What did you read during the war, Daddy?
In terrible conditions, soldiers in the 20th century found comfort in books
On June 6, 1944, Sergeant J. D. Salinger, alongside his fellow Fourth Infantry Division soldiers, landed on Utah Beach on D Day with six draft chapters of The Catcher in the Rye in his pockets. He was part of the second wave. Later that year, after the invasion of Normandy, Salinger went on to take part in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, meeting Ernest Hemingway for the first and only time at the Hotel Ritz after the liberation of Paris. They got on really well.
Not every soldier’s war was quite so literary but the amount they read was still prodigious. In my 2017 book A Book of Book Lists, I included part of the then current Army Professional Reading List put together by the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, the British Army’s think-tank, which included titless such as Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Howard, The Face of Battle by John Keegan, The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (George Bull ed), and Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer
The CHACR describes itself as not only “a champion for individual ‘soldier-scholars’, but as a catalyst for the promotion of a ‘brains-based’ approach throughout the Army”. But while this and its other extensive reading lists are pretty thorough, this is work reading, not what soldiers read for pleasure.
In the First World War, camp-based lending libraries, often run by organisations such as the YMCA and British Red Cross, were very popular, although an article in War Illustrated magazine in December 1915 (‘The Solace of Literature in the Trenches’) admits that mistakes had been made in supplying soldiers on active duty. “We knitted him a Balaclava helmet to keep his head warm and omitted to provide anything to supply the inside of his brain.”
Books were certainly a popular commodity in the trenches, useful aids during the long periods of inaction and a means of passing the time as well as taking men’s minds off the horrors unfolding around them. Particularly popular were works by Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan (especially The Thirty-Nine Steps) and the hugely prolific Nat Gould who specialised in horse racing stories. WW Jacobs’ work offered some humour and there was also considerable demand for Jane Austen’s novels. Her work was also used as an early form of bibliotherapy for soldiers suffering from shell shock.
Adventure and crime stories such as those featuring Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake were also on the most read list, and Conan Doyle brought the great detective out of retirement in The Last Bow specifically to help the war effort. Sentimental stories, were well-liked too, especially ones with VC in the title, such as Ruby M. Ayres's heroic romance Richard Chatterton, VC. Chatterton starts the novel as a louche slacker spending all his time at his club. His failure to enlist loses him his fiancée, but eventually he does sign up and becomes a changed man after various astonishingly brave incidents and wounds (and of course he wins his girl back). Published in 1916, around 70,000 copies were printed by the end of the war.
One key element in choosing what to read was simply the size of the books – large tomes were not sufficiently portable so consequently Penguins and other pocket-sized editions were highly prized. For this reason, Shakespeare’s plays were read individually rather than in collected editions. However, ownership was not always necessary. A Captain Corbett-Smith is said to have read A Christmas Carol to his troops in the trenches.
In his Books in Camp, Trench and Hospital written in 1917, Theodore Wesley Koch investigated first hand what soldiers were reading. As well as sensational fiction, he noted that poetry was also in demand, especially Hundred Best Poems anthologies, plus books on handicrafts, maps and even Bradshaw’s railway timetables. “A book must not be too formidable or sombre to look at,” he wrote. “It's like a cyclist with a long hill in front of him — the sight makes him tired.” Officers, he noted, went for the more expensive six shilling novels and ‘lighter biographies’. He listed three in particular:
Garibaldi and the Thousand by George M Trevelyan
Beatrice D'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497: A Study of the Renaissance by Julia Cartwright
Portraits and Sketches by Edmund Gosse
At the back end of last year, the estimable literary society the Grolier Club in New York put on a marvellous exhibition called The Best-Read Army in the World: The Power of the Written Word in World War II. It focused on how the U.S. military disseminated more than one billion books, magazines, and newspapers to 16 million American troops worldwide, partnering with the U.S. publishing industry to create pocket-sized paperback books called ‘Armed Services Editions’ (one of which is pictured at the top of this newsletter) as well as more compact issues of newspapers and popular magazines.
The exhibition featured more than 200 items from the collection of Molly Guptill Manning, author and associate professor of law, New York Law School. “The United States military sent troops into battle armed not only with weapons, but with ideas,” she said. “Reading was so prevalent among the troops that in 1945, the New York Post declared that the United States had ‘the best-read Army in the world.’”
During World War II, the Victory Book Campaign ran a nationwide book drive encouraging the American public to donate their favourite books to troops. A Victory Book Campaign poster on display encouraged the public to Give More Books, Give Good Books (Washington, D.C.: Office of War Information, 1943) after receiving too many volumes that were damaged or unsuitable for troops, such as cookbooks and children’s books.
Despite the approximately 18 million books donated in 1942-43, they were almost exclusively hardcover books and foot soldiers needed more portable reading materials. So Army Chief Librarian Raymond Trautman invented a miniature paperback book from a blank magazine cut in half. Formatted with two columns of text, a horizontal orientation, and a stapled binding, the Armed Services Edition was born.
More than 123 million pocket-sized ASE paperbacks were distributed to troops during World War II, among them were:
George Lowther’s The Adventures of Superman, published in 1945 and distributed to coincide with V-E Day
a “two-up” edition, with two books printed per page, of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Francis Wallace’s Kid Galahad
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for which author Betty Smith received 10,000 troop fan letters.
American soldiers invaded Europe carrying titles and authors that had been banned and burned by the Nazis. In May 1943, the tenth anniversary of the book burnings that swept across Germany, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt paid tribute to books in a speech. “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die,” he said, and urged Americans to read more books and donate to the Victory Book Campaign, as “in this war, we know, books are weapons.”
One of my most treasured possessions is the little book of Rupert Brooke's poems my 18 year old dad took to war with him. I love reading them now, thinking what strange comfort they must have been.