When Books Went to War

When Books Went to War

By Molly Guptill Manning
Unabridged
100% overall 3 ratings. Go to reviews
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“A careful account of what it took—a lot—to ensure that US fighting men had the right stuff to read.”

USA Today

An Amazon Best Book of the Month 

When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more.

Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered twenty million hardcover donations. In 1943 the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks in every theater of war.

Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy, in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific, in field hospitals, and on long bombing flights.

They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. When Books Went to War is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike.

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3 reviews

  1. Nelle
    Overall Liked it

    Small Details Make History

    This book by Molly Guptill Manning, read by Bernadette Dunne, is custom-made for every lover of books. It gave me a new appreciation not only for books but also for the Americans during World War II who worked so hard to get reading material to soldiers, for soldiers who faced so much hardship but always kept their books close by them, and for the way publishers worked together to develop a brand new “paperback” type of book. This is a virtually unknown aspect of World War II that most people have never thought about, and I was intrigued to learn about it. Overall, this book is quite enjoyable.

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  2. David12
    Overall Liked it

    This is one of the best books I read in the past year.

    During World War II, the people of the US armed forces were desperate for reading material. It is said that during wartime, 90% of the time is waiting and boredom, while the other 10% is horror. On ships and in outposts, there were often not even radios. Members of the armed forces often preferred solitary pursuits when they had downtime, because they were around other people all the time. Reading was a favorite activity, but there often was nothing to read. In contrast to the Nazis, who were banning and burning books, US librarians began a drive to collect donated books to send to those in the armed forces. Eventually, when donations could not meet the demand, publishers got involved, and began printing Armed Services Editions paperbacks (ASEs), which were specially designed to be as thin and light as possible. They were an extraordinary success, and the author recounts actual letters that mentioned how people swarmed around the crates when new books were delivered. They were meant to be read and then passed along to the next person. There are anecdotes about how many service people who never read a book outside of school became voracious readers, and went to further their educations after the war ended. This topic could have been presented in a very dry manner, but this book is fascinating, and held my interest from the very start. It is World War II history, as well as about the importance of ideas and the written word, and how they can never be eradicated. It is also interesting to know what books were most popular at the time. The number one most requested and read book was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith (which is one of the best novels I ever read). I also have never read a book where the ALA is one of the heroes. Bernadette Dunne is an excellent narrator.

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  3. DND
    Overall Liked it

    A great read

    This book gives listeners a view of WWII which isn’t discussed very often: What did the soldiers do in between the fighting? At first I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy this book, but after the first chapter I found myself loving it. To respond to the Germans burning books, the Americans set up organizations to give the soldiers books, sometimes the very same books the Germans burned. The council’s slogan was: “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” These books helped the soldiers forget what they were doing, even if it was for a couple of minutes. They could imagine a world where they weren’t sitting in a fox hole waiting for the gun fire to start up again. Or traveling across the Pacific to fight the Japanese on an island no one had ever heard of before. One soldier wrote: “I want to thank you profoundly, for myself, and more importantly [for] the men here in this godforsaken part of the globe. We fry by day and freeze by night. What we are doing near the Persian Gulf…no one knows. All we have…for recreation is a ping-pong set – with one paddle only.” Together Molly Guptill Manning and Bernadette Dunne give listeners a wonderful book.

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