both time-consuming and tedious. If different-sized books were coupled together, the shorter book would have blank pages—blasphemy in the age of paper rationing. Indeed, when the Army noticed blank pages in some early ASEs, it insisted that the council fill up these pages with biographies, puzzles, or the like. The council obliged by including an author’s biography when space allowed. Over the course of pairing books, the council took great pains to ensure that they were not edited to achieve a desired word count or size. If a book was condensed, the front cover always included a disclaimer.

  Knowing that battle conditions were stressful and lighting conditions were unlikely to be optimal for reading, the council aimed to create books that would be easy on readers’ eyes. Traditional hardcovers had four to five inches of text per line, and were taller than they were wide. For its ASEs, the council bound the books on their short side, making them wider than they were tall, so that each page could accommodate two columns of two and a half to three inches of text. It was believed that battle-weary soldiers would find the shorter lines of text easier to read. Another benefit of this double-column format was that 12 percent more words could be squeezed onto a page. The finished prototype was “small, light and attractive . . . and completely readable even under trying conditions of light and motion,” the council said in a memorandum on the project.

  The council aimed to make the exterior of the ASEs as attractive and functional as possible. Rather than shrink the image of the hardcover edition’s dust jacket to fit the smaller size, book covers were redesigned. A thumbnail image of the original dust jacket appeared on the front cover, and the book’s title and author were prominently displayed. The covers were printed on sturdy, heavyweight paper in vibrant colors. To alert readers of the other titles that were available in that month’s batch of books, the inside back cover listed the council’s latest offerings. The back cover of each ASE provided a brief description of its contents.

  Book covers were printed by one firm, the Commanday-Roth Company, and were distributed to the several printing houses that reproduced the interior pages. The ASEs were then assembled and bound, and the conjoined books sliced into two. Although hardcover books were typically glued and sewn together, the early ASEs were bound by staples instead. (According to one newspaper, staples were favored because many servicemen were stationed in locales where insects would feast on glue, or the dampness of jungles and other wet climes would cause the glue to loosen or dissolve.) Once production was complete, the ASEs were shipped to distribution points selected by the Army and Navy.

  In addition to being made a convenient size and weight, the books needed to be as affordable as possible, to meet the budget constraints of the Army and Navy. The council agreed to sell the ASEs to the government at cost, plus a one-cent royalty that was split between the author and the original publishing company. According to the council, “the prices at which [the ASEs] are being manufactured are probably the lowest at which comparable books have ever be
en produced in the United States.” Initially, the average cost of each book was only slightly more than seven cents per copy. They were such a sensation that demand necessitated the production of additional millions per year, dropping the average cost of production to 5.9 cents per book.

  At the project’s inception, the Army and Navy requested that the council provide 50,000 copies of each of fifty titles—or 2.5 million books—per month. Eighty percent would be distributed to the Army, and the rest to the Navy (which was in rough proportion to the number of men in each service). By the time the council signed its contract with the armed forces in July 1943, its initial goal was reduced from fifty to thirty titles each month, since the manufacturing and editorial challenges were daunting.

  A three-part process was used in selecting titles. First, the publishers gleaned from their stock lists books that would be appealing to servicemen. Next, the council’s staff of readers, a group of people outside the publishing industry who provided their opinions about each book’s merit, narrowed the selections. The third step was to seek government approval from Lieutenant Colonel Trautman on behalf of the Army, and Isabel DuBois, the head of the Library Section of the Navy. At any time, however, the Army and Navy could request that the council print certain titles, and feedback from the servicemen was always welcome. The main consideration in book selection was variety. The goal was for each series to consist of a range of titles so there would be a book to fit the tastes of every man. The most popular genre was contemporary fiction (almost 20 percent of the ASEs fell under this category), followed by historical novels, mysteries, books of humor, and westerns. Other categories included adventure stories, biographies, cartoons, classics, current events, fantasy, histories, music, nature, poetry, science, sea and naval stories, self-help and inspirational books, short story collections, and travel books.