How Books Became a Critical Part of the Fight to Win World War II

The United States armed forces are not generally known to be staunch defenders of free speech, but that's the story that emerges from Molly Guptill Manning's fascinating new book When Books Went to War, a history of the American military's huge World War II program of printing and distributing books to service members. In 1944, with the presidential election looming, Republicans and Democrats in Congress fought over the details of a new system for tallying the troops' votes. When the Soldier Voting Bill was finally passed, Republican Senator Robert A. Taft quietly added a sweeping, vaguely worded amendment prohibiting the government from distributing any material that could be considered propaganda. For the military's Council on Books in Wartime, the amendment was a potential disaster for the popular program. The Navy protested that deleting politically offensive passages might "result in coloring the intent of the author" and giving the impression that soldiers were being presented with "half-truths." But the alternative—banning books outright—brought the council uncomfortably close to the Nazi’s vicious censoring of ideas that Americans were supposed to be fighting against.
The idea that "books were intertwined with the values at stake in the war" is central to Manning's study, which begins with an account of a book burning in Berlin in 1933, and describes how these public provocations shocked and enraged the foreign press. When the United States entered the war, it was American librarians who spearheaded a national campaign to collect books for soldiers and thus send them to the war zones armed with ideas. When the War Department took over in 1943, they worked with publishers to produce special lightweight volumes in a huge range of genres, from pulp cowboy novels to Victorian poetry, and murder mysteries to The Great Gatsby (the book includes an appendix listing all 1,200 titles.) They went to theaters all over the world, to black and white units alike, and even, if the titles passed the censors, to POW camps.
For the soldiers themselves, the books were more practical than symbolic.