Books for the Army: The Army Library Service in the Second World War 9780231879064

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Tables
I. Army Reading and the Army Library Service
II. Antecedents
III. The Period of Expansion: The War Department Office
IV. The Service Command Librarians
V. Donated Books and Services
VI. Post Service
VII. Hospital Service
VIII. Overseas Book Distribution
IX. Book Distribution in the Pacific Theaters
X. Book Distribution in the Eastern Theaters
XI. The Overseas Magazine Set
XII. Armed Services Editions
XIII. Overseas Service: Puerto Rico to Saipan
XIV. The European Theater
XV. Censorship and the Soldier Voting Law
XVI. The Western Pacific
XVII. End of the War and Afterward
XVIII. Conclusion
Appendix: Expenditures for Reading Matter
Notes to the Text
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

BOOKS FOR THE ARMY

BOOKS FOR THE ARMY

THE ARMY LIBRARY SERVICE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

John Jamieson

NEW YORK • COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS • 1950

THIS PUBLICATION BY

FUNDS

WAS MADE POSSIBLE I N

GRANTED BY CARNEGIE

PART

CORPORATION

OF N E W Y O R K . T H A T CORPORATION IS NOT, H O W E V E R , T H E A U T H O R , O W N E R , P U B L I S H E R , OR P R O P R I E T O R OF T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N , AND 18 NOT TO B E UNDERSTOOD

AS

APPROVING

BY

VIRTUE

OF

ITS

G R A N T ANY OF T H E S T A T E M E N T S MADE OR V I E W S EXPRESSED

COPYRIGHT

1950,

THEREIN.

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

PRE8S

P U B L I S H E D IN GREAT B R I T A I N , CANADA, AND INDIA BY GEOFFREY

CUMBEKLEGE

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S , LONDON, TORONTO, AND BOMBAY M A N U F A C T U R E D I N T H E UNITED STATES OF

AMERICA

To my mother and my father

No one can claim that he has everything

observed

at first hand or learned all that

there is to know. Let each say frankly what he has to say; the truth will be born from these converging

sincerities.

—Marc Bloch, in The Strange

Defeat

Preface

T

H I S history of the Army Library Service covers the entire war period, from the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1940 to the effective conclusion of demobilization in the latter part of 1946. T o round out the story, a summary account is given in Chapter II of the earlier history of army recreational libraries and the Army Library Service, and conditions since 1946 are briefly described in Chapter XVII. Because of the nature of army organization, there was only an indirect connection between the agencies that comprised the wartime Army Library Service: between the Library Section in the War Department and the library or Special Services offices in the regional commands and the overseas theaters, between the command and theater offices and the post and unit libraries. The connection between army library administrators and the civilian agencies that co-operated with them was, naturally, even looser. But army librarians, army library administrators, and the civilians who contributed to the service were all inspired by the same belief and worked for the same end. They believed that soldiers needed books and libraries, and they did their best to provide both for them. The object of this work is to show how their largely independent endeavors were carried out as parts of a broadly unified enterprise. I have tried to describe the development of these loosely related efforts, not merely to recapitulate what was accomplished. The blunders, the misunderstandings, the failures seem to me as deserving of record as the successes. T o slight the failures is to depreciate the human needs which the service was designed to meet; if the failures did not matter, neither did the successes. The plans that worked were usually adopted only after the trial of plans that did not work. Both are part of the story of the effort to devise a workable plan. It is hardly necessary to say that a book about an army activity must be primarily a book about the army. It is impossible to evaluate, even to describe, the work of the Army Library Service without constant reference to its army environment. Army aims, army organization, army regulations, army attitudes and the geographical distribu-

viH

Preface

tion of the army during the war entered into and largely determined the objectives and policies of army library agencies, the availability and selection of their personnel, and even the details of their technical procedures. Many, although certainly not all, marked variations in the effectiveness of the service s p r a n g directly from variations in these military factors and cannot be accounted for in any other way. I n the interest of readability, I have tried to simplify the descriptions of army organization, administration, and supply, but the book would be meaningless if they were omitted or antiseptically isolated f r o m the rest of the story. I n the summer of 1945, when I was an officer in the L i b r a r y Section of the W a r Department Special Services Division, I wrote an account of the wartime work of the Army L i b r a r y Service to serve as source material for the history of the Army Service Forces which is now being prepared by the Historical Division of the D e p a r t m e n t of the A r m y General Staff. Surprisingly little concrete information could be gleaned from the official records, correspondence, and reports to which I had access. T o discover how the W a r Department L i b r a r y Section's plans had originated and how they had been carried out, I had to depend almost entirely on the personal recollections of the two senior officers in the section and on those of other officers in the Special Services Division. I t proved impossible to give an adequate account of how the Army L i b r a r y Service had functioned outside the W a r D e p a r t m e n t office. The records were too f r a g m e n t a r y : a mass of reports f r o m post libraries, but only partially t a b u l a t e d ; d a t a on book circulation in a p a r t i c u l a r area a t a p a r t i c u l a r time, on book distribution in another area a t another time; an account of one command's expenditures in one year, and of the number and size of another command's libraries a year l a t e r ; the principal library directives issued in some theaters and Service Commands, and none at all from others. In all this d i s p a r a t e material there was very little about the day-to-day problems of librarians and library officers, very little to distinguish between measures t h a t had only been d r a f t e d and those t h a t had actually been p u t into effect. Necessarily, then, this semi-official account of the Army L i b r a r y Service was mainly a record of the L i b r a r y Section's activities, with only passing and sometimes inaccurate references to the field. A year later, when a g r a n t from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to the American L i b r a r y Association enabled me to undertake a general history of the wartime work of the Army L i b r a r y Service, it seemed clear t h a t I could only find out what had happened in the

Preface

ix

field by interviewing or corresponding with the officers and librarians who had administered the service and the enlisted men f o r whose benefit it was intended. This was the course I followed; and so, although I have used records, memoranda, official directives, and other pertinent unclassified documents whenever I could find them, this history is based principally on interviews and personal correspondence. M y "sources" comprise about 250 persons. The m a j o r i t y of them were army librarians, library officers or Special Services officers. Their evidence gives the book a certain bias. I t emphasizes what they did or tried to do. I t tends to minimize, except in general statements, the activities they failed to undertake, the posts and whole areas where no real a t t e m p t was made to provide library service. T o offset this bias, I have interviewed or corresponded with men who served in the principal areas in which American soldiers were stationed during the war. Many of these men were librarians in civil life. Their comments were extremely helpful, but the extent of their observation was usually limited, and so f o r the most p a r t my account is based on the testimony of the men and women who did the work. W i t h negligible exceptions they appeared to be interested only in giving an accurate r e p o r t of what they had seen or done. Their candor and their generous assumption t h a t my only aim was to write an honest and impartial story, were extremely heartening. W i t h o u t their interest and co-operation, this book could not have proceeded very f a r . I t is impossible to name here all the persons to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude. About a score have read and commented on a third or more of the chapters and a few have critically examined the entire manuscript. T o all of these readers I extend g r a t e f u l thanks f o r the additions and corrections they have supplied, but since the full responsibility f o r the contents of this work is mine, I shall not single them out from the other sources named in the notes following the main text. I should like to thank again the five men who encouraged me to undertake this h i s t o r y : R a y L. T r a u t m a n and Paul E . Postell, my successive L i b r a r y Section chiefs, who first suggested it and have subsequently been unstinting in their aid, and Robert M. Lester and Charles Dollard, of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Carl H . Milam, the former executive secretary of the American L i b r a r y Association, who were instrumental in g r a n t i n g the funds which made it possible for me to devote the greater p a r t of a year to travel, correspondence, and research. I am indebted, too, to R. E . Dooley and Everett 0 . Fontaine of the

X

Preface

American Library Association Executive Office», for courteous cooperation and criticism; to H. Stahley Thompson, former manager of Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., f o r access to the Armed Services Editions publishing records ; to Israel Wice, for guidance through the W a r Department Historical Division's records of Special Services activities in overseas theaters; to Howard H a y c r a f t , for his careful study of the manuscript and for many valuable suggestions; and, most of all, to R u t h Jamieson, f o r her help and encouragement at every stage of the work. Slightly condensed versions of Chapters VI, X I I , and XV have appeared, respectively, in The Wilson Library Bulletin, the final catalogue of Armed Services Editions, and The Public Opinion Quarterly, and are reprinted by permission. New York October 9, 19^9

J.J.

Contents I.

ARMY R E A D I N G A N D T H E ARMY L I B R A R Y SERVICE Army

1 Reading

1

The Army Library II.

6

Service

ANTECEDENTS

12

The First

12

World War

Establishment

of the Army

Library

Service

15

The Corps Areas III.

THE

PERIOD

17

OF EXPANSION: T H E

WAR

PARTMENT OFFICE

20

The Chief of the Library Books, Buildings, Special IV.

Services

Section

25

of Librarians

and Information

29 and Education

T H E SERVICE COMMAND LIBRARIANS The Fourth Service The Smaller The Ninth Later

88

Commands Service

42

Command

45

Developments

50 Service

51

D O N A T E D BOOKS A N D S E R V I C E S

54

Local Drives The Victory

55

POST SERVICE Getting

60

Book Campaigns

The Red Cross and the Book-of-the-Month VI.

30 34

Command

The Army Air Forces Library V.

28

and Funds

The Reclassification

DE-

Started

Club

62 64 64

xi*

Contents

VII.

VIII.

IX.

Book Selection

67

Reference Work

70

Publicity and Support of Other Activities

70

Extension

72

Centralized Service

75

Accountability

76

Special Services Officers

77

HOSPITAL

SERVICE

80

Types of Hospitals

81

Library Funds and Personnel for General Hospitals

82

Post Hospitals

83

The Training Program

86

Book Selection

87

OVERSEAS BOOK D I S T R I B U T I O N The War Department and Special Services Supply

91

Library Supplies

96

BOOK DISTRIBUTION IN T H E PACIFIC THEATERS

X.

101

Alaska and the Aleutians

101

The South Pacific Area

105

The Southwest Pacific Area

107

BOOK DISTRIBUTION

IN THE

EASTERN

THEATERS

XI.

89

113

China-Burma-India

113

The Mediterranean Theater of Operations

118

Africa-Middle-East

124

THE OVERSEAS

Theater

MAGAZINE

SET

128

The Assembly Branch

130

Costs

132

Lightweight

Editions

Composition of the Set

132 134

Contents

xiü Controversies

138

The WAC Magazine XII.

ARMED

SERVICES

Kit

140

EDITIONS

142

The ASE

Project

143

The Army

Plan

144

The Council on Books in Wartime

145

Army

147

and Navy

Action

Operations

150

The Postwar

Project

The Reception XIII.

OVERSEAS

THE

of Armed Services

SERVICE:

PUERTO

Editions RICO

Overseas

TO SAIPAN

161

The Panama

Canal Department

167

Pacific Area

EUROPEAN

169

THEATER

The "Special Planning

187

188

Supply"

a Service

Phase

Program

192 193

Book Supplies

195 Program

197

The Civilian Librarians

199

Conclusion

209

CENSORSHIP

AND

THE

SOLDIER

Censorship The Soldier THE

190

Reorganisation

The Training

XVI.

161

Department

The First Phase

XV.

157

The Antilles

The Central XIV.

156

VOTING

LAW

212 212

Voting

WESTERN

Law

PACIFIC

214 230

The Plan

230

AFP AC

233

The Philippines Japan

(Eighth

(AFWESPAC) Army)

237 289

xtv

Contents Korea (XXIV

Corps)

243

Conclusion XVII.

XVIII.

END OF THE

WAR AND

AFTERWARD

247

The Library Branch

247

Procurement of Book Kits

249

Personnel Policy

250

Funds

252

CONCLUSION

256

APPENDIX:

NOTES

245

Readers and Sitters

256

The Librarians

259

The Service

267

EXPENDITURES

FOR READING

MATTER

277

Expenditures

for United States Posts

277

Expenditures

for Overseas Theaters

283

TO THE

TEXT

285

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

INDEX

309

Tables I.

T H E SERVICE COMMANDS AND THEIR LIBRARIANS

II. III.

PUBLICATIONS IN OVERSEAS MAGAZINE SET

152

DISTRIBUTION OF LIBRARY KITS IN WESTERN PACIFIC

V.

134

A S E T I T L E S AS CLASSIFIED BY T H E COUNCIL ON BOOKS IN WARTIME

IV.

85

285

NUMBER AND SOURCES OF PAY OF ARMY LIBRARIANS

253

I

Army Reading and the Army Library Service ARMY

READING

O

NE of the principal morale activities of the American army in the Second World W a r was the distribution of books and the provision of library service to soldiers. This activity was carried out under the general supervision of the Army L i b r a r y Service. Like all services intended for the entire army, it had to be carried out on a grand scale in order to be effective. The number of professional personnel employed was modest at best. Approximately 1,200 civilian librarians served for a y e a r or more in army libraries in the United States and overseas, although the greatest number employed a t one time was probably never more than six hundred. But the amount of material distributed was extraordinarily large. Between J a n u u r y , 1941, and October, 1946, roughly ten million hardbound books were purchased with a r m y funds and placed in libraries or issued to troop units. The same number or more were donated to the army by the Victory Book Campaigns and hundreds of independent donors: municipal libraries, state library commissions, the Red Cross, philanthropic organizations, and women's war work societies. About 50 million commercially produced paperbound books (in the Pocket Book, Penguin, I n f a n t r y J o u r n a l , Avon, Dell, and other series) were acquired by army libraries through purchase or donation. Then there were the paperbound Armed Services Editions, or Council Books, which were specially manufactured for the army and the navy. The Army L i b r a r y Service bought and distributed 98 million of these books between the fall of 1943 and the fall of 1946. Its purchases of lightweight editions of magazines for overseas troops alone during the same period amounted to 265 million pieces. These figures do not include the three and a half million hardbound books purchased by the Red Cross and placed in its overseas clubs and clubmobiles and the 50 or 60 million paperbound books which found their way to army posts outside army l i b r a r y channels. The Army

2

Army

Beading

Exchange Service alone purchased 250,000 Pocket Books a month f o r resale to soldiers, and individuals and private firms bought millions more to mail to soldiers overseas. All told, it can be safely estimated t h a t some 25 million hardbound and 200 million paperbound books were purchased or donated for distribution to soldiers between the beginning of 1941 and the fall of 1946. 1 Let us allow for the inevitable supply losses of an army spread over a g r e a t p a r t of the world and assume t h a t not more than two thirds of this material actually got into the hands of soldiers. Even so, it is an enormous amount. I t seems disproportionately large when we consider the relative unimportance of books in American culture as compared with newspapers, radio, films, and magazines. Did soldiers really need books in these vast quantities? Did they read them? T h e answer is t h a t they did—not all soldiers by any means—but certainly a large enough proportion of thein to j u s t i f y the army's effort to supply reading matter to all units. Several studies were made of soldiers' reading and use of libraries early in the war. In a poll of a representative cross-section of men in two combat divisions in t r a i n i n g in the United States in 1942, 49 percent of the men said t h a t they used their camp library occasionally, 21 percent t h a t they had used it within the last two weeks, and 10 percent said t h a t they had been reading a book t h a t day. In a similar poll taken in New Guinea in 1943, only 15 percent of the men said t h a t a good collection of books was available to them. Nevertheless, 40 percent had read a book d u r ing the preceding week and 20 percent had been reading a book t h a t day. In the same overseas "sample" 80 percent of the men had read or looked through one or more magazines in the last week and 50 percent had read or looked through a magazine t h a t day. No doubt the "prestige f a c t o r " influenced the answers of many of these men. In asking a man whether he has read a book recently, it is almost impossible to prevent him from inferring t h a t he ought to have read a book, and so his answer may be affirmative whether he has read or not. In any case, these figures seem definitely high. The}' are chiefly interesting for their evidence t h a t reading matter was much more in demand overseas than it was in the United States. W h a t percentage of soldiers normally read a t United States posts is an unanswerable question. So many variables are involved t h a t it is probably misleading even to speak of a norm. The best evidence is the purely nonstatistical testimony of the librarians themselves. W i t h extremely r a r e exceptions, they agree t h a t their libraries were heavily p a t r o n ized whenever they served t r o o p units which had a moderate amount

Army

Reading

3

of leisure in the evenings and that a large proportion of the men they served were men who had neither patronized libraries nor read books habitually as civilians.2 Why Soldiers Read.—Many men in the army read because reading newspapers, magazines, and books had been p a r t of their daily lives as civilians. As soldiers they tended to read more books and fewer newspapers, because books were generally more accessible than newspapers, both in United States posts and overseas. They were also inclined to read more than they had read when they were civilians, because they had more leisure and fewer ways of occupying it. Then there were many thousands of "new" readers in the army—men who had rarely glanced at a book or even a magazine when they were civilians and who began to read in the army, just as they began to play ping-pong and volley ball, solely because there was nothing else to do. This was particularly true of men in small isolated posts and of those in large posts which were too populous for the entertainment facilities of the neighboring towns. They turned to reading as an escape from boredom. The incentive that led a man to pick up a p a r ticular book might be a desire for self-improvement, for a better understanding of the war, for technical information, for spiritual solace, for enlightenment, or simply for escape from the present, but for the "new" readers who composed the majority, the determining factor was that at the moment there was very little else to do. I t is significant that at many posts library patronage seems to have been heaviest the week before pay day. A letter from a young corporal in New Guinea to the publishers of Armed Services Editions shows the place that books came to occupy in some soldiers' lives: In looking back over my short Army career, I find I could have made it much easier for myself if I had done more reading. . . . The days when no mail is received are not so lonesome when there is an unfinished story around. Then, too, reading takes the mind away from the experiences we have that are so different from the environment we left and keeps you from concentrating on all the discomforts we have, always looking for things that annoy you, and becoming a slave to self pity. You have many readers. I have traded many books with truck-drivers. They are worth their weight in gold on those long waits we have at the docks, many times arriving there before the boat is even docked. You find them in the pockets of the boys who operate the bulldozers. Being closely associated with the Army's new weapon, the landing boats, I have seen a small box with three or four in it fastened to the wall of their engine compartment so they will be dry and easy to find.

Army

Reading

There are many others who, like myself, find that having so many books available helps us to fill in that time when there are no shows and no letters to answer. They also keep me from the gambling tables when out of desperation, for the want of something to do, I'll imagine myself getting in with them and breaking the company with that last pound [five-dollar bill] they didn't get before. There was another reason for reading which made itself felt wherever there were organized army libraries supervised by civilian librarians. F o r the enlisted men, the interior of the library was usually the most comfortable room on the post and the least military in appearance. Purely by instinct and common sense, most army librarians tried to make their libraries look like living-rooms. They were f u r nished with easy chairs, floor lamps, divans, end tables, smoking stands, they were colorful because of the bindings of the books themselves, and feminine touches were added—flowers, curtains, and pictures (not pin-ups) on the walls. There was usually a woman in the room—young and not in army uniform—doing what appeared to be women's work, and willing to pause and talk. I t was relatively quiet. If the radio was playing, it seldom blared like the service club juke box. I t was a good place to sit in comfort and smoke, read, or write letters, away from the drabness, the discomfort, and the incessant noise of the barracks or company davroom—very often the only place on the post where one could get away f o r a few hours from the overpowering military atmosphere. I t is h a r d for civilians to appreciate the army's desperate need f o r on-the-post recreation. A f t e r a man's first few weeks at a p o s t — a n y p o s t — h e will do anything to obtain momentary relief from the cons t a n t sense of subjection to a r b i t r a r y authority and f r o m the bewildering lack of privacy, the narrowness and the monotony of b a r r a c k s life. The obvious escape is to leave the post or go to town, whatever sort of town it is. Going there in a soldier's uniform with his soldier friends, a man carries some of the army atmosphere with him and finds himself doing what a soldier is expected to do. H e will be tempted to relax from the strain of militarj' life by engaging in the traditional military vices of drinking, gambling, fighting, and running a f t e r the first accessible woman. This reaction is not inevitable— and the USO and the Red Cross did their best to provide other outlets—but it has been the obvious p a t t e r n of behavior as long as armies have existed. During the war in certain regions—in the United States as well as abroad—the venereal disease rate could be kept down only by inducing or compelling men to stay in camp, f o r the only accessible

A rmy Reading

5

communities offered nothing but drunkenness, promiscuity, and disease. No wonder soldiers showed a preference for hardboiled fiction which dealt plainly or sensationally with the crude facts of sex. I t corresponded to what they knew, saw, and everlastingly heard. I t was absolutely essential that soldiers be provided with ample diversions on their posts, both in the United States and overseas. They had to have something to entertain them or to engage their serious interest in their leisure time. Books and libraries were only p a r t of the picture. Athletics, films, soldier shows, the radio, manual arts shops, off-duty educational courses, and camp newspapers were equally necessary. The army librarian's job was to supply not only books for entertainment but also books that would be of use to men who had developed an interest in other off-duty activities or wanted to study military and technical subjects in their free time in order to qualify themselves for higher military ratings. Whether a man read to kill time, to improve his mind, to master a hobby, or to earn a promotion, the librarian who furnished him with a book suited to his purpose was performing an important sociological function. The military term for that function is "maintenance of morale." The alternatives to giving a soldier something to occupy his mind, or simply his time, were apathy, discontentment, drunkenness, and a soaring V.D. rate. Combat Troops.—What has been said so f a r applies mainly to soldiers who were stationed at army garrisons. What about combat troops in the field? Did they have any time for books and reading during combat operations? Opinions on this question vary. I t depends partly on what one means by combat troops. A 15,000-man division is a combat organization. Its rear headquarters, ten miles behind the combat area, might be staffed with as many as 400 men, including the regimental clerks in the division personnel office. There would be 150 or 200 men in the forward headquarters, a few miles back of the fighting zone. Another hundred men would be engaged in clerical and administrative work in the headquarters of the three regiments, the artillery battalion, and the service units attached to the division. At the rear headquarters there would be a medical unit. In the area between the forward and the rear headquarters were the operating men of the service units—ordnance, quartermaster, communications. The grand total of these "noncombat" men in a combat division was about 2,500, roughly 16 percent of the whole. At some stages of a campaign they had to work around the clock day after da}'. But more often than not they were on duty from eight till five. In other words, they often had ample leisure, barren as it might be of comfort and

The Army

6

Library

Service

security, and reading was one of the few possible ways of occupying t h a t leisure. T h e remaining 12,500 men might stay in the line one week, two weeks, or even two months at a time. Normally they were there for ten days or two weeks. If they were dug in, in a static sector, they might have absolutely nothing to do a g r e a t p a r t of the time. Like the man described in Chapter X I I , who was cut off at El Guettar, they might have use for a pocket-size book—if there was room for one in their pockets. When they were in an active sector, or were on the move, it was a different story. A librarian who was in an i n f a n t r y regiment in the European Theater for several months said t h a t there was never any need for reading material in his sector of the line. Yet a soldier who served in a similar unit in Italy wrote that the men in his unit habitually read Armed Services Editions in foxholes, and an artillery man in the 34th Division reported t h a t he and other men in his battery read Armed Services Editions frequently during their sixty days a t the Anzio beachhead. I t depended on the man and the circumstances. A f t e r their stay in the line, groups of combat soldiers went back to the regimental or divisional rest camp, fifteen miles or more to the rear, for a few days' relief. There they took a shower and shaved first of all, if they could. Then they got what post exchange supplies were available, if any, attended movies if the rest area had a p r o j e c t o r and films, wrote letters if paper was available, read if there were books, ate if there was edible food, and slept. The all-important if's depended upon the division's supply situation. I t was usuallj' impossible to engage in more than one or two of these activities, since the supply situation was normally less than perfect. Much f a r t h e r to the rear were the big rest centers for corps or entire armies. They were often in cities or prewar resorts, which offered more exciting diversions than reading. From the point of view of the men, the need for books was greater in the rest camps near the f r o n t . T o sum up, the noncombat soldiers in a combat unit which was not on the move had nearly as much free time as garrison t r o o p s : not always, but on many occasions. T h e real combat soldiers might have from three to six days of leisure in a month of battle. In t h a t leisure time they needed books and whatever other recreational material they could get. THE

ARMY

LIBRARY

SERVICE

I t was the function of the Army Library Service to provide for the reading needs of all troops, both in the United States and overseas,

The Army

Library

Service

7

both in garrisons and in the field. In order to describe what it was and how it performed t h a t function, it is necessary to explain the position of the Army Library Service in the general organization of the army. In the army system the responsibility for maintaining the morale of troops is vested in their commanders. Each commander has an officer on his headquarters staff whose duty it is to keep him apprised of morale conditions in his command and to recommend suitable measures for the maintenance of morale. A t the beginning of the war this officer was called a morale officer. In the highest army headquarters, the W a r Department, the function of making recommendations concerning morale matters was vested in the Morale Branch of the A d j u t a n t General's Office. E a c h headquarters on the next lower level of command—namely, the corps areas in the United States and the overseas departments—likewise had a Morale Branch under its own a d j u t a n t general. F a r t h e r down the chain of command, the large posts which housed complete divisions had their own morale officers, who were assistants to the post a d j u t a n t s ; in the smaller regimental-size posts, the post a d j u t a n t acted as morale officer in addition to his other duties. The Army L i b r a r y Service was one of the activities of the Morale Branch in the W a r Department and in the corps areas. In the posts, however, the responsibility f o r the library and its books was often assigned to the chaplain rather than to the morale officer or the adjutant. In March, 1942, the organization of the army was radically changed. On the top level, the W a r Department was divided into three separate headquarters—Army Ground Forces, Army Service Forces and Army Air Forces. E a c h of these agencies had a commanding general who was responsible to the Chief of Staff, who in turn was responsible to the Secretary of W a r and the President. The commanding general of the Army Ground Forces commanded all the army's combat units while they were in training in the United States. The commanding general of the Army Air Forces commanded all Air Forces units in the United States and some of those overseas. The commanding general of the Army Service Forces commanded the nine corps areas, now renamed service commands, and through them the army installations at which the Ground Forces and Air Forces units did their training. The post commander and his staff kept house, as it were, f o r the Ground Forccs units which trained at the p o s t : provided them with barracks, clothing, food, recreational facilities, and so forth. T h e post commander at an Army Air Forces base was always an Air Forces officer, but like the other post commanders he depended on the service

8

The Army Library

Service

command for most supplies and services, including the provision of library personnel. The Morale Branch in the W a r Department was renamed the Special Services Division 3 and was made part of the Army Service Forces headquarters. There was likewise a Special Services Division at the headquarters of each service command, and at each post a Special Services officer was appointed; it was simply a new name for the old morale officer. There were also Special Services officers in all Army Ground Forces and Army Air Forces units of regimental size or larger. The post libraries were operated under the supervision of the post Special Service officers. At large posts an assistant Special Services officer was sometimes designated as library officer in addition to his other duties. The commanding generals of the overseas theaters of operations were on the same level of command as the commanding generals of the Air, Service and Ground Forces. They were responsible to the Chief of Staff, but otherwise were almost completely autonomous. With minor exceptions, they had complete control of all troops in their theaters. Each theater commander commanded both the generals of the numbered armies in the fighting zone, the Air Forces generals in the theater (with some limitations), and the Service Forces general, who was responsible for housing, food supply, and other services in the rear or noncombat area of the theater. 4 The theater Special Services officer was on the staff of either the theater commander or the theater Service Forces commander, depending upon local conditions. One of his numerous functions was the distribution of reading matter to all troops in the theater and the provision of library service if he considered it desirable and practicable to provide such service. The Army Library Service comprised those offices or individuals on all levels of command who were responsible for the general supply of reading matter to troops. I t was represented in the W a r Department by the Library Section of the Special Services Division, Army Service Forces; in the service commands by the service command librarians on the staffs of the service command Special Services officers; and in posts in the United States by the post librarians on the staffs of the post Special Services officers. In overseas theaters the Army Library Service was represented by the theater Special Services officers. Some of these theater Special Services officers were assisted by library officers or civilian command librarians during the war, but generally they did not make room on their staffs for such specialized personnel until the cessation of hostilities. The following chapters relate how army librarians in the United

The Army

Library

Service

9

States and library and Special Services officers overseas tried to meet their responsibility. Much was accomplished, but it was a struggle all the way. The worst obstacle was, of course, what had created the need in the first place, the f a c t t h a t a war was being fought. F i r s t things had to come first, and library service certainly was not one of them. Nearly always the immediate need for books and service was much greater than the facilities for meeting it. The army recognized the existence of the need, and in the United States and certain overseas areas it took a long step toward meeting it by employing professional librarians to operate the library service. Once they were employed, the j o b was up to them. A post librarian worked for the post Special Services officer and through him for the post commander. The Special Services officer had a dozen other concerns; the commander had a great many more. The j o b of the librarian was to organize and operate the library and keep her superiors informed of its needs. Her superiors were not librarians. The extent of the support they gave the library was largely contingent upon the librarian's ability to convince them of the practical value of her program. I t was as if she were working directly under a board of trustees rather than under another librarian. She had to be a budget-maker and an administrator, as well as a librarian. These functions were p a r t of the j o b ; very often the most important p a r t of the job. The service command librarian back at service command headquarters could help the post librarian by giving her personal advice and by requesting the commanding general of the service command to make recommendations to the post commander on matters of basic policy; f o r example, that in view of an increase in the number of troops at his post he should have two libraries rather than one, or t h a t in order to p a y his librarians from appropriated funds he must make certain t h a t they meet the qualifications established by the W a r Department. But the service command librarian had to tread very cautiously when it became necessary, as it sometimes did, to tell a post commander j u s t how his library should be run. Unless the librarian had the firm backing of the service command Special Services officer and the service commander, his recommendations might be rejected out of hand. F o r the operation of the library was the post commander's responsibility, to be discharged as he saw fit, within the limits of existing regulations. T h e service command headquarters usually merely gave him general directions and furnished him with the means for carrying them out—funds, supplies, and an allotment of personnel, including a librarian. The service command librarian in his turn was responsible to the

10

The Army Library

Service

Special Services officer and the commanding general of the service command for the general supervision of library service in the command. H e could only provide the posts with as much general policy direction and as much concrete aid as he could convince his superiors to be both necessary and in accordance with W a r D e p a r t m e n t policy. Even more t h a n t h a t of the post librarians, his effectiveness depended upon his ability to sell his ideas to his superiors. T h a t was essentially what he had been employed to do. Thus, both the post and the command librarians had more t h a n a merely technical function to perform. They not only had to operate, b u t in the full sense administer, a service, and they had to do so in a constantly changing situation. The t r o o p population they served fluctuated from month to month, materials, supplies, money, and clerical help were often hard to get, and there was a steady and often rapid turnover among the officers for whom they worked. E a c h new Special Services officer or commander had a slightly different a t t i t u d e toward the library service, and the librarian had to win his s u p p o r t in order to do the work properly. Both a t the post and a t the service command level the work was exacting; but most of the librarians had the essential qualifications of understanding and desiring t o achieve the objectives of the program, and on the whole they succeeded admirably. Overseas, especially in the combat theaters, the situation was totally different. Supplies had to be shipped to the theaters from the United States, and cargo space was limited. Food, medical supplies, and munitions were infinitely more important than recreational supplies, and there were many types of recreational supplies besides books. If a theater Special Services officer wanted to obtain books, he had to make proportionate cuts in the space allotted to other Special Services supplies in order to obtain them. H e had to be convinced t h a t books were really needed before he would do this. W a r D e p a r t m e n t directives told him t h a t book supply was one of his functions. B u t he was not a librarian, and ordinarily he did not have a librarian on his staff. W i t h o u t a specialist a t the theater headquarters both to organize and c a r r y out the book supply p r o g r a m and to press its claim to relative importance, book supply was very likely to be neglected or to be carried out in only a haphazard way. In any one hundred American men there may be a dozen who could make a good t r y a t running an athletic p r o g r a m ; but hardly one will be able to do a good j o b of assembling and distributing collections of books and keeping them fresh and suitable to the readers' needs, and only a few will even think

The Army

Library

Service

11

the j o b worth doing. We have seen t h a t the circumstances of war did make the j o b worth doing, but the overseas Special Services officers seldom found the right men—indeed, any men—for it. Thus, the library service in most overseas theaters labored under two handicaps—shortage of books to begin with, and the absence of trained personnel who could devote their whole time to the tasks of obtaining and distributing books. Where there were professional librarians or library supervisors—in the Antilles and Panama Canal Departments and Hawaii—and later in the Marianas, the European Theater, and the Western Pacific—the library service was a success; but in most overseas areas until the end of the war, it was only an expedient, and more often than not a very inadequate one. The problem of supply was p a r t l y solved by the mail distribution of Armed Services Editions and lightweight magazine sets which began in 1944. But trained personnel did not become available in the combat theaters until a f t e r the fighting was over and the process of demobilization had begun. On the whole, for the men who were there the failures of the library service overseas overshadowed the successes. T o p u t it more concretely, there were more soldiers in Britain, North Africa, I t a l y , India, and the South and Southwest Pacific a t the height of the war than there were in the Antilles and the Central Pacific. In retrospect we can see t h a t more might have been done, and done sooner, but in the haste and the confusion of the fighting years many of the errors and omissions that now seem needless were actually unavoidable. The gravest error, from which most of the others flowed, was the W a r Department's failure to require the assignment of qualified library officers to the staffs of the theater Special Services officers. Thus there were many mistakes and many failures as well as many accomplishments. Yet, viewed as a whole and considering the obstacles with which it was confronted, the wartime work of the Army L i b r a r y Service was a real achievement, and a p a r t from its immediate military value it may well have a lasting effect not only on many of the men it served but also on the two civilian institutions which made the greatest contributions to it—the library profession and the publishing industry. Be t h a t as it may, the purpose of this work is to present enough evidence to enable the reader to form an independent judgment of what was done and what it was worth.

II

Antecedents

P

RIOR to the First World W a r the only libraries of any size at army posts were apparently collections of works on tactics, military law, and military history for the use of officers. In addition to military works, the libraries contained publications issued by the W a r Department and other Government agencies. The collections also included some recreational reading matter—sets of Dumas, Scott, and the like. Many post libraries in the Middle West, as late as the 1930's, contained leather-bound oversize sets of travel books which had been published in the 1870's. The Presidio of San Francisco and Fort Huachuca, Arizona, likewise had collections formed before the Spanish-American War. When army libraries for enlisted soldiers were established in the First World War, the nonmilitary books in these old collections were usually turned over to them. One of the last posts containing a large collection of this old material was Fort McPherson, Georgia. About half of its 30,000-volume library was sold as waste paper in 1940. In the Civil and the Spanish American wars recreational books for enlisted men were provided solely by donation. According to Dr. Theodore M. Koch, in Books in the War, the principal donors were religious or charitable organizations, and doubtless most of the books were inspirational in character. There was no centrally organized book distribution or library program. THE

FIRST

WORLD

WAR

In the First World War, recreational and educational facilities and programs for soldiers and sailors were provided by civilian organizations—the Red Cross, the YMCA and YWCA, the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Board, and the Salvation Army—under the general supervision of the civilian Commission for Training Camp Activities. At the request of the commission, book distribution and library service for soldiers and sailors were handled by the W a r Library Service, a civilian organization established for the purpose by the American Library Association. The War Library Service was directed by Dr. Herbert Putnam, the

Antecedents

13

Librarian of Congress. Fund-raising and book-donation drives were conducted in 1917 and 1918, and funds were provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York f o r the construction of library buildings at thirty-six large army posts. By the end of 1919, $6,000,000 had been expended on books and library service and 7,000,000 volumes had been placed in W a r L i b r a r y Service libraries or distributed directly to army and navy personnel. Service a t posts in the United States was organized by prominent civilian librarians on leave from their positions and operated by paid or volunteer librarians. The library buildings had shelf space f o r from 10,000 to 15,000 volumes, seating space for 200 men, and in addition to the main library room had living quarters for the librarian on duty. The m a j o r i t y of the librarians were men. Branch libraries and deposit collections were established in the YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and Jewish Welfare Board huts. Libraries were also established in about two hundred hospitals. The organizers normally spent two months a t each post, supervising the equipping of the libraries and the arrangement and distribution of the books, and employing librarians, assistants, and j a n i t o r s . Small F o r d trucks were purchased for the librarians at all of the larger posts, for they had to provide transportation for their own materials. The W a r Library Service relied largely on donations for its supply of fiction and light recreational reading, and processing centers f o r g i f t books were established in the principal big city libraries. This material was supplemented by purchases of serious books on technology, manual a r t s , military science, history, and travel. T h e total number of volumes purchased was about 1,700,000. A book depot was established in New York City to process and distribute all purchased books and to handle donations from the immediate area. A large staff sorted and processed the purchased books—that is, placed book plates, pockets, and cards in them—storing those for each post in a separate bin. As soon as a substantial number of books had accumulated in a bin, they were packed and shipped to the post. Gift books were sorted, but not processed; it was the responsibility of the professional librarians who supervised the sorting to see t h a t each shipment of g i f t books dispatched to a post was reasonably balanced as to subject matter and types of books. Obsolete and unsuitable books were sold for scrap. By the end of the war, the depot was shipping books to more than 1,600 addresses in the United States and overseas. Under a wartime postal regulation, used newspapers and magazines to which a one cent stamp had been affixed were delivered to the YMCA

IJj.

Antecedents

secretary, and later to the librarian at the nearest camp. As a result, the camps were flooded with magazines and newspapers, many of them out of date and unusable. Much of this material was sold as waste paper, and the proceeds were used to purchase books and magazine subscriptions. The W a r Library Service also provided subscriptions to forty-five magazines for the principal posts and a selection of eleven magazines for branch libraries and the smaller posts. Overseas, the W a r Library Service established a headquarters in Paris, and library buildings were constructed in some of the rear areas. About fifty representatives of the W a r Library Service served overseas, principally in France. Books were sent overseas from the New York depot and from dispatch offices in Hoboken, Philadelphia, Newport News, and Boston. Until cargo space was allocated to the W a r Library Service, the procedure at these shipping points was simply to place crates of donated books on the piers and let each man take a book as he boarded the transport. Later, arrangements were made to provide small boxes of books, some of which were turned over to the transport YMCA secretary for deck use and the rest placed in the hold as filler cargo. Eventually the W a r Library Service was allocated shipping space for 100,000 volumes a month, and the Red Cross provided tonnage for 25,000 volumes more. By March, 1919, 2,000,000 books had been sent overseas. The New York depot also mailed magazines overseas—15,000 copies of each issue of the Saturday Evening Post and 5,000 copics each of other popular weeklies and monthlies. The distribution of books and the establishment of reading rooms in the forward areas in France were entrusted to the directors of the YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and Jewish Welfare huts, since these were the only facilities available. Hospital libraries were operated by the Red Cross. Besides providing books for these facilities and for the libraries in the rear areas, the W a r Library Service headquarters in Paris filled requests from individual soldiers by mail. The service also co-operated in the post-hostilities army educational program in France and Germany, supplying a staff of librarians and some thirty thousand text and reference books for the A.E.F. University a t Beaune and issuing five hundred collections of about four hundred volumes each to other army educational centers. More than seven hundred professional librarians participated in the W a r Library Service for periods varying from several months to two or three years. Their experience had an energizing effect on the profession as a whole. Library administrators had been required to

15

Antecedent»

plan and carry out large-scale programs in a situation that was anything but routine. Many librarians had had their first real contact with the general public as distinguished from students and habitual library patrons. A strong impetus was given to hospital library service and to extension work, particularly in connection with adult education. Much of the "enlarged p r o g r a m " which the American Library Association planned in the mid-twenties and carried out in the next decade was a direct result of the experience gained by the leaders of the profession in the W a r L i b r a r y Service. ESTABLISHMENT

OF

THE

ARMY

LIBRARY

SERVICE

A f t e r the war the army made plans to carry on the educational and recreational work which had been provided by civilian agencies. Education and Recreation officers (later called morale officers) were assigned to all m a j o r headquarters, and civilian specialists were employed by the W a r Department to assist in planning a program of morale activities. A t the end of 1919 Luther L . Dickerson, one of the W a r L i b r a r y Service administrators, was appointed W a r Department L i b r a r y Specialist. During the following year the books, buildings, and equipment of the W a r L i b r a r y Service were turned over to the army, and the materials not needed f o r "the permanent posts were declared surplus. T h e surplus material included about five hundred thousand volumes which were turned over to state library extension agencies. In June, 1921, the A r m y L i b r a r y Service was officially established as an activity of the A d j u t a n t General's Office in the W a r Department, and in each of the six (later nine) corps areas into which the army forces in the country were then divided a civilian corps area librarian was assigned to the staff of the corps area Education and Recreation officer. A t this time there were 228 libraries at army posts in the United States, the Philippine Islands, and the Hawaiian and Panama departments. Forty-two of the libraries were in library buildings constructed during the war. T h e rest were housed in converted barracks or in general recreational buildings. The libraries were operated by enlisted men and a few nonprofessional civilians who had been employed as library assistants during the war. In August, 1921, as the first step toward putting the new morale program into effect, a one-week conference was held at Camp Grant, Illinois, for the Education and Recreation officers of the corps areas and 167 large army posts. In connection with the conference, Dickerson, the W a r Department L i b r a r y Specialist, and four of the corps

16

Antecedents

area librarians conducted a course for the enlisted librarians of the 167 posts. In terms of pupil interest, the Camp G r a n t library course was a success. But it turned out that only about half of the men who took the course had actually been serving as librarians. T h e rest had been sent to the school simply to fill their camps' quotas, and when the course was over they went back to their nonlibrary jobs. Those who did serve as librarians, if they were intelligent, received promotions sooner or later and were given more important assignments. Within a few years none of the graduates of the school were serving as librarians, and a t many posts the position was held either by a green recruit or by an old sergeant, unfit for harder work. T o be effective, the training course for enlisted librarians should have been given at least once a year. But the t r u t h was t h a t the army's acceptance of library service had not penetrated very f a r below the W a r Department General Staff. L i b r a r y service had been recognized as an army responsibility and a p r o g r a m had been drawn u p and presented at a conference. But the execution of the p r o g r a m was left to the post commanders, and it varied radically from post to post. According to Dickerson and other observers some commanders regarded library service as a form of " p a m p e r i n g " which fostered nonmilitary interests and was harmful to discipline. More often, their a t t i t u d e was t h a t the bulk of their men did not have enough education or intellectual curiosity to make the maintenance of a library worth while. They considered the magazine collections available in most company dayrooms (small recreational rooms in or near the b a r r a c k s ) sufficient f o r their reading needs. " T h e average commander," said one of the corps area librarians, "was interested in morale but he didn't think army libraries had much to do with it." Consequently, the army's plans f o r carrying on the post activities originated by the W a r L i b r a r y Service had only a limited success. As post funds were scant and not likely to be spent on books, Dickerson resorted to traveling libraries as a means of refreshing the post collections. The first traveling libraries consisted of twenty-five volumes each; they were later increased to fifty or sixty volumes. T h e earlier sets were composed of illustrated standard works—Dickens, Hawthorne, Parkman, and others—and current best sellers and westerns ; the later sets were composed entirely of current material. They were assembled and boxed a t the New York Quartermaster Depot and sent to the corps area headquarters. The corps area librarians processed the books and then sent each traveling library to four p o s t s in

Antecedents

17

t u r n . E a c h post kept the library for ninety days and then dispatched it to the next post. The last post of the four added the books t o its p e r m a n e n t collection. Ordinarily each post received four traveling libraries a year and kept one. Dickerson established the traveling library system in 1923 and 1924. A f t e r he resigned his W a r Department post in the l a t t e r year, a series of officers served as chiefs of the Army L i b r a r y Service, in addition to other duties in the A d j u t a n t General's Office. K a t e McDaniel, who had been Dickerson's secretary and chief clerk f o r several y e a r s , took over the selection and procurement of books f o r the traveling libraries and the general administration of the small W a r D e p a r t ment library office. THE

CORPS

ABEAS

T h e corps area librarians did what they could to keep the library p r o g r a m alive, but their work outside their own corps area headquart e r s libraries (which were primarily f o r the use of officers studying military science) was restricted more and more by shrinking travel budgets. A t the same time there was a steady turnover in post personnel. E a c h successive post commander had to be indoctrinated, each successive chaplain (the officer who supervised the library and was accountable f o r its p r o p e r t y ) had to be encouraged to keep the library in effective operation, and the new enlisted librarians had to be t a u g h t how to a r r a n g e the books on the shelves, how to charge them out, and how to keep army library records, which were as intricate and cumbersome as most other government p r o p e r t y accounts. In general, the chief interest of both the chaplains and the enlisted librarians seems to have been to prevent the loss of books. T h e books were usually shelved, not according to subject, but by accession number, f o r convenience in t a k i n g inventory. Book shelves in recreational buildings were frequently covered with chicken-wire screens, so t h a t no books could be taken down in the absence of the librarian, and naturally he would not be present a f t e r regular d u t y hours. In short, the post library was likely to become the place where the librarian took his ease, and only secondarily the place where soldiers came to read or to borrow books. When the corps area librarians' annual travel budgets were cut to $100 or less in the late twenties, they could no longer perform their essential supervisory functions. They continued to operate the corps a r e a headquarters libraries and to process and schedule traveling libraries, but t h a t was about all. Shortly a f t e r travel funds were cut below the level of practical usefulness, the W a r Department issued a

18

Antecedenti

directive which authorized the retention of the corps area librarians then on duty, but prohibited the appointment of librarians to replace those who resigned or died. Their duties became "additional duties" of junior headquarters officers. In one corps area headquarters, the lieutenant commanding a machine gun company had six or eight "additional duties" to perform, including t h a t of corps area library officer. The title "library officer" meant "officer accountable for library p r o p e r t y " and nothing more. Under the circumstances, t h a t was all it could mean. W i t h the decision not to replace corps area librarians who resigned, the army's first experiment in providing organized library service to soldiers came to an end. The W a r Department office continued to spend between $20,000 and $25,000 annually, chiefly for traveling libraries, and the framework of a service organization was preserved, but it was scarcely used. The decline in library expenditures tells the story. Ninety-four thousand dollars were spent in 1921, including the p a y of twenty-three civilian librarians. By 1931 expenditures had dropped to $44,000, including $16,000 for the pay of field personnel and $734 for travel. A year later only $51 was spent on travel, and thereafter nothing. By 1934 the p a y of field personnel (a total of two corps area librarians) was less than $8,000, and it remained a t this low level until 1940. T h e decline of the Army Library Service in the 1930's was, of course, only one aspect of the general decline of the army. There was not enough money to maintain activities of secondary importance. T h e autonomy of post commanders and the purely permissive character of directives concerning morale also contributed to the decline of the service. Commanders might carry out directives regarding library service or ignore them as they chose. But the basic weakness of the p r o g r a m was that the W a r Department had assumed t h a t libraries could be operated effectively without trained librarians. I t recognized the morale value of the libraries operated by the W a r Library Service during the preceding war, but the fact t h a t those libraries had been operated by professional librarians was overlooked or minimized. I t was assumed that specially trained library personnel were needed only on the higher levels and only, or chiefly, f o r planning work and the preparation of directives. When Dickerson resigned, a f t e r he had done his planning and prepared the implementing directives, he was not replaced. Without qualified operating personnel a t the post level, the plans were executed only haphazardly, and there was no one to sell and resell to the commanders the very idea of library service for

Antecedent»

19

enlisted men. The commanders themselves were usually not convinced that library service had any real morale value for the soldiers who composed the bulk of the army; apparently they regarded reading as an activity which could appeal only to well-educated men and serious students. And so, with permissive directives furnishing only a feeble incentive and with no trained personnel to do the work properly, they generally let the library service fall into disuse. F o r the most part, it became merely a gesture. Nevertheless, the libraries were there, the army took official cognizance of their existence, and the W a r Department library office spent as much money as it could to keep them in books. There was not much genuine service, but at least the responsibility for providing the service had been recognized and embodied in regulations. When war came, there was something to start with.

Ill

The Period of Expansion: The War Department Office

I

N T H E S P R I N G O F 1939, as a result of the threatening situation in Europe, Congress authorized the army to increase its enlisted strength from 174,000 to 210,000 men. The army did not begin to make detailed plans for a large expansion, however, until the summer of 1 9 4 0 , when the induction of the National Guard and the passage of the Selective Service Act were pending. Its total strength was increased to 450,000 in September of that year, when the National Guard was inducted ; then 630,000 selectees were inducted between November, 1940, and the following Jul}'. After the Selective Service Act was extended, in the summer of 1941, the army grew steadily. I t s strength at the end of 1942 was 5 , 4 0 0 , 0 0 0 ; in J u l y , 1 9 4 3 , 7 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 ; and at the end of the war in Europe it had reached a peak of 8,300,000. All these men had to be housed, equipped, fed, trained, both individually and in working units, and nearly two thirds of them were eventually sent overseas in service or fighting units. T h e first plans for a morale program for the enlarged army were made by the Morale Branch in the summer of 1940, in accordance with the general policies set forth in the army's Mobilization Regulations. Nobody imagined then that the army would grow to a strength of eight million men. The Morale Branch's plans were intended for an army of one million—especially for the 630,000 selectees. The selectees were to be inducted into the army at about fifteen reception centers, and most of them were to be sent to fifteen or twenty large training camps. The Morale Branch was responsible for the planning of adequate athletic and recreational facilities for some thirty-three new or enlarged posts and for organizing the recreational programs for which the facilities were to be used. Its immediate aims were to co-operate with the army engineers in erecting service clubs, recreational halls, and theaters, to equip the buildings properly, to arrange for the employment of hostesses and other personnel, and to provide movies and stage shows.

The Period of Expansion

HI

Civilian consultants came to Washington to help the Morale Branch formulate its plans—some by invitation, some voluntarily as representatives of the public interest. The library consultants, who were in the latter class, were Carl H. Milam, executive secretary of the American Library Association, and Luther L . Dickerson, the former W a r Department L i b r a r y Specialist and at that time chief of the Indianapolis Public L i b r a r y . Now, the library provisions of the Mobilization Regulations 1 were extremely general. They stated that the library service in mobilization would be an expansion of the peacetime service, t h a t the size of libraries and the number of personnel employed would be appropriate to the size of the command served, that books would be procured and distributed by the Morale Branch or by the commanding generals of service commands 2 from funds allotted by the army fiscal director, and that libraries would be maintained at large hospitals and, "when practicable and advisable," at all posts. I t was for the Morale Branch to determine how this generally stated policy should be executed. The consultants recommended the assignment of a chief army librarian to the Morale Branch—either a prominent civilian library administrator or a reserve officer with professional library experience, who should hold rank equal to that of the supervisors of the army's educational and recreational programs. Professional civilian librarians should be assigned to all service command headquarters and to the thirty-three large posts. The libraries should be housed in separate buildings similar to those used in the last war and, in the interest of economy in selecting and buying, should contain identical basic collections of four thousand volumes, purchased by the W a r Department, which should also supply uniform catalogues for the initial collections. Funds should be granted to the posts, so that the initial collections might be supplemented with about one thousand volumes selected by the post librarians in accordance with local needs. E a c h library should subscribe to a wide variety of magazines and newspapers. The libraries should be cultural and educational centers, handling music records, pictures, and educational films, as well as reading matter. Enlisted men should be assigned as library assistants and given a high enough rating to make the assignment desirable; they should be given a training course similar to that given at Camp Grant in 1921. The libraries should co-operate with the camp educational and military training programs. The post librarians should supply books and service to the post hospitals, even though the hospitals might not be under the same commanders as the posts. The army

22

The Period

of

Expansion

should select and buy its own books and not depend on book-donation drives. The consultants also emphasized the necessity of extending library service beyond the four walls of the libraries by means of branches, deposit collections, and mobile library units. It was a simple and practical plan. Both Milam and Dickerson had been in the War Library Service during the previous war, and they knew what was needed and what must be guarded against. It is regrettable that their recommendations were not accepted in toto, for they show a realistic understanding of the problems involved in organizing and administering an army library service.3 The Morale Branch adopted the two essential features of the plan —the employment of professional librarians and the allotment of ample funds for the purchase of reading material. It was decided to allot $6,400 to each new library for books and magazines, and $880 for equipment. The initial collections were to be purchased by the service commands under the general supervision of the W a r Department. A sum of $250,000 was set aside for this purpose. It was also decided that professional civilian librarians should be assigned both to the service command headquarters and to the posts where libraries were to be established. On the recommendation of the consultants, the base pay of the service command librarians was set at $2,600 (Civil Service grade SP-8) and that of the post librarians at $2,300 (Civil Service grade SP-7). When the mandatory 48-hour week went into effect soon afterward, overtime pay increased these salaries to $3,000 and $2,700, respectively. The recommendation that libraries be housed in separate buildings was not accepted. The Morale Branch officers thought it would be simpler and more economical to house all recreational activities except movies and gymnasiums in a single building—the so-called SC-3 service club. The library was to go on the balcony of the service club, directly over the end of a combined lounge and dance floor. It could be entered (according to the design most often followed) only from this room. The balcony contained stack space for 5,000 volumes, 1,180 square feet of floor space, and seating accommodations for twenty-four men. No provision was made for a work room. The balcony would have made a good game room (the purpose for which it was originally designed), but it proved entirely inadequate as a library intended, as was often the case, for a troop population of from five thousand to fifteen thousand men. The chief issue between the consultants and the War Department,

The Period of

Expansion

however, was whether a professional librarian should be assigned to the W a r Department Morale Branch. The Morale Branch officers saw no need f o r such an assignment. The W a r Department was a policymaking, not an operating, agency. I t was expected that all the work requiring technical knowledge would be done a t the service command and post levels. L i b r a r y policy was not considered important enough to require the assignment of a specialist at the top level of command. The consultants had to j u s t i f y their case in terms of money. They pointed out in a memorandum t h a t it would be unwise to entrust the supervision of the expenditure of a quarter of a million dollars to any man who did not have a specialized knowledge of book selection and book buying. " I n the interest of economy and to avoid unnecessary mistakes and resulting criticism," they wrote, "the j o b should be done by a person qualified by education, technical training and experience." In the conference a t which the memorandum was presented, Dickerson insisted energetically t h a t mistakes in spending the $250,000 allotment for library materials might cause the W a r Department considerable embarrassment unless the Morale Branch took the precaution of assigning a professional librarian as chief of the Library Section. The representatives of the Morale Branch finally agreed to accept the consultants' recommendation. T H E C H I E F O F T H E LIBRARY S E C T I O N

The man selected for the j o b was Ray L. T r a u t m a n , a 34-year-old reserve first lieutenant. A University of Kentucky Master of Science in geology, he had received his professional library degree at Columbia University in the summer of 1940 and was then assistant chief of the Department of Commerce and Technology a t the Enoch P r a t t Free L i b r a r y in Baltimore. T h e consultants interviewed T r a u t m a n and approved the selection. One of them remarked t h a t he had "enough knowledge of library work to understand the philosophy, and little enough to be impatient with unnecessary routines." T r a u t man had managed several book stores and was well versed in the commercial aspects of the book business. He had also been associated with the Civilian Conservation Corps, jointly operated by the army and the Department of the Interior, for a period of five years: first as a camp commander and later as a regional educational advisor. F o r the W a r Department officers, this may well have been the decisive factor, for it meant t h a t he was familiar with both army paper work and army organization and administration on the lower levels of com-

2Jf.

The Period of

Expansion

mand. His principal handicaps were lack of experience in planning large-scale programs, low rank, and the fact that he was not well known in the library profession. I t is essential to remember why T r a u t m a n was brought into the W a r Department. He was not brought in to determine library policy; the general lines of policy had already been laid down in the Mobilization Regulations and in directives to the service commands which were later incorporated in army regulations, and this was thought to be enough. His principal job was the getting and spending of money. The detailed planning and organizing of library service was to be carried out on the next lower level of command—at the service command headquarters in the United States and a t the theater headquarters overseas. As f a r as posts in the United States were concerned, even the spending—or most of it—was to be done by the service commands and the posts themselves, rather than by the W a r Department office. T r a u t m a n developed considerable ability in getting the results he was supposed to get—in obtaining money from Congress through army fiscal channels and in spending effectively that p a r t of the money which it was his function to spend. He was less successful in t r y i n g to extend his functions beyond these limits—specifically, in t r y i n g to establish uniform standards of supply and service in all areas. The army command system, geared f o r combat, in which it is necessary for field commanders to make spot decisions, does not g r a n t such authority to the W a r Department chief of a minor activity. A u t h o r i t y is decentralized to the commander in the field. The W a r Department ordinarily gives him only the most general instructions. I t tells him what he is there for, but not how to do it. At most it requires him to assign specialists to his staff who have certain kinds of technical knowledge which may be helpful to him. Thus, the service command librarians and the theater library officers worked for their own chiefs, the service command and theater Special Services officers, and not for the chief of the W a r Department Library Section. I t should be clear, then, that during the war the Army L i b r a r y Service did n o t have a single controlling head with authority to establish policies and to direct that they be carried out. I t was contrary to army policy to have a chief army librarian. There was only a W a r Department representative of the Army Library Service. 4 I t was the same with the other morale activities—athletics, music, education, and entertainment. Their W a r Department representatives were section or branch chiefs. They had much influence—they could amend regulations with the consent of other W a r Department

The Period of

25

Expansion

agencies, suggest programs and, above all, obtain money from Congress if the}' could present a good case for it. But neither they nor the chief over them—first the chief of the Morale Branch, later the director of the Special Services Division—had any direct authority over action taken in the field. Nor did they have as close contact with the field as was desirable. Correspondence through official channels was slow—too many people had to approve a letter written by a section chief before it went out—and field visits were made by special traveling representatives more often than by the chiefs of the operating branches and sections. A more experienced administrator, with greater personal prestige and higher rank to begin with, might have been more successful than T r a u t m a n was in building up the Library Section staff in the early years of the war and in inducing the m a j o r regional commands to accept uniform policies, but in the light of the experience of the other Morale Branch sections it is not clear that much more could have been accomplished. The Library Section feared better than average with respect to funds and centralized buying for the overseas theaters, a little less well than average in the size of its staff and in its influence on service command and theater policies. BOOKS,

BUILDINGS,

AND

FUNDS

The real work of organizing library service in the United States was done by the service command librarians. The Library Section could assist them only indirectly and at a distance. Let us consider a few concrete instances of this indirect aid. T r a u t m a n reported for d u t y as chief of the Library Section of the Morale Branch in November, 1940. The section consisted of a staff of two civilian clerks. T r a u t m a n was the only professional librarian in the section until Lieutenant Paul E. Postell, formerly chief of the Acquisitions Department of the Louisiana State University Library, was assigned as his assistant, in December, 1941. In October, 1940, letters had been sent to the commanding generals of the service commands, authorizing them to appoint service command librarians and post librarians ( a t posts where service clubs were to be built—that is, posts with 5,000 or more men)—and allotting funds for the payment of personnel and the procurement of reading material. T r a u t m a n ' s first task was to prepare a short informational manual for the guidance of the service command and post librarians. I t contained extracts from pertinent property and procurement regulations and, in the interest of uniformity, spelled out a

26

The Period of

Expansion

few basic procedures to be followed by all army libraries—how to prepare book orders, what records should be maintained, recommended dimensions for shelving, and other procedures. The manual was mimeographed and released in December. During the following months the Library Section compiled and issued a series of book lists—a 4,000-volunie basic collection for service club libraries, a one-thousand-volume collection of paperbound books, special lists for military or technological collections, for Negro libraries, for low literates, and so forth. All through the winter and spring of 1941 new posts were being authorized and old posts were being doubled or trebled in size. Keeping pace with the authorization of posts (by June the number authorized had gone from 33 to 1 4 5 ) , the appropriation for the initial collections of libraries had been increased from $ 2 5 0 , 0 0 0 to $1,160,000. T h e money had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year (June 30, 1 9 4 1 ) , the service command librarians were often short of help, and the reference works needed in preparing orders were slow to arrive. T h e Library Section lists were prepared hastily and were far from perfect, but at least they gave the newly employed librarians something to start with in preparing their book orders. In the spring of 1941, after 70-odd SC-3 service clubs had been constructed at new or enlarged posts, it became apparent that they were far too small for their purpose. In co-operation with the army engineers, the Morale Branch began to design a larger service club. I t was T-shaped, with the dance hall and a balcony for lounging in the center section, a one-story cafeteria in one wing, and a two-story library in the other wing. The library wing was 40 by 70 feet, had 5,405 square feet of floor space, room for 12,500 volumes, and seating space for 200 men. The wing was fairly well insulated from the noise of the main part of the club, had ample light and a separate entrance, and its stacks and seating could be arranged in almost any way the librarian found desirable. Fifteen thousand three hundred seventyfive dollars was allotted to the new style SC-3 service club libraries for books and magazines, and $2,925 for supplies and equipment. The wing-type SC-3 clubs were constructed at a number of large posts in the latter part of 1941 and early in 1942. They were the best all-purpose recreational facilities built during the war, but they were intended only for posts with six thousand or more men. Two smaller clubs containing space for libraries were also designed in 1 9 4 1 : the SC-4, which was allotted $3,500 for reading material, and the OM-1, which received a library allotment of $1,850. Because of their high

The

Period

of

Expansion

cost, the new style SC-3 clubs were not built after the middle of 1942. Their place in plans for authorized construction was taken by two other large service clubs and by two separate library buildings: a twostory H-shape building, with a little less floor space than the SC-3 library wing (in some cases only the first story was built), and a simple one-story barracks-type building, 20 by 100 feet. The former was authorized for posts of six thousand men and the latter was to be used as a branch library on posts with more than ten thousand men. Although the H-tvpe buildings were fairly satisfactory, comparatively few of them were built, owing to the increasing shortage of manpower and materials. The recreational building program was not executed on the scale planned. The army engineers erected thousands of buildings in the early years of the war, and barracks and offices had to take precedence over service clubs and libraries. The experience of the F o r t Hancock, New Jersey, librarian in trying to obtain a separate library building is typical of the situation that existed in 1 9 4 2 : It was not difficult [she writes] to convince the general that we needed one —the difficulty came in finding out how to get it. The general asked me to design a building, which I did. Then Service Command headquarters informed us that there were two types already designed by Washington and that we were entitled to the larger of the two. A request for this bounced back to our engineers several times for various measurements. After several months, it was disapproved by the district office of the Army Engineers and the post was asked to request the smaller type. After more months of delay a ruling came out that library buildings could not be built since they did not further the war effort. It was then decided to use a building already on the post, and after months of conferences we finally did obtain one, had it enlarged and reconverted to a library, and it served the purpose very well. The librarian's statement that library buildings were regarded as not furthering the war effort is a little misleading. The W a r Production Board, in order to conserve desperately needed labor and materials, required the army engineers to present a strong justification for each type of building they wished to construct. T h a t it was for the use of soldiers was not enough; there had to be a really vital need for it. The need for new recreational buildings could not be considered vital if existing structures were available. The failure of F o r t Hancock to obtain a new library building was not unique. Of the 163 libraries in the Fourth Service Command (covering all the southeastern states) in the middle of 1944, fifty-three were in the old- or new-style

28

The Period

of

Expansion

SC-3 service clubs, about ten were in the separate H - t y p e building, and nearly all the rest were "improvised," t h a t is, housed in old barracks or offices which had been converted into libraries. Now, it will be remembered t h a t the allotment of funds for books and the p a y of librarians had been based on the construction of buildings. The first SC-3's had been authorized only f o r posts with five thousand or more men, the later ones f o r posts with six thousand or more men. I t was not until the l a t t e r p a r t of 1941 t h a t any type of service club or library was authorized f o r smaller posts, and these posts did not always obtain, or even request, the buildings they were supposed to have. Yet small posts, with strengths of from one thousand to four thousand men, were springing u p all over the country. By the middle of 1941, the L i b r a r y Section had record of the existence of 230 army libraries in the United S t a t e s ; 77 of these had received funds for books and the p a y of librarians and 46 more were scheduled to receive funds. 5 T h e 107 libraries which were not scheduled to receive appropriated funds were operated by enlisted men and were stocked with miscellaneous collections of g i f t books or, if they were a t old posts, with government-owned books left over from the prewar period. The acuteness of the problem was aggravated throughout 1942 as more and more small Air Forces training bases were established. T h e L i b r a r y Section took several steps to remedy the situation. In August, 1942, it purchased 1,100 traveling libraries of 100 volumes each. E a r l y in the following year the libraries were sent to the service command headquarters, which rotated them among small posts in the manner described in Chapter I I . Meanwhile, T r a u t m a n and Postell were working on several more far-reaching measures. Obviously the best solution was to allot funds f o r books on a strength ( t h a t is, per c a p i t a ) basis to even the smallest posts, and allot additional funds for the p a y of librarians to all posts of moderate size, regardless of whether the post library happened to be housed in a new or in a converted building. At the beginning of the fiscal year ( J u l y , 1942) the L i b r a r y Section d r a f t e d an amendment, or "change," to the personnel regulation, authorizing the employment of librarians a t posts with a strength of 2,500 men or more, a t all general hospitals, and a t post hospitals containing 1,000 beds or more. A f t e r six months, in December, 1942, the amendment was published. During this period the L i b r a r y Section was also t r y i n g to get out a directive authorizing the allotment of funds f o r reading material to posts on a strength basis. The directive on funds was finally pub-

The Period

of Expantion

29

lished in January, 1943. Service commands were authorized to allot money for reading material on the following basis: Posts with less than 2,500 men Posts with 2,500 to 4,000 men Posts with 4,000 to 6,000 men Posts with 6,000 to 20,000 men General hospitals Post hospitals with 1,000 beds

$2,800 4,650 7,000 17,500 7,000 7,000

Stimulated by a short and explicit directive, which gave them a definite scale for spending, the service commands and posts spent appropriated money freely for reading material as well as for the pay of librarians. The largest service command, the Fourth, in which about 25 percent of the libraries were then located, assigned librarians to fourteen general and convalescent hospitals, nine post hospitals, and twenty-eight post libraries. I t spent $153,000 for reading material and more than $100,000 for payment of personnel, over and above normal expenditures. Counting the librarians' pay for one year only, the total expenditure resulting from the funds directive and the amendment to the personnel regulation was probably about $1,000,000. I t was a big step forward, providing professional service and basic library collections for scores of posts which had hitherto had neither. 6 THE

RECLASSIFICATION

OF

LIBRARIANS

Let us look back at one more incident. I t illustrates what Milam and Dickerson had tried to guard against when they recommended that the W a r Department library chief be invested with rank commensurate with the importance they attached to his duties; presumably the rank of major or lieutenant colonel. This was not done. The Morale Branch brought in a young lieutenant. He was placed at the bottom of the pyramid, with a constant turnover of the chiefs directly over him (there were twelve in his first three years in the W a r Department) ; they had to know and approve every action he desired to take before he could take it. Trautman was fortunate enough in his early chiefs. But in the spring of 1942 he found himself under a chief who was not in sympathy with certain aspects of the library program. Trautman's new chief, an able and decisive man, felt strongly that the post librarians were overpaid. He believed that they did little more than charge out books to patrons, and that $2,700 a year was far too high a salary for such a routine job. He requested the Civilian Personnel Division of the Office of the Secretary of W a r to review army li-

The Period

30

of

Expansion

brary positions with a view to reclassifying them, and he wanted the review made promptly. The Civilian Personnel Division analysts went to the nearest convenient post, which had only mediocre service, and based their subsequent recommendations primarily on what they found there. They recommended that post librarians be given a professional instead of a subprofessional rating, but this seemed to be merely a sop for a $300 reduction in their annual p a y . Thereafter post librarians were designated P - l ' s and paid $2,400 a year (including overtime). This affected only new appointees. Librarians already appointed continued to be paid $2,700 a year. Since the p a y of hostesses and other civilian employees a t posts was not similarly reduced, the standing of librarians was adversely affected : it had been administratively determined t h a t the relative value of their services had been overrated. I t was a real blow. Both T r a u t man and several of the service command librarians protested, but without success. They all felt that the job analysis had gone against them largely because of the haste of T r a u t m a n ' s chief. If more time had been taken and half a dozen posts, of various sizes and in various service commands, had been studied, the analysis might have had a different outcome. If Trautman's position had been higher, that is, if he had been a branch chief rather than a section chief, he could have requested the Civilian Personnel Division to make a further study. But since the branch chief to whom he was directly subordinate was satisfied, he could do nothing. Purely from the standpoint of the profession, it was the worst setback the Army Library Service suffered during the war. 7 SPECIAL

SERVICES

AND

INFORMATION

AND

EDUCATION

Several changes in the organization and functions of the Special Services Division must be described here in order to clarify f u t u r e references. In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Morale Branch was chiefly concerned with constructing buildings and with developing athletic and recreational programs. A significant change took place when Brigadier General Frederick H. Osborn was appointed chief of the Morale Branch, in September, 1941. Osborn recognized the usefulness of the athletic and recreational programs and let them continue without much change, but his own interest lay in the intellectual aspects of morale work. He established the research and information sections of the Morale Branch and considerably enlarged the Education Section. The Research Section was to ascertain by means of scientific studies the actual opinions and attitudes of the soldiers, and

The Period

of

Expansion

31

the Information Section was to assist commanders in fostering desirable attitudes by means of films, discussion groups, soldier publications, and the like. The Education Section was to contribute to morale and military efficiency by enabling soldiers to continue their education in their free time. General Osborn combed the country for experts in these phases of morale work and brought many of them into the War Department either as officers or civilians. The new program led to the assembling of a great deal of valuable information on soldiers' attitudes and on other aspects of army life, and it also inspired such projects as the foreign language and foreign country guides for overseas troops, the various editions of Yank and Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute textbooks, the Armed Forces Radio Network, and the "Why We F i g h t " films. The Library Section was slightly enlarged as a result of General Osborn's reorganization of the Morale Branch, and a little more securely established, but otherwise it was not directly affected. After the March, 1942, reorganization of the army, the Library Section was made a part of what was now called the Education Branch; this arrangement, which lasted a little more than a year, was not entirely satisfactory from the point of view of the Library Section officers, who felt that their colleagues and superiors in the Education Branch evaluated reading matter too exclusively in terms of its usefulness in courses of study. By the fall of 1943 the branches and sections of the Special Services Division had become too large and too disparate, both in function and in personnel requirements, to be operated successfully as a single agency. The division was split. General Osborn retained the activities which he had been instrumental in developing—research, information, and education—and his division was renamed first the Morale Services and later the Information and Education Division. Information and Education officers were appointed in the service commands, in the overseas theaters, and in army units of regimental size or larger, to supervise the education and orientation programs, soldier publications, radio broadcasting, and so forth. The chief of the Army Exchange Service, Brigadier General Joseph W. Byron, was designated director of the Special Services Division, comprising the Army E x change Service, the Army Motion Picture Service, and the Army Athletic and Recreation Service. The Library Section became part of the Army Athletic and Recreation Service in the Special Services Division. I t was almost by chance that the Library Section was placed in the

32

The Period

of

Expansion

Special Services rather than in the Information and Education Division. T h e idea behind the split was t h a t Osborn's division should concentrate on the intellectual and psychological aspects of morale work —education, the study of soldiers' attitudes, and the furnishing of information to the specialists who were to influence those attitudes. Byron's division was to be responsible f o r the material and the purely recreational aspects—the operation of "facilities" (exchanges, service clubs, and so f o r t h ) , the supplying of recreational equipment, and the supervision of athletic and entertainment p r o g r a m s . T h e only morale activities t h a t did not fall clearly into either one or the other of these broad categories were library service (reading was "intellect u a l , " but libraries were "facilities") and radio broadcasting. I t was finally decided to give radio broadcasting to the Information and Education Division, on the ground t h a t its use for indoctrination was more important than its recreational features. T h e supervision of library service was assigned to the Special Services Division, p a r t l y a t least for the sake of making the division of functions even. 8 In the opinion of this writer, the reorganization had one harmful effect. The library and the education programs were intimately connected a t the post level. W i t h the L i b r a r y Section and the Education Branch in separate staff divisions in the W a r D e p a r t m e n t and in the service command and theater headquarters, the connection was broken on these upper levels. I t is impossible for two agencies to maintain close working relations when they have to deal with each other through official channels: only final decisions are transmitted officially —no "hunches" or tentative suggestions. There was co-operation of a sort thereafter, but it was not nearly so close as it should have been. A t the post level, too, one cannot help feeling t h a t a well-qualified Information and Education officer might have been expected to have a better appreciation of the uses of books than a well-qualified Special Services officer. I t is possible t h a t both the education and the lib r a r y programs might have operated a little more effectively in the field if the L i b r a r y Section had been placed in the Information and Education Division, not under the Education Branch, but on an equal footing with it. T r a u t m a n and Postell believe t h a t the Library Section gained more than it lost in this reorganization, the principal gain being t h a t the section had greater freedom of action as a result of the change. But T r a u t m a n ' s promotion to lieutenant colonel a few months earlier and Postell's subsequent promotion to m a j o r may have affected the standing of the section even more than the reorganization did. They also

The

Period

of

Expansion

33

believe that in the long run it was advantageous not only to the Library Section but to the Army Library Service as a whole to be officially separated from the staff division whose principal function was indoctrination—a very important consideration. In short, there are telling arguments on both sides. Apart from its debatable effect on the library and education programs, the reorganization was sound from a practical point of view. B y adding Information and Education officers to Special Services officers, it doubled the number of men engaged in morale activities in the field, and in theory it enabled each man to concentrate on a narrower range of activities. The split between Special Services and Information and Education took place in November, 1943. A few months later, in March, 1944, the sections composing the Army Athletic and Recreation Service—Athletics, Entertainment, Music, Library, and Arts and Crafts—were moved to the New York City branch office of the Special Services Division, where they shared quarters with the Army Exchange Service. The distribution and purchasing sections were moved to New York at the same time, and in a later reorganization were made part of the Athletic and Recreation Service. The Library Section functioned a good deal more effectively after the move to New York than it did in Washington, partly for organizational reasons and partly because the officers in charge of the section now had sufficient rank to act with some independence.

IV

The Service Command Librarians

T

H E W O R K of the service command librarians was very different from t h a t of the W a r Department office. In the command headquarters one dealt constantly with practical problems calling f o r immediate solution. It was necessary to buy and sclect books as well and as fast as possible, librarians had to be interviewed and hired, posts had to be inspected and prompt action taken to meet the most pressing needs—and one had to learn the army ropes as one went along. I t was hard work, but it produced visible results. If a new purchasing procedure was satisfactory, the service command librarian knew it almost immediately: the orders went out, and within a month or six weeks the books were received by the posts. If a mistake was made in ordering books or in dealing with a post, it, too, usually came home to the librarian within a short time. A t the W a r Department level, the actions taken were often of such a general, almost abstract, n a t u r e t h a t a full year or more might pass before there was sufficient evidence on which to judge them. The work at the command headquarters was largely concerned with more tangible matters. I t was easier to see and to evaluate what had been accomplished. The pertinent facts concerning the nine service commands and their librarians from November, 1940, until the nine service commands were replaced by six army areas, in June, 1946, are shown in Table I. From the standpoint of organizing and operating library service, the most important aspect of a service command was its size. The command librarians in the F i r s t , Second, and Sixth service commands knew all their post librarians personally, and those in the Third and F i f t h service commands knew most of theirs. I t was relatively easy for these command librarians to give their post librarians support and personal advice when they needed i t ; and when the post librarians ran into trouble over buildings, funds, or the like, the command librarians learned about it promptly. In the larger commands this was not the case. The command librarians could not keep in close touch with all of their librarians ; there were too many of them and they were too widely scattered to be visited regularly. A larger staff was required, and the command librarian had to devote more time to purely administrative

Service

Command TABLE

Service Command First

Second

I.

THE

SERVICE

New York New J e r s e y Delaware

Pennsylvania Maryland Virginia (Baltimore, Md.)

Fourth

COMMANDS

AND

Area and LocaCommand Librarian tion of Headand Period of Service quarter! Aline C. Whiteside New England (Feb., 1941—March, (Boston) 1943) J e d H . Taylor ( M a r c h , 1943J u n e , 1946)

(Governors Island, NYC)

Third

35

Librariant

Southeastern U.S. (except W. Virginia, Kentucky & Louisiana) (Atlanta,

Ga.)

THEIR

LIBRARIANS

Number of Librariet Ettabliihed Ifovember, 1940May, 1941 2

Total Number of Librariet June, 1944 46

H a r r y F. Cook ( J a n . , 1941-June, 1944) Wm. C. Chait ( J u n e , 1944—Jan., 1946) J a n e t K. Zimmerman ( J a n . , 1946-June, 1946)

44

Frances S. Henke ( J a n . , 1941-Dec., 1942) M a r y Evalyn Crookston (Dec., 1942—Aug., 1944) Marie D. Riley (Oct., 1944—Feb., 1945) Lenora L. Manning ( M a r c h , 1945March, 1946) Ruth L. Sheahan (April, 1 9 4 6 - J u n e , 1946)

47

M a r y Frances Slinger (Nov., 1940-June, 1946)

28

174

Service Command

86 TABLE

I.

S erpice Command

Fifth

THE

SERVICE

COMMANDS

Area and Location of Headquarter»

West Virginia Kentucky Ohio, Indiana (Columbus, Ohio)

Sixth

Illinois Wisconsin Michigan (Chicago)

Seventh

N. Dakota S. Dakota Missouri Minnesota Colorado Wyoming Nebraska Kansas, Iowa

AND T H E I R

Command Librarian and Period of Service

Librariant

LIBRARIANS

(continued)

Number of Librarie* Establiihed November, 1940May, 1941

Total Number of Librarie* June, 1944

H e r b e r t M. Sewell (April, 1941—Sept., 1942) Chas. J . Boorkman (Sept., 1942—April, 1943) Agnes D . C r a w f o r d (Nov., 1944-Aug., 1945) Mary Gutheridge (Aug., 1945-June, 1946)

25

Elizabeth H . MacCloskey (April, 1927—Aug., 1945) Marion E . James (Aug., 1945-June, 1946)

30

Sybil O. Tubbs (Dec., 1940-June, 1946)

82

(Omaha) Eighth

Texas Oklahoma New Mexico Arkansas Louisiana (San Antonio, Dallas)

Ferdinand H e n k e (1925—June, 1946)

11

169

Service

Service Command Ninth

Command

37

Librarians

Number of Librariet Eitablithed Xovember, Area and Loea¿¡on of HeadCommand Librarian 1940quartert May,1941 and Period of Service Xenophon P. Smith 9 California (Jan., 1941—Oct., Oregon 1945) Washington Utah, Nevada Wendell B. Coon Idaho, (Oct., 1945—June, Arizona 1946)

Total Xumber of Librariet June, 1944 159

(Salt Lake City, San Francitco) MilitaryDistrict of Washington D.C.

None

(Included in 3d Service Command)

15

Total number of army libraries in the United States, Panama Canal Zone, Hawaii, and the Philippines in November, 1940—147. Total number of libraries established November, 1940—May, 1941 (not including Service Command headquarters libraries)—78. Total number of army libraries in the United States, June, 1944—791. In five service commands the position of Assistant Service Command Librarian was established during the war, usually at the P-2 grade: Second, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth. work. I n the l a r g e r commands an o r i e n t a t i o n course a t command h e a d q u a r t e r s f o r each newly hired l i b r a r i a n a n d the p u b l i c a t i o n of a periodical l i b r a r y bulletin or newsletter were real necessities. I n the smaller commands they were helpful, b u t n o t absolutely essential; one could orient and i n f o r m the l i b r a r i a n s in p e r s o n a l visits. I t should be k e p t in mind t h a t t h e r e was a g r e a t e r need f o r close relations between t h e command l i b r a r y offices and the p o s t s t h a n there would have been in a long-established a r m y a c t i v i t y whose o p e r a t i o n s were generally understood by all the p o s t personnel who were officially concerned with it. T h e wartime l i b r a r y service and its civilian l i b r a r ians were a novelty—even a s u r p r i s e — t o m a n y p o s t commanders, the a r m y itself was a radically new experience to the l i b r a r i a n s , and the Special Services officers were o f t e n very green. I n these circumstances " t r o u b l e s h o o t i n g " visits were a very necessary p a r t of the command l i b r a r i a n s ' work.

Service Command Librarians

38

The W a r Department letter re-establishing organized library service was sent to the service command headquarters in October, 1940. Only two service command librarians were then on duty: Elizabeth H . MacCIoskey in the Sixth Service Command and Ferdinand Henke in the Eighth Service Command. During the next six months command librarians were employed by all the remaining service commands in accordance with the qualifications set forth in the letter. The most important qualification was that in addition to his college and library school degrees, the command librarian should have had five years of library experience, including at least one year in an administrative capacity. Between November, 1940, and the end of M a y , 1941, 78 new libraries were established at posts in the United States. More than one third of these new libraries (28, to be exact) were in the Fourth Service Command, the area in which the largest number of training camps were located. I t remained the largest service command, both in troop population and in number of libraries, throughout the war, and it was the first that had to cope with problems of large-scale book procurement and of establishing service simultaneously at a number of posts. L e t us see what the problems were and how it dealt with them. THE

FOURTH

SERVICE

COMMAND

The W a r Department letter had established the qualifications of post librarians, 1 but had left the method of selecting librarians optional ; they might be selected either by the service command or by the post. In the smaller service commands the selection was usually made by the command librarian, but in large commands, with the exception of the Ninth, this was considered impracticable. In the Fourth Service Command, M a r y Frances Slinger reviewed and acknowledged more than a thousand applications during her first few months of service and interviewed all applicants who lived near Atlanta, the seat of the service command headquarters. The application forms of qualified applicants were forwarded to the posts at which libraries were to be established. I f a post preferred to select a librarian not on the approved list, her selection was approved by service command headquarters if she met the qualifications. Book Purchases.—In January, 1941, the L i b r a r y Section of the W a r Department sent a list of library tools—standard works on book selection, cataloguing, and so f o r t h — t o all command headquarters and offered to supply these publications to all libraries which did not possess them. The library tools were ordered f o r all Fourth Service

Service

Command

Librarians

39

Command posts a t which libraries were to be established, but owing to the cumbersome purchasing system then in use, it was many months before the posts received them. Of more immediate help was the 4,000volume basic book list which the L i b r a r y Section issued in the same month. Miss Slinger reduced this list to 1,000 volumes, added full bibliographical information concerning each title, and sent the revised list to all libraries for use as a guide in book selection. Since few of the post librarians had adequate selection tools, they usually began by requisitioning all the books listed. I t was intended that the post librarians should select the remaining 4,000 books f o r which funds had been allotted, but because of the delays in providing selection tools only a few were able to do so. Yet the money had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year. When this situation was pointed out to the commanding general, he authorized Miss Slinger to employ an assistant command librarian to help her complete the selection and ordering of books for some twenty-four libraries. Miss Slinger and her assistant extended the basic purchase list from 1,000 to 5,000 volumes and succeeded in spending the rest of the allotment in a period of two months. Fourteen National Youth Administration girls were employed to cut the order stencils. During 1941 the official procedure f o r purchasing books was difficult, to say the least. All interested book dealers or jobbers were furnished a copy of each post's order list. They had to submit bids giving a price for each book on the list which they wished to supply. The post order lists were not consolidated, and since it rarely happened that one jobber submitted the lowest bid on all books on a list, each procurement of books for a single post usually entailed making five or more separate contracts. If the procurement was f o r less than one hundred volumes, the cost of p r e p a r i n g scores of mimeographed invitations to bid and of making copies of half a dozen contracts might exceed the cost of the books. E a r l y in 1942 the Quartermaster General, with the assistance of the Library Section, established a much more effective procurement method. Each year all jobbers and publishers were asked to submit bids for the privilege of supplying to the army all books issued by each publishing house. Separate discounts were to be offered f o r each publisher's trade, text, and technical books. T h e firm offering the best discounts, for example, on the three types of Macmillan books received a contract authorizing him to fill all army orders for from 1 to 500 copies of all Macmillan books during the ensuing year. Usually the publishers offered the best discounts on their own books. Those who

Service Command Librarian* did not wish to be bothered with so many small army orders let one or another of the jobbing firms—American News, Baker & Taylor, A. C. McClurg, and others—underbid them. The first set of contracts covered only the period January-June, 1942. Thereafter the contracts were made for each fiscal year (July through June). Copies of all book contracts were published in annual contract bulletins. After the publication of the first Contract Bulletin, Miss Slinger developed the following purchasing system for newly established libraries (and it must be remembered that new libraries were being established in the command throughout the war). Three basic book lists for libraries of various sizes were prepared and constantly revised in order to keep them up to date. When a new library was established, all of its initial allotment of funds for books was retained at the service command headquarters, and three fourths of this sum was immediately expended on whichever list of books was applicable. The list was broken down according to individual contractors, and multiple copies were sent to the service command quartermaster with a covering purchase order for each contractor. Copies were also sent to the library for which the procurement was being made. The only action the quartermaster had to take was to sign the purchase orders and mail the orders and lists to the contractors. The average length of time between the preparation of an order and the delivery of the books from the contractor to the post was five weeks. On receipt of the books, the post librarian forwarded a copy of each contractor's list together with a receiving report form to the army finance officer in New York, who in turn paid the contractors' bills. The remaining quarter of the initial allotment was reserved to cover requisitions prepared by the post librarian on the basis of the observed needs and interests of the men using the library. Depending on the size of the initial allotment, the amount reserved for this purpose varied from $400 to $2,600. Since all the initial allotment had to be spent before the end of the fiscal year in which it had been made, one of Miss Slinger's assistants kept a running record of the expenditures made by each library and periodically advised the post how much money for books was still available to it. As a result of this close check on funds, nearly all the money allotted to each new post for library books was spent for that purpose. After the initial allotment for books had been exhausted, the libraries depended upon "local" nonappropriated funds for the purchase of books, subscriptions, and library supplies. These local funds consisted of a percentage of the profits of the post exchange, the post

Service Command

Librarians

theater, and the service club cafeteria. The policy of the W a r Department Fiscal Director was to encourage commanders to use this money for the support of post recreational activities and to use additional appropriated funds for recreational purposes only as a last resort. This policy was variously interpreted by the several service commands. In the Fourth Service Command the general rule was to grant no appropriated funds to libraries a f t e r their initial allotments had been spent. Exceptions were made only in the case of small posts where nonappropriated funds were inadequate. But even in this case the post had to take the initiative. I t had to request that an exception be made to the commanding general's published directive on the use of funds. Not many posts took this step. Training of Librarians.—As soon as a librarian had been hired, Miss Slinger sent her copies of pertinent regulations and directives, a list of equipment and furniture recommended for the type of library she was to operate, the W a r Department library manual, and after April, 1943, a longer service command library manual. In some cases it was possible to bring the new librarian to the service command headquarters f o r a short period of temporary duty, during which she would receive some orientation in army library procedures and visit the post libraries in the vicinity of Atlanta. If it was not possible to bring the new librarian to command headquarters, Miss Slinger or the assistant service command librarian made a point of visiting her post a t the earliest opportunity. This was not done in all cases, however, as there were simply too many posts in the command, and too heavy a flow of paperwork at the headquarters to allow either the command librarian or her assistant to be absent more than a few days at a time. The librarians in the more remote p a r t s of the command—Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee—had little contact with the headquarters librarians except through personal correspondence and the reading of the monthly service command Morale Bulletin (renamed Special Service Bulletin after the 1942 reorganization). The library items in the Fourth Service Command Morale Bulletin normally filled one of the publication's four pages. Their object was to acquaint the librarians both with new regulations and policies and with successful innovations in publicity or technical procedures made by individual librarians in the command. The bulletin served its purpose very well. A mobile library used by the Camp Shelby librarian to serve troops on maneuvers, for example, was written up in an early issue of the bulletin. The Camp Stewart librarian showed the report to the Special Services officer of the division in training at that post

Service

Command

Librarians

and induced him to provide her with the facilities needed to organize a similar library for his division when it moved out to a maneuver area. The previous chapter contains a summary of the effect of December, 1942, amendment to the personnel regulation and of the J a n u a r y , 1943, funds directive on library service in the F o u r t h Service Command. These results were j u s t beginning to be felt when the first conference of F o u r t h Service Command librarians was held in March, 1943. B y t h a t time there were 174 libraries and 137 librarians in the command. T h e average monthly circulation per library was 1,394. T h e m a j o r i t y of the libraries were spending $100 a month f o r new books and magazines and had two full-time clerical assistants (enlisted men or civilians) in addition to the librarian. The peak number of libraries ( 1 8 2 ) was reached the following J a n u a r y . From J a n u a r y , 1941, until the end of 1944, approximately $750,000 was spent on the initial book collections and equipment of libraries in the command. A t o t a l annual library attendance of five million during the same period indicates t h a t the expenditure was anything but a waste of money. THE

SMALLER

COMMANDS

The Second Service Command.—The Second Service Command affords a good example of the library establishment procedure in the smaller commands. Since the number of libraries established there was comparatively small, H a r r y F. Cook, the service command librarian, was able to devote his personal attention to nearly all of them. When a library had been authorized, Mr. Cook would go to the post himself. His first step was to call on the post fiscal officer and make sure t h a t the initial allotment of funds for the library had been received. Then he furnished the morale or Special Services officer with a s t a n d a r d list of the articles of f u r n i t u r e and technical library equipment required f o r a library of the type authorized. H e usually drew a layout of the f u r n i t u r e and equipment on the building p l a n ; this not only saved work f o r the Special Services officer but also helped to convince him t h a t the library actually needed as much equipment as Cook said it did. Book charging cards, borrowers' cards, magazine subscription cards, and cartoon posters indicating the location and open hours of the library were supplied by the Service Command headquarters, as well as lists of recommended books, magazines and newspapers, although the command librarian made it clear t h a t the actual selection of reading material would rest with the post librarian. While a t the post, he also visited the quartermaster, explained the book p u r c h a s i n g procedure to him if this was necessary, and gave him the names and

Service

Command

Librarians

price lists of library supply houses. In the Second Service Command purchases of books from appropriated funds were made by the post, rather than the service command, quartermaster. This preliminary work was usually done before the librarian was hired. The post librarians were hired by the service command headquarters. Even if a post commander had selected a librarian himself, she was not employed until she had been interviewed and approved by the command librarian. A letter was sent to the post, stating that the librarian had been appointed, giving directions f o r placing her on the pay roll and enclosing the fiscal instrument allotting funds to the post f o r her payment. A f t e r the librarian had placed her initial order f o r reading material, she was customarily sent to the service command headquarters f o r a week's temporary duty. Within a month after the librarian's tour of temporary duty at the command headquarters, Cook usually went to the post and called on the Special Services officer and the post civilian personnel, quartermaster, and fiscal officers, accompanied by the librarian. Thus the librarian met everyone both at the post and at the command headquarters who was concerned in any wa} r with her work. The Fifth Service Command.—-In the Fifth Service Command books were selected by the post librarians and purchased by the service command quartermaster after review by the command librarian, Herbert M. Sewell. The command librarian also selected the post librarians and usually went to the post when a new librarian reported f o r duty, to instruct her in army procedures and assist in laying out the library and in preparing the initial orders f o r books and equipment. H e made frequent field trips to libraries after they had been established and kept the librarians informed by means of a column of library notes in the weekly command Special Services Bulletin. Unfortunately there was a rapid turnover of officers at the command headquarters; Sewell had three chiefs in a year and a half. I t was rather difficult to maintain continuity of policy in these circumstances. Sewell took another position in the fall of 1942, and after a short lapse of time Charles J. Boorkman was appointed service command librarian. Boorkman resigned in the spring of 1943 to join the navy, and thereafter the command went without a service command librarian f o r a year and a half. A letter from General Byron, the director of the W a r Department Special Services Division, induced the new commanding general of the F i f t h Service Command to appoint a service command librarian in the fall of 1944. The librarian selected was Agnes Crawford, formerly command librarian of the Antilles Department. A few months

Service Command Librarian» after her appointment, all the librarians in the command were brought together for a conference. The minutes of the conference revealed extreme variations in fund allotments, ratings of librarians, and living and working conditions. Posts had continued to be established or enlarged after the resignation of the last service command librarian. Some of them had never received their initial allotments for books and equipment. They had been not only maintained but also established solely from local funds, which were usually insufficient for the purpose. Librarians doing the same work were variously classified and variously paid as professionals, subprofessionals, or clerks. Some had received their normal within-grade promotions and time-and-a-half pay for the usual eight hours a week overtime, and some had not. There was no uniformity in living quarters or in the pay deductions made for them. The command was reported to be the lowest in the country in per capita library expenditures, book stock, and circulation. There were eight or ten excellent libraries, but they were outnumbered by the mediocre and poor ones. Without a command librarian to ensure that funds were obtained and spent for library materials and to look after the interests of the individual librarians, the service had begun to lapse into the old prewar condition. The situation in the Fifth Service Command at the end of 1944 is an object lesson in what happens to library service even in a relatively small command when there is no library specialist at the command headquarters to supervise the service. The funds were available and the directives were on the record, but they were of little use so long as the officers responsible for obtaining and allocating the funds lacked the time, the background, and apparently the interest to do the job properly. Only a specialist could supply these elements. It took the new command librarian a full year to reorganize the service and eliminate some of the inconsistencies and inequities in the command's library service policies. The Sixth Service Command.—The picture is better in the Sixth Service Command. Elizabeth H. MacCloskey had been corps area librarian during the lean thirties. She knew the commanding general and all his stafF, and most of the post commanders; whenever any questions arose concerning books or libraries, they turned to her immediately. Her only trouble when the expansion began was in convincing the service command morale officer that the War Department letter authorizing the expenditure of money for books and the pay of librarians was not a mistake. He was staggered by the size of the figure and insisted on wiring Washington for confirmation.

Service

Command

Librarian»

Mrs. MacCloskey interviewed all applications for library positions and sent one or two recommended applicants to each post at which a library was to be established. The final choice among the recommended applicants was made by the post commander. When each librarian was hired, she was sent to the service command headquarters, and there she prepared her initial book-order list with Mrs. MacCloskey's assistance. Mrs. MacCloskey had prepared a 1,000-volume basic list on index cards, each card containing the necessary bibliographical data concerning one book. As the librarians went through the list, they added cards for current and forthcoming titles and withdrew out-ofdate material. B y the spring of 1941 the list had expanded to include 2,500 titles. I t was maintained at that size thereafter. After their initial collections had been ordered, the post librarians selected books in accordance with the needs of their own libraries. Their requisitions were forwarded to the service command headquarters, where they were processed in the same manner as were the book orders in the Fourth Service Command. This procedure was followed in the case of each newly established library until the initial allotment of funds was exhausted. As was usually the case in the smaller commands, the Sixth Service Command librarian assisted in planning the layout of new libraries and in placing the orders for furniture and equipment. On one occasion she planned better than she knew. A standard 2 0 ' by 1 0 0 ' building had been constructed at a new post to serve as a library. Mrs. MacCloskey had the post engineers build a charging counter across the breadth of the building at one end of the room. A rail about eight inches high was placed in front of the counter to prevent its being scuffed by the heavy service shoes of the library patrons. The post commander inspected the building one day while the shelves were being constructed. He had them torn out and gave the building to the post exchange to operate as a beer hall. The counter and the rail, which had made him see the possibilities of the place, were used as a bar. Other quarters were found for the library. Having a realistic awareness of nonlibrary values, the command librarian was willing to admit that a 20-foot beer bar might contribute as much to military morale as a 20-foot charging counter. THE

NINTH

SERVICE

COMMAND

After the publication of the first Contract Bulletin, the Ninth Service Command librarian, Xenophon P. Smith, and his enlisted assistant, Sergeant Wendell B . Coon, purchased books for newly estab-

Service Command

Librarian»

lished libraries in much the same manner as did the F o u r t h Service Command. The principal variation in the Ninth Service Command was that a greater number of basic lists were maintained. There were seven in all, ranging from three hundred to six thousand titles. T h e purchasing was planned so that the books would be delivered to each new library soon a f t e r the arrival of the librarian. F o r about a year the Ninth Service Command's method of receiving books was radically different from that of the other service commands. In order to expedite the preparation of the receiving reports, on the basis of which the New York finance officer made payment to the publishers, Smith requested that all book parcels be sent to the service command headquarters rather than to the posts. A staff of about twenty clerks, including NYA and W P A workers, received the books, typed the receiving reports, and then mailed the books to the posts which had ordered them. This practice was discontinued in 1943 because the service command control officer regarded the cost of mailing the books as excessive, although it actually effected a saving in the p a y of personnel at the post level. Smith was one of the command librarians who had protested against the reclassification of librarians in the summer of 1942. Within six months, while reorganizing post service in the interest of greater efficiency, he incidentally found a way to pay some of his better librarians what he thought they were worth. He had begun to centralize service a t the larger posts in the command by designating the best qualified librarian a t each post as chief camp librarian. With the concurrence of the post Special Services officer, the chief camp librarian was given general supervision over all post library activities—publicity, the co-ordination of purchases, the allotment of assistants, and so f o r t h . I t was a better arrangement than the customary practice of entrusting such supervision as an "additional d u t y " to an assistant Special Services officer. The job sheets of the chief camp librarians were rewritten to include their supervisory duties, and they were promoted from the P - l to the P-2 grade. Six librarians received this promotion early in 1943. With a few exceptions, librarians were appointed in the Ninth Service Command only on the approval of the command librarian. A f t e r appointment, each librarian was sent to the service command headquarters a t Salt Lake City (later, to the library depot in San F r a n cisco) for a two-week training course conducted by Sergeant Coon, a professional librarian. By the time the librarian went to her post, she was fairly well oriented in army procedures, knew what services she

Service

Command

Libraríant

47

and her Special Services officer could obtain from the command headquarters, and had had an opportunity to work for a short time in one of the libraries near the headquarters under the supervision of an experienced army librarian. She also carried with her the command library manual, a set of forms and form letters showing each step of most of the procedures she would have to use, and a folder of publicity suggestions. Thereafter she had to fend for herself. There were too many posts, and they were too widely separated, to allow the command librarian to keep in close touch with all of them. Book Distribution and the Library Depot.—To describe the series of organizational expansions which culminated in the establishment of the Ninth Service Command Library Depot, we must anticipate part of the account of the Victory Book Campaigns, which will be given in full in Chapter V. The Victory Book Campaigns were nationwide drives to obtain book donations for army libraries. When the first campaign was being planned, in the fall of 1941, civilian liaison librarians were appointed in each service command at the suggestion of the American Library Association. The liaison librarian in each command was to handle all relations between the command librarian and local Victory Book Campaign agencies and to mediate between the command librarian and the civilian library profession in any other way that seemed desirable. The liaison librarian for the Ninth Service Command was Mabel R. Gillis, the California State Librarian. At the command librarian's request, she appointed assistant liaison librarians at Seattle, Salem, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. Each assistant liaison librarian set up a processing center at which Victory Book Campaign contributions were sorted and prepared for use. The books were sent to posts in accordance with their needs as determined by the command librarian. Forty thousand Victory Book Campaign books were also sent to the command headquarters and made up into 1,000 small traveling libraries which were distributed to anti-aircraft searchlight batteries, harbor defense batteries, and other isolated units. Usually one regimental Special Services officer was responsible for from ten to twenty such units. The service command office would send him one box of books for each unit and request him to rotate the boxes once a month. A thousand more traveling libraries were sent out after the second Victory Book Campaign. When the first Victory Book Campaign terminated, in the spring of 1942, Smith induced the Works Progress Administration to employ a professional librarian and a staff of workers for each of the six

Service

Command

Librarians

processing centers. They continued to collect and process books. The next step was to persuade the army to take over the processing centers as branches of the Ninth Service Command library office. This was accomplished at the end of 1942. The service command hired the six librarians as P - l ' s and some twenty-four workers as civilian clerks payable from headquarters funds. The W P A was being liquidated, and it was only proper that the army should take over this activity which the W P A had been operating for the army's benefit. It was the logical thing to do in the situation. Of course Smith had created the situation by getting W P A aid in the first place. Naturally he did not do it unaided. He had an excellent service command Special Services officer above him—Colonel William M. Beveridge, a man who chose his subordinates with care and then backed them energetically—and he received invaluable help from his own staff and, on the civilian side, from Miss Gillis. But he deserves full credit for the planning and the insight into what might be done. In 1943 Smith began to look forward again. The bulk of the a r m y was either overseas or scheduled to go overseas. It seemed possible that a number of posts in the United States might be "inactivated"— that is, discontinued. In that case there would be a plentiful supply of used library books available for redistribution to the remaining posts or for shipment overseas. Smith decided that he needed a l a r g e depot to handle operations of this nature, and San Francisco, rather than the inland service command headquarters at Salt Lake City, seemed the best place for it. He was able to sell the idea to Colonel Beveridge and the commanding general both on its own merits and as an economy measure: it would cost less to operate one large depot than the six small processing centers. The Ninth Service Command L i b r a r y Depot was opened in April, 1944, with a staff of eleven professional librarians—including Smith and Sergeant Coon—ten clerks, and three laborers. Gift books previously sent to the processing centers were now sent directly to the depot, where they were sorted, classified, and packed for shipment as required. The same procedure was followed with books from inactivated post libraries. Two bookmobiles which had been obtained from the W P A the preceding y e a r and had been operating out of the Seattle Branch L i b r a r y were now based on the depot. Each bookmobile held 1,500 volumes and was operated by an enlisted man with professional library experience. Collections of 375, 750, and 1,500 volumes were sent to the three West Coast ports of embarkation for use on transports. Similar collections were sent to Alaska and the South Pacific

Service Command

Librarians

in response to requests from Special Services officers. At the end of 1944 the W a r Department Special Services Division began to allot overseas library funds to the depot for the purchase of about 12,000 volumes per quarter. These books were used to bring the collections for transports and overseas bases up to date with a sprinkling of new material; the books received from inactivated posts were usually a year or more old. In order to reduce the work of the port officers to a minimum, the transport collections were arranged in a series of twenty numbered boxes, each containing between thirty-five and forty titles. The contents of the boxes were so arranged that a port officer could provide a transport with a balanced collection of about 250 novels and 125 nonfiction books simply by issuing to it any ten consecutively numbered boxes. Sometimes transports were provided with twenty or forty boxes. Half were to be opened, used on the outward voyage, and unloaded at the transport's outermost port of call. The remainder were then used on the return voyage. One of the most valuable services rendered by the depot was its shipment of books from inactivated post libraries in the United States to the Western Pacific commands at the end of the war. The contents of entire libraries were sent to the depot, chiefly from posts west of the Mississippi, repacked in paper cartons, and dispatched through Army Postal Service channels to the Philippines, J a p a n , and Korea. A total of 270,000 volumes were shipped between the summer of 1945 and the fall of 1947. Centralized Procurement.—After their initial allotments had been spent, most of the Ninth Service Command libraries depended largely on local funds for the purchase of new books. The situation changed after the depot had been established. T o effect greater use of appropriated funds, the depot purchased thirty new titles each month and sent them to all libraries in the command. Copies of the purchase orders were sent to the libraries as soon as they were prepared, in order to prevent needless duplication of purchases. Post librarians also sent lists of contemplated purchases from local funds to the depot before actually making the purchases. If the depot had the books in stock (this applied particularly to orders for the replacement of worn technical books or best sellers which had retained their popularity), they were dispatched to the librarian, thus enabling her to apply the purchase price to a new book. After the war, lists of books available for redistribution were sent out periodically to all libraries in the western part of the country.

50

Service LATER

Command

Librarians

DEVELOPMENTS

During the period of the army's rapid expansion in the United States ( 1 9 4 1 - 1 9 4 3 ) , the service commands exercised considerable authority over the individual posts. With respect to library service, for example, it was possible to control the selection of librarians from command headquarters and to centralize the procurement of reading material from appropriated funds. In practice, too, it was almost impossible for a post commander to ignore the service commander's recommendation that library service be established at his post; after all, it was the service commander who provided the money for both the establishment of the library and the pay of the librarian. This situation changed at the end of 1943. Since the army's organization in the United States was now fairly well stabilized, the commanding general of the Army Service Forces issued a decentralization order, loosening the connection between the service commands and the posts under them and giving post commanders greater freedom of action. As a result of this directive, several service commanders authorized posts to employ librarians without review by the service command, and in the Third and the Sixth service commands the centralized procurement of books was abandoned. Thereafter, in some of the commands, the quality of the service depended even more than before on the ability of the individual librarians to sell their programs—and especially their budgets—to their Special Services officers and post commanders. F o r the library service the change was slightly detrimental in that it tended to weaken the command librarians in dealing with post personnel. Changes were made from time to time in the regulations affecting the operation of libraries. The most important of these changes was an amendment published in the spring of 1945. I t authorized posts to pay assistant librarians out of appropriated funds. Theretofore they had usually been paid from local funds, and one of the hardest tasks of librarians had been to induce their Special Services officers or post commanders to make a regular allotment of local funds for this purpose. The amendment made it easier for librarians to get the assistance they needed, and also made more local money available for the purchase of reading material. Although the amendment was not published until the spring of 1945, advance notice that it had been approved had been sent to the service commands the preceding summer, and it actually became effective in September, 1944, some months prior to its official publication.

Service Command THE

51

Librarian» ARMY

AIR

FORCES

LIBRARY

SERVICE

Until the summer of 1944 most materials and services a t Army Air Forces bases, as a t all other installations in the United States, were provided t h r o u g h the service commands. Because the command structures of the A r m y Air Forces and the A r m y Service Forces were too unlike to mesh p r o p e r l y , the system did not work f o r the benefit of the air bases. T h e commanders of most installations were directly under the commanding generals of the service commands in which the installations were located. T h e units in t r a i n i n g a t the installations were merely visitors whom the post commander supplied with food, clothing, and t r a i n i n g and recreational facilities, in accordance with policies established by the service commanders under the general direction of the commanding general of the Army Service Forces. Units training a t air bases likewise received materials and services f r o m the air base commanders, who in t u r n obtained them (other than those of a technical n a t u r e supplied t h r o u g h Air Forces channels) f r o m the service commands and were supposed to issue them in accordance with service command policies. B u t unlike the commanders of other installations, the post commanders a t air bases were not solely or even mainly responsible to the service commanders. T h e i r real chiefs were the commanders of the various A A F commands—the commanding generals of the Air T r a n s p o r t Command, the E a s t e r n F l y i n g Command, the Technical T r a i n ing Command, and so f o r t h , as the case might be. T h e A A F commands found it impossible to establish uniform supply and service procedures in their respective bases, because one base received its supplies and its supply policies f r o m the F o u r t h Service Command, let us say, another from the Ninth, and another f r o m the F i f t h . T h e divided responsibilities of the A A F base commanders were obviously a source of conflict. In order to prevent difficulties, many base commanders kept their relations with the service commands in which they were located a t a minimum. T h e y often did without funds and services to which they were entitled, simply to avoid entanglement with the service command ; or they would defer action on a service command directive until a p proval had been obtained f r o m the a p p r o p r i a t e A A F command, which might be half the continent d i s t a n t . T h e service commands, f o r their p a r t , wanted to t r e a t the air bases as they did other installations under their j u r i s d i c t i o n ; t h a t is, to deal with them directly r a t h e r than through an intermediate command in another p a r t of the country. T o eliminate the confusion caused by this crossing of wires, it was

52

Service Command Librarians

decided in the spring of 1944 t h a t the Army Air Forces should assume responsibility for all services and supplies a t air bases in the United States. As p a r t of the reorganization, H a r r y F . Cook, the Second Service Command librarian, was appointed chief Army Air Forces librarian, and his place in the Second Service Command was taken by William Chait. Command librarians were also appointed f o r the subordinate A A F commands in the United States, and 288 of the 791 army libraries then in the country were placed under the jurisdiction of the A A F . 2 On the face of it, this was an extremely expensive duplication of personnel and services; and since the bases pertaining to each command were often widely separated, the Air Forces command librarians were obliged to spend a disproportionate amount of time in travel, as compared with the service command librarians. Nevertheless, the reorganization was beneficial to the library service in certain respects. T h e air base libraries had not been properly serviced in some service commands because of the confusion in command channels described above. Moreover, because of their smallness, many air bases did not have the services of professional post librarians; this made it all the more necessary t h a t they should be frequently visited by command librarians, in order to ensure t h a t the enlisted or nonprofessional civilian librarians were properly trained and t h a t adequate supplies of reading material were procured. T h e appointm'-nt of Army Air Forces command librarians made it possible to g r e many of these smaller air bases the type of supervision they needed T h e foregoing account should make it plain t h a t the service command and the Air Forces command librarians played an essential p a r t in the development of library service a t posts in the United States. In the army, where authority to take decisive action is not vested in one central bureau, but is decentralized successively to the regional commands and from them to the individual posts, a minor and specialized activity such as library service must have qualified and zealous representatives a t the intermediate level if it is to be carried on effectively. No matter how able a post librarian may be, she can supervise only her own p o s t ; she can do very little f o r a new librarian a t another post or for a post t h a t has no librarian a t all. N o r can she tell the officials at service command headquarters where more librarians are needed in times of expansion and where they can best be spared in times of retrenchment. Only a librarian a t the command headquarters can do this, and he must do much more. He must interpret the pertinent regulations and directives to fiscal, personnel, quartermaster,

Service Command

Librarians

53

and Special Services officers at both the command and the post levels, and he must constantly press the claims of the service and the soldiers' need for it. Unless he does so, the directives pertaining to the service may be ignored or misunderstood and the service in the command as a whole will be neglected—not intentionally, but because most of the officers concerned with it are concerned only incidentally and have other and more pressing responsibilities. All in all, the command librarians were the most important single element in the organization of the Army Library Service in the United States. Thanks to them the minimum standards prescribed by army regulations were generally observed, and the service as a whole operated effectively.

V

Donated Books and Services

I

N C H A P T E R I it was stated t h a t ten million or more hardbound books were donated to the army by individuals and various civilian agencies. Although only a modest p r o p o r t i o n of these contributions were usable, those t h a t were, filled a real need. T h e placing of the initial book orders f o r newly established libraries took time. A f t e r the books were delivered they had to be processed more or less completely before being circulated, depending on the views of the librarian and of the Special Services officer who was accountable f o r them. Two or more months might elapse between the hiring of a librarian and the first circulation of books from the purchased collection. Gift books filled this gap. I n 1943 Mrs. MacCloskey informed the W a r D e p a r t ment library office t h a t nearly every library in the Sixth Service Command had "opened on VBCs" (Victory Book Campaign donations) and other g i f t books. F u r t h e r m o r e , Special Services officers usually did not allow librarians to place Government-owned books in company dayrooms, recreation halls, and outposts, f o r f e a r t h a t they would be lost. As a rule, only g i f t books or books purchased f r o m local funds were used f o r this purpose. I t must also be kept in mind t h a t until the beginning of 1943 initial allotments f o r library books were made only to posts a t which service clubs or separate library buildings were being constructed. Small posts and posts whose libraries were housed in "improvised" quarters were entirely dependent on local funds and g i f t s . W i t h o u t these millions of donated books, many of the g a p s in the distribution of reading material a t posts in the United States would have remained unfilled f o r a long time. Admittedly, many of the books were unsuitable or in poor condition. Few soldiers had such catholic tastes as the man ( a librarian) who described the g i f t collection in his company dayroom as haphazard, but convenient, and said t h a t during one month he had read " t h e whole Oz series, several H e n t y books, and a Bureau of Fisheries r e p o r t , all with equal delight." This writer remembers receiving several shipments of YBC books when he was an enlisted librarian in Texas. Every third or f o u r t h book seemed to have been written by H e n r y Sydnor H a r r i s o n , Charles M a j o r , or George B a r r McCutch-

Donated

Books and

55

Services

eon: there were far too many copies of Queed, V.V.'s Eyes, and other forgotten best sellers of the early 1900's. Although one remembers these anomalies, there was much good recent material also: novels by Pearl Buck, Romains, Roberts, Zweig, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and a smattering of nonfiction. More than half the books were not only usable but very welcome acquisitions. On a 5,000-man post with a book allotment of $25 or $30 every other month, the library would have been lost without them. LOCAL

DRIVES

In the short space available it is impossible to give more than a few examples of the donations of books and services made to the army by civilian agencies—principally municipal and state libraries. The following instances are cited almost at random. I t will be enough if they give the reader an idea of the nature and scope of the work done. F o r reasons of space, too, only a few names of individuals can be given. The First Service Command was particularly hard up for books in 1941 and 1942, because many of the harbor defense units scattered along the New England coast were too small to be authorized to have service clubs or new library buildings. One of the largest posts in the command, the Camp Edwards reception center, with a strength of 35,000 men, ran into trouble at the beginning when its initial book order was sent to the Office of the Quartermaster General instead of being handled by the service command quartermaster. The books were ordered in April and were not received until fall. The gap was temporarily filled by a book drive in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the vicinity. Within one week in April more than four thousand volumes were collected by two Worcester newspapers, loaded onto army trucks, and taken to the camp. During the following two years Camp Edwards received a total of 25,000 gift books through the Victory Book Campaigns and individual donations. Along with other posts in southeastern Massachusetts, it was also given fortnightly bookmobile service bj' the Massachusetts Division of Public Libraries. The bookmobile was particularly helpful in supplementing the camp's supply of textbooks and technical books. F o r t Ethan Allen, in Vermont, was similarly aided, first by a book drive conducted by the State Public Library Commission, and then by the commission's bookmobile. The small state of Rhode Island was primarily a naval center, but it also contained several army air bases, and it was heavily sprinkled with harbor defense units based on a few small forts. When Aline C.

56

Donated Books and Services

Whiteside, the service command librarian, made her first t r i p t o Rhode Island, in the late spring of 1941, she discovered t h a t nearly all the army units in Rhode Island were being served by the Rhode Island S t a t e L i b r a r y . Grace M. Sherwood, the S t a t e L i b r a r i a n , had visited the posts to ascertain their needs and had s t a r t e d a drive f o r books a n d ftlnds. Two h a r b o r defense f o r t s had been furnished with completely processed 1,000-volume libraries ; the books had been catalogued, lettered, and provided with pockets and c h a r g i n g cards. Another old harbor defense f o r t had had a very run-down l i b r a r y ; the books were taken to the S t a t e L i b r a r y , mended, rebound, processed, and supplemented with new material. L a t e r , s e p a r a t e collections were provided for the Hillsgrove Army Air Base and f o r each of the fighter squadrons in training there. As each squadron left f o r another p a r t of the country or f o r overseas, it took its collection along, and t h r o u g h o u t the war some of them continued to obtain shipments of books f r o m the S t a t e L i b r a r y . When the men in these units were questioned by other men overseas about their libraries, they explained where the books h a d come from, and so units which had never been near Rhode Island would write to the S t a t e L i b r a r i a n f o r books; it was usually easier t h a n getting them through army channels, especially if specific titles were desired. T h e books were sent overseas in small parcels of from twelve t o twenty volumes, but they were sent regularly. T h e Rhode Island S t a t e L i b r a r y supported f o u r Air Forces unit libraries in I t a l y , two in E n g land, which were later carried into Germany, three in the South P a cific, and three in the China-Burma-India T h e a t e r . These unit libraries were not random collections of d i s c a r d s ; the recreational books were often donations, but the technical and reference books requested were usually purchased from funds provided by the Rhode Island S t a t e Legislature. One of the civilian librarians who went to the E u r o p e a n T h e a t e r in 1945 reported t h a t the best unit library she saw there was the 2,000-volume collection of the 439th Air Service G r o u p in Germany. Nearly every book in it had been sent from Rhode Island. In 1942, 1943, and 1944 the Rhode Island S t a t e L i b r a r y , both independently and in connection with the Victory Book Campaigns, received about 200,000 donated volumes, of which 135,000 were distributed to army and navy units, principally the l a t t e r . D u r i n g the war it expended about $33,000 furnished by the Rhode Island Legislature, Rhode Island municipalities, and private donors. The money was spent on books, maps, miscellaneous technical material, and magazine subscriptions. T h e S t a t e W P A L i b r a r y P r o j e c t furnished personnel to work under the S t a t e Librarian's supervision, and eight of these

Donated Books and Services

57

workers were later employed by the s t a t e to continue the army and n a v y book supply work when the W P A was liquidated. T h e r e were many donors in the Second Service Command—the New J e r s e y S t a t e L i b r a r y Commission, the New York, Brooklyn and Queens Borough Public Libraries, the American Women's Volunteer Services, and the Civilian Defense Volunteer Organization, to name only a few, in addition to the Victory Book Campaigns in which most of these agencies p a r t i c i p a t e d . T h e m a j o r i t y of the g i f t books obtained f r o m these sources were sent t o the s t a g i n g areas which served the New York P o r t of E m b a r k a t i o n . A s t a g i n g area is a camp where t r o o p s receive their final physical examinations, have their records processed, and are issued new equipment before going to an overseas t h e a t e r . Camp Kilmer, the largest of the s t a g i n g areas f o r the New Y o r k P o r t of E m b a r k a t i o n was established in the summer of 1942. T w o of the wing-tvpe SC-3 service clubs were built, but they did not receive their initial library allotments f o r some months. D u r i n g t h a t period they depended on a 10,000-volume collection of Victory Book Campaign books. A f t e r new books had been purchased, donated books were kept on the second floor of each library. Whenever army or Red Cross units about to go overseas asked f o r books to t a k e with them, the librarians would select an assortment of g i f t books, varying in size f r o m one or two hundred to one thousand volumes. I n the course of the war, more than one hundred thousand volumes were issued in this way. Camp Kilmer's principal sources of g i f t books a f t e r the Victory Book Campaigns terminated were the New J e r s e y Public L i b r a r y Commission, the Newark Public L i b r a r y , and New Y o r k City's American Women's Volunteer Services. I t was the p r a c t i c e of the Newark Public L i b r a r y to purchase numerous copies of c u r r e n t best sellers; when the peak demand f o r a book had passed, the library sent all the unneeded copies (from five to twenty) to Camp Kilmer. T h e New Jersey Public L i b r a r y Commission, under the late S a r a h B. Askew, provided not only books b u t also services to all the a r m y libraries in t h a t state. I t furnished expensive technical books and outof-print items on inter-library l o a n ; a g r e a t deal of material was photostated f o r the use of the Signal Corps l a b o r a t o r y a t F o r t Monmouth. T h e librarian a t F o r t Hancock was given technical supplies and even the loan of a couple of tj'pewriters when she first came to the post and was unable to obtain them through a r m y channels. T h e Newark N Y A p r o j e c t , incidentally, constructed most of the f u r n i ture f o r the F o r t Hancock l i b r a r y : charging desk, book trucks, news-

58

Donated

Books and

Services

paper racks, librarian's desk, magazine shelving, and dictionary and atlas stands. When the first F o r t Dix librarian, D o r o t h y Stockford, was assigned, in the spring of 1941, she found a large accumulation of g i f t books a t the post. Nearly all t h a t were usable had been provided by the New Jersey S t a t e L i b r a r y Commission. W i t h the assistance of the New Jersey W P A L i b r a r y P r o j e c t , Miss Askew organized a continuing drive to keep the post supplies with g i f t books. T h e post received t h i r t y thousand volumes in 1941, eighty thousand in 1942, and a somewhat smaller number the following year. Most of the books were placed in dayrooms or given to soldiers when they left the post's big reception center. F o r t Hancock and Camp Monmouth likewise used the commission's donations primarily f o r dayroom and recreationhall collections. Altogether, the commission supplied about two million volumes to the services, both independently and as an agency of the Victory Book Campaigns. A radio stunt produced a windfall of books f o r several Second Service Command posts at the end of 1944. The master of ceremonies of a " g a g " p r o g r a m called " T r u t h and Consequences" had given a man named Wickel one half of a $1,000 bill and p u t him through all sorts of hazing while he looked for the remaining half of the bill. M r . Wickel's torment went on for months. One night the master of ceremonies informed him t h a t the missing half of the bill would be sent to him in a book—then, in an aside, requested the listeners to send books to Mr. Wickel also, and to send good books, as they would be given to the army. The audience responded. Within a week Mr. Wickel received more than ten thousand volumes. Most of them were current favorites and brand new. Mr. Wickel turned them over to Second Service Command headquarters officials, in f r o n t of a newsreel camera. The benefit of soldiers was hardly the main object of the affair, but the books were first-rate j u s t the same. Camp Kilmer and Camp Shanks received about four thousand each, and the rest went to a new army personnel redistribution station in Atlantic City. The library office of the F o u r t h Service Command headquarters a t Atlanta was literally flooded in 1941 and 1942 with used copies of Pocket Books. At the request of the L i b r a r y Section in the W a r Department, the publisher of Pocket Books had printed a statement on the back of each new book suggesting t h a t when the reader had finished the book he mail it to the F o u r t h Service Command headquarters. Several thousand volumes were sometimes received in a single month. Warehouse space had to be rented to accommodate them. The books

Donated

Books

and

Services

59

were sorted and packed in the warehouse and sent out to posts for distribution to day rooms, rest camps, and troop trains. Probably the biggest of all local drives was that undertaken by the Chicago Public Library under the direction of the librarian, Carl B. Roden, and the head of the publicity department, Mildred Bruder Buchanan. T h e drive began in the summer of 1941, with the object of supplying books f o r the Sixth Service Command libraries. The sorting and packing of the donations was done by volunteers from the lib r a r y ' s branches a f t e r working hours, under the direction of the small publicity department staff. Unsuitable material was sold to waste paper dealers or, if suitable for non-army libraries, turned over to other agencies. At first, the Chicago Public Library offered to pick up books at the donors' homes, but it was found that too many people were simply using the occasion to empty out their attics. A f t e r a few months donors were required to bring their books to the library or to one of its branches; the proportion of trash decreased immediately. Ten thousand books were turned over to the Sixth Service Command libraries as a result of this initial drive. The former Sixth Service Command librarian reports that thanks to ruthless weeding a t the source, nine tenths of them were usable. Thereafter, the Chicago Public Library continued to collect books for the army, at first independently, then in connection with the 1942 and 1943 Victory Book Campaigns, then independently again. In 1941 and in 1942 books were sent only to libraries in the Sixth Service Command, but beginning in 1943 a great deal of material was sent to both the Pacific and the European theaters of war. Books were sent not only to units, Special Services officers, and Information and Education officers, but to any soldier who made a request. Like the Rhode Island State Library, the Chicago Public Library supplied many units throughout the war and acquired new clients through word-of-mouth publicity. One of the best collections sent out was a 2,500-volume reference library which was shipped to the Education Branch of the Delta Base Section, European Theater, early in 1945. Large collections such as this were shipped by parcel post in seventy-pound packages. Both independently and as an agency of the Victory Book Campaigns, the Chicago Public Library sent 1,250,000 hardbound volumes to army and navy units and installations between 1941 and 1946. This figure gains more significance when it is considered that a total of five million volumes were received by the library: nearly 80 percent of the books received were discarded. Only current, usable books were

Donated

60

Books

and

Services

passed on the services. I t was this rigorous screening that made the library's work so valuable. Some three million paperbound books were also distributed. THE

VICTORY

BOOK

CAMPAIGNS

The national Victory Book Campaigns of 1942 and 1 9 4 3 were a logical outgrowth of the numerous local drives for books which were made in the first year after the passage of the Selective Service Act. In making their recommendations to the Morale Branch in 1940, Milam and Dickerson had questioned the advisability of conducting a national book donation drive. They considered that the army should select and buy its own books rather than depend on chance collections of used material. Remembering the mounds of old books and magazines collected in the drives of the F i r s t World W a r , they felt that the cost of sorting and distributing donations collected on a national scale might well be excessive, and also that the very existence of a national drive might become a deterrent on army buying. Consequently they recommended that the army countenance only local drives to meet special needs; such drives would be easier to organize and easier to discontinue when the need had been filled; the danger of crowding library shelves with unwanted books would be kept to a minimum. The representatives of the Morale Branch accepted these recommendations. In view of Congress's generous appropriation for books, it seemed unnecessary to solicit civilian aid. B u t for reasons which have been given above it transpired soon enough that an urgent and widespread need for civilian aid did exist. Local drives sprang up in all parts of the country. A few of them have been described. I t will be noted that nearly all of those described were conducted by librarians ; they knew what was suitable for libraries in general, and wherever possible they ascertained from service command and post librarians the specific needs of the camps which they were supplying. B u t many other drives were conducted by people who were unable to distinguish between a good or suitable book and a worthless one; their sole criterion was quantity. B y the summer of 1941 two facts were very clear: the army did need books, and whether invited to do so or not, the American people—from school boys to club women—urgently desired to give them. T o make a donation of some kind gave civilians a sense of participation in the war effort, and books, to speak frankly, were for most people the easiest things to give. Since donation drives were going to be made in any case, it seemed best to organize and control them. L a t e in 1 9 4 1 , therefore, the

Donated Books and Services

61

Morale B r a n c h advised the American L i b r a r y Association t h a t the army would sanction a national book donation drive. T h e navy also gave its a p p r o v a l . T h e drive, known as the National Victory Book Campaign, was held a t the beginning of 1942 and was repeated, by p o p u l a r demand, a t the beginning of 1943. I t was sponsored by the USO, the Red Cross, and the American L i b r a r y Association, the first two organizations furnishing o p e r a t i n g funds and the third, technical guidance. T h e director of the first drive was Althea W a r r e n , of the Los Angeles Public L i b r a r y . T h e directors of the second drive were J o h n M. Connor and, a f t e r his departure to join the army, Helen Wessells. F o r both drives s t a t e directors were appointed by the heads of the s t a t e library commissions and the presidents of the state library associations, and liaison librarians were designated to co-ordinate relations with the service commands. A list of co-operating agencies would include every public library in the country and nearly every social and welfare agency, not to mention publishers, newspapers, radio stations, railroads, business organizations, and trucking firms. Concise descriptions of the drives will be found in the mimeographed " F i n a l R e p o r t s , Victory Book Campaign 1942-1943," issued in 1944 by the three sponsoring agencies. A t o t a l of 18,449,000 volumes were collected in the two drives; 10,290,000 volumes were distributed. T h e army's share was 5,829,000 volumes, of which 4,463,000 were sent to posts in the United States and 1,366,000 to overseas theaters. T h e army also received the benefit of most of the 1,114,000 volumes issued to USO clubs in this country and the 224,000 volumes sent to Red Cross clubs overseas. Although the national and state headquarters issued instructions to sort the donations rigorously, it was often impossible to follow these instructions to the letter. The sorting was done by volunteers. Those who were not librarians were rarely discriminating enough, and the librarians themselves, working night a f t e r night a t the end of a full day's work, were swamped by the volume of the material to be sorted. I t might be possible to sort four thousand volumes carefully in one week; it was out of the question to consider the relative merits of each of 18,000 or 20,000 volumes in the same length of time. Yet the l a t t e r was usually what had to be done. T h u s the army received many good books, but a t the price of having to cull them from a lot of bad ones and from a vast number of duplicates (chiefly book club selections of the previous five or six y e a r s ) . A t posts in the United States where there were librarians to

62

Donated

Books

and

Service»

do the culling it was a small price to pay. One post librarian reports: In our state the books were distributed by the WPA in conjunction with the State Library Commission. They called the really good books "Grade A " and gave us these on a percentage basis. The more books we asked for, the more "Grade A's" we received. We therefore asked for more than we actually needed and the old worn out ones we sold for waste paper and spent the money for new books. Unfortunately, this sensible system could rarely be followed overseas, since only a few theaters had librarians on their headquarters staffs in 1942 and 1943. Correspondence and interviews with soldiers indicate that the reaction of overseas men to the Victory Book Campaign books was mixed—sometimes favorable, but more often sharply critical. In most theaters it appears to have been a matter of chance whether a unit received "Grade A " books, "Grade B " books, or a mixture of the two. Even in the case of a mixed lot, the final impression was likely to be adverse. You got through all the readable books in a few weeks or a few months; after that you could only stare in amusement or disgust at the unreadable ones: Government reports from the 1890's, a 1 9 1 1 number on combustion engines, a 1922 B o y Scout manual. You read the good books and remembered the bad ones. I f there had been librarians at the theater headquarters to screen the books, it would have been another s t o r y ; but usually there were none. In the United States, where the Victory Book Campaign donations could be resorted by the post librarians and where they were used, in accordance with the original V B C plan, mainly to supplement purchased books, either as additions to the post libraries or as dayroom collections, they produced a more favorable reaction ; and as we know, nearly three fourths of the books were used in the United States. Insufficient weeding at the source was probably inevitable. In a donation drive staffed with volunteers who are consciously racing against time, one must accept some bad with the good. W h a t matters most is that there were so many willing and tireless volunteers to collect and dispatch the books. The sense of personal participation which the Victory Book Campaigns fostered among civilians of all ages and classes was incidental to their main purpose, but it, too, was a contribution to the war effort. The campaigns did as much for civilian as they did for military morale. T H E R E D C R O S S AND T H E B O O K - O F - T H E - M O N T H

CLUB

In many overseas areas the only collections of books on hand prior to the mail distribution of Armed Services Editions were those in the

Donated

Books and

Services

63

Red Cross clubs. Frequently they were VBC books which had been issued to army units in the a r e a ; the unit Special Services officers would turn the books over to the Red Cross clubs as the only facilities which could serve as reading rooms. In some cases, too, as in the last war, the books were sent overseas on Red Cross shipping priorities when the Special Services Division was unable to obtain cargo space of its own. In addition to handling the units' Victory Book Campaign books, the Red Cross clubs contained books purchased by the Red Cross headquarters in Washington. Two standard 500-volume lists were used in making these purchases. A total of 3,400,000 volumes were purchased and sent overseas during the war. 1 M a n y overseas clubs were also provided with subscriptions to twenty-five popular magazines and about a dozen newspapers. The donations of money by the Red Cross and the Kellogg Foundation for hospital libraries and the hospital work of the Red Cross G r a y Ladies are discussed in Chapter VII. Perhaps the most valuable donation which the Army L i b r a r y Service received from a single agency was made, or rather begun, by the Book-of-the-Month Club in the spring of 1942. H a r r y Scherman, the president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, had read a statement by Dorothy Stockford, the Camp Dix librarian, about the soldier demand for new books. He wrote to the Secretary of W a r offering to donate a number of book club subscriptions to the army for the duration of the war. His offer was promptly accepted. The original donation consisted of 656 subscriptions—-three each for the 130 libraries, including service command headquarters, a t which librarians were then employed, one each for the 254 camps where libraries were operated by soldiers, and 12 for overseas libraries. The donation was later increased to 1,500 subscriptions, and the mailing list was revised to give priority to hospitals, overseas bases, and small posts in the United States. These free subscriptions were continued until the spring of 1946. The Book-of-the-Month Club packages contained the only new hardbound books that men in many post hospitals and in remote overseas bases could count on receiving regularly. The f a c t that they were book club selections and therefore p r e t t y sure to be currently popular in the United States gave them an added attraction for soldiers—the attraction of up-to-dateness, of news. T o a man who read, they were as close a link with home as a current magazine or a new movie. The total money value of the donation was about $350,000. As an aid to morale its value was inestimable.

VI

Post Service

I

T W A S in the post libraries t h a t the ultimate transaction occurred f o r which all the staff work of the L i b r a r y Section in the W a r Dep a r t m e n t and of the command librarians a t the service command and Air Forces command headquarters was merely a preliminary. A soldier, while off duty, came into the library to look for something to read, to obtain information, possibly to study, more often to write a letter, or merely to sit in comfort and smoke and look a t a picture magazine or a cartoon book while he did so. This was what the library was f o r . I t was the librarian's j o b to see t h a t it served these purposes and many more. I t was a full-time job. There seemed to be no limit to what might be done if only one had time and could wangle the money and the help required. GETTING

STARTED

In some cases, the initial orders for books, furniture, and technical equipment for a new library had been placed before the librarian a r rived a t the post. More often, she had to do this herself, with or without assistance from the command librarian. The p r e p a r a t i o n of the orders usually brought the librarian face to face with her first serious problem: How was she to get clerical help? The problem was especially serious if the library had been authorized toward the end of a fiscal year. T h e librarian might have only a few months in which to spend f r o m $6,000 to $15,000. In 1941 and 1942, a t posts near large centers of population, it was often possible to have W P A or N Y A workers assigned temporarily to the library. Otherwise the librarian had to depend on soldiers, who could work for her only p a r t of the day. Two or three "casuals" (men not yet assigned to a definite outfit) might be sent to her one day, two or three others the following day. A good deal of her time would be spent in showing them what to do and in checking their work. The post Special Services officer might assign one or two of his enlisted staff permanently to the library, but " p e r m a n e n t l y " rarely meant more t h a n three or four consecutive months. T h e men were usually lost either by being taken away from Special Services f o r work on another post activity or by being sent to another p o s t ; then

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a new man was assigned. Naturally, the Special Services officer tended to keep his best men for more responsible work than typing orders or charging out books under a librarian's supervision. I t was somewhat exceptional for a librarian to have a really efficient enlisted assistant. The biggest handicap, however, was the constant turnover. One had to learn how to get satisfactory results from a man with a seventhgrade education without wasting too much time or having to do too many things over and how to make the most of an intelligent and interested man whenever one came along. Very little responsibility could be delegated to some assistants; a great deal to others. The librarian had to learn to size up her helpers quickly so as to make the best use of them without loss of time; it was a challenge. Obtaining equipment, furniture, and fixtures was another challenge —this time to one's ingenuity, persuasiveness, and persistence. Even when the money was available, Special Services officers were not always convinced that the library needed as much equipment as appeared on the service command library equipment list. They had to be shown j u s t what the stuff was for and why a surplus desk from a disused company orderly room (headquarters office) would not do j u s t as well as an expensive charging desk from a library supply house. Often enough, of course, both they and the post commanders took great pride in the appearance of all their buildings and were glad to spend " l o c a l " (that is, post) money, in addition to the initial grant from appropriated funds, in order to enhance the comfort and attractiveness of the library. B u t first the librarian had to show them how attractive the place could be made. I t was up to her. In other cases there was a long delay before appropriated funds were obtained, or the librarian wanted to save on equipment in order to have more money for books. Sooner or later the librarian would have to make the acquaintance of the officers and enlisted men on the post engineer's staff: better sooner than later, for she would have many favors to ask of them. They were the handymen of the post. When a barracks was to be converted into an "improvised" library, it was the engineers who converted it. When a disused office had to be dragged across the road and attached to the end of a recreation hall to serve as a library, it was the engineers who did the j o b . When they did this kind of work, the librarian had to be sure that she knew exactly what she wanted them to do. They were busy men, and they would not be anxious to do half the j o b over six weeks later. In theory, it was the Special Services officer or one of his assistants who requested the assistant post engineer to make repairs on the library building or to

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alter its construction. B u t a f t e r she h a d been there a y e a r , the l i b r a r ian was an old-timer, and both the Special Services officer and his assistants were likely to be newcomers. I t was best f o r her t o know the engineer's staff herself. If she did, she might be able to wangle materials and services out of them without wasting time in g e t t i n g the Special Services officer to ask f o r them. When one Special Services officer told his librarian he could not afford to buy new linoleum f o r her floor, she mentioned her need to her friend the a s s i s t a n t post engineer. H e found some linoleum left over f r o m another c o n s t r u c t i o n j o b and p u t it down f o r her. I t was the same with the q u a r t e r m a s t e r . I t behooved t h e librarian t o make the acquaintance not only of the clerks in the q u a r t e r m a s t e r p u r c h a s i n g office but also of the lieutenants and sergeants in the warehouses. T h e y might be able to c o n j u r e u p t y p e w r i t e r s and supplies f o r her even when the Special Services equipment allowance had been exceeded. She had to know what she wanted and who could get it f o r her. Ordinarily she did not obtain co-operation of this s o r t by t a l k i n g a b o u t books and the Dewey decimal classification. She had to establish a r e p u t a t i o n f o r herself as being on the j o b and not a f r a i d of p r a c t i c a l problems. Generally, she g o t better results by being businesslike t h a n by being appcalingly helpless. An alert and energetic librarian who knew how to deal with people h a d m a n y resources. T h e p o s t Special Services officer, as her supervisor and the controller of her funds, could do more f o r her t h a n anyone else—if he would. B u t she was n o t solely dependent on him. She was a civilian, not a soldier, and if need be she could go out of command channels with relative impunity in order to get what she wanted. T h e best situation of all, of course resulted when the p o s t commander took a personal interest in the l i b r a r y . T h e n the l i b r a r i a n was sure to get both help and money. In all service commands the model libraries to which the command librarian pointed with pride were n e a r l y always on p o s t s where this situation existed. W i t h o u t the p o s t commander's personal s u p p o r t , a librarian could do much if she was a good p l a n n e r , a good m a n a g e r , and a positive and persuasive talker. If she had these qualities and the commander's s u p p o r t , she could accomplish wonders. T o r e t u r n to the newly established l i b r a r y . A f t e r the initial order f o r books had been placed and the l i b r a r y had been f u r n i s h e d , the lib r a r i a n might have Victory Book C a m p a i g n and other g i f t books t o circulate or she might be obliged to wait until the books on the order began to come in. When they did arrive, she had a n o t h e r rush j o b t o p e r f o r m . Receiving r e p o r t s listing all the books had to be t y p e d and

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sent to the New York finance office. T h e command librarian sometimes eliminated this tedious chore by furnishing the librarian a mimeographed copy of each book order, which required only a cover sheet to be converted into a complete receiving r e p o r t ; but this did not happen invariably. Then f a i r l y detailed d a t a concerning the books had to be entered in the accession record (the formal book-property record of the l i b r a r y ) , and the books themselves had to be processed. How fully the books were processed before being circulated depended on the librarian. As a rule, the service command librarians recommended p u t t i n g books into circulation as soon as they had been accessioned and the self-list cards had been typed, and then doing the rest of the processing gradually whenever the librarian and her helpers had time. W a n t of time and help tended to make the cataloguing r a t h e r sketchy. Many librarians got along very well with only shelf-list, author, and title cards. In libraries with only a few thousand volumes devoted largely to recreational reading, this was usually sufficient. W i t h irregular assistance, keeping up a detailed catalogue with a number of analytic subject cards was more trouble than it was worth, especially when so much time had to be spent on p r o p e r t y records—the accession book and its accompanying voucher files. T h e type of librarian who was exclusively interested in the minutiae of classification, multiple-entry cataloguing, the preparation of detailed " t r a c i n g s , " and the deletion of pseudonyms from title pages, was not likely to be h a p p y or even very useful in the average post library. Only the largest libraries, or those posts which had central cataloguing systems, needed such highly specialized workers. How long it took a librarian to " o p e n " a f t e r the thousand, two thousand, or more volumes on the initial order arrived depended on the amount of help she had and the extent of preliminary processing which she considered necessary. W i t h only a single untrained helper, it might take her as long as two months. The norm was four or five weeks. BOOK

SELECTION

In p r e p a r i n g her initial order, the librarian might depend largely on a standard book list provided by the service command librarian ; in some cases, too, the initial order had been placed before she was hired. But t h a t order rarely used u p all the initial allotment of money f o r books. Unless the library had been authorized toward the end of a fiscal year, thus necessitating the immediate expenditure of the money, she usually took a great deal of time in p r e p a r i n g her subsequent orders.

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She had to find out what sort of men used the library, what their predominant reading interests were. The habitual readers did not leave her in any doubt. They were much more conscious t h a t the library was there to serve them than the patrons of municipal libraries usually are. Civilian readers are pleased—even grateful-—when they find what they want in a l i b r a r y ; if the library does not own a copy of the book they want, they are disposed to accept the fact as unalterable. Soldier readers had less humility. At every large post there were men who were experts in their chosen fields. They would not be put off with secondr a t e or obsolete material. In technical subjects particularly, a librarian who had not bought the latest and best works would soon have her error pointed out to her. Some libraries built up excellent small collections in music, radio, architecture, and electronics, largely from lists furnished the librarians by enlisted experts in those fields. T r y i n g to meet the needs of particular units was an expensive matter. For six months a librarian might serve a division drawn largely from urban regions. I t might contain a comparatively large proportion of habitual readers, who would want the latest popular fiction and nonfiction and would prefer mysteries to westerns. The next division which occupied her p a r t of the post might have a larger proportion of normal nonreaders. The use of books would be less, and it would be concentrated on westerns and cartoon books. The sex interest would be satisfied by Thorne Smith and Donald Henderson Clark rather than by Steinbeck and Farrell. A good quarter of the recreational material bought for the last division might become dead wood. Or the function of the post might change. The Signal Corps might take it over, bringing in hundreds of language experts and highly trained technicians who wanted to pursue their interests or to study for advancement in their spare time. The scientific, technical, and belles-lettres collections would have to be expanded. Or the post might become a convalescent center, from which many men would go back to civil life. T h e demand f o r both the lightest recreational reading and for vocational guidance materials would be great. The stage of the war, too, affected reading interests. Before Pearl H a r b o r , the demand for purely recreational reading matter predominated. After Pearl H a r b o r , there was a demand for books on aeronautics, radio, and other technical subjects which men wanted to study in order to qualify themselves for new or better assignments. T h e demand for books on all phases of mathematics—from arithmetic to the calculus—was insatiable. There were more readers, too, f o r books on the progress of the war. And always, throughout the war, men wanted

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to read about manners and personality, sought guidance from dictionaries, grammars, and secretaries' handbooks in the a r t of letter writing, and read books about marriage and sexual relations—perpetual subjects of barracks talk. There were never enough books on photography. Books on other hobbies became popular as men settled down for a long stay at a post and as hobby and manual arts shops were built. A man who felt that he was "stuck" a t a camp for the duration might take a U S A F I (United States Armed Forces Institute) correspondence course with a view to the f u t u r e ; he would ask the librarian for the supplementary books listed in the text. Books on careers were likely to be only another form of escape reading a t first—one daydreamed of becoming a farmer, a writer, of owning one's own business; any livelihood that did not involve taking orders from a boss seemed appealing. As the war drew to a close, this interest became more urgent. What did it take to get a certain sort of job? How could one's army specialty be exploited in civil life? How could one's educational opportunities under the GI Bill of Rights best be used? Then boys under twenty began to be d r a f t e d : books about the army, again, and photography, and, for the serious and hopeful, textbooks and college catalogues. And regardless of these changes there continued the constant 60 to 70 percent circulation of pastime reading—westerns, hard-boiled mysteries, the current best sellers, and the perennial favorites, H. Allen Smith, Farrell, Steinbeck, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, T h o m e Smith, God's Little Acre. Keeping the collection up-to-date and appropriate to current needs required alertness and mental flexibility. One could be fairly sure t h a t there would be a demand for mathematics texts, grammars, books on technology, and a few other basic things (including poetry anthologies)—for these and for current best sellers and the fiction stand-bys. The rest had to be chosen in accordance with the expressed interests of the men served. Assistants had to be trained to note down all requests that could not be filled, and even when a librarian had as many assistants as she needed, she usually found it well to spend a few hours a day at the charging desk, although it might mean delaying other work which could not be delegated. The effectiveness of the library depended on her close acquaintance with her patrons' interests. I t was a responsibility that could not be slighted. She had to keep her eyes open, too, to what was being read in the room; many men habitually read in the library, since it was quieter and more comfortable than their barracks or day rooms. A man might take the same book from the shelf day a f t e r day, yet never borrow it for outside reading. In

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short, the librarian had to be alert and observant even when she was engaged in such a routine task as c h a r g i n g books. REFERENCE

WORK

Army librarians were often surprised a t the number and type of reference questions asked in the library. Elizabeth Evans Mischler, the former librarian of F o r t Hancock, s a y s : The library soon became known as the place to call for information of any sort. We answered technical questions from officers in all departments, we helped soldiers with all sorts of problems, and we settled all kinds of soldier bets. A soldier came into the library one evening holding over $100 in bets on the question "On what date did Joe T.ewis fight Johnny Paycheck?" Often we answered bet questions on the telephone and had to give the answer to both parties. F o r answers to bet questions, one could usually make shift with the World Almanac, Famous First Facts, and a few other s t a n d a r d tools. Incomplete cataloguing and the absence of back magazine files made the answering of technical and historical questions (the l a t t e r f o r intelligence and Information and E d u c a t i o n officers) somewhat more difficult. I t was frequently necessary to telephone to a public or college library, if there was one in the vicinity. Civilian libraries near army posts were generous in supplying books on inter-library loan. I t was an extremely valuable service f o r the army libraries, f o r their reference collections were usually small and limited to material which happened to be in p r i n t when they were established. The answering of reference questions and the assistance given men in using reference books and in digging up the information they wanted —whether to settle a bet or to decide on a career—may have for some veterans a carry-over value more lasting than the libraries' influence on their recreational reading habits. Thousands of men learned, really for the first time, t h a t libraries serve other purposes besides providing fiction for housewives and collateral reading for high school students. They discovered the practical usefulness of libraries as a source of information. They may forget the satisfactions of reading books when they have more to occupy their minds and their time and when it is necessary to walk f a r t h e r than a block or p a y more t h a n a q u a r t e r to get a book. But they may remember and continue to use the reference facilities of libraries. PUBLICITY

AND

SUPPORT

OF

OTHER

ACTIVITIES

Library publicity depended on the ability and the ingenuity of the librarian. Illustrated posters for dayrooms, indicating the where-

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abouts of the library and its open hours; other signs containing the same information ; occasional columns of book notes in the camp paper, and even better, brief articles tying a library book in with current events in the country, in the army, or on the post itself—these were essential, but for some librarians they were only a beginning. Other devices were book talks by soldiers or by authors who were visiting the region in connection with war bond drives, announcements or comments about books on the post, division, or hospital public address system, and especially the use of the library to support other activities. A librarian extended interest in the library by extending its usefulness. I t could and, with the proper staff and the proper support, did serve as a cultural and information center f o r the post. Library displays were not necessarily limited to books, some did not even include books. The libraries at several posts rotated sets of prints and drawings borrowed from a r t museums in neighboring cities. Others had displays of photographs taken by soldiers on the post, of soldier handicraft products, of souvenirs brought back from overseas, of types of weapons. I t was officially p a r t of the librarians' j o b to disseminate information concerning the U S A F I courses; in some cases they also provided classroom space. The Information and Education Vocational Guidance Kits, consisting of books and specially prepared pamphlets on careers, although intended for the use of Information and Education officers, were frequently turned over to the library. They were supplemented, beginning in 1945, by the Occupational Kits issued monthly by the W a r Department Library Branch (as it was then called) in co-operation with the A d j u t a n t General's office. E a c h kit contained three or more copies of a variety of pamphlets on occupational opportunities and qualifications published by various sources —government bureaus, business associations, private firms. This material was much used, both b}' the men and by officers engaged in counseling work. In the libraries of the wing-type SC-3 service clubs, the upper floor, or a p a r t of it, was sometimes converted into a workshop for the quieter arts and crafts. In many cases these upper rooms were used for weekly or semi-weeklv concerts of recorded music. In smaller libraries, the main library room might be used for this purpose one or two hours a week. There must have been hundreds of good phonographs and record collections in army libraries. Radios were very often present, too. They were a trial to some of the men, but when properly subdued and dialed only to musical p r o g r a m s they may have pleased more library users than thev annoyed.

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I t was the official policy of the Army L i b r a r y Service t h a t reading matter should be made available to soldiers wherever they were. On a large post, t h a t meant extending the service beyond the library itself by means of branches, deposit collections, and mobile service. The assumption was t h a t if a man had to walk a mile to use the library, he would not use the library. Where the post bus service was good, the need for extension was less urgent. I t was not an easy need to meet. T h e first drawback was personnel. A unit Special Services officer might be willing to send a truck to the library once a week to pick up a collection of books f o r circulation, but he could not always detail the same man to charge the books out and collect them when they were due. I t was best to send someone from the library. If a number of units were to be covered regularly, it meant adding another assistant to the library staff. I t was difficult to get additional assistants, and it was not easy to get trucks regularly, so t h a t in general there was not much mobile service. With respect, to assistants, a f t e r the spring of 1943 it was rarely possible to assign enlisted men regularly to library work. Because of the increasing shortage of manpower, the general policy of the Army Service Forces was t h a t Special Services activities should employ civilian operating personnel from a p p r o p r i a t e d or local funds. T h e more money a librarian paid to assistants, the less she was likely t o have f o r books. In 1944, as more and more WAC's were enlisted and trained, the Army Service Forces authorized their assignment to Special Services activities. Many of them were given library j o b s , with the result t h a t more local money was released for books. The best step of all, the authorization to p a y qualified assistants from a p p r o p r i a t e d funds, unfortunately, was not taken until late in the war. Thus, the obtaining of assistants was a rather serious problem f o r most librarians during the greater p a r t of the w a r ; and if they did not succeed in obtaining the number and type of assistants they needed, they could do only a limited amount of work outside the library. More use was made of deposit collections t h a n of mobile service. In some posts and in some entire service commands, notably the Sixth, Victory Book Campaign books and other donations were distributed to company davrooms, and the collections were periodically rotated and refreshed. On other posts, the commander, the Special Services officer, or the librarian herself felt t h a t the unit dayroom collections were not the post's concern, since the unit commanders had funds for

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equipping them. Such posts might, however, establish deposit collections in recreational halls or even in post exchange branches in isolated p a r t s of the post. T o encourage this method of extension, the Ninth Service Command furnished Special Services officers and librarians with a blueprint of a deposit collection bookcase which could be locked in the absence of the man in charge. I t was fastened to a wall, held a b o u t three hundred volumes, and when opened, provided a writing surface f o r the man charging out the books. F o r t Monmouth, New Jersey, established deposit collections in all p a r t s of the post a t any distance f r o m the main library and its five branches. In 1943 it had twentythree collections; in 1944, forty-three. The collections varied in size f r o m a few hundred to two thousand volumes. A card was kept in the main library f o r each book, and the man in charge of the collection was given a charging t r a y , a d a t e r , and a stamp p a d , a simple list of rules f o r circulating books, and a mimeographed calendar on which to record the daily circulation. A total of t h i r t y thousand books were used in these deposit collections between 1942 and 1945. T h e collections were originally made u p of Victory Book Campaign donations, but the replacements were new books purchased from local funds. Portable collections of one hundred volumes each were also sent out to the bivouac areas, where troops in t r a i n i n g went f o r their field exercises. A t a few installations the main p a r t of the service was extension work. This was p a r t i c u l a r l y true of the Army Air Forces and Army Service Forces redistribution stations, which were usually located a t summer or winter r e s o r t s : Lake Placid, Atlantic City, Miami Beach, Palm Springs. These were the stations to which soldiers, who had come back f r o m overseas f o r rest leaves or f o r hospital care, went a t the termination of their leaves or hospitalization. They stayed for a week or ten days before going overseas again and were allowed to bring their wives with them. One center might occupy half a dozen hotels and private houses. L i b r a r y branches had to be set up wherever the men were quartered. One librarian reports t h a t many copies of popular books always had to be bought, because the men did not stay long enough to "sweat o u t " a reserve list. Since the library branches were in the same buildings as the men, circulation was high ; the chief demand, naturally, was f o r new best sellers, cartoon books, and pure escape literature. Oddly enough, it was often the soldiers who told their wives what was new and good, rather than the reverse; they had read the new publications overseas in Armed Services Editions. Soldiers frequently asked f o r books which they had begun in Armed Services Editions and had not finished.

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The supply of reading material to troop trains was another form of extension work. Some reception center troop movement officers had an allowance for paper books, comic books, and magazines and were assisted by the librarians in making their purchases. This supply was often supplemented by g i f t books from the library. The librarian a t Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, had special book boxes built for troop train use and provided boxes of twenty books for as many cars as possible. The troop movement officer in charge of the train and the enlisted men detailed to assist him were responsible for rounding up the books at the end of the trip and bringing them back. Camp Chaffee also provided kits of paperbound books for troops on bivouac. In the latter p a r t of the war, the Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, staging area became a debarkation point for troops returning from overseas. Since staging areas were supplied with the same recreational items as were issued to overseas bases, Kilmer had large quantities of Armed Services Editions and overseas magazine sets for distribution. E a c h time a troop train left the camp for separation centers in other p a r t s of the country, Dorothea Surtees, the senior camp librarian, dispatched a truck load of Armed Services Editions and magazine packages to the railhead. Whenever possible, newspapers from the region to which the troop train was going were also provided. This reading matter was usually delivered to the combined kitchen and mess car of the train, as that was the one car all the men on the train were bound to visit. T r o o p planes going to the West Coast were also supplied. As the flow of returning troops swelled during the summer and fall of 1945, the supplying of troop trains and planes became the most imp o r t a n t activity of the Camp Kilmer library staff. There were often more than 20 trains a t the railhead at one time. The maximum number of trains which the staff had to supply at one time was 34. I t was a big operation. The debarkation points on the West Coast provided similar service. On the whole, the use of extension methods probably was not carried as f a r as it should have been. In July, 1945, a little less than 50 percent of the United States post libraries provided service through branches or deposit collections, and only about 12 percent of the two million books reported were in branches and deposit collections. Considering the sprawling expanse of many posts and the irregularity of p o s t bus service, it was not enough. There were understandable deterrents, of course. The shortage of personnel was one; another was the lack of centralization. Should the librarian of Service Club A on the north side of the post take care of the troops on the western outskirts, or

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should the librarian of Service Club B in the center of the post do the j o b ? Generally the librarian who wanted to do the job, did it, but sometimes neither had enough initiative to undertake it. Apart from the outstanding work done by the Ninth Service Command's bookmobiles and traveling libraries—referred to in Chapter IV above—the best extension work was done by centrally organized library systems such as that at Fort Monmouth. CENTRALIZED

SERVICE

Monmouth is the classic example of what an able, energetic, and imaginative librarian can accomplish when her post commander and Special Services officer solidly support her. The strength of the post fluctuated between thirty thousand and forty thousand men. As a signal corps training center, it had an abnormally large percentage of well-educated men—experts in all the sciences and studies which have any bearing on communications. Those who were not experts were in training to become experts. The post needed a good, up-to-date library system. The post commander recognized the need, had the service command assign a librarian of proved ability, and then gave her the support she needed. The librarian, J a n e t K. Zimmerman, reported for duty early in 1941. After spending her initial allotment of appropriated funds for a new service club library, she depended chiefly on local funds, which were freely forthcoming. Within a year, her expenditures for books and other materials averaged about one thousand six hundred dollars a month; she invariably asked for more and occasionally got it. B y the end of 1943 the library system consisted of a main library with seventeen thousand volumes, four branches with a total of eight thousand volumes, and twenty-three deposit collections with twelve thousand volumes. In 1944 the total inventory was fifty thousand volumes and the total expenditure for books, equipment, and supplies was nineteen thousand dollars. The staff consisted of twelve professional librarians, four subprofessional assistants, and four clerks; there were eleven Gray Lady volunteer workers in the hospital branch; and each of the deposit collections was cared for on a part-time basis by an enlisted man. The clerks and civilian librarians, except for the chief post librarian (a P - 3 ) , were paid, not from the Special Services personnel appropriation, but from the much larger appropriation for post and command headquarters civilian personnel. This was contrary to the policy of the W a r Department Fiscal Director, but since the Monmouth commander regarded the library as an essential post activity, it was done there.

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In addition to the regular reading room, seating 134 men, the main library contained a small juvenile collection and a large reference department with two full-time librarians and separate order, cataloguing, and processing departments. The reference department included an extensive clipping file and a full collection of regulations, technical manuals, and other army publications. There was a union catalogue of the library system's holdings. The Information and Education office and classrooms for off-duty education courses were located in the library building. The courses were conducted in the evenings by civilian instructors from neighboring communities, and the library supplied supplementary texts, visual aids, and reference assistance. T h e annual library attendance hovered around 200,000, and the circulation around 155,000. Because of the special type of troops served and the library's close liaison with the education program, nearly as much nonfiction as fiction was circulated. ACCOUNTABILITY

Another deterrent to extension work was library "accountability." T o some librarians it seemed a deterrent to doing anything a t all a p a r t from keeping records. With rare exceptions, accountability was the aspect of army library work that the librarians liked least. This is not the place for a detailed description of the army's system of keeping p r o p e r t y records. I t is enough to say that it is complicated and that it embodies elaborate precautions against pilfering and wanton destruction. Any piece of equipment t h a t is not "expendable," t h a t is, to be consumed in use, is charged to an officer who becomes "accountable" for it. If it is lost or damaged, he must present a formal statement of the circumstances of the loss or damage and prove t h a t due precautions were taken and t h a t no negligence was involved. Otherwise, somebody (to be determined by an investigating officer) will have to pay f o r it. The cost of army equipment makes a system like this necessary. I t is considerably relaxed in wartime, overseas, but in the United States it was an unavoidable headache for all accountable officers. The Special Services officers were accountable f o r library books, although the actual record-keeping was done by the librarians. Special Services officers were often unduly concerned about the possibility of book losses. I t was not too hard to write off normal losses periodically, but there was always the possibility that an auditor or an investigating officer would not be satisfied. Perhaps he would not consider t h a t due precautions had been taken against loss if a book disappeared from a deposit collection which had not been closely supervised. T o play

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safe, Special Services officers usually did not permit librarians to place Government-owned books ( t h a t is, those purchased from a p p r o p r i a t e d f u n d s ) in deposit collections. Some would not authorize using localf u n d purchases f o r this purpose either, although, unlike Government p r o p e r t y , they could easily be written off if lost. Thus, only g i f t books would be available for deposit collections, and they often were not worth circulating. The net effect of the book accountability regulation was to h a m p e r the free circulation of books, particularly through extension methods. I t was largely psychological—very few officers ever had to make good library book losses—but it was a real impediment, nevertheless. I t also made extra work for the librarians. Even when the "writing o f f " was done without a hitch, it took a great deal of preliminary work—the p r e p a r a t i o n , witnessing, and signing of statements, the a d j u s t m e n t of records, and the transmittal of "statements of charges" to the commanders of soldiers who had lost governmentowned books. Men moved about frequently in the early years of the war, and a statement of charges involving $1.50 or less might be t r a n s mitted from post to post and even overseas before it caught up with a man. Statements which had passed through ten or fifteen headquarters were common. T h e transmittal comments of overseas company commanders were often biting; they appeared to blame the whole thing on the fussiness of the librarians. A f t e r 1943 librarians were authorized to write off books if the men charged with them had gone overseas, but their other accountability headaches remained. SPECIAL

SERVICES

OFFICERS

Another headache for many librarians was the variable caliber and the excessive turnover of the Special Services officers. One librarian who served a t the same post f o r three years had eighteen successive Special Services officers; not an unusual case. A turnover as rapid as t h a t was bound to be a hindrance, considering t h a t librarians were supposed to " g o t h r o u g h " their Special Services officers in dealing with other personnel on the post. Many librarians preferred to "go a r o u n d " them, t h a t is, to deal directly with the quartermaster, the engineer, and so f o r t h , r a t h e r than explain what they wanted and why they wanted it to a Special Services officer who was new on the post and might not s t a y more than a few months. I t was hard to know what to do. The abler librarians managed to get along, but those less well adapted to the confusion and constant change of an arm}' a t war found this turnover in the officers to whom they were directly responsible a g r e a t trial.

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N a t u r a l l y , the officers v a r i e d e x t r e m e l y , b o t h in c a l i b e r a n d in their a t t i t u d e t o w a r d l i b r a r y service. One l i b r a r i a n spoke f o r n e a r l y all the rest when she said t h a t the best S p e c i a l Services officers t o h a v e were " t h o s e who said ' H e r e ' s the l i b r a r y — r u n i t ' a n d b a c k e d u p t h a t s t a t e ment with enough money, t y p e w r i t e r s , a n d h e l p . " A S p e c i a l S e r v i c e s officer or an a s s i s t a n t S p e c i a l S e r v i c e s officer who t o o k an a c t i v e p e r sonal interest in the l i b r a r y was r a t h e r a r a r i t y . If his interest took the p r a c t i c a l f o r m of seeing t o it t h a t e v e r y d e t a i l on the l i b r a r i a n ' s r e p o r t was a c c u r a t e , of a d v i s i n g — a n d h e l p i n g — h e r t o extend her service o u t side the l i b r a r y building o r of seeing t h a t she h a d as m a n y a s s i s t a n t s as she needed, it was a p p r e c i a t e d . I f it t o o k the f o r m of o v e r r u l i n g her decisions on p r o f e s s i o n a l m a t t e r s , she was g r a t e f u l when he w a s replaced b y someone less zealous. Some of the ablest S p e c i a l S e r v i c e s officers—men who made a success of the athletic o r e n t e r t a i n m e n t p r o g r a m s — h a d little interest in their l i b r a r i e s and were r e l u c t a n t t o p r o vide sufficient money or help of a n y kind. T h i s was the g r e a t e s t c h a l lenge of a l l : t o sell one's p r o g r a m t o a c a p a b l e , b u t u n s y m p a t h e t i c , boss. Some l i b r a r i a n s were able t o meet it, some were not. F o r the l a t t e r , the experience was c r u s h i n g ; f o r the f o r m e r , g o o d t r a i n i n g f o r the f u t u r e . T h e y learned to p e r s u a d e , t o resist b r o w b e a t i n g , even t o d o a little b r o w b e a t i n g of their own. " A b o a r d of trustees holds no f e a r s f o r me n o w , " one g i r l remarked ; " I c a n s t a n d u p t o a n y o n e . " I f her S p e c i a l Services officer was incompetent, all the l i b r a r i a n could do was to g o a r o u n d him as o f t e n as possible. B u t in such a c a s e , she was usually a t a d i s a d v a n t a g e . F o r if she h a d a succession of incomp e t e n t Special Services officers, it m e a n t t h a t the p o s t c o m m a n d e r undervalued morale work in c o m p a r i s o n with the o t h e r a c t i v i t i e s of the p o s t and t h e r e f o r e would not be likely t o s u p p o r t her. S h e would h a v e t o do her j o b as well as she could w i t h o u t official p o s t b a c k i n g . In some cases it was impossible t o make the service much more t h a n a g e s t u r e . S u c h eases were e x c e p t i o n a l , b u t the}' did o c c u r . U s u a l l y b o t h the commander and the l i b r a r i a n were a t f a u l t ; sometimes, t o o , the c o m m a n d l i b r a r i a n was not so h e l p f u l as he o r she m i g h t have been. T h e a r m y is a h i g h l y complex o r g a n i z a t i o n . I t t a k e s more t h a n one m a n o r one woman to make an a c t i v i t y a complete success or a t o t a l f a i l u r e . E n o u g h has been said t o show t h a t p o s t l i b r a r y service w a s e x c i t i n g , s t i m u l a t i n g , and above all c h a l l e n g i n g work. M o s t of the l i b r a r i a n s met the challenge more than h a l f w a y , and the w o r k p r o v i d e d its own r e w a r d s , both in the sense of accomplishment and in t h e o b v i o u s response of the men. A tenth, o r less, of the men on a p o s t m i g h t use its l i b r a r y facilities r e g u l a r l y . T h i s was more than enough t o s w a m p those

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facilities and to keep the librarians working till they dropped. When they saw their libraries crowded night a f t e r night, with every chair taken and men leaning against the walls and sitting side by side on the floor, they knew they were doing a j o b that really mattered. T h e work was hard, the army atmosphere startlingly different from anything they had known before, and often they had to argue, plead, and plot to get what they needed. But the response of the men was conclusive proof t h a t the library was filling a vital need. Some librarians thought the service was creating a nation of readers—a debatable assumption. There is no doubt t h a t it helped to maintain the spirit and the balance of thousands of civilian soldiers, to whom army life was as strange and disturbing as it was to the librarians.

VII

Hospital Service

T

H E L I B R A R Y a t a post hospital was often merely a branch of the post library, and if the hospital it served was a s e p a r a t e installation in itself, the library was in a sense simply another post library. Yet the technical, administrative, and fiscal problems of hospital libraries were so different from those of post libraries t h a t they must be considered separately. An adequate description of the peculiar conditions of hospital library service and of the techniques developed to cope with them would require many more pages than can be devoted t o the subject here. This chapter discusses only the organizational and administrative foundations of library service in army hospitals. T h e whole technical side of it, a p a r t from the selection of books f o r p a tients, must be summed up with the observation t h a t hospital libraries needed a much larger staff and many more books than did post libraries in order to render anything like adequate service. Although there was a large percentage of ambulatory patients in army hospitals, the first responsibility of the hospital librarians was to provide service to p a tients confined to their wards, and the typical army hospital, not more t h a n two stories above ground, and making up in extent what it lacked in height, had literally miles of corridors. Pushing a book truck along them was heavy and time-consuming work. A post library could serve a five-thousand-man camp tolerably well with a staff of one librarian and three or four assistants. A staff of the same size was scarcely enough f o r a hospital with only five hundred beds. Civilian hospitals are for the sick and the injured ; army hospitals are for the sick, the injured, and the convalescent. T h a t is the principal difference between them. T h e army has no place for a man unless he is fully well. A f t e r a soldier has been sick, has had an i n j u r y , or has been operated upon, he must remain in the hospital until he is fit f o r fulltime duty. And so the wards, corridors, porches, recreation rooms, libraries, and post exchanges of the wartime army hospitals were thronged with ambulatory patients clad in socks, shoes, p a j a m a s , and the purplish bathrobes issued by the Surgeon General's Office. They and the soldiers still confined to bed or to their wards were without doubt the most bored men in the world, in spite of all the efforts made

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by the army and the Red Cross to relieve the monotony of hospital life. I n their boredom, they read or leafed through books and magazines without number, so long as books and magazines which they had not read before were supplied. Their chief demand was for recreational reading—anything to kill time—but if the hospital had a good reconditioning program, 1 they might go on to educational or vocational reading or study books related to one of the hospital's hobby activities. In any case, the turnover of books in army hospitals was much higher than in any other type of installation. Book use was at least twice as great in hospital libraries as in post libraries. Where sufficient new books, book trucks, and operating personnel were available, the difference might be much greater. The demand seemed to be limited only by the library's capacity to meet it. 2 T h a t capacity was determined largely by the type of hospital in which the library was located. TYPES

OF

HOSPITALS

There were four types of army hospital in the United States: post, general, and regional hospitals and convalescent or reconditioning centers. The post hospitals (officially called "station hospitals" and by far the most numerous category) were for the care of sick or injured men on the post who did not require prolonged or specialized treatment. In theory, a post hospital was administratively subordinate to the post commander, as a part of the entire installation. But in fact, since the hospital commander was usually of the same rank as the post commander and since his work was so specialized that only another specialist could pass judgment on it, the hospital commander usually had a great deal of autonomy, which was carefully guarded. F o r all practical purposes he had absolute control over the hospital and all activities carried on under its roof. General hospitals were reserved for cases requiring long hospitalization or specialized treatment—particularly sick and wounded men evacuated from overseas theaters. They were sometimes located on posts; more often, they were separate establishments. They were always independent installations, even when situated within the geographical limits of another installation. Indeed, until the spring of 1943 they were independent even of the service commands; their commanders were responsible only to the Surgeon General's Office, in Washington. Convalescent or reconditioning centers were primarily for convalescent patients transferred from general hospitals. In some cases they

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were annexes to general hospitals; in other cases they were separate installations under independent commanders. As a rule, regional hospitals were simply outsize post hospitals which treated patients from other posts besides that at which they were located, but some of them, too, were independent installations. LIBRARY

FUNDS

AND

PERSONNEL,

FOR

GENEKAL

HOSPITALS

When nine general hospitals were established in the fall of 1941 (eventually the number rose to sixty), each one was authorized to employ a professional librarian and to spend $7,280 for its initial supply of books and equipment. Two-thousand-volume collections, costing about $3,200 each, were purchased for the hospitals by the Library Section of the Special Services Division, and the rest of the money was allotted directly to the hospitals for the purchase of equipment and additional books. When convalescent hospitals were built, later in the war, the same provisions were made to supply them with books and librarians. After the spring of 1943 the initial purchases for general and convalescent hospitals were made locally or by the Service Command librarians. At the beginning, general and convalescent hospitals usually had from 500 to 1,200 beds. An initial allotment of a little more than $7,000, plus the assignment of one professional librarian, was considered adequate. But in 1944 their "bed strength" began to rise sharply as overseas casualties increased. Many hospitals were expanded to accommodate 2,000, 2,500, 3,000, and even more beds. In the spring of 1945, therefore, the Special Services Division authorized the granting of an initial allotment of $7,000 to each general or convalescent hospital unit of 1,000 beds and the employment of an additional assistant librarian for each additional 750 beds after the first 1,000. For the maintenance of their collections the libraries used local or appropriated funds, in accordance with the policy of the service commands in which they were located. With rare exceptions, the library service at general and convalescent hospitals was excellent. Some of the best army libraries were located at general hospitals—the Schick General Hospital in Omaha, and the Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, for example. One of the largest Army Library Service installations in the country was that at the Percy Jones Hospital Center at Battle Creek, Michigan. The center was composed of a general hospital of 2,100 beds, an annex with the same bed strength, a convalescent center, and a rest camp which served as an annex to the convalescent center. The total number of

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patients early in 1945 was 16,000. The Sixth Service Command librarian practically lived a t the center while the library facilities were being set up. A t the peak, they comprised seven recreational libraries, f o u r reconditioning ( t h a t is, educational) libraries, three medical libraries, sixty different subject reference collections for as many reconditioning program classrooms, and numerous deposit collections in enlisted men's dayrooms and nurses' and officers' quarters. The lib r a r y staff, headed by Marion E . James, consisted of seven professional civilian librarians, f o u r subprofessionals, and eleven enlisted men and women. T h e general and convalescent hospitals were new independent installations, the importance of their morale services was recognized from the s t a r t , and adequate provision was made for them in regulations and directives. Ample a p p r o p r i a t e d funds were provided to establish their libraries, and it was made clear t h a t the libraries should be operated by professional army librarians assigned to the staff of the hospital commanders. POST

HOSPITALS

T h e status of library service in post hospitals was very different. Since the plans for library service made by the Morale Branch in 1940 were based on the construction of service clubs, they did not include any provision for furnishing either books or librarians to post hospitals. P r i o r to the passing of the Selective Service Act, the Red Cross had been solely responsible f o r the recreation of the sick and wounded in post hospitals. The Morale Branch planners evidently assumed t h a t the Red Cross field directors and G r a y Ladies—volunteers who worked f o r the Red Cross a certain number of hours each week—would provide whatever library service the hospitals needed as p a r t of their general recreational program. T h e Red Cross recreation rooms or annexes at post hospitals nearly always had a collection of books, and the books were usually circulated to ward patients by the Gray Ladies. But the collections consisted almost entirely of g i f t books—some new, some old and worn—and in most post hospitals the Gray Ladies had other duties besides the circulation of books; they wrote letters for men unable to use their hands, distributed refreshments, arranged entertainment programs, and so forth. They did their best, but they had rarely had any training f o r library work, and in most cases it was only an incidental p a r t of their jobs. So in general neither the ward service nor the supply of books was adequate f o r the greatly increased number of patients a f t e r the army began to expand. As early as the spring of

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1941 the Library Section began to receive complaints about the inadequacy of post hospital libraries. To remedy the situation, the Library Section placed an item in the 1941—1942 budget for the purchase of reading material for post hospitals. The budget also contained an item for the purchase of reading material for the nine general hospitals which were to be established in the fall of 1941. The latter item was approved bv the War Department Budget Advisory Committee and Congress in turn, and, as we have seen, the mone}T was duly allotted. But the item for post hospitals was disapproved b}' the Budget. Advisory Committee, on the ground that post hospitals received a double "ration allowance" for each patient and that this extra money was supposed to be spent for recreational supplies for the patients. But as far as books were concerned, the double ration allowance was not of much use, since there were no army librarians in the hospitals to select or to buy the books or even to see to it that some of the extra allowance was spent for that purpose. The responsible officers in the hospitals usually assumed that supplying books was solely a Red Cross responsibility and did very little about it. Since he could not get an appropriation for post hospital books, the chief of the Library Section began to look for donors. He went first to the Red Cross headquarters, in Washington. The Red Cross was already aware of the need, and it agreed to donate $29,000 to the W a r Department for the central purchase of books and magazines for post hospitals. A number of publishers then agreed to sell books to the army for little more than the cost of production plus transportation, and several magazine publishers offered equally liberal terms. Thus it was possible to stretch the $29,000 donation from the Red Cross to cover the purchase of about 250 sets of reading material for hospitals, each set comprising 11 magazine subscriptions, 150 paperbound, and 93 hardbound books. In the spring of 1942 the Library Section received an unsolicited donation of $100,000 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. This donation was similarly stretched to cover between $300,000 and $400,000 worth of books and magazines. The procurement included 100,000 hardbound and 71,000 paperbound books, subscriptions to four book clubs for each of 400 hospitals in the United States and overseas, and 17,900 magazine subscriptions. The number of separate magazines subscribed to was 26. As an example of what this procurement meant to the individual hospitals, the Fort Custer, Michigan, hospital received 490 paperbound books, 266 hardbound books, the Encyclopedia

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Americana, 8 book club subscriptions, and 60 magazine subscriptions. This material flowed into the hospitals in the summer and fall of 1942. At the same time, they received large quantities of books collected in the second Victory Book Campaign. Yet, helpful as these donations and central purchases were at the time, they were only a stopgap. They were no substitute for steady buying for each hospital in accordance with its needs. As we have seen in Chapter III, the assignment of librarians to post hospitals of one thousand beds or more was authorized by the December, 1942, amendment to the personnel regulation. This measure helped to put library service in many large post hospitals on a sound basis, but the smaller hospitals continued to be a problem from the standpoint both of funds and of personnel. In some cases the post librarians established a working arrangement with the Red Cross Gray Ladies: the Gray Ladies noted down requests for books not in the hospital collection and made daily or twice-weekly visits to the post library to borrow them for hospital patients and to return them. In other cases the post librarians offered to establish branches in the hospitals. This usually meant that the librarian would have to sj>end one or two days a week at the hospital, either visiting the wards herself or supervising the loading of the Gray Ladies' book trucks and charging out books in the reading room. Her Special Services officer might not want her to spend so much time away from her own library, and he might fear that the extension of service to the hospital would increase book losses. The hospital commander, too, might consider the arrangement a needless complication, preferring to deal either with the Red Cross alone or the post librarian alone, but not with both; since the Red Cross had been there first, he might prefer not to make a change. Moreover, the librarian was responsible, through the Special Services officer, to the post commander, rather than to the hospital commander; the latter might regard the establishment of a branch of the post library in the hospital as an encroachment on his authority. Even when regulations were changed late in the war to make hospital library service clearly a part of the post library system, the situation remained delicate. Satisfactory arrangements for branch service could be made, but because of the three-way division of responsibility— between post, hospital and Red Cross—much time, planning, and patient diplomacy were required. The upshot was that the quality of library service provided in post hospitals remained extremely variable. At the beginning of 1944 the Office of the Surgeon General and the Special Services Division re-

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quested the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division to make a sampling stud} of post hospital libraries in order to ascertain what the general level of book supply and library service was. The results were depressing. Hospitals with between three hundred and one thousand beds were generally short of books, personnel, and professional guidance. The 1,000-bed hospitals were better as a rule; some were providing excellent service; but others were no better stocked or served than were the smaller libraries. After studying the survey, the Office of the Surgeon General and the Library Section agreed that the simplest means of assisting post hospitals would be to distribute Armed Services Editions to them on the basis of one set per month per fifty beds (roughly, one set per ward). The sets then contained thirty titles each; the number was later increased to thirtytwo and then again to forty. The distribution of Armed Services Editions would ensure that all hospitals received a number of new titles every month, and it would also relieve the acute personnel problem, particularly in the smaller hospitals. If they received thirty Armed Services Editions a month, the men in a ward would not be wholly dependent on the book truck service for their reading matter. The Council on Books in Wartime approved the use of the books for this purpose, the Deputy Director of the Special Services Division authorized the expenditure of funds for additional Armed Services Editions, and distribution of the sets to all army hospitals in the United States was begun in August, 1944. An average of five thousand sets were distributed to hospitals in the United States every month thereafter, at an annual cost of about $144,000. This action did not solve all the problems of the post hospital libraries, but it did place a definite floor under their book supply. Bedridden readers preferred the hardbounds (they were printed on better paper and were easier to hold), but in their absence the Armed Services Editions were a welcome substitute, and they were usually the only books that could be distributed to the quarantined and other closed wards. THE

TRAINING

PROGRAM

Toward the end of the war, when the staff of the W a r Department Library Section was increased from two officers to six it became possible for it to deal more directly with the field than it had in the past. It was able to send out representatives of its own instead of relying entirely on the traveling field representatives of the Special Services Division who had many other interests besides library service. At this time (fall, 1944—spring, 1945), the Library Section initiated two

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programs to support library service in the United States. One of these was the selection and distribution of the occupational materials kits referred to on page 71. The other was designed to encourage and, wherever possible, standardize hospital library training methods, with emphasis on the training of ward workers. This program was carried out by Captains Geneva C. Hall and Mary Kent. In essence, it was an attempt to disseminate information concerning hospital library practices to army librarians by means of conferences and brief in-service training courses. Conferences were held in five service commands, and the whole subject was ultimately treated in an army technical manual, Hospital Library Service. The training program helped to draw the attention of service command Special Services and medical officers to the need of co-operation between medical and Special Services officers and Red Cross workers in the planning and administration of hospital library service. But in the main, full co-operation was achieved only at hospitals which were separate installations with their own Special Services staffs and librarians, all of whom were ultimately responsible to the hospital commander. Library service in post hospitals continued to suffer from a division of responsibility which made co-operation in the use of funds and personnel difficult to achieve. BOOK

SELECTION

While the types of books in demand in hospitals were generally the same as those most read in the post libraries, there were certain differences in emphasis. The combination of boredom and accessibility extended the reading public; the hospital librarians appear to have been even more conscious than the post librarians of reaching men who had never turned to books for recreation before. These men usually wanted only the lightest sort of escape reading—westerns, mysteries, humor, cartoon books—or books which were reputed to be bawdy. One hospital completely restocked its large western collection six times in the course of two years. The attitude of the librarians generally was that the book a man wanted to read would probably be the best book for him from the therapeutic standpoint. While they refrained from pushing works that appeared to be excessively morbid or depressing or, on the other hand, sexually exciting, they usually felt that it would do more harm than good to deny a man a copy of God's Little Acre or a Donald Henderson Clark novel if he was bent on reading it. Studs Lonigan might seem depressing to the librarian herself; she could only admit that

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soldiers seldom saw it in that light; to them it was genial, racy stuff— or at least those parts of it which they read. One librarian tells of three men who had been burned in an accident. Their hands were so badly burned that they could not hold a book. Yet they all wanted to read Forever Amber: somebody in the ward had told them about it. She tore out the pages of the Armed Services Edition of the book and had the ward attendant give the men a few pages at a time. This was as much weight as they could hold. The exploits of Amber took their minds off their pain as a more innocent story might not have done. On the other hand, the fact that a man might be confined to the hospital for weeks or months sometimes made it possible for the librarian to guide and extend his reading interests if he began to tire of escapc books and asked for her advice. When asked whether they have observed any extension of reading interests in the soldiers they have served, hospital librarians frequently answered, "Yes," "Yes, temporarily," or "Yes, if guided"; the answers of post librarians to this question were likely to be either "No evidence" or simply "No." But the greatest demand during the war was for pure escape fiction and for current bestsellers. The demand for the latter was inexhaustible. The librarian at one large post hospital had six subscriptions to the Literary Guild and ordered six copies of all forthcoming publications which were forecast b}' the Virginia Kirkus service or by Alice Hackett in the Publishers' Weekly as likely candidates for the bestseller list. She reported that books more than three months old were rarely taken from the ward service trucks, the only exceptions being the perennial favorites Kitty, Strange Woman, King's Row, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Fountainhead, and anything at all by Gardner, Zane Grey, Thorne Smith, Cain, or Farrell. The relative demand for escape reading and current bestselling fiction at this library began to decline after the end of the war, as men about to be discharged began to consult occupational and study materials and re-enlisted soldiers and new draftees turned the clock back to 1942 with requests for mathematics texts, technical works, and books about the army. By the middle of 1946 the library was circulating nearly as much nonfiction as fiction. Other hospital libraries went through similar phases of reader interest. When one hospital served an Air Forces technical school, the demand was divided about equally between recreational and technical material. When it became a general hospital for the treatment of wounded soldiers from overseas, the demand for escape fiction increased enormously. Immediately after the war, the demand for vocational, educational, and hobby books rose to nearly the same level as the demand for westerns and bestsellers.

VIII

Overseas Book Distribution

D

URING 1941 army reinforcements began to move into the overseas departments, as they were then called, of Puerto Rico, Panama, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines; Army Air Forces, Signal Corps, and other units were sent to a number of Atlantic bases stretching from Greenland to Brazil; and in the fall of that year, our first contingent of combat troops landed in Iceland. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, our troops fanned out to nearly every part of the world not held by the Axis. Brisbane, Australia, became the headquarters of the Southwest Pacific Area, and New Guinea its principal combat zone; the South Pacific Area spread north from New Zealand through New Caledonia to the New Hebrides and the Solomons. The ChinaBurma-India theater, with headquarters at New Delhi, had bases scattered over India and West China and engaged in combat, supply and construction operations in Burma. The Africa-Middle-East Theater, consisting largely of Air Forces and Signal Corps bases and supply units, stretched from Accra on the Gold Coast to Eritrea on the Red Sea, and north to Alexandria, Cairo, and Palestine. Farther east, the Persian Gulf Command funneled supplies north from the Persian Gulf into Russia. After the invasion of Africa, the North African Theater of Operations extended from Casablanca on the Atlantic coast to Benghazi in Northern Libya, and then moved up into Italy in a series of long, hard campaigns. The European Theater of Operations, as it was later called, was confined to the British Isles until the invasion of France was finally mounted, in the early summer of 1944. In addition to these main theaters, hundreds of air bases, weather stations, and signal stations dotted the map, from Galapagos to Greenland, from Christmas Island in the Pacific to Ascension Island in the Atlantic. To get men, equipment, food, medicine, and munitions to all these parts of the world and to get them there in the right proportions and when they were needed, was a formidable task. It was carried out successfully, and it was as much our logistics as our fighting that determined the outcome of the war. To repeat what was said in Chapter I, first things had to come first. Far, far down the list of shipping priorities were recreational and other morale supplies—motion picture

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Distribution

p r o j e c t o r s and films, Army Exchange items, such as fountain pens, watches, and chewing gum, athletic equipment, musical instruments, soldier show equipment, magazines, and books. These were things it was good to have, but the supplies t h a t were needed to sustain or to preserve life and f o r the performance of a unit's mission had to come first. Of all morale items, f o r example, the most important was personal mail; yet there was a time when personal mail was eighth on the p r i o r i t y list of articles to be flown over the Himalayas into West China. T h e ships and planes t h a t carried soldiers overseas in the first years of the war seldom had space f o r anything except absolute necessities. T h e commander of an infantry regiment t h a t sailed for Australia a t the end of 1941 had been told t h a t he must pack all his headquarters files and equipment into six hundred cubic feet of space. H e did so. When he boarded the t r a n s p o r t he found t h a t his headquarters space allotment had been reduced to 97 cubic feet. Nearly everything had to be abandoned, including most of the typewriters. T h e only recreational equipment t h a t unit took with it was carried in the pockets or b a r r a c k s bags of individual soldiers. I t was very little. Even if the commander had foreseen how difficult it was going to be to get recreational supplies in New Caledonia, where the unit finally went, he could not have done very much about it, and it would have been hard to determine what supplies would be the most useful. The chances are t h a t he would not have thought of reading material—except magazines or pocket books f o r the outward voyage. If he had observed how his men spent their leisure in the training camp, he would not have noticed much demand for books, much p a t r o n a g e of the library. There were other sources of recreation—USO clubs in town, beer halls (on or off the p o s t ) , well-stocked service club cafeterias, three movie p r o g r a m s a week, and in the company dayrooms ping-pong, pool, radio, and cards. N o t many of the men in any given unit patronized the post library regularly or seemed particularly addicted to reading. Crowded as the library usually was, it still served only a fraction of all the troops in training. Commanders and their Special Services officers leaving the United States for the first time cannot be blamed for not having anticipated the demand for reading material t h a t was to develop overseas. When the distance to a recreational club (if there is one) is measured, not by yards, but by miles ; when there is no bus to take you to town or no town to go to and no girls to date ; when there is no bar, no soda fountain, no cafeteria, then reading does become a popular pastime. Even if there are movies and facilities for sports, reading will help to fill up the

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yawning gaps in the off-duty hours and the long waits that punctuate the d u t y time of nearly all soldiers. But this was not self-evident. I t had to be learned, not only by the unit Special Services officers and commanders, but by the base section and theater Special Services staffs, by the W a r Department and the army as a whole, and means had to be devised to meet what was actually an unexpected need. With certain notable exceptions, t h a t need did not begin to be adequately met until the automatic issue of Armed Services Editions and magazines through the medium of the Army Postal Service was initiated, in the spring of 1944. T h e r e a f t e r overseas book supply improved steadily, and at the end of the war it was supplemented by ambitious library service programs in the principal combat theaters and occupation zones. With respect to book supply and library service, the overseas areas fall into two groups. The first consisted of the Antilles Department, the Panama Canal Department, the old Hawaiian Department, renamed the Central Pacific Base Command, and the Western Pacific Base Command, comprising the Marianas Islands. Library service under professional direction was provided in all of these regions while the war was still in progress. All the other overseas areas in which American soldiers were stationed fall into the second group. During most of the war, with temporary exceptions or reservations, these areas did not have anything t h a t could be called organized library service. The Special Services staffs a t their headquarters simply requisitioned books and magazines from the United States and then distributed them as best they could to the individual installations or troop units to be used as the local commanders saw fit. This chapter describes the development of the W a r Department's Special Services supply procedures with particular reference to their effect on the areas which did not have organized library service. Book supply in those areas will be briefly considered in chapters I X and X . Chapters X I and X I I will take up the two "automatic issue" projects — t h e overseas magazine sets and Armed Services Editions. Chapter X I I I will describe the development of library service in the Antilles, Hawaii, and other areas. Chapter XIV will be devoted to the rather special case of the European Theater. Chapter XVI will complete the overseas story with an account of the establishment of library service in the Western Pacific a f t e r hostilities had ceased. THE

WAR

DEPARTMENT

AND

SPECIAL

SERVICES

SUPPLY

The Special Services Division did not develop systematic overseas supply procedures until the beginning of 1943. Before that time supplies were procured and issued hastily—one might say blindly. The

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movement of troop units from the United States to overseas bases was shrouded in secrecy. Fairly near the time of a unit's or task force's departure, the Morale Branch, or the Special Services Division, as it later became, would be informed that Unit X , consisting of five thousand men, or Task Force Y, consisting of twenty-five thousand or more men, was scheduled to leave the New York or New Orleans P o r t of Embarkation for an unknown destination. The Athletic, L i b r a r y , and other sections were instructed to procure a p p r o p r i a t e supplies f o r the task force. If there was sufficient time, procurement directives were transmitted to the Office of the Quartermaster General, which would instruct one of its purchasing depots to buy the material and send it to the port. More often, there was not time for this, and the Morale Branch had to make "emergency purchases" direct from athletic goods manufacturers, book jobbers, and others. T h e weekly reports of the Library Section for the years 1941 and 1942 have many entries like the following: "Purchased 2,600 paperbound books f o r special task f o r c e " ; "purchased thirteen unit sets of magazines and requested 1,000 books from Victory Book Campaign for special task force." Sometimes these procurements reached the p o r t in time to be carried overseas with the task force or the individual unit t h a t was sailing. But it very often turned out t h a t the t r a n s p o r t s had no room for recreational supplies; then the material was held for later units or was shipped subsequently as cargo to the overseas destination of the task force. A f t e r the units reached their destinations, their morale officers would send requisitions for more recreational supplies to the Morale Branch in the W a r Department. Additional procurements were made on the basis of these requisitions and sent overseas—or a t least sent to the ports pending the availability of cargo space. But there was no follow-up system by which the Morale Branch could ascertain when and where the supplies had finally gone and whether the units to which they were addressed had received them-—meanwhile the requisitions kept flowing in. At best, the distribution officers in the understaffed Morale Branch could only catch the crest of each wave of requisitions. T h e most urgent requisitions were filled; the rest piled up on their desks. In the summer of 1942 the first attempt was made to plan procurement ahead, so t h a t some of the requirements of units could be met as they started overseas. Certain types of recreational kits were purchased in advance and stocked in the ports of embarkation. T h e two kits which concern us were the A kits, consisting of athletic equipment

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and t h i r t y paperbound books (including sports rule books), and the B kits, consisting of a radio-phonograph, records, and one hundred paperbound books. Two A kits and one B Kit were to be issued to each separate unit of company size (150 men) as it went through the p o r t , and issue was made to larger units on the basis of twelve A kits and six B kits per one thousand men. The advance procurement of these kits reduced the amount of emergency buying t h a t had to be done, but it did not solve the distribution problem. Some units took the kits with them when they sailed, but many did not. Thus, it was often necessary to send a unit the kits to which it was entitled a f t e r it had sailed. When this happened, the unit's chances of getting its kits were none too good, since supply channels, especially f o r morale items, within the overseas areas were still in a very primitive state. So requisitions from these units, too, would begin to flow into the W a r Department. Another special kit of which large quantities were bought in advance and stored was the C Kit. T h e C Kit was the standard library equipment for the so-called Special Service companies. These companies were first formed in 1942. In all, about forty-eight Special Service companies were established during the war. Their mission was to provide recreational equipment and organize recreational programs for troops in combat t h e a t e r s ; they frequently operated the rest centers behind the combat zones. E a c h company consisted of four independent platoons. Each platoon had a complement of recreational specialists—musicians, actors and show technicians, film technicians, and two men who doubled as publication and library specialists. T h e C kits comprised four shelved cases f o r books, each containing 1,900 paperbound and 100 hardbound books. One kit was issued to each platoon. The C kits were the first s t a n d a r d book sets designed by the Special Services Division; the p r o j e c t was handled by the Planning Branch, which was responsible f o r all Special Service Company equipment, and the kits were assembled by the Washington, D.C., Quartermaster Depot. Some mistakes were made in this first book-assembling p r o j e c t which were not repeated in later collections. The cases themselves turned out to be too heavy f o r easy maneuverability in the field, and serious mistakes were also made in purchasing and assembling their contents. The four kits supplied to each company duplicated each other, thus limiting the number of titles available and making it pointless to rotate the kits from one platoon to another, as should have been done when a company served the same large body of troops f o r more than a month. This error was corrected in the last C-Kit p r o -

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Book

Distribution

curement, made in 1943. Four differently composed kits were purchased for each company to be supplied: C-l, C-2, etc. There were also needless duplications of titles within the kits, due to the depot's lack of experience in purchasing and assembling books. As a typical example one Special Service Company received a total of 125 copies of The Way of All Flesh in its four kits. Later in the war large numbers of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets (from 50 to 250 sets of each) were issued regularly to all Special Service companies. Reorganization Of Special Services Supply.—When the Special Services Division was made part of the Army Service Forces headquarters in the W a r Department, in the spring of 1942, the commanding general of the Army Service Forces, General Brehon B. Somervell, sent three experts in administration to the division to survey and reorganize its administrative and supply procedures. They completed the survey and made their recommendations in the fall of 1942, and one of the three officers, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin A. Leibman, was assigned to the division to set up the supply system they had recommended. The new supply system was gradually put into effect in the latter part of 1942 and the first months of 1943. A Special Services Supply Division was established at each port of embarkation, and staffed, not with Special Services officers, but with Transportation Corps officers familiar with shipping and distribution work. Requisitions from overseas were sent thereafter to the ports rather than to the W a r Department office. Storage space was obtained in quartermaster depots for advance purchases of about a hundred standard items of recreational equipment as well as of the A and B kits. The Special Services Supply Division at each port was to keep on hand a thirty-day supply of standard items for shipment in response to requisitions. As the stock level of an item sank, it was to be replenished by placing an order on the quartermaster depot in which the advance purchases of that item had been stocked. A system of reporting was instituted, so that the Distribution Branch of the W a r Department Special Services Division could follow through each item on each requisition from the date the requisition arrived at the port until the item had been sent overseas. During 1943 and part of 1944 the items were followed up until their arrival at the overseas ports. In a subsequent refinement of the system, each overseas theater was given a quarterly monetary credit against which it might draw any standard items desired; and it was authorized to use 10 percent of its credit for nonstandard items. Funds were allotted to the ports for the purchase of nonstandard items. Only

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requisitions f o r a few nonstandard items not available locally, such as individual books, were to be forwarded to the W a r Department. T h e s t a n d a r d library items on the supply list were P B kits, R B kits and R B libraries, all of which will be described later. T h e new system greatly expedited the shipment of Special Services supplies. There were still delays, of course, and uncontrollable misshipments a f t e r the material got on the water, but the flow of material to the p o r t s was controlled, and there was little likelihood t h a t requisitions would be lost or sidetracked. T h e system had two drawbacks, however, both of which affected book supply. The flow of Special Services supply items to a theater was controlled p a r t l y by the theater Special Services officers and p a r t l y by the distribution and fiscal officers in the W a r Department Special Services Division. With limited cargo space at his disposal and a somewhat less limited monetary credit, the theater Special Services officer had to decide what Special Services items were most needed. He had to prorate both his space and his credit. The W a r Department set no minimum standards for him; it did not recommend that he spend roughly so much of his credit per man f o r each of the five types of Special Services supplies—athletic, musical, library, theatrical, handicrafts. He had to make the decision as the representative of the theater commander; he was supposed to be in a better position than anyone else to know what was needed. Yet it was only to be expected t h a t his decisions might sometimes be influenced as much by his personal predilections as by an objective study of units' needs and requests. At any rate, the Library Section noticed t h a t some theaters requisitioned books frequently and in large quantities ; they seldom got more than half of what they asked f o r a t any given time, but they kept repeating their requisitions. Other theaters requisitioned books infrequently at best; and when a requisition was cut in half by the W a r Department in one quarter, as too often happened, due to nonavailability of funds, they did not ask f o r the rest of it in the following q u a r t e r ; another book requisition might not be submitted for a full year. The Librar}' Section felt that these marked differences in requisitioning reflected the attitudes of the several theater Special Services officers toward book distribution. 1 As we shall see in a moment, the W a r Department certainly did not make it easy for the theaters to get books when they needed them and in the form in which they were needed. I t was necessary f o r the theater officers to plug to get the books in the first place, and when they arrived, it was usually necessary to assign a detail of men to get them into usable order for the units. Some theater Special Services officers did not consider it

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worth the trouble; and so, with no minimum standards to be conformed to, the library supply j o b was done only half-heartedly, or, a f t e r a promising start, was abandoned in mid-career. T h e other drawback was closely connected with the first and tended to a g g r a v a t e it. T h e officers in the W a r Department Special Services Division could not anticipate how each theater would prorate its expenditures. I t was impossible to know how great the demand f o r certain standard items would be. T h e division's fiscal and distribution officers were reluctant to lay in heavy stocks of the more expensive standard items if there was any uncertainty about their being requisitioned. One of these expensive items was the most important library item—the 500-volume R B L i b r a r y , priced at $875. T h i s item was understocked in both 1943 and 1944. Requisitions f r o m the theaters had to be cut in half, canceled, or back-ordered. I t was not very encouraging to those theater Special Services officers who had private qualms to begin with about expending much of their credit on books. T h e supply system worked better f o r single manufactured items than it did f o r expensive sets of articles which had to be purchased and then assembled before the}' were available f o r shipment. I t took too long to correct erroneous estimates of needs, and yet errors of this sort could not be avoided. LIBRARY

SUPPLIES

So much f o r general supply procedures. N o w let us review the handling of books and l i b r a r y kits. In 1941 and 1942 the L i b r a r y Section developed certain semi-standardized lists of books and magazines to fill overseas requisitions. T h e r e was a roughly balanced list of about two thousand hardbound titles to meet requisitions f o r that t y p e of material, lists of f r o m twelve to fifteen popular magazines, and the most variable list of a l l — t h a t of all suitable paperbound titles momentarily in print, usually about five hundred. When a requisition f o r books was received, a procurement directive was sent to the Office of the Quartermaster General, which in turn directed its chief book purchasing agency, the Jersey City Quartermaster D e p o t , to buy the books. T h e publishers packed the books f o r overseas shipment and sent them t o the appropriate p o r t of embarkation. I f a large procurement of hardbound books was to be made, a firm such as Doublcda}', Doran might receive an order f o r five copies each of seventy or eighty titles, all to be overseas-packed and sent to the New Y o r k , New Orleans, or San Francisco P o r t of E m b a r k a t i o n ; H a r p e r and Brothers might send five copies each of f o r t y titles on the same o r d e r ; and so forth.

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97

The Doubleday titles might go out on one ship; the Harpers, Knopf, and Little, Brown books on a ship sailing a week later; and books from Macmillan, Scribner, and a half-dozen other publishers on a third ship. Thus, the books would reach the overseas theater at different times, and might not even be unloaded at the same port. The first and third ships containing books might be completely unloaded at the proper port. But after the most important cargo on board the second ship had been unloaded, the empty holds might be filled immediately with cargo pressingly needed at another port five hundred miles away. And so the books would be unloaded at the second port, or they might even be carried back to the United States and then reshipped a month or two later. This happened frequently in the Pacific areas. These changes of destination could not be anticipated or controlled by either the port or the theater Special Services officers. Meanwhile, what happened to the books that had arrived at the proper place? If several thousand books had been ordered for distribution to five or six different commands, they had to be unpacked and broken down into as many different sets. Since a quarter or a third of the books might not have been received, the sets were likely to be lopsided ; still, there would be a fair number of different titles in each collection. But something else might, and often did, happen. The officer in charge of the Special Services depot, with a small staff and many other supply items to think of, might send the unopened crates of books to the requisitioning units or installations as they were. A unit might thus receive a crate of two hundred volumes, consisting of five copies each of forty titles. Even worse, a large shipment of paperbound books might be handled the same way; in that case, a unit might receive as many as one hundred or more copies of only two or three titles; it might even receive five hundred copies of a single title. A soldier reports, for example, that a few days after the invasion of Sicily, one of the beachheads was strewn with books. But they were all the same book—Erie Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Lucky Legs. The base section or unit Special Services officer supplying the beachhead may have assumed that he had a preassembled kit of books. Instead, he had received all the copies of one title intended for five hundred kits. One other point about these early requisitions from overseas theaters should be mentioned. Each book item was only one line on a general Special Services requisition that might cover two or three pages. Often the line would read: "Books, paper, 10,000"; or "Books, clothbound, 1,500." Were the clothbound books for a single library, or for two libraries, or for three? The Library Section could only guess. There

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was no theater library officer to send back a letter explaining what the book items on the current requisition were for. The Library Section only gradually became aware of these library supply difficulties overseas, through reports from traveling officers.2 The solution for the problem was obvious; books should be assembled into library collections before they were shipped. This had been done occasionally in the past, when emergency purchases had been placed through book jobbers such as the American News Company; but it had not been done in the case of the routine procurements handled by the quartermaster depots. In the spring of 1942 the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot did its first preassembling of books. On a large order for five hundred miscellaneous puperbound titles, the books were delivered to the depot and assembled in separate crates, each containing five hundred different titles. The crates were labeled " P B [paperbound] Kit," and the theaters were notified that thev were available. A f t e r the new distribution system was established, at the end of 1942, the P B kits were stocked in the various ports of embarkation a f t e r they had been assembled. The preassemblv of hardbound books into kits was begun in the spring of 1943, when the Jersej' City Quartermaster Depot assembled four hundred R B (reference book) kits and 150 R B libraries. The former consisted of one hundred reference books—dictionaries, an atlas, a one-volume encyclopedia, and basic reference books in the a r t s and sciences. The R B libraries consisted of the one hundred R B Kit titles plus four hundred additional fiction and nonfiction titles. All three sets of books—PB kits, R B kits, and R B libraries—were listed as standard items of supply and were stocked in the ports of embarkation. Books requisitioned by title were classified as nonstandard items, and requisitions for them were usually forwarded to the W a r Department. The R B kits were no longer procured a f t e r the spring of 1944, and the proportion of recreational books in the R B libraries was increased with each successive procurement, until even its name was changed from Reference Book Library to Recreational Book Library. The R B libraries procured in 1943 and 1944, as the Library Section learned afterwards, had f a r too little of the purely recreational material which was in the greatest demand overseas. Although they were a step in the right direction, the early R B libraries were too "balanced" according to conventional library standards to fill the overseas need satisfactorily. And until 1945 there were not enough of them: only 150 were assembled in 1943; in 1944 only about 500. 3 From the point of view of the theater Special Services officers the

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situation was as follows: The War Department encouraged them to order certain items, by designating them "standard" and promising to stock them in anticipation of requisitions. It discouraged them from ordering other items by designating them "nonstandard" and limiting the money value of requisitions for these items to 10 percent of each theater's quarterly credit. Yet when the theater officers requisitioned the standard library supply items—RB libraries or PB kits—their requisitions were frequently cut or canceled by the W a r Department due to nonavailability. They could still get books by ordering, let us say, "Books, clothbound, 5,000" or "Books, paperbound, 5,000" or by ordering itemized lists of books by title. But this meant that they would have to assemble the books into collections when they came, and it also meant dipping into the precious 10 percent credit for nonstandard items. A theater Special Services officer had to be pretty firmly convinced of the need for books and of his staff's ability to handle them effectively when they arrived, before he would do this. In 1944 only two theaters did this regularly—the Panama Department and the Central Pacific Area: in 1945 these two and the European theater. They were all theaters where professional librarians or professional library staffs were assigned to headquarters. Thus, although the Special Services overseas supply system was rational and generally effective, it did not work well with respect to book supply. When it is pointed out in the following chapters that certain theaters slighted book supply, the obstacles here described should be borne in mind. For a theater Special Services officer who did not have an expert library staff of his own it was very hard not to slight book supply. Let us recapitulate. With some exceptions, to be noted later, the picture of the overseas supply of hardbound books from 1941 to the end of 1944 is that the earlier shipments did not reach the theaters in immediately usable form and thus lost some part of their value, since the theaters did not, as a rule, have the personnel or the supply organization to give them the special handling they required. And the preassembled RB libraries, which did not require special handling, were few and late. The Library Section in the W a r Department lacked detailed information concerning the theaters' requirements and special problems, and the theaters lacked headquarters library staffs to supply that information and in the interim effectively to organize such material as was received. About two million new hardbound books were sent overseas during this period in addition to one and one half million Victory Book Campaign books, but outside of the areas that had fulltime library staffs, the distribution of the books was extremely spotty.

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They were lost in the shuffle. Until the automatic mail distribution of magazine sets and Armed Services Editions was begun, the average soldier in most of the areas to be discussed in the two following chapters did not know that the army was making any effort to provide him with reading matter. Efforts were being made on all levels of command from the W a r Department down to the individual divisions and bases, but they were poorly co-ordinated, and in the main they failed to overcome the difficulties created by the constant shifting of troops, bases, and supply channels and by shortages of funds, shipping space, and qualified personnel.

IX

Book Distribution in the Pacific Theaters ALASKA

O

AND THE

ALEUTIANS

F THE LARGER overseas areas to be described in this chapter, the Alaskan Department (including the Aleutian Islands) was the best situated with respect to both books and libraries. It had the shortest supply line to the United States, the department Special Services officer (a newspaper man by profession) took an active interest in book distribution, and for a short period he had the assistance of a professional librarian who had specialized in extension work. In the critical early period, too, W a r Department liaison was good. Until the spring of 1943, the Alaskan Department was based on the Ninth Service Command for supplies. In the spring of 1941 Xenophon P. Smith, the Ninth Service Command librarian, began to send small collections of gift books to the various Alaskan posts, and after the Seattle book processing center was established early in 1942 (see page 47 above), large quantities of Victory Book Campaign books were dispatched to Alaska whenever shipping space was available. In the summer of 1942 Colonel Henry W. Clark made a survey of the Alaskan Department for the W a r Department Special Services Division. On returning to the United States, he interviewed Smith at the Ninth Service Command headquarters and explained that the department needed to receive books packaged in a manner that would facilitate distribution—portable preassembled collections rather than books in bulk. Smith said that he could provide small library kits if the W a r Department would furnish the money for them. Thirty thousand dollars were allotted to the Ninth Service Command for this purpose. Smith purchased and assembled 260 traveling libraries consisting of 35 volumes each, at a total cost of $15,000. The rest of the allotment was spent for waterproofing materials and reinforced boxes, and the traveling libraries were shipped to Alaska late in the summer. At the same time the Library Section in the W a r Department shipped a number of paperbound books to Alaska by mail.

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in the Pacific

Theaters

Meanwhile, in August, 1942, Frederick A. Wemmer, a California county librarian, had been appointed civilian post librarian at F o r t Richardson, the Alaskan Department headquarters at Anchorage, and a month later Lieutenant Colonel John T . Carlton came to F o r t Richardson as department Special Services officer. Some of the Victory Book Campaign books had been shipped directly to other Alaskan posts, but a "houseful" of them were still a t Anchorage when Carlton arrived. He set a crew of five or six men to work breaking down the mass into transportable collections which were dispatched to the various mainland and island posts. The collections were supplemented by the traveling libraries from the Ninth Servicc Command, but t r a n s p o r t a t i o n difficulties and personnel shortages made it impracticable to r o t a t e them in accordance with the original plan. By midwinter all posts had book collections of some sort, but the need f o r new material was still great. Carlton went back to Washington in the spring of 1943 and arranged for shipments of P B kits and of some of the R B kits and R B libraries which were then being procured. This material began to arrive in the summer and early fall of 1943. After the fall of 1943 requisitions f o r R B libraries and for occasional itemized lists of titles were filled by the W a r Department with reasonable promptness. In September, 1943, Wemmer was transferred to the Special Services staff at department headquarters. After requisitioning books f o r a number of posts, he was to make a tour of the island bases, weeding out their collections, instructing the enlisted librarians in library work, and informing them about requisitioning and procurement procedures. Unfortunately this program of professional supervision from the department headquarters had to be abandoned when Wemmer was inducted into the army, in the spring of 1944—the only library he had an opportunity to visit was t h a t at Adak. Carlton was unable to obtain a suitable replacement f o r him: male civilians fit f o r overseas duty were hard to come by in 1944, and Special Services did not have first claim on military personnel. Wemmer remained in the Alaskan Department, however, and his work required him to do a good deal of traveling. He reports t h a t by the end of 1944 the department libraries had well over one hundred thousand volumes. " I n most cases," he says, "the libraries had adequate quarters. W h a t they lacked was the organization and the regular addition of new material that was achieved at F o r t Richardson and Adak." Master Sergeant Robert E. Kingery, who served in the Aleutians from several years in an AACS (Army Airways Communications Sys-

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103

tem) unit, confirms this statement. Until 1944, when other recreational supplies became moderately plentiful, the men on the islands had almost nothing to do in their free time except listen to the radio, read, and engage in such hobbies as the weather and scanty materials permitted. Book use was heavy, and although some of the collections Kingery saw were fairly large (5,000 volumes or more), they usually presented a pretty ratty appearance. T h e only exceptions he observed were at Elmendorf, Fort Richardson, and Adak, all of which had large, attractive, and well-organized collections. In the main, the Alaskan Department handled book supply intelligently and effectively. I t did as much as could be done without a fulltime specialist at department headquarters to follow up the details. The bases had books, and more were obtainable on requisition, but the nature of the service provided at any given base was almost entirely contingent on the interest of the local commander and on the ability of the men assigned (part-time as a rule) to library duty. Commanders were encouraged to requisition books, but once they had received their initial supply, they tended to stop, not imagining that anything more might be accomplished. Those who did see that more could be done received ample co-operation from the department headquarters, but under the circumstances, not only the formal initiative but the detailed plan of supply and service had to be originated by the base commanders. Ordinarily, they lacked personnel qualified to do such planning. The department Special Services officer could see that the base commanders got books, but after the department librarian left he had no one to send to them to organize their collections, train their librarians, and see that requisitions were placed in accordance with their real needs. L e t us consider one of the bases where the commander took an active interest in the library. I t is generally agreed that the island of Adak had the best morale program in the Alaskan Department. The island commander was M a j o r General H a r r y F . Thompson, who had been an enlisted man in the First W o r l d W a r . Adak was occupied by the army in October, 1942. During the following year it gradually filled up with about fifteen thousand troops (not including navy personnel), and in anticipation of a possible push through the Aleutians to Japan a number of large supply depots were built. General Thompson requested that a Special Service Company be assigned to the island. A f t e r some delay the 38th Special Service Company arrived in Adak, at the end of 1943. Within a few months the company was publishing a daily paper, The Adakian, under the supervision of Sergeant

Book Distribution

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Dashiell H a m m e t t , giving twice-daily news b r o a d c a s t s , and p r o d u c ing a series of soldier shows on c u r r e n t topics in the Living N e w s p a p e r style. A 25-piece band was b r o u g h t t o g e t h e r and provided music t o accompany the shows, which were not only given in the center of the island b u t also taken to the o u t p o s t s , where the unit mess halls were utilized as auditoriums. W h e n the company arrived, it h a d a C K i t and fifty sets of each of the first two series of Armed Services E d i t i o n s . A t t h a t time the lib r a r y was housed in an old b a r r a c k s and had only a shabby a s s o r t m e n t of g i f t books. Wemmer came to the island to organize the collection. W i t h the assistance of two members of the Special Service C o m p a n y , he weeded out most of the unusable m a t e r i a l , and he suggested t h a t the l i b r a r y p u r c h a s e books f r o m H a r t m a n ' s Book S t o r e in Seattle and p a y f o r them f r o m local funds. T h e Special Service C o m p a n y librarian, C o r p o r a l Vernon Metz, worked o u t the details of the a r r a n g e ment, and the island commander made generous allotments to the l i b r a r y f o r this p u r p o s e . T h e initial book order was f o r between ten and twelve t h o u s a n d volumes and cost a b o u t twenty thousand dollars. T h e r e a f t e r Metz sent H a r t m a n monthly o r d e r s f o r from t h r e e hundred t o six hundred dollars w o r t h of books. I t took from f o u r to six months to fill the orders. These p u r c h a s e s were supplemented by occasional requisitions on the W a r D e p a r t m e n t , sent t h r o u g h the Alaskan D e p a r t m e n t h e a d q u a r t e r s , f o r R B libraries a n d P B kits. E v e n t u a l l y the l i b r a r y contained a b o u t eighteen t h o u s a n d volumes. Small collections of g i f t books were sent t o the island o u t p o s t s or donated to comp a n y dayrooms. A p h o n o g r a p h was provided f o r the l i b r a r y , a n d Metz built u p a good collection of records. Armed Services E d i t i o n s and magazine sets were supplied t o all units "in p r o f u s i o n . " I n the summer of 1944 one of the then unneeded warehouses was converted into a recreation center, one section of which housed the l i b r a r y . B o t h before and a f t e r the move t o the center, the l i b r a r y was used t o s u p p o r t the off-duty education p r o g r a m . I t provided classroom space, was used f o r orientation displays, and furnished s u p p l e m e n t a r y reading material f o r the s u b j e c t s being t a u g h t . T h e island commander, incidentally, directed the commanders of o u t l y i n g units to provide t r u c k s t o bring their men to the classes, some of which were conducted on d u t y time. Evidently he felt t h a t men could b e t t e r endure the bleak isolation of the island if they were encouraged to keep mentally active even a t the cost of a few d u t y hours a week. B y all r e p o r t s , he had an unusually S3 r mpathetic a p p r e c i a t i o n of his men's reactions and was r e m a r k a b l y successful in keeping u p their morale in very adverse circumstances.

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ABEA

A f t e r the principal islands of the Aleutians were retaken from the J a p s in 1942 and 1943 and the plan for launching an attack on J a p a n from t h a t quarter was abandoned, the military situation in the Alaskan Department was fairly static. In the South Pacific, on the contrary, there was movement, or supply build-ups for movement, from the time the theater was established in 1942 as an offshoot of General MacA r t h u r ' s Southwest Pacific headquarters until it began to empty out again into the Southwest Pacific Area in the latter p a r t of 1944. Moreover, the theater was several thousand miles f a r t h e r away from the United States than the Alaskan Department. Until 1944 it was extremely short of many types of supplies that are usually considered essential. F o r example, during p a r t of the war, in the theater's principal supply base a t Noumea, on the island of New Caledonia, there was not enough material to construct warehouses. Cargo was unloaded onto the beaches in t i e r s ; the three bottom tiers provided a foundation f o r the rest, and whatever was in them simply rotted. Nothing else could be done. In 1942 and the first p a r t of 1943, recreational supplies from the United States were practically nonexistent. The unit Special Services officers on New Caledonia stripped the troop transports of whatever recreation material they contained when they reached the island, but as the comment in the last chapter on t r a n s p o r t space shortages will indicate, it did not amount to much: as a rule, only a few magazines, p a p e r books, and small game sets. T h e Red Cross supplied some recreational material acquired in Australia and New Zealand, and there were irregular mail deliveries of magazines which had been subscribed to by the L i b r a r y Section for d e p a r t i n g units. The magazines and occasional shipments of VBC books were usually turned over to army hospitals. Conditions in the theater improved somewhat a f t e r Guadalcanal was taken, in the spring of 1943. Guadalcanal was converted into a rest center, and supplies were gradually accumulated. Sergeant F r a n cis E . S t a r k , who served with the 137th Station Hospital, says t h a t when his unit reached the island, in the summer of 1943, the Red Cross was operating a 2,000-volume library consisting of g i f t books, Red Cross purchases, and army-issued books which had been turned over to it. In the fall of t h a t year Special Services built several service clubs on the island. The library was placed in a wing of the largest service club and was operated thereafter by army enlisted men. Elias Jones, its librarian, reports t h a t the nucleus of the library had been a ship-

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ment of seventy-five books from the Cleveland Public Library. At its largest, the library contained a little less than three thousand volumes. In the year and a half that Jones was there (November, 1943—May, 1945) the library received only one sizable shipment of books to supplement its initial collection. The 137th Station Hospital had a donated library nearly as large as the Special Services collection which was supposed to serve all the troops on the island. Sergeant Stark had been on the staff of the Queens Borough Public Library. In the summer of 1943 he wrote to the Queens Borough Librarian, Louis J . Bailey, asking for books. Bailey had turned over his salary as a Victory Book Campaign consultant to the library, and this money, supplemented by other donations, was used to purchase a 2,000-volume collection. I t was shipped to Guadalcanal in the late summer and eary fall. The bulk of the lib r a r y was placed in the hospital chapel, and several small collections of about fifty volumes each were routed from ward to ward. The situation a t Banika in the Russell Islands has been described by John Hedges, formerly a sergeant in the 28th Special Service Company. The army used the island as a staging area, and there were also several large navy bases there. The army population of the island was about twelve thousand men. Two platoons of the 28th Special Service Company came there in the spring of 1944. Hedges and three other men in the company published a single-sheet mimeographed paper twice a day. The rest of the company p u t on soldier shows for the army units on Banika and the neighboring islands; it took them six weeks, with six stands a week, to cover all the units in the area. The platoons never opened up their C kits. During their first three months on the island they could obtain neither space nor electric current for a library tent. Thereafter they distributed Armed Services Editions and magazine sets to the units. The men in units t h a t had electric current in their dayrooms and tents could read at night. Those where there was no current either did not read or, if they were not too f a r distant, went to the island Red Cross club, which had a collection of several thousand gift books. The island hospital had a collection of several hundred volumes, all of which had been bought by the chaplain's enlisted assistant. His sister sent him a package of four books every week from New York—usually one or two best-selling novels, a mystery, and a popular nonfiction book. He circulated the books to the men in the wards. If a man wanted a particular title, the chaplain's assistant "ordered" it for him—for delivery several months later.

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Apparently, the island did not receive hardbound books in quantity f r o m theater headquarters until an Information and Education program was established there, in the fall of 1944. The island Information and Education officer took over a good-sized building wired f o r light, and set up offices, classrooms, and a library in it. The library consisted largely of educational material, but according to Hedges it contained some novels and general nonfiction also. From his description, it appears that the nucleus of the collection may have been an R B library. I t was accessible, however, to only a small proportion of the men on the island. Conditions were better elsewhere—at Bougainville, for example, even when it was still in the combat area. An officer who was sent to Bougainville early in 1944 reports that the two Special Service companies on the island distributed paperbound books from their C kits to combat troops during the period when the Japanese were still counterattacking the American positions. By the middle of spring several R B libraries had been placed in tents as tempoary field libraries, and bulk shipments of P B kits and magazine sets had been received and issued to the units. The library setup was described as "primitive," but a t least some reading matter had got to the island and it was distributed. New Caledonia was comparatively well supplied with books by the latter p a r t of 1944. There was a 3,500-volume library at the recreational center in Noumea, and it is reported that at that time all hospitals and all large units which had requested books had at least one R B Library, supplemented by mail deliveries of magazine sets and Armed Services Editions. There was some rotation of R B libraries, and books in indeterminate quantities were supplied to the rest camps on the island. T o sum up, books were in very short supply in most p a r t s of the South Pacific Area during the greater p a r t of the theater's existence. The theater headquarters apparently lacked the personnel to a t t e m p t a centrally directed library service program, and in any case until the middle of 1944 there was scarcely enough material to support such a program. THE

SOUTHWEST

PACIFIC

AREA

In the Southwest Pacific Area the picture is clearer, but even worse. To begin with, the logistics were worse. The South Pacific Area was primarily a navy t h e a t e r ; f a r awaj' from the United States as it was, it did have ships; and equipment that could not be obtained through

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army channels might be available in the navy supply depots. The Southwest Pacific Area, based on Australia and moving gradually up New Guinea, and eventually into the Philippines, was even farther from the United States, and its cargo space was extremely limited. Each forward step that General MacArthur's forces took was preceded by a heartbreakingly slow build-up of the essential military equipment and supplies. Inevitably recreational supplies were at the bottom of the priority list. So little recreational material was available in 1942 and 1943 that it hardly seemed worth while to assign officers to Special Services; they had nothing to work with. Commanders were reluctant to waste good officers on what seemed to be a useless assignment, and the upshot was that Special Services got a bad name. In this early period most units seem to have relied almost entirely on the Red Cross to conduct recreational activities: but although the Red Cross had good facilities in the larger cities of Australia, it could do very little in the forward areas. Special Services supplies gradually became more plentiful in 1944, but even so, very few books were furnished. The Special Services officers at theater headquarters used nearly all their limited cargo space for films, post exchange supplies, and athletic equipment, and little consideration was given to the matter of book supply. P B kits, R B libraries, and other books were requisitioned only in token quantities, and the War Department did not always fill even these small requisitions. Even if more attention had been paid to book supply, it might not have made an appreciable difference to the average soldier in the theater. A zealous library officer might have obtained four or five times as many books as were obtained in 1 9 4 4 ; but presumably not five, but ten or twelve times as many books would have been required in order to effect widespread distribution. As a further complication, the theater Special Services officers who determined policy were at the theater headquarters, while the Special Services officers who were responsible for sending requisitions to the United States and for distributing the material received were at the theater Service Forces headquarters. They dealt with each other through official channels and eventually were separated by half the length of New Guinea—the theater Special Services officers in Hollandia and the theater Service Forces Special Services officers at Milne Bay. There was a world of room for mistakes and misunderstandings. What it all added up to was that book supply was totally inadequate before the mail distribution of Armed Services Editions was

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begun, and because of transportation difficulties, pilferage, and so forth, it was less than adequate even then. Consequently unit and installation Special Services officers could not supply much reading matter even when they were fully aware of the need for it. M a j o r Everett T . Moore, who traveled extensively in the theater as an Information and Education officer, describes the general situation in the fall of 1944 and the spring of 1945 as follows: Libraries and reading rooms for troops in Australia and in New Guinea were virtually unknown, except for little collections of books that might be gathered together by an enterprising chaplain, Special Services or Information and Education officer, or by a G I with time on his hands, or perhaps by the local Red Cross staff, in service-troops areas. In these cases, Armed Services Editions and lightweight editions of magazines were depended upon almost entirely. Once in a while someone would have books sent to him from the States. In certain areas Information and Education or Special Services officers could draw on stocks of U S A F I textbooks and other educational material which the Information and Education Division of the War Department had shipped overseas. 1 The Red Cross did what it could in some of its service clubs to get collections together. . . . The great mass of the troops were not reached by these scattered efforts, and thousands of those with the longest service in the theater (in many instances up to 36 and 40 months) returned home without ever having had access to a library or a library book. The reaction of the men in the units has been described by Aaron X. Maloff in an article in The Library Journal: You would have to spend a year in the lethargy and isolation of the Southwest Pacific to realize the value of a book. Entertainment is limited to moving pictures three times a week, an occasional U.S.O. camp show, perhaps a day room or Red Cross building. But nothing else, and the nights are long, the days often spattered with a fistful of free hours. I t doesn't take long before most men will read anything. Though I have been all over the Pacific, from the southern tip of Australia to the northern Philippines, I have found only one library, and that one a mere 700 books strong, a motley collection of importations from Australia. This pioneering spadework was performed at a replacement center in New Guinea by a Public Relations officer who was genuinely and intelligently concerned with the welfare of personnel. Sergeant Martin P. McDonough was stationed at an Air Forces repair and supply base near Townsville, Australia, from the spring of ! 1943 until the summer of 1945. The average strength of the troops at the base was five thousand men, not including transients. This is his report of his experience:

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When we tried to get a library started, we were told that the Red Cross, and later the Special Services, took care of such things. The Red Cross did have a collection in the town, but it was something they must have picked up in a Brisbane second-hand juvenile book-shop. They had a good periodical collection, although mostly popular in scope. About November, 19-44, a library was started by Special Services, but it never got bigger than about two hundred volumes. Our outfit spent 26 months in one spot in Australia, and six months in another in Leyte. Our overseas conditions were far from bad. Thus, if any reading material was being distributed in the Southwest Pacific, we were sure to get our share. But that share was very small, and we gathered that the amount distributed must have been very small. If that is what we got, what did the casuals and the on-the-go infantry get? They say that the Occupation Army in Japan has excellent library facilities. I hope that this is true. But we used to read in home town papers how the troops overseas were being excellently served as to books ! If I sound rabid on the subject, it is because reading was such a big thing in our lives, especially overseas. I t was often the only thing besides letter-writing, working, eating and sleeping. What really saved the day were the Armed Services Editions and the occasional book-gifts some of the fellows received. But we had been in Townsville 15 or 16 months before the Armed Services Editions began to come. Some installations, t o be sure, were b e t t e r supplied t h a n t h a t a t Townsville. M a j o r Moore s a y s : The only large local purchases of books I know of were made by the combined Information and Education-Special Services Section of the 14th AntiAircraft Command. Lt. Colonel William Taylor, chief of this section, directed the purchase of several thousands of books which were distributed to all Anti-Aircraft outfits in the Southwest Pacific Area (from Australia to the Philippines). Many of these units were located in isolated areas where entertainment was scarce. I saw some of these little unit libraries in New Guinea and on Biak Island. They provided better library facilities than many an outfit situated in the more heavily concentrated troop areas. Long after all the anti-aircraft units had moved north, the 14th Anti-Aircraft Command maintained a purchasing office in Australia to procure books and other entertainment and educational supplies for distribution to forward areas. A n o t h e r command which succeeded in p r o v i d i n g l i b r a r y service on a small scale was Goodenough Island. T h i s island, situated between A u s t r a l i a and the s o u t h e a s t t i p of New Guinea, was the s t a g i n g a r e a f r o m which General K r u g e r ' s Sixth A r m y j u m p e d off f o r a t t a c k s on Japanese-held positions on New Guinea and the bordering islands, in 1 9 4 3 and the first half of 1944. T h e a t t a c k s on Arawi, Cape Gloucest e r , Finchhaven, and H o l l a n d i a were all launched f r o m Goodenough

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Island. T h e troop strength on the island when it was staging an a t t a c k sometimes ran as high as 60,000 men. T h e island commander, Colonel H e n r y Disston, went to the Service Forces headquarters a t Milne Bay with his Special Services officer in the summer of 1943 and obtained all the recreational supplies he could lay his hands on, including several thousand books, and had the material dispatched to the island by plane. A capable sergeant was p u t in charge of the library. A Red Cross worker gave him some assistance in organizing the collection and supplied additional reading m a t t e r , but the function of running the library was recognized as an army responsibility. A collection of between four and five thousand volumes was organized and catalogued, and a simple book-charging system was established. By dint of continually prodding the theater Service Forces headquarters f o r supplies and furnishing air t r a n s p o r t f o r whatever was available, the island commander succeeded in obtaining enough replacements of books and other recreational supplies to keep his Special Services program going. The 14th Anti-Aircraft Command and Goodenough Island, each in its own way, repeat the Adak p a t t e r n described earlier in this chapter. They got more books than the average because their commanders or Special Services officers had a more-than-average interest in getting them. Bad as the general supply condition of a theater might be, it was still only relatively bad. A few thousand books were nearly always to be found somewhere in the theater supply channels, and they could be obtained by the commander or the Special Services officer of a m a j o r command or of a large installation if he literally "went a f t e r them." But if the officers in the m a j o r commands did not consider book supply important or were not in a position to follow it up vigorously, the men in the units f a r t h e r down the line were simply out of luck— unless (the last chance) a company or regimental or hospital commander managed to get a donated collection from someone in the United States. After the Philippine Islands were retaken in the spring of 1945, conditions began to change; once hostilities were over, recreational supplies moved up from the bottom of the priority list to very near the top. On the recommendation of Colonel Clark, the W a r Department Special Services officer mentioned earlier in this chapter, who visited General MacArthur's headquarters in the summer of 1945, the theater commander authorized the establishment of an extensive library service program for troops in the Philippines and ( l a t e r ) in the occupied areas. Library officers and civilian librarians were sent out from H a waii and from the United States to do the job. But since the theater

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Special Services headquarters had been unable to make adequate advance plans for the supply phase of such a program, it was many months before the service program could go into effective operation (see Chapter X V I ) . F o r the great m a j o r i t y of the troops who served in the Southwest Pacific Area, M a j o r Moore's statement is only too true : they "returned home without ever having had access to a library or a library book."

X

Book Distribution in the Eastern Theaters CHINA-BURMA-INDIA

« T T 1 H E T H I N N E S T supply line of all," according to General Mar_L shall's third biennial report, was that to General Stilwell's ChinaBurma-India theater, which, with its headquarters in New Delhi, India, had the triple mission of driving the Japanese from Burma, building a thousand-mile supply road through the jungles of Assam and North B u r m a to Kunming in West China, and carrying supplies to the Chinese army and the American Air Forces in China by air. Until the end of 1943 Special Services supplies and army-supplied reading material were practically nonexistent. M a j or Louis J . Shores, who went to the theater as a lieutenant at the end of 1942 with an A A C S unit, says that it was eight months before the unit received any cigarettes and fourteen months before it received any other army exchange supplies. Reading matter, of course, was even scarcer. Lieutenant Colonel G. E . Clark, who later became the theater Information and Education officer, reports that in December, 1943, when the supply situation had begun to improve, the total number of magazine sets received for the entire theater was fifty-five. "Throughout almost the lifetime of the theater," he adds, "we always had to fight for every pound of cargo space against requisitions for ammunition, food and medical supplies." Naturally, Special Services and Information and Education could only get such space as could be spared after these vital requirements were met. In this early period the Red Cross was able to help the theater Special Services, inasmuch as it had an allotment of shipping space from the United States to the theater. It dispatched thirty thousand volumes to India early in 1943, partly purchased books, partly V B C ' s ; and later in the war it dispatched about fifty-three thousand more books to the theater. The 30,000-volume shipment was broken up in Calcutta into traveling libraries of 150 volumes each. They were placed in shelved metal cases and sent to Red Cross clubs in various

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p a r t s of India. This service was continued until army-supplied materials became more plentiful the following year. Thereafter, the Red Cross clubs depended on Special Services and Information and Education for most of their reading matter, although they were able to supplement it in some cases with local purchases. One example of army-Red Cross co-operation was the library of the Red Cross club in New Delhi. The headquarters of M a j o r Shores' AACS unit was located in that city. He and the Red Cross club direct o r borrowed about two thousand volumes from the public library of Old Delhi, a few miles away. Shores selected the books from the lib r a r y ' s collection, the army paid a fee f o r the loan and had the books transported to the Red Cross club. The Red Cross, in turn, paid the salary of the professional Indian librarian who operated the library. Throughout 1943 and the early p a r t of 1944, the supply of books was only a trickle. P B kits were received from time to time, and there were a few R B kits and R B libraries, but there were only two sizable shipments of other hardbound books—two 1,000-volume collections which were dispatched from the United States at the beginning of 1944 —one to Karachi in northwest India, and one to Calcutta in the east. F o r several hundred thousand men scattered in clusters over a vast subcontinent, it was hardly enough to matter. The units depended on books carried with them from the United States or mailed to them singly or in small sets by friends, libraries, and other donors; or they simply did without. With Special Services material in such short supply, the Special Services headquarters discouraged the units from requisitioning specific items. Personnel reports were studied and whatever material was available was issued to the commands and installations in accordance with their strength. If there were any " e x t r a s " (a r a r e occurrence) they went to hospitals or rest centers in addition to their usual allotment. Sergeant Joseph W. Rogers, who served with a troop carrier squadron in the 10th Air Force, saw one of the small Red Cross collections in Assam. He said that the books were well selected, but were too few to make any real difference at a 5,000-man base, with 90 percent of the men billeted from one to four miles from the club. His unit had carried a small collection of VBC books from the United States to India. By the time the unit was settled in Assam, the books had been soaked with rain several times and had begun to mildew. Rogers wrote to the Milwaukee Public Library and the Queens Borough Public L i b r a r y for more books. The unit received small parcels from both libraries during the rest of its time overseas—about eight hundred volumes all told.

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T h e squadron collection was never larger than 350 volumes a t any one time. Armed Services Editions and magazine sets began to arrive in t h e latter p a r t of 1944. On the whole [Sergeant Rogers says] these were very popular, though I could never fathom the reasoning that determined the selection of such titles as The Education of Henry Adams. Air crews frequently carried these books along on flights, but for leisure reading at night hard-cased books were usually preferred. H e remarks, incidentally, t h a t the unit's meager book supply was p r o b a b l y sufficient for its needs: the men were constantly active and h a d comparatively little time for recreational reading, not to mention serious study. T h e men in the AACS units described by M a j o r Shores were in an entirely different situation. They were scattered throughout India, China, and Burma—sometimes behind the J a p lines—in detachments of twenty or t h i r t y , and much of their work consisted in listening, watching, and waiting. T h e y guarded radio beams and other air navigational aids, transmitted coded messages, and performed other highly technical services. The men were highly educated, they frequently had time to read on the j o b , and they needed books badly. Shores, who visited all the units regularly, carried a supply of books in the bomb b a y of his B-25 and dropped them to the units along with other supplies. Most of the books were donations f r o m the Young Business Men's Club of New Orleans. T h e theater supply situation began to improve a f t e r the middle of 1944. Armed Services Editions and magazine sets began to arrive in steadily increasing quantities, and during t h a t year the Special Services office a t the theater Service Forces headquarters (first in New Delhi, later in C a l c u t t a ) began to p r i n t editions of Newsweek, Time, the New York Times Overseas Weekly, the Chicago Overseas Tribune, and the Reader's Digest from plastic plates dispatched to the theater by air. These were in addition to the regular army publications— Yank, CBI Roundup (the CBI equivalent of Stars and Stripes, and Newsmap. T h e printing was done on Indian presses under the supervision of the theater Service Forces Special Services officer Lieutenant Colonel Paul B. Zimmerman, who had been sports editor of the Los Angeles Times before the war. A t first p a p e r was obtained from Indian sources on reverse lend-lease. Only a small quantity was available: the original printings of Time and Newsweek, in F e b r u a r y , 1944, ran to only

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two thousand copies each. A f t e r nearly a year, shipments of p a p e r finally began to arrive from the United States, and it became possible to p r i n t in much larger quantities. By the middle of 1945 the weekly press runs of the news magazines had risen to twenty-five thousand copies each, and the total number of pieces of all types (both army and civilian publications) printed p e r month was a little more than one million. W i t h production on this scale supplementing the deliveries of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets, it was possible to blanket the theater fairly well with expendable reading m a t t e r . D u r i n g most of 1944 distribution was effected by rail, truck, and plane, and a f t e r the fall of t h a t year it was handled almost entirely by plane. F r o m t h a t time on, the news magazines could be delivered to combat troops in Burma within a week a f t e r their United States publication date. Let us see how this material was handled on the Ledo Road, one of the most important forward areas in the theater. When Captain E u gene B. Vest was appointed Special Services officer f o r all t r o o p units on the road in J a n u a r y , 1944, it was about one hundred miles long— from Ledo, in Assam, to Shingowiyang, B u r m a ; a year later it extended 1,079 miles, from Ledo to Kunming, China. A t first the American t r o o p strength along the road in combat and construction units was about fifteen thousand. A f t e r J u l y , 1944, there were t h i r t y thousand troops in combat units along the advanced sections of the road, and fifty thousand construction and supply troops f r o m the base in Ledo to the end of the road. E a r l y in 1944 the only reading material available was a collection of four hundred tattered and moldy VBC books. Armed Services Editions and magazine packages began to arrive in moderate quantities in the spring of 1944. They were thrown into the mail bags f o r each unit in accordance with its strength. T h a t summer the Armed Services Editions and magazine packages began to arrive already addressed to the individual units: the direct mail system, which skipped normal supply channels, had gone into effect. T h e r e a f t e r only extra sets of this material were delivered to the Ledo supply base. Some of these extra sets were sent forward to the six hospitals along the road and to the Red Cross clubs located near them, and a few were placed in a small reading room a t the Ledo base. T h e base received all "undeliverable" book and magazine parcels which came to the Ledo army post office. These, too, were issued to hospitals, Red Cross clubs, and the base library. T h e 572-mile stretch of the road in China proper had neither hospitals nor Red Cross clubs; Special Services supplies other t h a n those delivered

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b y mail were taken to the units along that p a r t of the road by two Special Services companies—the 18th and the 36th. T h e Armed Services Editions were supplemented by a moderate number of P B kits and later by very rare deliveries of R B kits and R B libraries. These, too, were sent down the road and issued to the larger units (regiments and battalions). The deliveries of the Calcutta printings of news magazines and other publications were small at first; in the summer and fall of 1944 there were seldom more than two or three copies of each magazine for a company. After the beginning of 1945 they began to arrive much more rapidly, as more planes became available for this purpose, and the quantities also increased steadily, thanks t o the shipments of paper from the United States. Across the Hump in West China, the 60-odd thousand American troops in the 14th Air Force, the 20th Air Force, and Ground Forces units were completely dependent on air supply from India. Most recreational supplies came through only sporadically, and because of the difficulty of maintaining liaison the Special Services chief in Kunming seldom knew what was being shipped to him. The only articles delivered regularly were the weekly magazine packages and the monthly Armed Services Editions packages. One of the 20th Air Force medical officers has said that there were never enough Armed Services Editions, and that it was a real tragedy to finish one book and not have another to pick up. F o r men who did not have the zest or the stamina for a very rough four-hour trip by jeep or truck to the nearest community, he explained, there were only three things to do after working hours: read, play cards, and talk. There were at least two collections of hardbound books in West China—one at the headquarters of the 14th Air F o r c e a t Kunming and one in the Red Cross club at Chungking—but of course they were accessible to only a fraction of the troops in the a r e a ; and since the books could not be replaced, it would have been useless to t r y to spread them out. When the China theater was moved to E a s t China, late in 1945, with headquarters at Shanghai, the Philippine Islands became its supply base, and recreational materials in considerably greater abundance were furnished to it from that source. Considering the almost hopeless supply situation of the theater, it appears that the C B I Special Services and Information and Education officers did about all that could be done with respect to book supply. After the beginning of 1944 they requisitioned books and book kits regularly, although necessarily in small quantities, and when they got the material—usually less than the amount requisitioned—they pushed it forward. I t would have been pointless to attempt to establish any-

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thing like a library service p r o g r a m : there were not enough books to work with. An effective reading material supply program was out of the question, too, until the automatically issued material began to come in. Since the only other reading matter available in any quantity consisted of the publications printed and distributed by the theater Service Forces Special Services office in Calcutta under the general supervision of the theater Information and Education officer, the latter was also made responsible, late in 1944, for the distribution of magazine sets and Armed Services Editions. Co-operation between the two headquarters appears to have been satisfactory, and production and distribution were well integrated. The result was t h a t the supply program functioned quite effectively during the last year of the war—the only year when there were enough supplies to make a program feasible. THE

MEDITERRANEAN*

THEATER

OF

OPERATIONS

The Mediterranean (originally called the North African) Theater of Operations was another m a j o r theater in which it proved impracticable to establish a library service program. I t had one advantage over the other m a j o r theaters so f a r considered, in t h a t it was closer to the United States and was able to obtain more supplies and at an earlier date in the war. But this advantage was counteracted to a considerable extent by two other factors. The first was the sheer expanse of the theater. In Africa alone, it extended, along the coast and in the interior, from Casablanca to Benghazi, covering an area nearly half the size of the United States. In the spring of 1943 a quarter of a million troops were dotted over this a r e a ; the theater strength was increased to about six hundred fifty thousand men a f t e r the invasion of Italy, but the dispersion of troops was still very considerable. The other factor was the constant activity of the theater. W i t h a few short intermissions, it was engaged in combat operations from the invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942 until the final capitulation of the German forces in Northern Italy in the spring of 1945. Thus, although the Mediterranean Theater received more recreational supplies than could be shipped to the South or Southwest Pacific, the distribution of the supplies within the theater was extremely difficult. Two American task forces landed in North Africa in November, 1942, one sailing from England to Oran, the other from the United States to Casablanca. The force which sailed from England had left all its recreational equipment behind. A large quantity of recreational equipment, including one hundred thousand hardbound and two hundred fifty thousand paperbound books, had been procured f o r the

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force leaving the United States, but owing to lack of cargo space only about a quarter of the books at most were taken along. The only other reading material carried by this force was a collection of VBC books which the task force Special Services officer had obtained from the T h i r d Service Command librarian. During the Tunisian campaign that winter and the following spring, divisions and even smaller units requisitioned recreational supplies direct from the W a r Department: the theater Special Services headquarters was not established until April. There were no fixed recreational supply channels at this time. The sporadic shipments from the United States seldom reached the units for which they were intended, and of course there was no one to sort and organize the books that were received. During the first six months of the theater's existence the Red Cross was the only centrally organized agency that could do anything about book distribution. Paperbound books obtained from the Red Cross headquarters in Washington and VBC's and other books obtained from the army were issued to the Red Cross field directors for distribution to such Ground Forces and Air Forces troops in Tunisia as they could reach. The field directors did what they could, but there were not many of them, and their supplies were limited. Later in 1943 the Red Cross began its clubmobile service. At first there were only a few vehicles, but the number eventually rose to twenty-five or thirty. The clubmobiles tried to visit every unit in the theater periodically. Although this was an unrealizable ideal, they did cover a lot of territory. They usually carried some books, which, after the middle of 1943, were generally supplied to them by the corps, base section, or Army Special Services officer in whose area they were traveling. This was done because the clubmobiles were often able to reach out-of-the-way units which the Special Services officers could supply only irregularly owing to the shortage of vehicles. In 1944 and 1945 the clubmobiles were often stocked with Armed Services Editions and magazine sets which had been turned over to the corps or base section Special Services officers when they could not be delivered to the units to which they were addressed. There was similar co-operation between the Red Cross and the army in the establishing of libraries in Red Cross clubs. The clubs were operated by the Red Cross, but their initial stocks of books were frequently supplemented by local Special Services officers who had neither the personnel nor the facilities for establishing reading rooms of their own.

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In April, 1943, the theater Special Services headquarters was established at Algiers, with Colonel Leon T . David as Chief of Special Services. At his request, a library officer, Captain (later M a j o r ) Warren L. P e r r y , was assigned to the theater a few months later. By this time (midsummer, 1943) the theater's book supplies consisted of a scattering of several thousand B kits, perhaps 100,000 paperbound books (a total of 222,000 were received during 1943), and an indeterminate number of VBC's (probably less than 50,000), plus such books as the Red Cross had been able to supply for its clubs. Paperbound books continued to come into the theater headquarters, but there was nothing else to work with. A f t e r a survey of the theaters' needs, the Special Services office requisitioned two thousand B kits for general distribution and 71 libraries of two thousand volumes for each of the 71 hospitals which were to be established in the theater. The W a r Department Special Services Division cut the size of the libraries to one thousand volumes, owing to lack of funds. The L i b r a r y Section selected the titles and transmitted the order through quartermaster channels to the Kansas City Quartermaster Depot. The books were purchased and preassembled in the depot. E a c h library was packed in four large cases, and the titles were so distributed among the cases t h a t each one contained a fairly balanced collection of fiction and nonfiction. This made it possible for the theater personnel to break up the collections wherever it seemed desirable to do so. When they reached the theater, at the beginning of 1944, complete 1,000-volume sets were issued to the 23 general hospitals then in the theater, and 500-volume sets were issued to between f o r t y and fifty smaller hospitals. Of the remaining 500-volume sets, a few were placed in Red Cross clubs and the rest were issued to base section, corps or other headquarters where it was feasible to establish organized libraries. I t was a good beginning, but unfortunately no comparable requisitions of hardbound books were made thereafter. According to the theater's supply records, which may, of course, be incomplete, about 30,000 additional hardbound books were received in 1944. These appear to have been a miscellaneous collection left over in the Kansas City Quartermaster Depot a f t e r the assembly of the 1,000-volume libraries. Seventy-six of the 100-volume R B kits were also received that year, and about 50,000 paperbound books. In 1945, 75 of the 500-volume R B libraries were received. Many of the R B kits were allotted to the F i f t h Arm}', which, as the m a j o r combat command in the theater, had

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first priority on recreational materials. They were issued to the Special Service Companies which operated the Fifth Army rest camps, to hospitals, and in some cases to combat divisions. But they were purely reference collections—serviceable only as core collections for much larger libraries. In any case, there were not enough of them, nor did they contain enough titles, to provide adequate replacements for the 1,000-volume collections which had been received at the beginning of 1944. The RB libraries were more useful, but apparently very few of them reached the theater before 1945. Thus the collections furnished by the first big procurement were not adequately supplemented or replaced. The failure to continue the hardbound book supply program on a large scale was due partly to the inadaptability of the RB kits and libraries to field situations and the slowness with which they were delivered to the theater and partly to the availability of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets, as well as other factors. Personnel shortages apparently made it impracticable to plan, and requisition materials for, special kits and collections to be assembled within the theater, as was done in Hawaii and later in the European Theater. At any rate, Armed Services Editions and magazine sets appeared to be the most practicable means of meeting general reading needs. Since this automatically distributed material did not require special handling, the theater library officer was reassigned in the summer of 1944 to a Special Services position in another command in the theater. Armed Services Editions, magazine sets, and the book shipments listed above were not the only reading matter in the theater. Yank and Stars and Stripes were printed there throughout the war, and for a short period Stars and Stripes reprinted Reader's Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines as weekly supplements. This original experiment is described on pages 224-225 below. After the summer of 1944, Time and Newsweek were printed in Rome. Yet until Armed Services Editions and magazine sets became available in large quantities, toward the end of 1944, the men in the individual units far from large headquarters were little better off than the men in the South and the Southwest Pacific. An article by the late Joseph T. Wheeler 1 describes the situation of the 88th Infantry Division in the combat zone in the late summer of 1944. Shortly after he was assigned to the division as a replacement, Wheeler questioned one hundred men concerning their use of books and libraries as civilians and as soldiers in the United States. Thirteen had used camp libraries

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in the United S t a t e s : the same number, incidentally, that had been habitual library users as civilians. On the troop transport and in I t a l y , the writer reports, it was another story: There was scarcely a man who hadn't read everything he could lay his hands on during that long voyage across or who wouldn't jump at the chance to read while he is over here. But there was almost nothing to read. The Red Cross and the Army Special Services distributed books on board ship but there was no library. During the five months I have been in Italy I have seen one box of VBC books and that hidden away in a Red Cross tent, and perhaps 200 or 300 copies of the armed forces reprints of popular recent titles. Richard Gilbert, a sergeant in the 88th Division, confirms Private Wheeler's account. The division landed in Africa in December of 1943. During our short stay in North Africa our regimental Special Services had no books, in fact they had very few recreational supplies of any kind. The first recollection I have of seeing books overseas was about March 1944. A Red Cross clubmobile visited the regiment, and as we were in a holding position, a few of us were able to visit the vehicle and obtain paper-covered books. In the latter part of 1944 there seemed to be an increase in the supply of papercovered novels which were issued to the various companies, but even then such books were not too plentiful. T h e two spots in Italy where I saw an adequate supply of books were the Red Cross club in Naples and the Fifth Army Rest Center at Rome.

Sergeant Robert Griswold had a similar experience in a different type of unit. He served in the port headquarters company at Bizerte from the spring of 1943 until the spring of 1944. The Red Cross club in Bizerte had a very small collection of badly worn books. Griswold says that the biggest and best collection of books available to the men in his company was contained in a foot locker which he kept under his bed. He received books regularly from home, and when other men in the company obtained books they passed them on to him as the unofficial unit librarian. He was transferred to the Naples port in April, 1944. The port headquarters company had a 500-volume collection of VBC books. The men refreshed the collection from time to time by trading books with the libraries of the ships that came into the harbor. The twenty sub-units of the Naples port depended upon Armed Services Editions and hardbound books received from home. There was a good library at the Peninsular Base Section headquarters in Naples, but it was scarcely accessible to the men in the port companies.

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M a j o r H a r r y C. B a u e r , who was an intelligence officer in the 9 8 t h B o m b a r d m e n t G r o u p stresses the i m p o r t a n c e of books f r o m home. Many individual soldiers received magazines, books and newspapers from their own families. In the 98th Bombardment Group these items played a more important part than the Army Library Service in provisioning the personnel with reading matter. The soldiers read their magazines and books and then lent them around the camp. T h i s unit did receive army-issued m a t e r i a l , however. Occasional shipments of books and magazines came in a f t e r the beginning of 1943. The collection reached the size of 1,000 volumes, first housed in tents and then in huts. It served pretty well as a crude library. . . . By 1944 the Bombardment Group had a good quantity of Armed Services Editions and overseas editions of magazines. These were good, plentiful and popular. They were the best things we had. In the M e d i t e r r a n e a n T h e a t e r , as elsewhere, some units obtained donated collections f r o m libraries in the United S t a t e s . W h e n the 3 2 5 t h F i g h t e r G r o u p l e f t the Hillsgrove A r m y A i r Base, in Rhode Island, a t the end of 1942, the R h o d e Island S t a t e L i b r a r y provided it with about one t h o u s a n d volumes. Since no c a r g o space was available f o r the books, the G r o u p Special Services officer, C a p t a i n W a l lace L. K o t t e r , h a d each of the t h o u s a n d men in the unit c a r r y a book with him when the unit left the c o u n t r y . W h e n it a r r i v e d in N o r t h A f r i c a , the books were b r o u g h t t o g e t h e r to f o r m a l i b r a r y . T h e r e a f t e r , both in N o r t h A f r i c a and l a t e r in I t a l y , C a p t a i n K o t t e r h a d the men write down the titles of the books they wanted on a sheet of p a p e r kept in the l i b r a r y t e n t . On the basis of these n o t a t i o n s , he requested about t h i r t y titles every month f r o m the R h o d e I s l a n d S t a t e L i b r a r y . The l i b r a r y filled the requests r e g u l a r l y , o f t e n by a i r mail. In 1944, when C a p t a i n K o t t e r was t r a n s f e r r e d to the next higher h e a d q u a r t e r s (the 3 0 6 t h F i g h t e r W i n g ) as intelligence officer, he requested the Rhode Island L i b r a r y to f u r n i s h a collection f o r this unit also. Books were accordingly d i s p a t c h e d to it in 70-pound p a c k a g e s d u r i n g the next few months. T h e t o t a l number of books sent t o each unit was about two t h o u s a n d , b u t owing to the losses which occurred whenever the units moved, the a v e r a g e size of each collection was a t h o u s a n d volumes. K o t t e r remarked t h a t he was never able t o t a k e a decent picture of either collection, because t h e r e were r a r e l y more t h a n one hundred volumes on the shelves a t a n y one time. T h e books circulated constantly, both before and a f t e r Armed Services E d i t i o n s became available. Neither unit received a n y h a r d b o u n d books t h r o u g h a r m y channels.

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There were good army-supplied libraries in the vicinity of some of the larger headquarters. Several observers have mentioned the Peninsular Base Section headquarters library a t Naples. This library was first established a t Casablanca, then moved to Naples, and finally to Leghorn. T h e 12th Air F o r c e headquarters and several other large commands likewise a p p e a r to have been well supplied with books. Some of the I t a l i a n rest camps, too, had adequate collections, and most of the Information and E d u c a t i o n school centers had good collections f o r reference and study. In the fall of 1945 Colonel David was succeeded as theater Special Services officer by Colonel R o g e r W . W h i t m a n , who had been a regimental commander in the theater p r i o r to t h a t time. Shortly a f t e r his assignment, Colonel W h i t m a n visited the E T O t h e a t e r headquarters to study the Special Services p r o g r a m in t h a t theater. Along with other supplies, he obtained two bookmobiles, which were driven back to I t a l y and p u t into service in the Trieste area. E a r l y in the next year he went t o W a r D e p a r t m e n t Special Services headquarters in New York and laid plans to send a number of civilian hostesses and librarians to the Mediterranean T h e a t e r . B u t it was too late. When he returned to the t h e a t e r , he was advised, as Colonel David had been a year before, t h a t funds could not be made available f o r this purpose, since the remaining t r o o p s were "soon" to be withdrawn from the theater. The Mediterranean T h e a t e r was somewhat better supplied with hardbound books t h a n any of the other m a j o r theaters discussed so f a r , even though it did not obtain enough to effect more t h a n s p o t t y distribution. Nevertheless, it would a p p e a r t h a t too much reliance was placed on Armed Services Editions alone—-that once they began to be delivered regularlj', supplying large quantities of other books was no longer regarded as urgent. Even though the results might not have been commensurate with the effort, one cannot help regretting t h a t the theater ceased to push as vigorously f o r books in the last y e a r and a half of the war as it had done previously. T h e Armed Services Editions were a wonderful expedient, but they did not fill all reading needs. AFRICA—MIDDLE-EAST

THEATER

Only a sketchy account of book distribution in A f r i c a and the Middle E a s t can be attempted. Several men who made the air t r i p f r o m India back to the United States by way of Central Africa have commented t h a t book supplies and libraries got steadily better as one moved westward. T h e r e was a small collection a t K a r a c h i , India, some-

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what larger ones at Aden, on the Red Sea, at Radio Marina, a Signal Corps installation at Asmara, Eritrea, and at Khartoum, a really decent library in a building of its own at Accra, on the Gold Coast, equally good libraries in Natal and Belem, and finally a first-rate establishment, comparable to the best in the United States, at Borinquen Field, in Puerto Rico. The Khartoum and Accra stations, together with ten other bases of some size and a number of scattered service units, composed the Central African Division of the Air Transport Command. A number of these stations had been established by an American commercial airline which had contracted to fly planes and supplies to the British forces in North Africa. The stations had been furnished with small recreational libraries. All these stations were taken over by the army in 1942 and 1943. After Major Hall F. Achenbach was assigned to the command as Special Services officer at the end of 1943, he obtained one RB Library for each of the twelve principal bases. They were shipped to Accra by water freight and then distributed to the individual stations by air. The command also received a good many VBC books, most of which had been handled by the New Jersey State Library Commission. A few bases obtained books from dealers in Cairo. Some also purchased books from jobbers in the United States, paying for them out of unit funds. The Red Cross had small hospital libraries at Khartoum and Accra. In 1943 and part of 1944 the command received overseas editions of Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times Weekly News Review by air, and throughout the war it was often possible to have other recreational material transported from the United States by the same means. Most recreational and other supplies, however, were obtained through the West African Service Command, a supply agency controlled by the Africa-MiddleEast Theater headquarters at Cairo. By the middle of 1944 supplies were coming in regularly. Major Achenbach remarks that the base at Maiduguri lost all its recreational equipment that year in a fire and that "within seventeen days the West African Service Command was able to re-equip them with everything from musical instruments to a 1200-volume library." Accra was the showplace of the command. It had two theaters, a G.I. college run by Information and Education, seven ball fields, nine tennis courts, a polo field, two golf courses, and a 6,000-volume library. Sergeant David Wilder, who served in an AAF weather squadron in this region for two years and a half, mentions the excellent collec-

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tions a t A c c r a , P a y n e Field, in Cairo, and the Cazes A i r Base, a t Casablanca. These were the largest fields, with 1500 or more men; fields of around 500 had smaller but probably adequate libraries, those of around 100 or less, where the need was greatest, had none. . . . Magazines were exceedingly plentiful because we got a complete set for each of our stations. The most serious adverse criticism I have, is the slowness with which the facilities were set up. The situation I have described was truly only after the middle of 1944, when we were already closing stations and reducing personnel. The Armed Services Editions of books and the lightweight magazines were wonderful when they came but I never saw the packets until the spring of 1944. L i e u t e n a n t Colonel Leroy C. Hinchcliffe, the Special Services officer of the 9 t h A i r F o r c e , also testifies to the universal s h o r t a g e of recreational supplies in the Middle E a s t in 1942 and 1943. If command Special Services officers wanted to get a n y t h i n g f o r their men, they had to get it by c a j o l e r y , chiseling, or t h e f t . Hinchcliffe a p p e a r s t o have employed all three methods with considerable success. F r o m J u n e , 1942, until October, 1943, the h e a d q u a r t e r s of the 9 t h A i r F o r c e were in Cairo, and it h a d subcommands as f a r away as Benghazi. D u r i n g this period the command received almost no recreational supplies t h r o u g h a r m y channels. Some m a t e r i a l was obtained f r o m the R A F , and Hinchcliffe b o u g h t u p or " g r a b b e d " whatever he could find in Cairo. Luckily, he had had the foresight to a p p r o p r i a t e six t h o u s a n d volumes f r o m various unwilling or unwitting sources b e f o r e leaving the United S t a t e s , and he succeeded in g e t t i n g two t h o u s a n d volumes f r o m the R A F — s o m e t h i n g of a f e a t , since other observers r e p o r t t h a t the British were much less well supplied with books t h a n the Americans were. T h e books were made u p into 2,000-volume libraries and issued to the f o u r p r i n c i p a l subcommands. A f t e r the beginning of 1 9 4 3 bulk shipments of magazines came to Cairo a t i r r e g u l a r intervals. T h e 9 t h Air F o r c e Special Services staff uncrated the magazines, assembled them into sets, and distributed them to the s u b o r d i n a t e units. T o ensure t h a t the units made full use of the recreational materials sent to them, Hinchcliffe conducted a one-week t r a i n i n g course f o r the u n i t Special Services officers. I t was repeated f r o m time t o time as new units arrived or new officers were appointed. T h e h a n d l i n g of reading m a t e r i a l was stressed because Hinchcliffe realized t h a t this was the aspect of recreational work the Special Services personnel in the units were the least likely to be familiar with. T h a t is the s t o r y of book supply in the p r i n c i p a l overseas a r e a s

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where there was no continuous direction of this activity by a specialist or a staff of specialists a t the theater headquarters. I t is pieced together from a variety of sources and no doubt contains some inaccuracies. But the generally depressing impression is in accordance with the facts. A few of these areas were well provided, but most were poorly provided if provided at all. The mail distribution of magazine sets and Armed Services Editions, to be described in chapters XI— X I I , alleviated the situation considerably in 1941 and 1945. But need conditions have been so bad to begin with ? And could they not have been improved sooner? Organized book supply f o r combat troops was nearly always out of the question, but could not the noncombat areas — t h e places like Banika, Townsville, and Bizerte—have been better supplied, notwithstanding the logistical handicaps? If it is assumed that trained library or book-supply personnel could not be assigned to the headquarters of these theaters for this work alone, what happened was inevitable. With small staffs, the theater Special Services officers had to make assignments according to their judgment of the relative importance of the several Special Services activities, and in tending to slight book-supply and library service, as some of them did, they merely reflected the common American attitude toward books and libraries. On the other hand, while the assignment of library officers and of men to help them would certainly have made a difference, it is not easy to estimate how great the difference would have been. All observers agree that the worst handicap was the supply factor—the insufficient quantities of books and preassembled kits made available to the theaters in the first place and, secondly, the impediments to their distribution when they were received. In certain theaters the failure to assign qualified personnel to organize and supervise book distribution made a bad situation worse—or a t any rate ensured that it would not become better—but the theater Special Services officers were certainly not to blame for the f a c t t h a t it was bad to begin with or for the general shortage of Special Services personnel. They did the best they could in very unfavorable circumstances ; in most cases they accomplished all t h a t was actually feasible.

XI

The Overseas Magazine Set > T H E PRECEDING CHAPTERS show, the obstacles to shipping and distributing large quantities of reading matter overseas were not overcome until the automatic mail distribution of magazine and Armed Services Editions sets to all theaters was commenced in 1944. In instituting this system the army took official cognizance of the fact that reading matter was an essential supply for soldiers overseas and that it should be made available to all units, whether they requested it or not. 1 The principal advantage of automatic mail distribution was that it skipped normal supply channels. The material did not have to be requisitioned, nor was it charged against a theater's monetary credit. The only paperwork involved for the theaters was keeping the mailing list of units up to date. Moreover, the packages did not have to be opened at the theater headquarters, assembled, and redispatched to the base sections and from them to the units. The packages were sent directly to the units by mail, and their contents were already assembled for use. The system developed slowly, and it had some imperfections (especially the lag in reporting the address changes of units which were on the move), but on the whole it worked extremely well. Let us consider the development of the magazine set first. In 1941 and 1942 the distribution of magazines to overseas units was effected chiefly by providing large numbers of subscriptions for task forces and separate units when they left the country. These subscriptions were usually placed by the Library Section through the Washington News Company, a subsidiary of the American News Company. The basis of issue (determined largely by considerations of cost) was one set of subscriptions to fourteen or fifteen magazines for every unit of company size. Since different types of companies varied in size from one hundred to two hundred men, the normal company size was assumed to be 150 enlisted men. New subscriptions to groups of magazines were placed every few weeks, as more units went overseas or requisitioned magazines after their arrival overseas. After the first year, renewals had to be placed in addition to the current new sub-

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scriptions, and every week hundreds of changes of address had to be transmitted to the publishers. This procedure involved a great deal of paperwork for the Library Section, and it also placed a heavy load on both the facilities of the Army Postal Service and the Special Services officers of the larger overseas units. F o r example, in one week, in the summer of 1 9 4 2 , 3 , 0 0 0 new subscriptions and renewals for each of fourteen magazines were placed with the Washington News Company: 715 for units in England and Ireland; 8 6 0 for the Pacific; 492 for Alaska; and the rest for bases in Puerto R i c o and the South Atlantic. Of the 8 6 0 subscriptions to each of 1 4 magazines going to the Pacific, some 2 0 0 might be addressed to the headquarters of a task force which was now scattered over four or five islands in the South Pacific. Every week, eight or nine bulky packages, each containing 2 0 0 copies of a single weekly magazine would be sent to that headquarters. These packages tended to pile up in the overseas postal distributing centers: their bulk made them hard to handle, and personal mail had to be taken care of first. Delivery to the task force headquarters from the theater postal center might be delayed until there were, not 8 or 9 packages, but 25 or 30, each containing 2 0 0 copies of a single issue of a single magazine. In some headquarters (the 9th Air Force headquarters in Cairo, for example) all the packages would be opened and their contents assembled into sets containing a few copies of each issue of each magazine; these sets were then issued to the subordinate units. B u t often enough the command or task force headquarters did not have enough personnel to do this work properly, and the packages were sent out to the units as they were. One month a unit would get several hundred copies each of three or four magazines; the next month nothing; the third month, several hundred copies of the same three or four magazines (possibly even of the same issues) or of some others. Once again, preassembly was indicated. E a r l y in 1942 the Library Section recommended that magazine subscriptions be addressed to the several ports of embarkation rather than to the overseas units and that the ports assemble the magazines into sets before sending them overseas. Nothing of this nature could be done, however, until each port had a separate department to handle Special Services supplies, and so the bulk mail dispatches had to be continued. The only command which could handle the material differently was the Air Transport Command: from the summer of 1942 until the summer of 1944 magazines were shipped to its Miami base in bulk, there broken

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down into sets and carried by plane to its bases in Africa and the Middle E a s t . THE

ASSEMBLY

BRANCH

W i t h the reorganization of the Special Services supply system, a t the end of 1942, the preassemblv of magazine kits at the ports of embarkation a t last became feasible. As it turned out, the port nearest the source of supply was able to do the entire job. Colonel Richard S. Sollman, prior to his appointment as chief of the Special Services Supply Division of the New York P o r t of Embarkation, had organized the Army Postal Service center a t t h a t p o r t . He had set up its procedures and knew precisely what it could do. H e volunteered to undertake the assembly of magazine sets for all overseas areas and was able to persuade the Chief of the Army Postal Service that the p o r t postal center could handle whatever material was turned over to it. I t would obviously be easier for the Army Postal Service to handle a steady flow of weekly four-pound magazine packages than the irregular deliveries of twenty-, fifty-, and seventy-pound packages it had hitherto had to cope with; so much easier t h a t Colonel Sollman was convinced t h a t not only the assembly but all the mailing could eventually be handled by the New York p o r t alone. He established an assembly warehouse as p a r t of the p o r t Special Services Supply Division and equipped it in the same manner as the dispatch department of a magazine or a commercial printing house—with power-driven conveyor belts, automatic tying machines, addressograph machines, and other devices. Within a year, the staff of the Assembly Branch, as it was called, expanded to more than one hundred employees—thirty in the addressograph section, where an average of five thousand new address stencils were cut every week, sixty or more on the assembly line. The first weekly dispatch, made in M a y , 1943, comprised 3,572 packages, each containing about a dozen magazines. During the spring and the early summer of 1943, the set consisted of the following magazines: American Baseball Colliers Detective Story Flying Infantry Journal Life Look Modern Screen

Newsweek Omnibook Popular Mechanics Popular Photography Radio News Readers Digest Superman Time Western Trails

The

Overseas Magazine

Set

131

E a c h weekly set contained all the weekly magazines, one of the two twice-monthly (Look and Superman), and three or four of the monthly magazines. The delivery of the monthlies to the Assembly Branch was staggered so that the weight of the packages would remain uniform week by week and not exceed the maximum allowable weight of four pounds. By July, 1943, the weekly dispatch had been increased to 16,675 sets, totaling about 250,000 pieces. Fourteen months later, in September, 1944, magazines were being sent overseas at the rate of 1,500,000 a week (63,000 sets averaging 25 pieces each 2 ) . Distribution rose t o 110,000 sets a week in July, 1945, and remained at that level until the end of J a n u a r y , 1946, after which it dropped steadily until it was down to 20,000 sets per week in October, 1946. Eight million magazines were dispatched in 1943, 63,000,000 in 1944, 143,000,000 in 1945, and 61,000,000 in 1946. Distribution of the sets was discontinued in June, 1947. In 1943 the packages were mailed only to units in theaters based on the New York P o r t of Embarkation for supplies. Packages addressed to units in other theaters were packed in wooden cases and shipped by freight to the appropriate ports of embarkation, which in t u r n shipped them to the several theater headquarters. The theaters then sent them down through the base sections to the units. This method of shipment through normal supply channels was too slow to be satisfactory, and so, early in 1944, in accordance with Colonel Sollman's original conception, the New York P o r t of Embarkation began to send the packages by mail to units in all theaters. As production increased in 1944, the Assembly Branch began to mail extra packages to the headquarters of the larger theaters to fill special requirements. These extra sets were issued by the theater headquarters to replacement depots, rest camps, or units on the move which were not receiving sets because of the time lag in transmitting their successive changes of address to the Assembly Branch. The basis of issue of the regularly addressed sets was one per week to every unit of 150 men or m a j o r fraction thereof, one to every 50 hospital beds, and one to every isolated unit of 75 men or less. In theory, sufficient sets were available to meet that basis of issue as early as July, 1943, when nearly 17,000 sets were being dispatched every week; and even when troop strength overseas later rose to more than 5,000,000 men, it would seem that 35,000 or 40,000 sets per week would have been ample to supply all units. But the thousands of isolated units of 10, 20, or 50 men were a constant drain, losses in

132

The Overteas Magazine

Set

transit were very high, and there was considerable "short-stopping" and pilferage all along the line. At any rate, the quantity of sets sent overseas was not enough to blanket most theaters effectively until production rose to well over 50,000 sets a week, in the summer of 1944. Even when production reached a peak of 110,000 sets, in July, 1945, the magazines were absorbed without trouble. I t was not until several months after V-J Day that they began to pile up in the overseas postal centers. Finally, at the beginning of 1946, complaints of oversupply received from several theaters led to a sharp cutback. COSTS

The two essential factors in the enormous production of magazines for overseas units were low costs and light paper. In September, 1944, the average contents of a monthly set of magazines ( t h a t is, four successive weekly sets) was 100 pieces, and its cost to the army was $3.86, or about 4 cents per magazine. 3 The average annual cost of the project to the army between 1943 and 1946 was about $3,000,000. These low costs call for a few words of comment. Most army contracts are figured on a cost plus basis to ensure a fair profit for the manufacturer who is producing the material. If the Library Section had had to do business on that basis, the overseas magazine set would never have grown much beyond its original size or numbers. Special Services budgets simply were not big enough to permit the section to buy millions of magazines and allow normal profits to the publishers. Therefore, the publishers were asked to produce the magazines at cost, at only a fractional profit, or at a loss chargeable to promotion. Most of the publishers were willing to accept this proposal. The p r o j ect was an interesting experiment, it had a strong patriotic appeal, and it obviously had great prestige and promotional values. LIGHTWEIGHT

EDITION'S

The manufacture of lightweight editions was desirable from every aspect except that of durability. I t saved weight, space, money, and paper. In 1943 the best reason for producing lightweight editions was the saving they would effect in paper costs. In order to make the magazines as inexpensive as possible, the Library Section urged the publishers to eliminate advertising, use light paper, and even, where possible, print on a smaller-size page. At that time most popular magazines were using from 45-pound to 60-pound paper stock. I t was thought that lighter sheets would rip too frequently in going through high-speed presses to make lighter weights worth bothering with. But the increasing shortage of paper and the section's insistence

The

Overseas Magazine

Set

133

on cutting costs, encouraged the publishers to experiment, and ultimately the weight of the stock used in the special army editions was brought down to between 20 and 25 pounds—a lighter weight than had ever been used in mass-produced magazines. The next step in reducing the paper consumption of the magazines was to reduce their page size. F o r technical reasons, only a few publishers were able t o do this. In 1941 Time had produced a special small size edition which was sent by first class mail to its subscribers in England. The first small, or " p o n y , " size edition f o r army use was produced by Newsweek early in 1943. The page forms were set in type of the regular size, then by using photographic processes stereotypes of the desired size (approximately 6 " x 8 " ) were produced. Ultimately, five magazines adopted this pony size or one approximating i t : Newsweek, Time, the New Yorker, Science News Letter, and McGraw-Hill Overseas Digest, and the three specially produced comic magazines, Overseas Comics, G.I. Comics, and Jeep Comics, used a page size only a little larger than this. Although the pony format was the greatest paper-saver of all, it had one serious disadvantage: the size of the letters was reduced along with the overall size of the plate. The print in the pony editions—about the same size as 7-point type—was a little too fine f o r easy reading. Even in good light one could not read it very long at a time. By the latter part of 1943, when paper stocks had fallen so low that the W a r Production Board had to institute rationing, about two thirds of the magazines in the set had eliminated advertisements and were using lightweight paper, and several were producing pony editions. Trautman and Philips Wyman, the Executive Secretary of the National Publishers' Association, requested the W a r Production Board to permit publishers to use paper in excess of their normal paper consumption quotas in the manufacture of lightweight, adfree editions f o r distribution overseas. Their request was approved. The army's need was the primarj' consideration, but the fact that the magazines were being sold to the army at cost of production made the case a great deal stronger than it would have been if purchases had been made on a cost plus basis. The possibility of a publisher's making large profits as a result of an extra quota paper grant from the Library Section was automatically ruled out. The W a r Production Board dealt liberally thereafter with the Library Section in the matter of extra quota paper. I t had to substantiate its requirements in detail, but they were always approved. The only conditions were that the magazines should not contain advertising matter or be offered for sale in the United States and that they should meet the

The Oversea» Magazine

134

Set

L i b r a r y Section's specifications regarding format, weight of paper, and other details. Thereafter, inclusion in the set was limited to magazines willing to produce lightweight, ad-free editions. The real expansion of the set, both in the number of magazines included and in the number of copies printed, dates from this time. The number of pieces in each package was increased from 17 in December, 1943, to 25 by the following June, and eventually to about 35, and the number of sets produced and distributed was doubled within four months and continued to rise thereafter until the July, 1945, peak was reached. Thus, the year of experimenting with light paper and reduced formats in the interest of lowering costs paid unexpected dividends. A f t e r paper rationing was imposed the number of sets produced multiplied, instead of dwindling, and the increase was effected without seriously—one might say without even slightly—diminishing the total stock of paper available for regular editions of magazines. Only 12,165 tons of paper were consumed in the manufacture of overseas editions of magazines between December, 1943 and the revocation of magazine paper rationing in August, 1945. The total consumption of paper by all magazines in 1944 alone was 722,293 tons. A t the same time, the expansion of production made it possible to lower the unit cost of the magazines still further. The word spiral usually has an ominous connotation when applied to business matters. This was a spiral that moved in the right direction. COMPOSITION

OF

THE

SET

In September, 1944, the overseas magazine set consisted of the publications listed in Table I I . TABLE

Magazine

II.

PUBLICATIONS

Frequency of I »sue

IN

OVERSEAS

yumber of Weight Copies in Ounces per Issue per Copy

Air Force

Monthly

1

Coronet

Monthly

3.8

Cosmopolitan

Monthly

4.3

Country Gentleman

Monthly

MAGAZINE

SET

Remarks

Regular size, light paper; official publication of Army Air Forces Regular digest size, light paper Regular size, light paper; serials and feminine features omitted Regular size, light paper

The

Overseas

Magazine

Set

135

Number of Weight Copitt in Ouneee per Ittue per Copy Magazine Remark» 1 3.8 Detective Story Regular size, light paper 2 Esquire 8 Regular size, light paper 1 3.5 Flying Regular size, light p a p e r Official publication of Mu1 H i t Kit sic Branch, Special Services Division Monthly 1 4 Special digest size, light Infantry Journal paper 1 4 Regular size, light paper I n s i d e Detective Monthly Monthly 1 4 Regular digest size, light Intelligence p a p e r ; official publicaBulletin tion of Military Intelligence Service Weekly 3 5 Regular size, light p a p e r Life Monthly Pony size; reprints from McGraw-Hill 1 1 Overseas McGraw-Hill technical and trade publications Digest Regular size, light p a p e r 1 4 M o d e r n Screen Monthly Weekly Pony size Newsweek 2 1 Pony size; features from 4 Monthly 1 1 N e w Yorker weekly issues Monthly 3 Regular digest size, light Omnibook 4 paper Monthly 1 2.5 Regular size, light p a p e r Outdoor Life 6 0.5 11"; newsprint Overseas Comics Weekly Every 1 Regular size, light p a p e r 4.7 Pic other week Monthly Regular size, light p a p e r Popular 1 2.5 Photography Regular size, light p a p e r P o p u l a r Science Monthly 1 5 Regular digest size, light 3 3.4 Readers Digest Monthly paper Regular size, light p a p e r ; Saturday Monthly 4.2 3 features from 4 weekly Evening Post issues Pony size 1 0.5 Monthly Science News Letter Tabloid size, newsprint Weekly 1 1 Sporting News Pony size 1 Weekly 2 Time Regular size, light p a p e r 1 4 Monthly Western Story Frequency of Ittue Monthly Monthly Monthly Monthly

136

The Overseat

Magazine

Set

American, Colliers, and Look, which had been included in the set in 1943, were dropped when magazines containing advertising were excluded from the set. A t t h a t time none of them were in a position to produce special editions. T r a u t m a n considered the absence of these three magazines the most serious deficiency of the set, as overseas lib r a r y reports always indicated t h a t there was a g r e a t demand for them. Look finally produced a lightweight edition for a six-month period in 1945, and this edition was included in the set. Popular Mechanics was in the set throughout the war, except f o r the period J u l y December, 1944. Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Downbeat were added to the set in 1945, and in the same year the 16-page Overseas Comics was reduced to 8 pages and two other 8-page comic leaflets were added—G. I. Comics and Jeep Comics. T h e r e a f t e r four copies of each comic weekly were included in the set. Infantry Journal and Air Force were dropped from the set a t the end of J u n e , 1945, and replaced f o r three months by Military Digest, which was produced by Leatherneck, the Marine equivalent of Yank; in October Military Digest was superseded by Armed Forces Digest, produced by the Infantry Journal with the co-operation of certain other service j o u r n a l s which had first proposed the idea of including a military digest magazine in the set r a t h e r than any one of the more specialized existing magazines. T h e composition of the set was determined p a r t l y by planning and p a r t l y by chance. As was remarked a t the beginning of this chapter, the L i b r a r y Section subscribed f o r most of its magazines in 1941 and 1942 through the Washington News Company. Money was a very important consideration in t h a t period, as the bulk of the library a p propriation was then being spent on libraries in the United States. Since the Washington News Company offered lower subscription rates f o r the magazines which it distributed regularly, in choosing between two magazines of the same type the L i b r a r y Section usually took the one which was normally distributed by t h a t company. This did not affect the selection of obvious "musts," such as the news and p i c t u r e magazines, Esquire, and Readers Digest, but it did determine the choice of some other publications. Having s t a r t e d to buy them, the section continued to buy them when the preassembling of sets was begun—provided the publishers were willing to produce lightweight editions. Regardless of the individual publications chosen, the magazine set, as originally conceived, was to be predominantly p o p u l a r in c h a r a c t e r . When only a dozen or so magazines could be included in each package, obvious mass appeal within the limits of masculine interest seemed to

The Overseas Magazine

Set

137

be the best criterion. T h a t meant Esquire, Readers Digest, the picture magazines, the news magazines, the most popular "general" weeklies and monthlies, and whatever was to be had a t the lowest price in the movie, popular science, mystery, western, and general sports fields. "Comic books" were less obviously called for, since post exchanges in the United States were flooded with them, and it was presumed that the same was true overseas. But j u s t to be sure, T r a u t m a n included Superman (issued every other month) in the 1943 magazine sets. In some instances the principle of mass appeal was disregarded, for fairly good reasons. I t seemed desirable to include at least one good military magazine in a set going to soldiers, regardless of the relative lack of popularity of military magazines. The Infantry Journal was chosen, p a r t l y because the "basic training" which every soldier was supposed to have before he was permanently assigned to a unit was primarily i n f a n t r y training and p a r t l y because T r a u t m a n thought it the best written, best produced, and in general the most interesting of the service journals then available. Two official military publications —Air Force and Intelligence Bulletin—were included without cost simply for the sake of getting them overseas. Hit Kit (words and music of p o p u l a r songs) was included for the same reason. These three were the only official publications in the set. Omnibook was included, not because it had any great mass appeal at the beginning of 1943, but because it provided a means of giving soldiers a taste of best-selling books as soon as they were published. A f t e r the middle of 1943, as more publishers began to use light paper, the scope of the set was expanded. In addition to Popular Mechanics, two somewhat more technical publications were included —Science News Letter and the McGraw-Hill Overseas Digest. All copies of the latter were free, and the former was furnished without charge a f t e r 1944. Popular Science was added to the set in July, 1944. Country Gentleman was added for men interested in farming and count r y life (1943), Outdoor Life for men interested in hunting and other outdoor sports (1944), the New Yorker, for its cartoons and war reporting ( 1 9 4 3 ) , Downbeat, for jazz fans (1945), and the three comic publications for the mass of newspaper readers who had presumably done their share toward making comics second only to headlines in newspaper "readership." These comics, printed in four colors on a reduced page (7% x 11 inches), were produced for the army by the King Features Syndicate. Unlike the commercially produced "comic books," which reprint strips which have appeared in the newspapers a year or two before, they contained only current material,

138

The

Overseas

Magazine

Set

with some condensation. T h e number of comic pieces dispatched (more than a million a week in the l a t t e r p a r t of 1945) may have been excessive, but even so they took up less t h a n six ounces in each package. F r o m the beginning of 19-15 until the middle of 1946, every fifth or sixth weekly dispatch contained a " o n e - s h o t " — a special one-time publication in either magazine or p a p e r book f o r m a t . Among the oneshots were the 1944, 1945, and 1946 World Almanac, Lieutenant Oliver Jensen's Carrier War (in the p a p e r book " k i n g " size f o r m a t — like the paperbound edition of One World), two atlases, two special collections of New Yorker cartoons, a paperbound edition of Nizer's What to Do with Germany (sent to units in the E u r o p e a n T h e a t e r only and purchased f r o m I n f o r m a t i o n and Education Division f u n d s ) , several sports guides and yearbooks, the Infantry Journal edition of General Marshall's third biennial r e p o r t , king-size p a p e r books on house plans and on p a r t - t i m e f a r m i n g , and a guide f o r veterans. I n the composition of the magazine set there was only one important omission other t h a n t h a t of the p o p u l a r magazines which did not produce overseas editions. So long as the set was limited to fifteen or twenty magazines, T r a u t m a n ' s emphasis on the purely popular was justified. B u t when the number of magazines began to a p p r o a c h t h i r t y he might well have found room f o r a t least one magazine addressed more or less exclusively to the "serious" general reader. T h e New Yorker was as f a r as the set went in this direction, and of t h a t only excerpts were published. A magazine set t h a t had room for publications as specialized, relatively, as Science News Letter, Country Gentleman, and Outdoor Life should also have included either Harper's or the Atlantic. Only a minority of the men in any given unit wanted these magazines, but the men who really wanted all three of the detective magazines t h a t were included in 1945 were also a minority group. Harper's was finally added to the set in the second half of 1946, but was dropped a t the beginning of 1947, when shrinking budgets reduced the size of the set to less t h a n twenty magazines. CONTROVERSIES

D u r i n g 1944 and 1945 a good third of the working time of the officers in the L i b r a r y Section was spent on matters p e r t a i n i n g to the overseas magazine set. Once the production of Armed Services Editions was set up, the only people the L i b r a r y Section officers had to consult concerning the operation of this p r o j e c t were the manager of the producing firm and a h a n d f u l of officers in the Special Services

The Overteas Magazine

Set

139

Division, the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot, and the New York Port of Embarkation. But in the case of the magazine set there was no outside agency to establish production specifications and schedules, see that they were carried out, and help the publishers get the materials and priorities they needed. The Library Section had to perform these functions in such time as could be spared for them. New contracts had to be made every three months with some publishers ; every six months with others. The bulk of the complex paperwork on the contracts was handled by the Contracting Section of the Special Services Division and the Purchasing Section of the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot, but the specifications and the preliminary agreements on prices were Trautman's concern. After Trautman had reached an agreement with a publisher, Postell drew up the preliminary papers on procurement and distribution and obtained the necessary concurrences from the other Special Services Division sections concerned before turning the case over to the Contracting Section for formal action. Every few months Trautman spent several days studying the physical make-up of all magazines currently in the set and then telephoned or wrote to half a dozen or more publishers to suggest minor changes or further price reductions. This writer assisted Postell in preparing the procurement and distribution "cases" and handled the allotment of extra quota paper. Another rather large block of time was taken up in disputes and controversies concerning various aspects of the set. From time to time Trautman had to dissuade representatives of other War Department agencies from trying to use the civilian magazines in the set to promote the programs which their officers were sponsoring. He held that the printing of special indoctrination messages in the magazines would destroy their morale value, which consisted precisely in their being civilian publications which were not army-edited or army-controlled. It was a sound view, but in practice it was sometimes hard to defend, particularly, for example, when the message happened to be a small "spot" or a cleverly drawn cartoon for the conservation of paper— and when it was pointed out that most magazines for civilian use were printing the same material. Trautman contended that the average soldier, unaware that civilian publications were also using this material, would resent having it thrust upon him in army-supplied magazines. In this particular case the decision was left to the publishers; in more clear-cut cases, Trautman usually dissuaded the other agency from approaching the publishers at all. For the same reason, he re-

The Overseas Magazine

Set

sisted successfully all proposals t h a t the magazine set be used as a medium f o r distributing separately printed bulletins or leaflets concerning other army programs. There were only a few full-fledged controversies. Two concerned the relative representation of certain competing magazines in the set; largely f o r the sake of prestige, their promotion managers wanted the army to double or treble its purchases. They were ahead of their rivals in the civilian market, and desired to be ahead of them in the magazine set too, even though it might mean excluding two or three other magazines due to limitations of funds and of weight. These particular magazines were extremely co-operative in all other respects, but a real promoter, a p p a r e n t l y , can no more stop promoting than he can stop breathing. In one case T r a u t m a n ' s judgment was sustained by higher authority, in the other he was finally overruled. The sequence of events which brought about the substitution of the Marine-produced Military Digest f o r the Infantry Journal and Air Force and the subsequent substitution of the army-produced Armed Forces Digest for the Military Digest likewise involved much correspondence and some heated conferences in the Pentagon. But disputes of this n a t u r e were relatively infrequent. The magazine set was a m a t t e r of public interest and properly subject to scrutiny and criticism both by civilians and the military. No set of twentyeight or thirty magazines could possibly have met with the unvarying approval of all civilian and military publishers. I t is significant t h a t the controversies were invariably concerned with minor details: whether there should be two or four copies of a particular magazine in the set; whether a single military magazine or a digest of many military magazines should be included. The basic idea of the set—the mass production of lightweight editions of popular magazines for recreational reading—and the general execution of it were never seriously questioned. I t was a big undertaking. The production capacity and the assembly and distribution techniques of American printing made it feasible, but it was largely T r a u t m a n ' s grasp of the possibilities and his ability to get things done, both within and outside of army "channels," t h a t converted it into a practical reality. Sollman's able organization and operation of the Assembly Branch was likewise a m a j o r f a c t o r in the success of the enterprise. THE

WAC

MAGAZIXE

KIT

E a r l y in 1945 the Assembly Branch at the New York P o r t of Embarkation began to distribute a WAC magazine set to hospitals and

The Overseas

Magazine

Set

WAC units overseas. The set was composed of the regular editions of the following magazines: Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Mademoiselle, Personal Romances, True Confessions, True Story, Woman's Home Companion. The composition of the set was determined (within the limits of availability) by studies of WAC reading tastes made at two large posts by the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division. About ten thousand packages were mailed each month. The basis of issue was one set per month for each fifty WAC enlisted personnel, one set for each isolated WAC unit irrespective of size, and one set for each hospital for the use of WAC patients. Distribution of the set was continued until the spring of 1946.

XII

Armed Services Editions

T

H E O U T S T A N D I N G A C H I E V E M E N T in the history of the wartime activities of the Army Library Service was the production and distribution of the paperbound books known as Armed Services Editions. I t was the best organized and most efficiently operated of all the activities in which the Army Library Service had a p a r t , and with the possible exception of the overseas distribution of magazines, it directly affected the largest number of soldiers. Indeed, for the bulk of our troops overseas, Armed Services Editions were the only books that were widely and easily accessible. Armed Services Editions were the product of an expertly planned and ably executed co-operative enterprise which involved a number of arm}' and navy agencies, the W a r Production Board, some seventy publishing firms, and more than a dozen printing houses, composition firms, and paper suppliers. The agency which co-ordinated and guided the enterprise from its inception was the organization of trade book publishers known as the Council on Books in Wartime. The object of the enterprise was the mass production of paperbound books at low cost for distribution to soldiers and sailors overseas. Its achievement, merely in quantitative terms, was staggering. Between the fall of 1943 and the fall of 1947 1,322 titles were printed, and a total of 122,951,031 volumes were delivered to the army and navy at an average cost to the government of 6.09 cents per volume. 1 The quality and variety of the books produced were equally impressive. Since the books were for free distribution, and since there were thirty and later forty titles in each set—not j u s t a handful—the selection of titles did not have to be limited to works guaranteed to have the widest mass appeal. The thousands who might enjoy Hemingway's short stories or Housman's poetry could be considered, as well as the millions who were sure to welcome Thorne Smith and Forever Amber. Mysteries, westerns, and current bestsellers were printed in abundance, but there were also "critical" or purely literary successes of the last few decades, serious nonfiction books, poetry, and standard classics and semi-classics. In short, the sets were supposed to contain a

Armed

Services

US

Editions

sufficient variety of reading m a t t e r to provide something calculated to appeal to nearly everyone who cared to read a t all. THE

ASE

PROJECT

Let us go back to the beginning. I t became a p p a r e n t fairly early in the war t h a t paperbound editions of books were more suitable for mass distribution overseas than were regular hardbound editions. They were cheaper and easier to handle, and since they were expendable ( t h a t is, lawfully subject to be consumed in use), the officers responsible f o r distributing them did not have to place restrictions on their use in order to prevent loss. F o r these reasons the L i b r a r y Section began to make large purchases of paperbound books as soon as troops began to go overseas. As we have seen in Chapter V I I I , these collections of paperbound books were sent overseas a t first in the original publishers' containers; then in 1942 this practice was gradually abandoned and the books were delivered to the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot and there assembled in P B kits before being shipped. The incomplete records of the L i b r a r y Section do not indicate how many paperbound books were sent overseas between 1941 and the end of 1943; perhaps three million a t the most, not to mention several million more purchased by the Red Cross or by unit officers or mailed by civilians to friends overseas. But there were two grave impediments to the use of this material. Distribution both to and within the theaters was haphazard and irregular, and duplication was heavy—there were not enough separate titles to choose from. Usually about five hundred titles were available, but many of them were miscellaneous brochures or pamphlets r a t h e r than books, and many of the books were the same titles that had been purchased for earlier shipments. T h e same mysteries and bestsellers of the last decade kept turning up again and again. Current bestsellers and most other new books were available only in hardbound editions. This drawback was inherent in the conditions of the publishing industry. Publishers of current bestsellers naturally did not authorize them to be reprinted in paperbound editions until they had ceased to be bestsellers in the original f o r m a t ; and on the other hand the paper book publishers had to limit their selections to books of wide popular appeal—largely mysteries, bestsellers of earlier years, and books which had been filmed. T h r o u g h o u t 1942 T r a u t m a n did all he could to extend the range of titles available in paperbound editions, but the economics of the industry made it impossible for him to do much.

Armed Services

Editions

Pocket Books, Penguin Books, and the Infantry Journal all published a few titles principally for army distribution, but they could not afford to produce a large variety of titles solely for the army, nor could the original publishers afford to let them reprint their current publications. Several publishers considered the possibility of printing from ten thousand to twenty thousand extra copies of their most popular books and wrapping them in paper covers for the army, but the estimated reduction in cost was not sufficient to make the project worth while. THE

ARMY

PLAN

This was the status of the army's paper book purchasing program until the last months of 1942. In November or December of that year representatives of the British army suggested that the Library Section purchase a large quantity of Combined Operations: the Official Story of the Commandos, which had recently been published in England and was going to be reprinted in the United States by an American publisher. Trautman was willing to buy the book, provided that the American publisher would produce a cheap paperbound edition. For various technical reasons the publisher was unable to do this, and so the Library Section's purchases were relatively small. But while the manufacture of a special edition was still being considered, Trautman consulted H. Stahley Thompson, the graphic arts specialist of the Information Branch of the Special Services Division, and Thompson made a suggestion which pointed the way to the Armed Services Editions project of the following year. Thompson's suggestion was that the type of Combined Operations be reset to fit a 634" x 9 " page and that several hundred thousand copies of the book be run off in this format on one of the rotary presses used by the big commercial printing firms which print pulp and digest size magazines and the catalogue supplements issued by mail order houses. Owing to the wartime drop in the production of consumer goods, the printing of catalogue supplements had fallen off, and consequently not all the rotary presses were being used to their full capacity. Thompson estimated that on a large run these presses could print books of the proposed size at a unit cost of 10 cents or less. This particular plan was not carried out, but T r a u t m a n and Thompson continued to investigate the feasibility of producing lowcost books on rotary magazine presses. At Trautman's request, the chief of the Information Branch allowed Thompson to devote all his time to this work. After a careful study of types of equipment, paper

Armed

Services

Editions

weights and costs, and possible formats, Thompson concluded t h a t these presses could print books for less than 10 cents a copy on runs of fifty thousand or more and for as little as 5 cents a copy on runs of one hundred thousand; and a preliminary census of plants with the p r o p e r equipment indicated that there was enough press capacity to print a large number of titles regularly. If publishers and authors were willing to let current books be reprinted, they could be distributed to soldiers in larger quantities and at lower costs than had heretofore been considered feasible. Moreover, this could be done without tying up any of the book industry's printing resources, since only these "nonbook" presses would be used. But it was plain t h a t nothing could be done on a large scale unless the book publishing industry as a whole would accept the project and make current copyright material available. In J a n u a r y , 1943, therefore, T r a u t m a n and Thompson laid their tentative plans before Malcolm Johnson, a member of the executive committee of the Council on Books in Wartime, hoping that the council would be willing to present the project to the publishers. THE

COUNCIL

ON BOOKS I N

WARTIME

In the spring of 1942 a group of publishers, booksellers, authors, and librarians had formed the Council on Books in Wartime f o r the purpose of mobilizing all sections of the book industry behind the war effort. One of the express objects of the council was to foster the use of books in the interest of both civilian and military morale. Johnson welcomed the plan with great enthusiasm. He presented it to the executive committee of the council early in February and recommended that the council not only support but also operate the entire p r o j e c t — t h a t is, assume full responsibility for manufacturing the books and selling them at cost of production to the armed forces (the navy had agreed to participate in the project, and the chief navy librarian, Isabel DuBois, played an active p a r t in the negotiations with the council). A detailed plan of operation, drawn up by a planning committee consisting of Johnson, John F a r r a r , and William Sloane, was presented to the membership of the council a month later by the chairman of the executive committee, the late Warder W . Norton. In its finally approved form, the salient points of the plans were as follows. An advisory committee on selection would select approximately fifty books a month for reprinting, from lists provided by the publishers concerned. Royalties of 1 cent a copy would be p a i d — % cent to the publisher, 1/2 cent to the author. The books—predominantly, but not

146

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exclusively, c u r r e n t p u b l i c a t i o n s — w o u l d be p o p u l a r novels; books a b o u t the w a r a n d o t h e r nonfiction, including works p a r t i c u l a r l y desired by the a r m y a n d n a v y ; books of h u m o r ; occasional classics ; a n d " m a d e " b o o k s — t h a t is, specially p r e p a r e d anthologies of stories a n d verse. T h e books would be sold t o the a r m y a n d n a v y b y the council a t c o s t of m a n u f a c t u r e ( e s t i m a t e d a t 6 cents p e r volume) plus 10 p e r c e n t f o r overhead. T h e c o n t r a c t s with t h e services would c o n t a i n a n agreement t h a t the books were t o be k e p t o u t of t h e civilian m a r k e t . I n the l e t t e r in which he p r e s e n t e d the p l a n t o t h e council's membership, N o r t o n answered in a d v a n c e c e r t a i n p r a c t i c a l o b j e c t i o n s which he knew would be raised a n d stressed the p o t e n t i a l value of the p r o j e c t n o t only t o the a r m y b u t t o the p u b l i s h i n g i n d u s t r y itself. Those persons in bookselling and publishing who have examined this plan in its preliminary detail are of the conviction . . . that while direct Army and Navy orders may be shortened temporarily . . . the net result to the industry and to the f u t u r e of book reading can only be helpful. The very fact that millions of men will have an opportunity to learn what a book is and what it can mean is likely now and in post-war years to exert a tremendous influence on the post-war course of the industry. We are mentioning these rather selfish aspects of the plan because there is no precedent for it and because its impact on the necessary economic structure of the industry must naturally be considered. But we are asking for your collaboration on other and unselfish grounds; because we believe that this is the most valuable thing that bookmen can undertake in the conduct of the war. A l t h o u g h most of the members of the council were h e a r t i l y in f a v o r of the p l a n , t h e r e were several s t r o n g d i s s e n t i n g voices. Some publishers felt t h a t the p l a n did n o t c o n t a i n a d e q u a t e s a f e g u a r d s a g a i n s t p o s t w a r d u m p i n g of s u r p l u s books. A f t e r the last w a r one a r m y a g e n c y h a d t h r o w n a n u m b e r of unused technical books on the m a r k e t a t 15 cents o r 2 0 cents each a n d h a d n e a r l y b a n k r u p t e d several p u b lishers by d o i n g so. M i g h t this n o t h a p p e n a g a i n ? A small m i n o r i t y expressed the opinion t h a t the sale of r e p r i n t s t o the g o v e r n m e n t a t 6 cents or 8 cents a c o p y would d e s t r o y the p r i c e s t r u c t u r e of t h e ind u s t r y . T h e public would n o t u n d e r s t a n d why n o r m a l t r a d e editions of new books h a d t o cost t h i r t y or f o r t y times as much : in effect, t h e r e m i g h t be a b u y e r s ' s t r i k e . T h e s t r o n g e s t o b j e c t i o n came f r o m several t e x t b o o k publishers. T h e y were concerned because some s t a t e s do n o t a u t h o r i z e t h e i r e d u c a t i o n b o a r d s t o p a y more f o r a book t h a n t h e lowest p r i c e a t which a n y edition of it is offered f o r sale. T h e r e were

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1-i-?

also a few complaints t h a t the plan was "socialistic"—specifically, t h a t it gave too much independent authority to the council. The firm support which W a r d e r Norton, the chairman of the executive committee, gave the plan sufficed to convert several dissenters, and the remaining few were won over by dint of argument, cajolery, and some concessions. The army was induced to make as definite a commitment against postwar dumping as it legally could, and the reprinting of "textbooks, educational books, technical and scientific books" was explicitly excluded. By the middle of M a y the p r o j e c t had been officially established as a council activity under the general direction of a management committee consisting of Richard L. Simon, S. Spencer Scott, and Malcolm Johnson. Philip Van Doren Stern, an authority on printing production and a former editor of Pocket Books, was appointed manager of the Armed Services Editions branch of the council. ABMY AND

NAVY

ACTION

The army and the navy agencies concerned with the p r o j e c t were equally active during these preliminary months. In F e b r u a r y , Thompson, representing the army, and Freeman Lewis, Philip Van Doren Stern, and Malcolm Johnson, representing the council, had met with a dozen leading commercial printers to discuss the question of costs. Five printing firms, the Cuneo Press, Street and Smith, the W . S. Hall Company, the Rumford Press and the Western P r i n t i n g and Lithographing Company, agreed to produce the books a t somewhat less than half their normal percentage of profit, and the format of the books, on which the cost estimates were based, was tentatively determined. Portability was the first consideration: the books had to be small enough to fit into a man's pocket. Yet the format had to fit the equipment which was to be used, and t h a t equipment was not designed primarily for pocket-size publications. I t was therefore decided to print the books "two-up," t h a t is, in pairs, one book above the other, and then to separate them by a horizontal cut. In other words, they were to be printed as magazines and then cut in half to make pocket size books. The magazine sizes settled on were t h a t of the Reader's Digest (for Hall, Western and Rumford Press equipment) and t h a t of pulp magazines ( f o r Street and Smith and Cuneo equipment). Fairly short books were to be printed on the digest size presses, and when the pairs had been separated by "slicing," the resulting books would measure 5 % by 3% inches. Longer books were to be printed on pulp size presses; a f t e r slicing, their dimensions would be 634 by 4/4

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inches. In both sizes, the text would be printed in double columns of type and, of course, the books would have to be bound on the short rather than the long side. In the army and the navy, as in the Council on Books in Wartime, the idea of the project was generally welcomed after its merits had been fully explained, but it required much patient negotiating to reach agreement on certain important incidental details. The number of books to be printed each month was eventually cut to thirty. The Special Services Division of the army was to take forty thousand copies of each book, and the navy library service, ten thousand copies. The most serious problem in the preliminary planning of the project was how to obtain the initial operating funds. The council had intended to obtain a loan of $100,000 from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for this purpose, but its application was rejected because it was a nonprofit organization; according to the terms of its charter, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation could only assist enterprises devoted to gain. A t the same time, the army's purchasing supervisors in the Procurement Division of the Army Service Forces were reluctant to permit the Quartermaster General to make an advance payment to the council, partly because its subcontractors (the printers and the paper firms) were well-established profit-making organizations which should not need such aid. Moreover, since the council had almost no capital, it could not be regarded as financially responsible; it could not reimburse the Government in case it failed to make deliveries. A t this stage of the proceedings Malcolm Johnson, the chairman of the Armed Services Editions planning committee, drafted a contract with the New Y o r k Trust Company to discount the council's bills to the army at a low rate. This would enable the council to secure money in advance, at the cost of a slight appreciation in the price charged to the army. When he presented the draft of the contract to the Office of the Quartermaster General, that agency conceded that it was unbusinesslike for the army to pay more for the books merely to enable the trust company to advance money to the council, and the Procurement Division officers likewise decided that the only practical thing to do was to take the risk of making a 50 percent payment in advance on the first three-month contract, and a 25 percent advance on subsequent contracts. The first contract between the army and the council was signed early in July, 1943. One million five hundred thousand volumes, comprising fifty thousand copies each of thirty titles, were delivered to

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the army and the navy distributing points two months later. The entire enterprise had been planned, organized, and put into effective operation in a period of seven months. In spite of its revolutionary novelty, it had been set up with a minimum of confusion, crosspurposes, and waste. I t was certainly one of the most efficiently planned and best co-ordinated production programs of the entire war—a credit to the printers, the publishers, and the services. I t was a co-operative endeavor. I t would be misleading to single out a few individuals and say, "They did it." The men did it who were in a position to do it—they were not the only men who were wholeheartedly for it. Nevertheless, the development of the project can best be made clear by describing the work done by certain key men. Stahley Thompson had the idea on which the whole project turned—the use of magazine and catalogue presses to produce, not magazines and catalogues, but books, and he was also instrumental in setting the printing costs a t an unprecedentedlv low level. But, of course, the men who actually set the costs at that level were the printers themselves. Backed with Thompson's production charts and his own energetic persuasiveness, T r a u t m a n had his chiefs in the Special Services Division lined up behind the idea long before it was certain that the publishers would accept it. He was equally successful in winning over the other army agencies whose co-operation was needed. He always took the line that the person he was dealing with was the only man in or out of the army who boggled at the idea. If those who hesitated or raised objections had known how much company they had, the project might never have been approved. In the procurement end of the business Captain John F. Franzen of the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot and Captain Evaristo Murray, in the Office of the Quartermaster General, had to work out the details of a contract that would set the council up in the publishing business and yet satisfy the army's requirements regarding pecuniary responsibility. I t was Murray, incidentally, who finally evolved a formula on dumping satisfactory to both the army and the publishers. I t had to be vague, since the army did not have the legal power to make a fullv binding commitment, but it served its purpose, and thanks to Murray's vigilance as Special Services supply chief in 1945-1946 there was no dumping at the end of the war. The question of distribution was settled bv Colonel Sollman, of the New York P o r t of Embarkation. His Assembly Branch was so organized that it could assemble and ship the books as rapidly as they were delivered. Miss DuBois pushed the project through the navy as energetically as Trautman pushed it through the army.

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The progress of the Armed Services Editions project through the Council on Books in Wartime has been told fully in the excellent official history of the council. The men on the planning and management committees and the others who helped in the figuring, the writing, and the policy discussions all say t h a t W a r d e r Norton's personal standing in the industry was the chief f a c t o r in creating unanimity. F o r many of the council's members, his attitude was decisive. The ASE. plan was a radical d e p a r t u r e : his sponsorship convinced them that it must be sound. As a member of the council's executive committee, director of the Book Publishers' Bureau, and member of the W P B Advisory Committee for the P a p e r I n d u s t r y , Malcolm Johnson also occupied a key position. Thanks to his multiple functions, he knew the answers to a great man}' practical questions. T h e bill-discounting arrangement was his answer to one question of the utmost importance; it opened the way to a final solution. As the history of the council points out, the planning committee, consisting of F a r r a r , Sloane and Johnson, did its work so well that its original plan, presented to the council in March, 1943, "may be read almost as a post-facto outline of the operation." OPERATIONS

The difficult and extremely complicated task of putting this unprecedented publishing enterprise into operation and of keeping it going, devolved upon Philip Van Doren Stern. As a former executive editor of Pocket Books, Stern was familiar with both the editorial and the production aspects of the p a p e r book business. During the first two years of the war he had been editor of the Overseas Publication Section of the OWI. Owing to his O W I experience, he had an understanding of governmental administrative and fiscal procedures which proved very helpful in his dealings with the army and the navy. As manager of the Armed Services Editions branch of the council, Stern had to maintain constant relations with five different army and navy offices, a p a p e r firm (Bulkley, Dunton, Inc.) and its mills, five printers, a dozen or more composition (typesetting) houses, the entire membership of the Council on Books in Wartime (both individually as publishers and collectively through the council's management committee), and an advisory committee on book selection. His relations with the army, the navy, and the paper suppliers were governed by contracts. All the other individuals and agencies, with the exception of the unpaid management committee (which was consulted on all i m p o r t a n t questions of policy), did business with him on a purely voluntary, co-oper-

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ative basis. To keep everyone working in harness to achieve the ends the army, the navy, and the council desired was a very difficult assignment. The results showed that Stern was the right man to do it. In the summer of 1943 Stern had a paid staff of ten persons to plan the printing and delivery of thirty titles a month and to handle a large volume of technical and financial correspondence with all the agencies connected with the enterprise. Future publications were selected by an unpaid advisory committee, which met twice a month. The original members of the advisory committee were John F a r r a r , William Sloane, Nicholas Wreden, H a r r y Hansen, the late Jennie Flexner, Mark Van Doren, and Amy Loveman. When F a r r a r joined the OWI, he was replaced by S t e r n ; Beatrice Libaire (succeeding Miss Flexner), Edward C. Aswell, Lewis Gannett, Joseph Margolies, and Archibald Ogden were added to the committee later. The committee's selections were made principally from current and forthcoming publications submitted in book or proof form by the publishers; but suggestions also came from the army and navy library offices, individual soldiers and sailors, Congressmen, and many other sources. Titles approved by the committee were submitted to the army and navy library offices. Titles approved by both the army and the navy were then scheduled for publication. After the number of letters contained in a book had been counted, it was paired with another book of approximately the same length, type was set for both by a composition house, and stereotype or electrotype plates for printing were made from the forms of type. The plates for each pair of books were sent to the printers according to a closely planned production schedule. All book covers were printed by one firm (The Commanday-Roth Company) and then distributed to the other printers. After the books had been printed and stapled, they were dispatched to the services' distribution points, each point receiving its allotted number of the thirty titles printed each month. Including the ninety-nine reprints of reprints (for example, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was printed in the fourth monthly series—Series "D"—and then reprinted in the 11th series—Series " K " ) , the total number of titles was 1,322. The books were roughly classified by the council, as indicated in Table I I I . Without attempting a critical analysis of the list, let us take note of some of the considerations which influenced the selection of titles. Recreational reading was the aim. The books were to be "general trade" books, as distinguished from books which were "essentially tools and not of a recreational nature," that is, educational, techni-

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152 TABLE I I I .

A S E

T I T L E S AS C L A S S I F I E D BY T H E C O U N C I L ON IN

33

Adventure Aviation

8

Biographies

86

Classics

23

Cartoons Contemporary

fiction

6 246

Countries and travel

45

Current affairs and the war

20

Drama Fantasy

7 26

Historical novels

113

History

20

Humor

130

Miscellaneous

Music and the arts Mysteries

BOOKS

WARTIME

Number of Titlet

Clarification

Editions

24

11 122

Nature

16

Poetry

28

Science

32

Examples London, Call of the Wild; Household, Rogue Male Saint-Exupery, Night Flight; Markham, West with the Night James, Andrew Jackson; Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin The Iliad, A Connecticut Yankee (that is, both "classical literature" and "popular classics") Price, Arno, and others Steinbeck, Marquand, Rawlings, and others De Poncins, Kabloona; Keith, Land below the Wind Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy; Ernie Pyle's books O'Neill, Shaw, and others Hudson, Green Mansions; Bradford, 01' Man Adam an' His Chillun Allen, Bedford Village; Roberts, Northwest Passage Sandburg, Storm over the Land; Nevins and Brebner, The Making of Modern Britain Thurber, My Life and Hard Times; Smith, The Glorious Pool MacDougall, Danger in the Cards; Schuster, A Treasury of the World's Great Letters Miller, Esquire's Jazz Book Chandler, Ellery Queen, and others Dempewolff, Animal Reveille; Sanderson, A Caribbean Treasure Housman, Longfellow, Shelley, and others Sears, Deserts on the March; Gray, Science at War

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Classification

Sea stories and the navy

Number of Titles

28

Example»

Ellsberg, Hell on Ice; Goodrich, Delilah

Self-help, inspiration, etc.

16

Fosdick, On Being a Real Thouless, How to

Person; Think

Short story collections Sports

92 30

Anderson, Mansfield, and others Graham, Lou Gehrig; Farson, Go-

160

Mulford, Haycox, Grey, and others

Straight

ing

Westerns

Fishing

cal, and scientific works. Books whose effect depended largely on h a l f tone illustrations were a u t o m a t i c a l l y eliminated because of the cost of p r e p a r i n g h a l f - t o n e p l a t e s , a l t h o u g h books c o n t a i n i n g line drawings ( c a r t o o n s , etc.) were p r i n t e d occasionally. C u r r e n t publications were to p r e d o m i n a t e ; f r o m the services' p o i n t of view, t h a t was the very first requirement. All levels of t a s t e were t o be c a t e r e d to within reasonable limits: t h e r e m u s t be " g o o d " books, b o t h fiction and nonfiction, f o r the serious reader, as well as books which t h e serious r e a d e r would r e g a r d as t r a s h . Some s t a n d a r d works of the p a s t were to be p r i n t e d f r o m time to time, and m a n y collections of s h o r t pieces, a d a p t e d to r e a d i n g in snatches, magazine-wise. A n d only selections a p p r o v e d by the advisory committee, the a r m y , and the n a v y could be printed. N a t u r a l l y , the a r m y ( r e p r e s e n t e d by T r a u t m a n o r one of the lib r a r i a n s in his office), the n a v y (represented by Miss D u B o i s ) , a n d the advisory committee did n o t agree on every title submitted f o r consideration. Any book n o t acceptable to all t h r e e was a u t o m a t i c a l l y rejected. T h e committee consisted largely of publishers a n d p r a c t i c ing men of letters ; they were inevitably prepossessed in f a v o r of good writing and of books with serious l i t e r a r y intentions. T h e a r m y r e p r e sentatives, influenced by l i b r a r y r e p o r t s and the comments of a r m y librarians on the relative p o p u l a r i t y of specific books and a u t h o r s , were inclined to f a v o r books which they t h o u g h t would a p p e a l t o the largest numbers of men—westerns, mysteries, T h o r n e Smith, H . Allen Smith, and the racier bestsellers. I t was largely because of the a r m y ' s a t t i t u d e t h a t the l a t e r series of A r m e d Services E d i t i o n s contained a g r e a t e r p r o p o r t i o n of this s o r t of m a t e r i a l t h a n did the earlier series. T h e members of the committee dealt f a i r l y in m a k i n g this concession ; f o r it doubtless went a little a g a i n s t their ideas of what book publishing was f o r . F o r the most p a r t , t h e a r m y exercised its r i g h t of r e j e c -

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tion r a t h e r sparingly. I t was more interested in getting certain types of book in than in keeping anything out. Miss DuBois usually followed a middle course as regards the reading tastes to be served. Nevertheless, she made a number of rejections for another reason. Unlike the army, the navy had a fully centralized book procurement system which enabled it to order books regularly f o r navy libraries well in advance of publication. In order to keep duplications between the navy's Armed Services Editions and its hardbacks a t a minimum, she sometimes felt obliged to reject books which she had already ordered in the other form, unless she was certain t h a t they would be in very great demand. I t was a sound policy, even though it resulted in the elimination of some good titles from the A S E lists. 2 Another f a c t o r which influenced the selection of the A S E titles was availability. The number of competently written books on all literary planes dwindled steadily from 1942 to 1946. A f t e r the number of titles in each monthly set was increased to f o r t y a t the end of 1944, f o u r or six popular titles were reprinted each month from earlier series, and there were usually six or more publications from the 1930's or earlier, plus two or more "made" books—anthologies of stories or verse specially compiled for Armed Services Editions. T h a t left about twentyfive books to be selected from current or forthcoming publications. I t was sometimes difficult to select twenty-five, or even a dozen, current titles calculated to be of real interest to a considerable number of readers. There was a plethora of second-rate historical novels in the mid-forties. Quite a number of them got into Armed Services Editions simply because no other current novels of conceivably general interest were available. Notwithstanding these limiting conditions, the monthly A S E lists, taken all together, contained a world of good and entertaining reading matter. They were not equally satisfying to all readers. W h a t collection of only a thousand-odd titles could be? B u t they did provide reading m a t t e r of interest for a greater diversity of readers t h a n any other mass producer of books has ever attempted to serve. A t the beginning of 1944 the Armed Services Editions branch of the council was separately incorporated as Editions f o r the Armed Services, Inc., in order to dissociate the p r o j e c t financially from the council p r o p e r and thus protect its funds in case a law suit should be brought against the council in connection with any of its other activities. The personnel and the management committee of the p r o j e c t remained the same. Representative George A. Dondero's a t t a c k on the council as a

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distributor of "communist p r p p a g a n d a " (based, as it later turned out, on misinformation) and the effect of the censorship provisions of the Soldier Voting Law on the selection of books during the summer of 1944 are described in Chapter XV. As a result of these incidents, Stern employed a reading staff to check every word of all books selected and to note all references to politics and racial or religious minorities—in short, all m a t t e r likely to provoke controversy or scandal. Several books had to be rejected by the advisory committee for reasons of this s o r t : for example, Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (an attack on Mormonism). Mrs. Stephen Vincent Benêt was the first member of the reading staff. She was joined by Louis Untermcyer a f t e r the passing of the Soldier Voting Law, and later nine other readers were employed. Free-lance editors, too, were employed from time to time to abridge books too long f o r publication as A S E books in their original f o r m : The Moonstone, Henry Esmond, and other titles. When a book was abridged, this fact was always indicated on the cover, but because of their small size many soldiers were convinced that all Armed Services Editions had been abridged and possibly expurgated—a disturbing thought- 3 Distribution to the Theaters.—All the books f o r the army were sent by the printers to the Assembly Branch of the New York P o r t of Embarkation, where they were assembled into monthly sets and packed in cardboard cartons for shipment to all overseas bases. The basis of issue was one set per month for every 150 men or m a j o r fraction of that number ; one set per month for every fifty hospital beds ; and one set per month for every isolated unit or detachment overseas, no matter how small. At first none of the A S E sets were dispatched by mail. They were packed in wooden cases holding twenty sets each and shipped as freight through normal supply channels. I t was a slow process, and when only f o r t y thousand or fifty thousand sets were being delivered to the army each month, there were not enough sets to supply all units according to the basis of issue: the requirements of small isolated units were a constant drain on supplies, and the staging areas of p o r t s of embarkation also absorbed many sets. But production rose steadily. With the " H " series (68,000 sets for the a r m y ) , issued in the late spring of 1944, direct shipment by mail to units in all theaters was instituted, and from that time on, Armed Services Editions were moderately plentiful in most overseas areas. With Series " J , " at Stern's suggestion, the number of books per set was increased to thirty-two, to effect a more economical use of the paper purchased for the book covers; and with that series, distribu-

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tion to hospitals in the United States was also commenced. W i t h Series " Q , " delivered to the port in March, 1945, the number of titles per set was increased to f o r t y , and 125,000 sets were produced f o r the army and the navy. Maximum production was reached in Series " W " (155,000 sets), and it stayed at that level through Series " Z . " Thereafter it coasted down to 90,000 sets, in Series " A A , " and eventually to 50,000 after Series " D D . " Series " H H , " the last in the original A S E p r o j e c t , was delivered to the Assembly Branch in August, 1946. T H E POSTWAR

PROJECT

In December, 1945, Stern resigned his position as manager of Editions f o r the Armed Services, Inc., and was succecded by Stahley Thompson, who had just returned from military service with Yank overseas. A t that time it was expected that the project would be liquidated in the summer of 1946. The original agreement between the council and the services had been that the p r o j e c t would not be continued more than a year after hostilities ceased. But Postell, who had succeeded Trautman as chief of the L i b r a r y Section, knew that there would be a half million or more occupation troops still to be served after the summer of 1946—many of them in isolated constabulary units f o r which it would be impracticable to provide regular library service. Expendable paperbound books were still needed. I t was estimated that the army could use a maximum of twenty thousand sets of twelve or fifteen books each, and the navy was willing to take five thousand sets. I t seemed too small a quantity f o r cheap mass production. The idea of purchasing regular editions in paper covers instead of cloth casings was considered, but Postell encountered the same obstacle that Trautman had encountered in 1942. The cost of such editions was too high. Postell, Thompson, and the management committee discussed the question frequently during the early months of 1946. Thompson sketched out a number of plans f o r reducing production costs and finally developed one that seemed practicable. The essence of it was to print books in about the same format as Pocket Books and to lower the cost of labor and material by using flexible rubber plates instead of rigid stereotypes. The new method made it possible to print runs of twenty-five thousand copies at a unit cost of 18 cents. The council agreed to let Editions f o r the Armed Services, Inc., continue operations for another year. Royalties were increased to 6 cents to enable Editions f o r the Armed Services to deal with publishers on the same commercial basis as any low-priced book club. The printing was done

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by the J . W. Clement Company of Buffalo, and the number of books was set a t twelve per month. Series " I I , " the first in the post-war project, was delivered to the Assembly Branch in October, 1946. Series " T T , " the last in the project, was delivered in September, 1947. The original contract price was 25 cents per copy, but thanks partly to improvements in the method of production and partly to surpluses accumulated during the wartime program, the actual cost to the services of the twelve series was only 10.9 cents per copy. The total number of volumes issued was 3,046,798. THE

RECEPTION

OF ARMED SERVICES EDITIONS

OVERSEAS

T o revert to the wartime program, the method of distribution by mail had one unavoidable flaw. Everything depended on the accuracy of the mailing list. There was an inevitable time lag in reporting changes of address, and a unit that was constantly on the move might not receive its ASE sets through the mail for many months. To remedy this situation the Assembly Branch sent bulk lots of packages to the headquarters of the larger theaters. They were to be used to fill the gaps in the mail distribution and to answer special needs—troop trains, replacement depots, rest camps, and so forth. But the bulk lots were limited in quantity, and some units never were supplied regularly. Some units, too, were not supplied at all, simply because their addresses were never reported to the Assembly Branch. Sollman's men did a magnificent job, but they could not divine addresses. 4 There was one other flaw in distribution which the Library Section and the Assembly Branch were powerless to correct. When the A S E books and magazine sets reached the units, distribution was usually on a first-come first-served basis. In all too many units very little was left a f t e r the first had been served. The man who opened the packages and his friends got and kept the cream, and the others got what was left, if anything. In some units, with alert commanders or Special Services officers, the books were charged out like library books, in order to ensure the fairest distribution. In many more, they were regularly placed in the dayroom or library (if there was one) and although they were not charged out, the men were requested to return the books after reading them. But in general the rule of " g r a b " prevailed. Armed Services Editions were much more plentiful in the rear areas, of course, than they ever were in the combat zone. I t was hard enough to get food and munitions to men on the line in the quantities needed. As a rule, books, magazines, and the army publications, Yank and Stars and Stripes, only trickled through occasionally to men a t the

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f r o n t or in the rest areas j u s t behind the f r o n t . On some occasions, however, combat troops were fairly well supplied. This is true, f o r example, of the task forces t h a t went into the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, and Okinawa from Hawaii. The library officer in Hawaii stockpiled A S E and magazine sets for each of these task forces and issued them to the departing units until the supply was exhausted. The most notable mass distribution of Armed Services Editions to combat troops was t h a t which took place in the marshalling areas of southern England j u s t before the invasion of occupied France. A representative of the European T h e a t e r Special Services staff had p a r ticipated in planning the supply phase of the invasion. Detailed arrangements were made for entertaining the troops as they waited in the marshalling areas before crossing the Channel, and in this connection the Special Services representative had recommended t h a t one Armed Services Edition be issued to each man before he went on board ship. General Eisenhower's staff had approved the recommendation, and when series " C " and " D " (about 8,000 sets of each) were received, early in 1944, they were held in stock for this purpose. In the latter p a r t of May, a f t e r the invasion units had been marched and trucked down the long avenues of the marshalling areas and deployed in the rows of tents t h a t lined the avenues, three Special Service companies went through all the area sections they could reach, distributing cigarettes, candy, and Armed Services Editions. T h e men who did this work reported afterwards t h a t the books had been welcomed enthusiastically. They provided sorely needed distraction to a great many men. Before the soldiers boarded the invasion barges and landing c r a f t , they discarded everything inessential; but very few Armed Services Editions were found by the clean-up squads t h a t later went through the areas. An article on the invasion by the New Yorker correspondent, A. J . Liebling, confirms the f a c t t h a t many men carried the books with them onto the landing c r a f t . Liebling had boarded an L C I L (Landing C r a f t , I n f a n t r y , L a r g e ) on J u l y 1. I t had not yet received its complement of troops. Two days later another L C I L , already loaded with troops, pulled up beside it. " T h e soldiers were spread all over the L C I L next door, most of them reading paper-cover Armed Services Editions of books," Liebling reports. He began to talk with a private from Brooklyn whose D - D a y mission was to demolish enemy pillboxes with charges of T N T . He nodded toward the book he was holding. "These little books are a great thing," he said. "They take you away. I remember when my battalion was

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cut off on top of a hill at El Guettar, I read a whole book in one day. I t was called Knight without Armor* This one I am reading now is called Candide. It is kind of unusual, but I like it. I think the fellow who wrote it, Voltaire, used the same gag too often, though. The characters are always getting killed and then turning out not to have been killed after all, and they tell their friends what happened in the meantime. I like the character in it called Pangloss." T h e mass distribution of A r m e d Services Editions to soldiers before the most critical o p e r a t i o n of the w a r a n d the conspicuous f a c t s t h a t t h e y were glad t o get them and did read them incidentally convinced a number of officers f o r the first time t h a t the provision of reading m a t t e r to combat t r o o p s really was an aid to morale. T h e r e can be no d o u b t a b o u t the effect of this and ensuing distributions on the t r o o p s themselves. T h e war c o r r e s p o n d e n t quoted above s a y s : I remember seeing the 29th Division land at Greenock in October 1942. The Red Cross had provided them with kits containing playing cards, etc. and also pocket editions of books. They abandoned the books all over the ship and pier, had no use for them. The same troops a couple of years later had become book readers, traders and hoarders, an indication of the missionary work the constant bombardment of handy books accomplished. Largely, they had to turn to books . . . because there were no towns with jukeboxes to go to, no jive to tune in on, no liquor to be had, etc. . . . An i n f a n t r y m a n who f o u g h t t h r o u g h the campaign in F r a n c e in the summer and fall of 1944 told the following s t o r y in a letter to his wife. H e picked u p a c o p y of S t r a c h e y ' s Queen Victoria shortly before his unit went into b a t t l e . H e r e a d a few c h a p t e r s and stuffed the book into one of his pockets. The next time I became cognizant of it [he wrote] it was some two days later. We had advanced through enemy artillery fire and had finally been pinned down in a field by their mortar and machine gun fire. . . . After some close ones, I j u s t dove head first into what appeared to be a solid growth of brambles and bushes. They broke under my weight, and I found myself in a rather deep narrow ditch below the surface of the ground. Soon I became cramped and started to move a little; a lump in my pocket turned out to be Queen Victoria. I t was pretty "hot" above. . . . There was nothing I could do except wait. I started to read and found it a rather good substitute for just "sweating." There was a two-way traffic above me, our shells going, theirs coming and bursting, and I kept reading of Victoria's "dear, beautiful Albert" and his soft flowing mustache that she admired so much. . . . Many times I wondered if I would ever finish it. The shelling lifted, we moved on, and days later I finished the book in a hospital somewhere in England.

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R e a d i n g u n d e r fire was e x c e p t i o n a l , however. Even when A r m e d Services E d i t i o n s were available in c o m b a t zones men generally h a d too m a n y absolutely vital things t o stuff i n t o their pockets to m a k e room f o r them. T h e chief use of the books was in the r e a r a r e a s , where t h e y were more p l e n t i f u l and where the men all too o f t e n h a d more leisure, b o t h on and off the j o b , t h a n t h e y knew what t o do with. T h e q u o t a t i o n s in C h a p t e r s I X and X show w h a t Armed Services E d i t i o n s m e a n t t o m a n y of these men all t h e way f r o m the Aleutians t o t h e B u r m a R o a d . Let us close this c h a p t e r with two more comments f r o m first-hand observers, one an officer who served in the Southwest Pacific, t h e o t h e r , a E u r o p e a n T h e a t e r enlisted man : 8 One of the most valuable uses of these invaluable little books was on troop transports (particularly in landing operations) where many a man's sanity must have been preserved by having them to read during the long weeks and even months during which they were isolated on these hot, crowded, terribly uncomfortable ships. Most men seemed to take them for granted, as they later took beer rations in the jungle, and the blessings of D D T , but it is not hard to imagine how much worse conditions would have been without this wide range of reading matter. Many times on transports I saw men scramble after the little books—or at least resort to them a f t e r they had exhausted the precious comic books and picture magazines. We began to receive the Armed Services Editions shortly before the invasion. I recall that at that time I was stationed in a meadow in Devonshire where the dearth of reading matter inspired my buying an armful of English novels with which I set up a minusculc lending library within my company. . . . Then we received our first set of Council Books [The usual army name for Armed Services Editions]. They were so much more attractive (in content, that is) than the English novels that I went quickly out of business, cheerfully pocketed my loss, and joined the enthusiastic audience. From then on the Council Books were our mainstay. They arrived punctually wherever we were throughout the Normandy campaign and later during the buzz-bombing months in Antwerp. They were the backbone and the chief attraction of the company day room wherever it was and however otherwise inadequate. They were read again and again and were regarded with the respect which normally goes only to fine editions. Speaking for myself, I never ceased to wonder at the amazing imagination and taste which went into the selection of titles. I t seemed that every lot had something for somebody. I have long wanted to pay my compliments and express my thanks to the people who made the selections and who worked out the scheme of distribution. I am sure that by and large it was by f a r the most successful effort of the Special Services Division.

XIII

Overseas Service: Puerto Rico to Saipan T H E AXTII.LES

DEPARTMENT

S

OON a f t e r the a r m y began to expand in earnest, in the latter p a r t of 1940, the forces in our overseas possessions were increased. T h e troops t h a t went into P u e r t o Rico and the other islands in the P u e r t o Rican D e p a r t m e n t , as it was then called, were mostly Coast Artillery and Air Forces submarine p a t r o l units composed of regular army soldiers. Two or three units were placed on nearly every island in the department. A little later, a number of Air T r a n s p o r t Command bases were constructed—the largest being a t Trinidad, Zandery Field in Dutch Guiana, and F o r t Reed in British Guiana. These bases were taken into the D e p a r t m e n t when it was enlarged in 1943 and renamed the Antilles D e p a r t m e n t . In 1942 jungle training centers f o r troops on their way to India were established in Puerto Rico and T r i n idad. Numerous A r m y Airways Communications System units and weather observation stations were also scattered through the islands and in the Guianas. A t the beginning of 1941 the Morale Branch recommended to the department commander, M a j o r General James L. Collins, t h a t he set u p a morale p r o g r a m similar to t h a t planned for the service commands in the United States and t h a t he employ a department librarian to supervise the l i b r a r y p r o g r a m . H e requested the Morale Branch to provide the librarian. Agnes Crawford was selected f o r the position. Formerly a county librarian in South Carolina and then assistant national director of the Federal W P A L i b r a r y P r o j e c t , she was familiar with government "channels" and had had ample experience in extension work, both in the field and as a headquarters administrator. When Miss Crawford arrived a t the department headquarters a t San J u a n , P u e r t o Rico, in M a y , 1941, she found a very run-down lib r a r y a t the Post of San J u a n , operated by untrained personnel, and containing one thousand volumes, mostly worn and out of date. T h e

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other posts in the department (nine in all) and the numerous a i r c r a f t warning stations and gun emplacements had virtually nothing. Miss Crawford's first tasks were to build up the military and reference collections of the department headquarters, to review, weed out, and catalogue the San J u a n post library and obtain a fresh stock of recreational books f o r San J u a n and the other posts. T h e first requisition for books was sent back to the United States in June, and about a thousand volumes in Spanish were purchased locally f o r the few units of Spanish-speaking troops then in the department. Centralized Service.—Miss Crawford's plan was to establish small basic recreational and reference libraries a t all posts of any size and to supplement the post collections and serve small isolated detachments by means of traveling libraries. In order to keep track of the department's library resources and to minimize duplication of p u r chases, a union catalogue of all the collections was to be maintained a t the department headquarters. T h e traveling libraries—fiber cartons containing thirty-five books each, principally fiction—were t o be circulated on P u e r t o Rico by t r u c k and among the outlying islands by plane. T h e use of trucks had to be abandoned a f t e r a few months: the roads were too narrow, too rough, and in the mountainous central p a r t of the island too precipitous. F o r t u n a t e l y , however, both General Collins and his successor, M a j o r General William S. Shedd, were actively interested in the library p r o g r a m , and they authorized the use of planes to t r a n s p o r t books between posts on P u e r t o Rico as well as between P u e r t o Rico and the outlying islands. Air t r a n s p o r t was used not only in filling inter-library loans of individual books and in circulating the small traveling libraries but also in moving entire library collections from the department headquarters to newly established bases. T h e Antilles D e p a r t m e n t , incidentally, was the only overseas area in which planes were used regularly f o r this purpose in serving other than Air Forces units. During her first months in the D e p a r t m e n t , Miss C r a w f o r d had only enlisted men and a few native civilian clerks to assist her. F u n d s were set aside f o r the payment of professional librarians, and while she was training her nonprofessional helpers, she conducted a recruiting campaign in the United S t a t e s by mail, writing in t u r n to the principal library schools and to the librarians recommended by them. Eventually ten professional librarians came to the department f r o m the United States. T h e first post librarian, Virginia Yates, arrived in the fall of 1941 and was assigned to Borinquen Field. She spent two months a t the department headquarters, first assisting in cataloguing

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the San Juan library and then, as the books for Borinquen began to arrive, cataloguing and processing her own collection. When she flew to Borinquen, at the beginning of 1942, she took with her a fully processed 2,500-volume collection, complete with catalogue and shelf list, leaving behind at the headquarters duplicate catalogue, shelf-list, and charging cards—the first two for the union catalogue and union shelf list, and the third to serve as an accession record and an inventory check list. The same procedure was followed when each new librarian came to the department. The books were ordered in advance by the department librarian, the newly appointed librarian processed and catalogued them at the headquarters, while being taught army procedures, and then took them with her to the post to which she had been assigned. The property records were kept at the department headquarters, which simply lent the books, as it were, to the individual posts. When the library records were audited each year, the auditor took the headquarters set of charging cards for each individual post to the post, made a physical check of the books on the shelves, and adjusted the records accordingly. Reference service was similarly centralized. I f a post library required a book which was not on its shelves, the librarian sent an air mail request to the department librarian, who in turn directed the nearest library which had a copy of the book to send it to the librarian who had made the request. Scholarly or out-of-print books not available in any of the department libraries were borrowed from the San Juan Public Library, the University of Puerto Rico Library, or the Library of Congress. In order to enable the post librarians to select their own books, Miss Crawford entered subscriptions to the Saturday Review of Literature and the Retail Bookseller for each library as it was established, and arranged to have the copies sent to them by air mail. Deliveries were none too regular, however, and it took a long time for the librarians to get their requests for new publications back to the department headquarters. Because of the slowness of the W a r Department's Special Services supply methods at this time, the "turnaround time" on book requisitions from Puerto Rico was from three to five months ; that is, this was the normal lapse of time between the mailing of the requisitions from the department and the arrival of the books at San Juan. To hold up the department requisitions for the latest publications until requests had come in from the outlying posts caused an equally long delay before the preparation of the requisitions. Since soldiers wanted the newest books, it proved more practicable for the

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department librarian simply to order numerous copies of new publications as soon as they were announced and then let the post librarians know what was available. They placed their magazine and newsp a p e r subscriptions direct, but they were entirely dependent on the headquarters f o r the selection and the procurement of books. As a matter of principle, a competent post librarian should be a better judge of the reading needs of the men at her post than the librarian a t the next higher headquarters, and the selection of books on the basis of her daily observation is a function of which she should not be deprived. But the difficulties of supply made centralized selection a necessity in this case. Between May, 1941, and the l a t t e r p a r t of 19-t-i approximately sixty thousand volumes were purchased and issued to the twenty libraries which had been established in the department, as well as about twelve thousand Victory Book Campaign contributions. The department also received about a dozen R B libraries in 1943, and all its air bases received periodical shipments of books from the A A F Technical Libraries depot at W r i g h t Field, Ohio. Both the R B libraries and the A A F shipments largely duplicated books already purchased, since neither the Technical Libraries depot nor the Library Section in the W a r Department gave advance notice to overseas theaters of the books it planned to purchase. The assignment of librarians to posts required more preliminary planning and negotiating than it did in the United States, since special arrangements usually had to be made for their quarters. Some commanders were indifferent or hostile to the idea of library service. B u t in dealing with them the department librarian had two very strong points in her favor. T h e p r o g r a m had the clearly expressed approval of the department commander, so t h a t the department directive authorizing the employment of librarians, while permissive in form, was practically mandatory in force. The other point was t h a t there were very few American women in the islands. The assignment of an American librarian to an island post was usually a much appreciated addition to its social life. T h e upshot was that the department librarian was able to make her own terms about the librarians' quarters and living conditions. No post received a librarian until these details were satisfactorily arranged, and if conditions deteriorated a f t e r the assignment of a librarian it was always possible to remove her and recommend t h a t no replacement be provided. In the main, conditions were good. Later Developments.—The

building up of the department's book

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stocks proceeded steadily throughout the war except for one long interruption. In the spring of 1942 the German submarine warfare against American shipping was greatly intensified, and for more than a year very little shipping from the United States reached the islands. All supplies had to be flown in, and with the resultant crowding of air t r a n s p o r t there was ; naturally, room only for essentials. T h e only books received from the United States between the spring of 1942 and the fall of 1943 were the Book-of-the-Month Club subscriptions, which were dispatched by mail. In 1943, not long before water shipping from the United States was resumed, the Puerto Riean Department was enlarged to include Trinidad, the Lesser Antilles, and the Guianas and was renamed the Antilles Department. The newly acquired bases were almost destitute of reading matter. Some of the stations in the Guianas were so short of material t h a t even the army Newsmaps had to be copied on tissue paper by hand in order to make them available to outlying units. T h e small isolated weather stations and communications units, staffed with well-educated specialists, were entirely dependent on such books and magazines as the men had brought with them individually or received from home by mail. Trinidad had books—some 36,000 volumes, which the L i b r a r y Section had sent there the year before in response to urgent requests from some unit commanders—but in the absence of library personnel the books had been stored in a warehouse a t the island headquarters f o r safekeeping. Miss Crawford sent a number of traveling libraries to Trinidad and the Guianas and assigned a librarian to the Trinidad headquarters to act as supervisor f o r the entire region. This measure proved only p a r t l y successful, owing to a snarl in command channels: the responsible officer in Trinidad was unwilling to let the new Trinidad librarian act as a traveling supervisor outside his command area, and because of library accountability regulations similar objections were raised to the widespread distribution of books originally shipped to the Trinidad headquarters. A f t e r six months the department headquarters settled this "jurisdictional" problem by establishing two more library positions in the area. One librarian served as the Trinidad headquarters librarian, another acted as field supervisor f o r the outlying bases on the island, and the third, stationed a t Zanderv Field, supervised all bases in the Guianas. Service for Spanish-Language Troops.—In the early years of the war relatively few units in the department were composed solely of Spanish-speaking troops. A f t e r 1943, however, the number of English-

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speaking units was reduced, and t h a t of Spanish-speaking units g r e a t l y increased. Heretofore, Puerto R i c a n g i r l s had been employed a t some libraries as clerical assistants, but now it was nece s s a r y , both for p r a c t i c a l and social reasons, to train them to serve a s r e g u l a r librarians. W i t h the co-operation of the Puerto Rico Commissioner of Education, arrangements were made to give a one-semester course in l i b r a r y service to students in their last y e a r a t the University of Puerto Rico. The university l i b r a r i a n s prepared a syllabus with the aid of the department librarian and the l i b r a r i a n of the P u e r t o Rico Department of Education. The course was given by the university l i b r a r y staff in the spring of 1944, with the p a r t - t i m e assistance of several army librarians. American librarians continued to serve a t posts housing both English and Spanish-speaking troops, but posts with only Spanish-speaking troops were served t h e r e a f t e r by Puerto R i c a n librarians alone. U n f o r t u n a t e l y , only three of the Puerto R i c a n librarians were professionals and therefore eligible to be paid the same s a l a r y a s the lib r a r i a n s from the United S t a t e s . T h e others (ten in all by the end of 1 9 4 4 ) had to be hired as subprofessionals a t a lower r a t e of p a y . Miss Crawford feared t h a t in the f u t u r e a l a t e r department commander, influenced by shrinking personnel funds, might decide to employ only subprofessional librarians for the post positions. This step was taken shortly a f t e r the end of the w a r , when all professional librarians from the United States, except the department l i b r a r i a n , were dismissed and replaced by Puerto Rican subprofessionals or professionals reduced to a subprofessional r a t i n g . The selection of reading material in the Spanish l a n g u a g e presented some problems. It was p r a c t i c a l l y impossible to buy books in q u a n t i t y through the Puerto Rican bookstores ; the size of the a r m y orders and the paper work involved were too much for them. Moreover, the books were cheaply made and very short-lived. Miss Crawford had to purchase most of her books from stores in Mexico C i t y , Cuba, and New Y o r k . Eight thousand Spanish-language volumes were purchased in the l a t t e r p a r t of 1943 and about twelve thousand volumes in each of the next two y e a r s . P a r t of this material was used for traveling libraries, and the rest was issued to the individual posts. As many of the educated Puerto R i c a n s read English by preference, a good deal of the Spanish-language material was for low literates. The librarians were surprised to discover that the most popular American authors in Spanish translation were those who wrote for the schoolgirl, or at best the housewife, m a r k e t : Grace Livingston

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Hill, Lloyd Douglas, Kathleen Norris, and Berta Ruck. Berta Ruck was more popular than Zane Grey. Poetry, psychology, and idealistic romances by Latin American authors were the most popular of all. Even in action stories the Puerto Ricans preferred color, romance, and f a n t a s y — D u m a s and Verne, for example—to the hardboiled fiction which the continental Americans read. The Spanish collections also included a rounded selection of subject interest books, of which the most in demand were simplified works on mechanics and mathematics. Spanish-language magazine sets were provided. Bulk subscriptions were placed for popular magazines and comic books published in P u e r t o Rico, Cuba, and South America. The magazines were delivered to five or six of the larger post libraries in Puerto Rico and Trinidad. T h e librarians at these posts assembled the magazines into weekly and monthly sets according to the frequencj' of issue and dispatched them to the Spanish-speaking units in the area. A f t e r Miss Crawford returned to the United States in the fall of 1944, the position of department librarian was filled in turn by Sally Boyd and Delia Shore during the last year of the war. With trained librarians a t the larger posts, fairly adequate book stocks, and close relations between the headquarters and the field, the department continued to provide a library service which was in most respects equal to t h a t provided in the service commands in the United States and in some respects (personnel supervision, inter-library lending, and the handling of property records) even better. Its only serious weaknesses during the war period were the restriction of book selection to the headquarters office and the slow delivery of books from the United States—both conditions which could hardly have been remedied. THE

PANAMA

CANAL

DEPARTMENT

The Panama Canal Department was about as extensive geographically as the Antilles D e p a r t m e n t ; although the bulk of its troops were stationed along the canal, the department also included air bases as f a r away as Guatamala, Ecuador, and the Galapagos. Centrally directed library service was established in the department in the summer of 1942, when Carl William Hull, formerly head of the DuBois, Pennsylvania, Public L i b r a r y , was appointed department librarian on the recommendation of the Library Section of the W a r D e p a r t ment. Mr. Hull served until his return to the United States in the summer of 1944, when he was replaced by Dr. Hervey P. Prentiss, an educator who had previously been librarian of the University of

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Panama. When Dr. Prentiss returned to the United States in 1 9 4 6 , he was succeeded by Mrs. Hallie F . Moran, previously librarian of F o r t Kobbe, which had the largest post library in the department. When Mr. Hull made his first tour of the department's installations, in the summer of 1942, he found book collections of sorts a t ten or twelve posts. Several air bases had fairly good technical and recreational collections, but most of the books in the department dated from the last war. Mr. Hull described them as "worn out, mildewed, wormeaten and generally depressing." As in the Antilles Department, the first tasks of the department librarian were to weed out the worthless material and replace it with new books requisitioned from the United States and to arrange for the employment and the training of full-time civilian librarians. There was more local autonomy in the Panama Canal Department library service than in that of the Antilles Department. The department librarian selected and requisitioned books through regular supply channels (between 3 0 , 0 0 0 and 4 0 , 0 0 0 volumes were purchased in the first two years), but with respect to the organization of libraries at the individual posts his function was purely advisory. Civilians were hired locally, or enlisted librarians were assigned, depending on the wishes of the installation commanders. Only a few of the librarians were professionals ; the rest were instructed in library procedures and in army paperwork by the department librarian on his periodical tours of inspection. Of the twenty-one libraries in the department in the summer of 1944, thirteen were operated by civilians, four by full-time enlisted men, and four by part-time enlisted men. The libraries varied in size from one thousand five hundred to five thousand volumes. Red Cross Gray Ladies handled the circulation of books to the wards in the two large army hospitals in the department, but both the books and the supervision of the service were provided by the army. The quality of the library service at the posts depended, of course, upon two variable factors—the ability of the librarians, only a few of whom had had formal training—and the attitude of the commanders. F o r t Kobbe and some other posts in the Canal Zone gave professionally operated service on a par with that of the better posts in the United States and in the Antilles. Service in the outlying posts was more in the nature of an improvisation. B u t these posts were not left entirely to their own devices. They were visited regularly by the successive department librarians, and they were able to obtain new books. The initial collections had been provided from the material requisitioned from the United States in 1942 and 1943. At the recommenda-

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tion of the department librarians, these collections were generally replenished by purchases from local funds. The posts set aside from $ 2 5 to $ 1 5 0 a month for books, and orders were placed direct with book jobbers in the United States. The usual interval between the ordering and the delivery of the books was about six weeks—only a third as long a time as it took to obtain books by requisitioning through official channels. In other words, the procurement system used by a few posts in the Alaskan Department was applied generally throughout the Panama Canal Department. The difference was that the latter department had a full-time library specialist whose j o b it was to find out the posts' needs and to help to fill them. I t was a matter of convincing the local commanders that a regular supply of books was needed, showing the local librarians how to obtain them, and then returning to the posts periodically to give whatever additional help was needed. T H E C E N T R A L PACIFIC AREA

At the beginning of the war there were ten army libraries in the Department of Hawaii, as it was then called. 1 All of them were located on Oahu, the principal island of the Hawaiian group. The largest library was at Schofield Barracks. I t contained about forty thousand volumes, many of which had been there since the end of the last war. The other libraries had collections ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand volumes. There was no real library organization— merely some scattered collections of old books, usually housed in post recreation buildings or dayrooms. The civilian department librarian was, in f a c t , simply the post librarian of Schofield Barracks. From the attack on Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, until the great naval battle of Midway, the following June, the Hawaiian islands were believed to be in imminent danger of invasion. Thousands of civilians were evacuated to the mainland, and nearly ninety percent of the troops previously stationed at the old army garrisons on the islands were sent out to artillery positions and observation posts in the mountains and on the beaches. Once the positions were established, the troops who manned them had little to do after duty time. They were completely cut off from the recreational facilities of the towns and the regular posts, and in the absence of any work but observation and drilling, their morale was none too good. The Assistant Chief of Staff of the department, Colonel William W . J e n a , believing that the distribution of reading matter would relieve the boredom of the field troops, decided to establish a department

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library section and began to look for an officer to take charge of it. A review of personnel classification cards revealed that First Lieutenant Leon B. Poullada, a reserve officer then commanding an antia i r c r a f t battery, had worked as assistant librarian and librarian of the Southwestern University law library when he was a student there. He was offered the assignment and endeavored to decline it. If he was to be removed from his field command to a staff job, he would have preferred one in which his legal experience would be utilized. The lib r a r y j o b was given to him in spite of his evident reluctance. A few weeks later Colonel J e n a , the one high-ranking officer in the department who then fully appreciated the potential morale value of library service, was transferred to another overseas theater. T h u s , at the beginning of June, 1942, Poullada found himself in charge of an activity with a small staff (one civilian librarian and two enlisted men), almost no suitable material to work with, and, once Colonel Jena was gone, no active official backing. Although he had had personal reasons for not wanting the assignment, Poullada actually was well qualified for it. He had a really fervent belief in the morale and educational value of reading, he was a first-rate organizer, and thanks to his library experience in law school, he knew much more about library practices than did the average nonprofessional administrator. Poullada's first action was to present to department headquarters a plan f o r expanding the existing post library facilities, establishing centralized procurement and processing, providing mobile service for field units, and making hospital library service (then handled independently by the Red Cross) p a r t of the general department library program. Since the plan entailed the use of building materials, transportation, and military personnel, in all of which critical shortages existed, it was disapproved. The most Poullada could do f o r the moment was to distribute to the field positions some seven thousand books which had been discarded from the Schofield Barracks library as unfit for f u r t h e r use. He afterwards regretted t h a t he had done even this. The books were placed in apple crates and issued to the ration trucks which came in to Schofield Barracks periodically to obtain food. The books were obsolete to begin with, and by the time they reached the units they were needlessly dirty and damaged as well, due to careless handling. T h e reaction of the soldiers was that if this was library service, they did not want any. The first real improvement came when a shipment of twenty-one thousand Victory Book Campaign books was received, in October,

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1942. A f t e r weeding, only a third of them were found to be fit f o r distribution, but the mere fact t h a t such a large q u a n t i t y of books was on hand gave the library officer a talking point when he repeated his request f o r men and vehicles. T h e library h e a d q u a r t e r s ' enlisted strength was increased to five men, and a weapons carrier was turned over to it f o r use as a book truck. T h e next step was to obtain s t u r d y cases in which to pack the books, so t h a t they could be rotated from unit to unit with a minimum of wear and t e a r and exposure to the elements. A portable library unit was designed which could be securely closed when being transported and when open displayed its complete contents, consisting of f o r t y hardbound books, f o r t y paperbound books, and twenty magazines. B u t lumber was still in very short supply, and when Poullada requested material f o r the building of five hundred portables he was almost forcibly ejected from the office of the D e p a r t ment G-4 (supply chief). Eventually the five hundred portables were constructed by a civilian c o n t r a c t o r f r o m s c r a p lumber. E a r l y in 1943 the department library headquarters began to distribute these portable libraries, filled with Victory Book Campaign books and new paperbound and hardbound books received f r o m the W a r D e p a r t ment, to all field positions on the island of Oahu. Both men and commanders were favorably impressed by the neat appearance of the kits and the newness of most of their contents, and regular field service, with monthly rotation of the portables f r o m unit to unit, was begun. T r a n s p o r t a t i o n was provided by the library headquarters. A few months later portable library service was extended both to the other islands in the Hawaiian g r o u p and to the Army Airways Communications System units on the Line Islands. Distribution of portables and larger collections in the three largest of the outer H a waiian islands—Maui, Hawaii, and Kaui-—was handled with the cooperation of the civilian county librarians on those islands. T h e y supplied the trucks and professional supervision while the a r m y supplied fuel and enlisted men f o r the work of loading and unloading the trucks. This joint system continued until the library headquarters was able to send civilian supervisors of its own to the outer islands, in 1944. Post and Hospital Service.—As the battle of Midway ( J u n e , 1942) receded into the past, it gradually became clear t h a t it had been a turning p o i n t ; the possibility of a J a p a n e s e invasion became more and more remote. T r o o p s began to reach the islands in increasing numbers, shipping from the mainland was opened up to supplies other than essential military items, and among many other things books

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became more plentiful. T h e increase both in t r o o p strength and in the supply of reading m a t t e r lent weight to the library officer's constant requests f o r full-time civilian post librarians. I n the fall and winter of 1942 he was authorized to hire five civilians in addition to the one already on duty. All but one were professionals. D u r i n g the same period the Red Cross was induced to accept army supervision in the hospital libraries. Of the six civilian librarians, f o u r were assigned to the larger posts, one was appointed supervisor of hospital service, and one was appointed supervisor of post service. A library manual was prepared and immediately p u t to use by the hospital supervisor in training the Red Cross G r a y Ladies. Within a few months arrangements were made to give similar instruction to the enlisted men who operated the libraries not staffed by professionals. The number of enlisted men a t the library headquarters was increased to nine. Staff Sergeant Carl Ficker acted as office chief under Poullada and handled most of the p a p e r work connected with requisitioning books and supplies ; five men took care of service to field posts and the outlying islands; and there were two bookbinders and one carpenter. All the military personnel, the post supervisor, and the Schofield Barracks librarian worked together unloading, processing, and c a t a loguing books whenever a shipment was received from the mainland. By F e b r u a r y , 1943, there were sixty-three thousand volumes in the 21 post and 19 hospital libraries in the islands, plus about twenty thousand volumes in the portable libraries. Nearly everything Poullada had asked f o r and been denied in June, 1942, had been achieved, or a t least commenced with official approval, by the end of the following J a n u a r y . All libraries in the islands were under unified, if sometimes remote, control, professional service or supervision was provided for the larger posts and hospitals, the field units were receiving new portables with f a i r regularity, book stocks were on the rise, a bindery was in operation, t r a i n i n g was provided for nonprofessionals, and the central cataloguing of books was soon to be started. 2 The basis for the official approval of every one of these steps was a concise and clearly written " j u s t i f i c a t i o n " demonstrating t h a t a real need existed, proposing a means of meeting it, and indicating precisely what the means would " c o s t " in money, supplies, and personnel. Poullada's courtroom experience was not wasted in his library assignment. H e presented his cases convincingly, t a k i n g nothing for granted—least of all t h a t the value of a library p r o j e c t would, or should, be self-evident to a layman.

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The next two years and a half saw a number of important new developments : the professional staff was greatly increased by the employment of librarians from the mainland; a new method of obtaining books was developed, which at first supplemented requisitioning on the War Department and eventually overshadowed i t ; a new type of service was provided for the task forces that began to use Hawaii as a staging area; provisions were made for servicing task forces after their departure on their combat missions; and out of the latter activity proceeded the extension of professional service to the new command in the Marianas. Librarians.—Poullada constantly urged on his superiors the need for employing more professional librarians. As the book stocks at the various posts increased, new positions were authorized, until by the middle of 1945 there were 34 professional librarians in the Hawaiian and Marianas Islands, and a total of 45 authorized positions. Most of the librarians were recruited from the United States, the chief sources, other than United States Army posts, being the School of Librarianship of the University of California and the University of Wisconsin Library School. Funds for the payment of the librarians were held at the Central Pacific headquarters instead of being allotted to the individual posts; thus the library headquarters retained control over all civilian library personnel, and the librarians could be moved from one assignment to another according to current needs. Each new librarian spent a month at the headquarters after her arrival and attended the training course as part of her orientation. Thereafter she was assigned to one of the vacant positions. Monthly meetings were held to acquaint all librarians with new developments, and in the intervals between meetings the libraries were visited by traveling supervisors from the library headquarters. Thanks to this centralized control and the close liaison between the "field" and the headquarters, service at all posts was kept at a fairly uniform level. If a librarian could not sell her program to the post commander, the traveling supervisor might be able to do so. I f a librarian and her commander clashed, another librarian, selected by the library headquarters, could be sent to the post with a full knowledge of the situation. Thus, it rarely happened that service was completely stymied at a post merely because of poor relations between the commander or Special Services officer and the first librarian who happened to be sent there. Thanks to the monthly meetings, even the librarians on the outlying islands were not completely cut off from other people doing the same sort of work, as many of the post librarians in the United States were.

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In 1943 the supervisory system in the principal island, Oahu, was functional. There was a supervisor for post libraries (Olive Duffy), one for hospital libraries (Ethel Hill), and one in charge of the rotation of portable libraries (Jane Fairweather). Supervision on the outer islands was geographical, each civilian county librarian overseeing all service in her area. Experience showed that the functional arrangement on Oahu involved a considerable waste of time and transportation, since all three supervisors had to visit all parts of the island regularly. In 1944 it was abandoned for a purely geographical division of responsibility. Miss Fairweather was designated executive librarian, and Ficker supply chief, at the headquarters, and two supervisors were appointed for the island—Jane McClure for the southern half and Jeanette Sledge for the northern half—each supervisor being responsible for all types of libraries in her sector. Each of the outer islands was given a single army librarian supervisor, replacing the non-army county librarians. Mary Walther was assigned to Hawaii, Sarah Whelan to Kaui, and Sheila Dove to Maui. Procurement.—Books for portables and the initial collections of new libraries were provided by the library headquarters, but post and hospital libraries depended largely on local funds for the maintenance of their collections. The library headquarters recommended that books be replaced at the rate of 5 percent of the total collection per month, and the commanders were generally liberal in allotting local—that is, nonappropriated—funds for this purpose. But it was not long before the purchases made by post librarians began to create a serious problem for the Hawaiian booksellers: the librarians frequently bought up all their stocks of new bestsellers and made it impossible for them to supply their regular customers. This awkward situation was relieved by an agreement made in the spring of 1943 between the library headquarters, Patten's Book Store and the Honolulu office of Henry M. Snyder & Company, an American book exporting firm. The New York office of the Snyder Company sends annotated lists of forthcoming books to its overseas branches from three to four months before publication. These lists are transmitted to the local bookstores, which thus can place advance orders for books and obtain them very shortly after publication. The agreement was as follows. The monthly "Snyder letters" containing the annotated lists of books were to be made available to the library headquarters. There the lists and annotations were revised and somewhat condensed for the army librarians, mimeographed, and sent to all posts and hospitals. The librarians checked the books they

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wanted and wrote in additional titles if they so desired. The librarians' book orders were returned to the library headquarters within a week or ten days, consolidated, and transmitted in turn to Patten's, the Snyder offices in Honolulu and New York, and the publishers of the books. On publication, the books were mailed bv the publishers direct to P a t ten's. Patten's broke down the shipments according to copies of the original post and hospital orders which had been forwarded to the store along with the consolidated order. The librarians sent jeeps or trucks to pick up the books and made payment at the same time. An important p a r t of the agreement was that only books not included in the Snyder lists were to be ordered from the other bookstores on Oahu, thus saving the latter from unexpected " r u n s " on their limited supplies of new titles. T h e Patten-Snyder arrangement was used chiefly for the purchase of new publications. Reprints and replacements f o r worn-out books were requisitioned from the W a r Department through official channels. The "turnaround time" on these requisitions was from four to six months; on the Snyder orders, from six to ten weeks. Thus, notwithstanding an otherwise highly centralized system, the librarians at individual stations were able to do much of their own book selecting. The army versions of the Snyder lists ran to one hundred or more titles, of which about half were usually annotated; material not mentioned there could be traced through the bibliographical aids available at the posts, the library headquarters, or the Library of Hawaii. Books for portable libraries and the initial collections for new libraries were acquired by the library headquarters both by requisition on the W a r Department and by purchases through Patten's and Snyder. As explained in Chapter VIII, individual books were among the many " n o n s t a n d a r d " items on which only 10 percent of a theater's Special Services credit could be expended, and consequently the number of books t h a t could be requisitioned by title from the W a r Department was limited. During 1943 and 1944 the great m a j o r i t y of headquarters acquisitions were purchases made through the Patten-Snyder channel and paid for from F D G A funds (the allotment made to theater commanders for spot purchases of any supplies which could not be obtained by requisition on the W a r Department). This use of F D G A funds by the library headquarters was terminated in 1945 on the grounds t h a t these allotments to theater commanders could be spent only for goods produced outside the United States. Thereafter only orders payable from nonappropriated funds—that is, the post and hospital orders—were placed with Patten's.

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In F e b r u a r y , 1943, as we have seen, there were roughly 83,000 volumes in the Central Pacific libraries, including portables. B y the end of 1944 the total book stock was nearly four times as g r e a t : 1,000 portable libraries of 40 volumes each, 70-odd field libraries of 500 t o 1,000 volumes each, and 40 post and hospital libraries averaging 5,000 volumes each—a g r a n d t o t a l of 300,000 volumes, with little more duplication of titles t h a n the interests of the men and the popularity of individual books warranted. Both the difference in quantity and the relative variety of titles were due largely t o the P a t t e n - S n y d e r arrangement. Service to Task Forces.—From the summer of 1943 until the end of the war, the primary mission of the Central Pacific Area was the training and staging of task forces f o r assaults on islands to the westward. T h e large concentrations of troops comprising the t a s k forces (usually one or more full divisions) could not be adequately served with the portable libraries, which were suitable only f o r small isolated units. Service was provided to the divisions in training by means of field libraries. One or more tents, Quonset huts, or other prefabricated buildings were reserved as libraries f o r each aggregation of troops and stocked with five hundred or a thousand books each, plus magazines and, a f t e r the end of 1943, Armed Services Editions. One or two enlisted men on the staff of the division Special Services officer were designated unit librarians and given a training course a t the library h e a d q u a r t e r s ; t h e r e a f t e r they depended on the island library supervisors for guidance. By the fall of 1944 there were more t h a n seventy field libraries scattered through the islands. They varied considerably in usefulness according to their contents, the ability of the enlisted librarians, and the interest of the unit Special Services officers. An officer who was stationed at the 13th Replacement Depot ( a few miles from Schofield B a r r a c k s ) in the fall of 1944 remarked t h a t the Schofield B a r r a c k s library was excellent in all respects, b u t t h a t the field library in his immediate area was open only a few days a week and was "strictly r a n d o m " as t o contents. The " b i g d a y s , " he reported, were when Armed Services Editions were distributed. A t best, the field libraries were a good a t t e m p t to solve a problem t h a t was never satisfactorily resolved: the provision of library service, as distinguished from simple book distribution, to large concentrations of troops in temporary quarters a t a distance from normal post facilities. Makin and Kwajalein.—When the invasion of the Gilbert Islands was planned, in the summer of 1943, it was assumed t h a t Special Services supplies need not be sent to Makin Island, the a r m y objective,

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until D-Day plus 90—three months after the initial assault. The Special Services officer of the 27th Division which made the attack on Makin discovered, however, that there was a real need for reading matter not only on the voyage out but even during the period before fighting on the island had ceased. By D plus 90 the combat troops who had taken the island were on their way back to Hawaii, so that the only men who benefited by the tardy distribution of recreational supplies were the members of the holding force, and they were usually too busy with construction and supply work to have much time for recreational activities. As a result of the Makin experience, when the 27th and 7th Divisions attacked Kwajalein in J a n u a r y , 1944, they carried Armed Services Editions and magazine sets with them, some for deck use, some for use during the combat phase; and plans were made to send in portable libraries on D plus 10 and 500-volume field libraries on D plus 30. The plans were carried out, but both the library headquarters and the divisional Special Services officers had reckoned without the hazards of moving the material from the troop transports to the shore. The landing barges shipped a great deal of water, and since the portable libraries and the crates containing the field libraries had not been waterproofed, their contents were soaked and useless by the time they were landed. The Special Services officers sent an SOS for more books, but once again it was D plus 90 before usable books got to the island. The Marianas.—The first invasion force that was adequately supplied with reading matter both on the voyage out and after the landing was t h a t which went into the Marianas in the early summer of 1944. The divisions carried Armed Services Editions and magazines with them, and the packages not to be used until after landing were adequately waterproofed. Portable libraries followed on D plus 10, and field libraries on D plus 30. U p to D plus 30, book distribution was to be controlled by the divisional Special Services officers; thereafter it was to be the responsibility of the Special Services officers of the garrison force—that is, the Army Service Forces "housekeeping" command—on each island. Prefabricated buildings for library use were included in the construction plans for each island, and arrangements were made to provide replacements for the field libraries at the rate of 5 percent per month. The plan was carried out successfully through D plus 30. But during the fall and winter of 1944 it became evident that distribution within the islands was not working well. In some cases portables and field libraries lay for weeks in storage depots after they reached the

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Marianas, while a t the same time unit Special Services officers protested to the Central Pacific library headquarters t h a t they had received no reading matter. One unit in Guam obtained an 800-volume library by sending the money f o r it (about $1,300) to the San F r a n cisco News Companj' and requesting the Ninth Service Command L i b r a r y Depot to select the books. W i t h thousands of service troops and the steadil}- expanding "20th Air Force, the islands were rapidly becoming a small theater of operations in themselves. Tinian had 50,000 t r o o p s by the spring of 1945, and there were many more both on Guam and on Saipan. L i b r a r y service to t r o o p s in these numbers could not be handled as an incidental Special Services supply function. E a r l y in the fall of 1944, a t the instance of the library headquarters, the Chief of Special Services in the Central Pacific Area offered to send a g r o u p of professional librarians to the Marianas, to organize and operate library service. 3 This offer was followed, according to Poullada, by a "diplomatic t u g - o f - w a r " which lasted for six months. The principal M a r i a n a s headquarters recognized the need f o r library service, but it definitely did not want to assume the responsibility of bringing female army employees into the islands. Not all the J a p a nese units had surrendered, and the mopping u p process continued throughout 1 9 4 5 ; on all three islands a few fugitive bands were still at large as late as 1946. Conditions were extremely primitive, and a tremendous construction and supply j o b was under way. Bringing in women librarians meant special quartering, mess, and g u a r d arrangements. H u n d r e d s of nurses and women Red Cross workers were already on the islands, but nurses were military personnel for whom definite arrangements had been made, and the Red Cross workers were, in theory, the responsibility of the command's Red Cross field director, not of the army. Poullada pointed out t h a t in reality the army was j u s t as responsible for the Red Cross civilians as it would be for the handful of librarians he proposed to send out. Moreover, since the librarians were directly subordinate to military a u t h o r i t y they should cause even less difficulty t h a n civilians employed by a non-armv agency. The M a r i a n a s h e a d q u a r t e r s finally yielded, and once it accepted the librarians, it was a n y t h i n g but g r u d g i n g in the s u p p o r t it gave them. Nine librarians flew out to the M a r i a n a s in May, 1945. Jeanette Sledge, the chief of the g r o u p went to Saipan with three other librarians ; M a r v YValther and two others went to G u a m ; and S a r a h Whelan and Edmee Hanchey to Tinian. They were provided with everything f r o m floor plans and charging desk designs to the latest Snyder

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lists, but their best equipment was their previous experience in overseas l i b r a r y work. Conditions differed on the three islands, but the general practice was f o r each librarian t o operate a central l i b r a r y near a command o r subcommand headquarters and to supervise f r o m f o u r t o a dozen o r more branches operated by enlisted men in the subordinate units. T h e librarians usually had more than a little trouble obtaining the p r e f a b r i c a t e d buildings earmarked f o r l i b r a r y use in the construction plans. T h e t r o o p strength on the islands was g r o w i n g steadily, and obviously hospital, barracks, and office buildings were needed more urgently than l i b r a r y buildings. M a r y W a l t h e r tells of having a building set up as the l i b r a r y f o r a bombardment wing only to have it disapp e a r overnight before the books and equipment could be moved into it. Days later, we found it in use as a squadron headquarters. Finding it was a feat in itself, when every building was in a row and every row was just like the next one. Getting it back was even harder, but the squardon C.O. finally consented to give us another of his buildings after he had faced two irate ladies several days in succession. T h e l i b r a r y buildings were usually 20 x 4 6 - f o o t Quonset huts o r p r e f a b r i c a t e d frame structures. W h e n Quonset huts were used, the windows in one wall were eliminated t o make room f o r shelving. I n some cases, covercd porches were built on the other side of the building. Chairs and tables were built by the island engineer units; salvage rep a i r units provided cushions f o r the chairs. I n general, anyone who came near a library under construction was likely t o be d r a f t e d as a handyman. Paint, varnish, material f o r curtains, and other " e x t r a s " were obtained by " s c r o u n g i n g " and c a j o l e r y . F o r such articles the librarians could draw not only 011 the a r m y engineers but also on the navy's Seabees, who were generally both well supplied and amenable to persuasion. T h e construction plan at Saipan called f o r one Quonset hut l i b r a r y f o r each unit of a thousand men. T h e unit commanders, however, had t o be induced to put the buildings up and assign enlisted men to operate the libraries. Some were inclined to say, " L e t the R e d Cross do i t , " but most accepted the idea t h a t the unit library should be a r m y operated and army-controlled. A c c e p t a n c e was made easier f o r them by the plain fact that the p r o g r a m had the backing of the Saipan headquarters which, in June, had become headquarters f o r the entire command, now designated the W e s t e r n Pacific Base Command. On Saipan units of less than 1,000 men were furnished field libraries of about five hundred volumes on a six-weeks rotation schedule. I f specific

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titles n o t available in the traveling collection were desired, they were obtained f r o m t h e h e a d q u a r t e r s l i b r a r y on i n t e r - l i b r a r y loan. T h e h e a d q u a r t e r s l i b r a r y , incidentally, consisting of two connected s t r u c tures, each 120 feet long and made broader t h a n normal by the addition of p o r c h e s , was one of the largest buildings on the island and p r o b a b l y the most handsome. T h e other islands had similar r o t a t i o n schemes f o r small units. N o t n e a r l y enough l i b r a r y buildings had been allowed f o r in the c o n s t r u c t i o n p l a n . Guam had been allotted five, yet the librarians discovered t h a t fully twenty-six were needed if book collections were to be made available in all p a r t s of the island. Miss W a l t h e r writes t h a t the l i b r a r i a n s g o t in touch with all organizations and agreed to put in libraries as soon as they could furnish covering which would keep books dry during most of the heaviest rains. The results were amazing. In no time at all, fellows called us to come and see if their handiwork would do. We found everything from tents to elaborate woven palm structures and modernistic buildings . . . built out of scrap lumber and reinforced with parts of old planes (sheet metal and "blisters" were the favorites). We accepted almost everything they had to offer and gave them the books. Service to the planes which were bombing J a p a n was an i m p o r t a n t p a r t of the l i b r a r i a n s ' work. T h e round t r i p on a bombing mission might t a k e f r o m twelve to eighteen hours, and some of the men on the plane crews h a d ample time f o r reading. It would be highly romantic [writes Miss Hanchey] to tell you that we dashed down in a jeep and delivered reading matter just before each flight —but such was not the case. Getting a large number of B-29's off a field with the take-offs spaced only a couple of minutes apart was a complicated procedure, and usually only plane crews were allowed near the planes. However, the crew members always took along sufficient reading material —Armed Services Editions, magazines and clothbound books. Because many of the missions began a t night or e a r l y in the morning some libraries stayed open t w e n t y - f o u r hours a d a y , f o r the use of both g r o u n d and flight crews. A l t h o u g h the islands were not b a r e of books when the librarians arrived, there were not enough to stock more t h a n a few libraries adequately. Shipments of a p p r o x i m a t e l y five t h o u s a n d volumes f o r each of the three main islands were sent out f r o m H a w a i i directly a f t e r the librarians left. T h e y helped to stop the g a p until the librarians could obtain allotments of f u n d s and place their own orders. T h i s was done p r o m p t l y . T h e G u a m h e a d q u a r t e r s allotted $5,000 to the C e n t r a l

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Pacific Area l i b r a r y headquarters in J u n e f o r the purchase of books through P a t t e n ' s and Snyder, and Saipan made a similar allotment of $20,000. T h e books began to arrive from the United States in September. L a t e r in the summer Miss Sledge, the chief librarian on S a i p a n , received an even l a r g e r g r a n t of local funds from the 20th Air F o r c e headquarters and went back to Hawaii to select the books and place the order a t P a t t e n ' s . A t the same time the Tinian headquarters also g r a n t e d local funds to a total of $5,000. Figures on total book stocks a r e not available, but it is evident t h a t they must have been reasonably large by the fall of 1945, when the staging of troops r e t u r n i n g to the United States became the principal function of many installations ( f o r a description of a post-hostilities staging area overseas see pages 2 0 1 - 2 0 3 below). Okinawa.—The largest task force staged in the Hawaiian Islands was t h a t which invaded Okinawa and the other islands in the R y u k y u s g r o u p in the spring of 1945. The nucleus of the force was the newly established T e n t h Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, previously commanding general of the Alaskan Dep a r t m e n t . T h e T e n t h Army numbered about one hundred thousand men when it landed on Okinawa; t h i r t y thousand had staged t h r o u g h H a w a i i ; the rest came direct from the United States and f r o m the South Pacific. T h e task force comprised three Marine divisions, in addition to the T e n t h Army, and plans for supplying the R y u k y u s had to take into account a total of three hundred thousand troops who were to be stationed there, a t least temporarily, a f t e r the islands were secured. F o r the Ryukyus were to become a staging area in t u r n , f o r the final t h r u s t against J a p a n in the spring of 1946. E a r l y in the summer of 1944 Poullada and Lieutenant Colonel J o h n T . Carlton, now the T e n t h Army Special Services officer, began to make plans for library service for the Ryukyus task force. T h e y were joined in the later stages of the planning by Lieutenant Colonel H a r o l d B. Bachman, Special Services officer of the Service Forces command which was to handle all supply functions in the Ryukyus. Poullada was responsible for providing the books, Carlton for scheduling their shipment to the Ryuk}-us (this included j u s t i f y i n g to certain key supply officers the desirability of supplying any books to combat soldiers), and Bachman f o r issuing them a f t e r they got there. Fifteen hundred portables and 20 field libraries, totaling 80,000 volumes in all, were to be prepared for the task force, plus 5,000 magazine sets, 2,500 sets of Armed Sex-vices Editions, and 500 P B kits. The magazines, A S E books and P B kits were for use on the voyage f r o m

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Hawaii to Okinawa (the men in the first assault waves were on the water thirty days and many others did not touch land for fully two months) and during the initial combat period. The portables were to be landed on D plus 10, and the field libraries on D plus 30, as was done in the Marianas campaign. A sergeant from the Central Pacific Area library headquarters was to be assigned to Bachman's staff to supervise the handling of the portables and field libraries, and several of the enlisted men in Bachman's section were sent to the library headquarters for training. I t was hoped that the project would be financed by a grant to the Tenth Army of several hundred thousand dollars from the Central Pacific Welfare Fund, which had accumulated a much greater amount in post exchange and motion picture service profits. This hope proved illusory, and the library headquarters had to draw on its own funds and materials, supplemented by requisitions on the W a r Department. The disappointment with respect to funds meant a considerable scaling down of the supply plan. I t was followed by a serious misadventure which entailed a further retrenchment. In August, 1944, two planes collided in mid-air, and one of them went down in flames on the warehouse in which the books for the Tenth Army were being accumulated. The library bindery and some twenty-five thousand volumes were destroyed. Within the next forty-eight hours a long requisition for books listed by title was prepared to replace the loss and sent to the W a r Department. The requisition was turned down because the cost of the books, added to other items which had been ordered by the Central Pacific Area Special Services office, exceeded the theater's 10 percent credit for nonstandard items. Since the projected size of the Tenth Army was classified as top secret, it had not been taken into account when the W a r Department Special Services Division made its credit allocations to the theaters for the fiscal year. The result was that the library headquarters had to cut down the Tenth Army's hardbound book allotment to 48,000 volumes—700 portables and 20 field libraries—and could draw on only two sources for this material: R B libraries and the Central Pacific Area post and hospital collections. The latter source provided 23,000 volumes—chiefly gift books and duplicates of popular titles—and fifty R B libraries dispatched from the United States furnished the rest. But since the R B ' s contained only five hundred titles among them, the duplication of titles in the portables and field libraries made up from them was much heavier than it should have been. The surplus books from the Hawaiian libraries, too, often duplicated the R B titles. Sergeant Ficker and a group of

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civilian librarians worked f o r four months assembling the sets of books in the only warehouse space available—a converted stable. When the task force left f o r the Ryukvus, in F e b r u a r y , 1945, it carried most of the expendable material which had been assigned to it in the original plan and about half the reduced number of portables and field libraries—360 of the former and 5 of the latter. The remaining sets were dispatched, some to Okinawa and some to the Philippines, in the summer and fall of 1945. T h e Armed Services Editions and magazines were p u t to good use on the voyage out. Instead of five thousand, nearly twenty-five thousand magazine sets were issued, and Colonel Bachman reported t h a t " a walk around the decks of any one of the t r a n s p o r t s a t any time of the day would reveal hundreds of men whiling away the hours with magazines and paperbound books." Carlton remarked t h a t he was mystified by the way this material disappeared f r o m day to day, since there were strict orders against throwing anything overboard. Some of the portables were issued to combat units while they were still in Hawaii, so t h a t they could c a r r y them in with their other equipment when they landed. The rest of the portables and the five field libraries were carried with the other Special Services cargo intended f o r the island. This material was transported from the ships to the beaches at intervals between early April, two weeks a f t e r the first assault on March 26, and the end of June. The principal harbor of Okinawa was blocked by sunken vessels, necessitating the unloading of cargo from the ships to light landing c r a f t and "ducks" several miles offshore; and both the ships and the landing c r a f t were f r e quently under attack by J a p planes. Although much material was lost in transit, the m a j o r i t y of the portables seem to have reached the shore. T h e P B kits did not f a r e so well; it would a p p e a r t h a t considerably fewer than half the original five hundred reached their destination. A central Special Services depot, consisting of tents, was set up as soon as the first Service Forces Special Services personnel landed, about two weeks a f t e r the initial attack. Motion pictures were shown as early as D plus 15. T h e portable libraries began to come in a t the beginning of May and were immediately issued to field hospitals and combat units. Each hospital consisted of a g r o u p of tents, one of which was reserved for movies and other recreational purposes. Books were taken to bed patients, but only the recreation tents were illuminated a f t e r dark, except when there were air raids. T h e combat units sent their own vehicles to the Special Services depot for recreational supplies, which were issued to them roughly

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in accordance with their strength. But generally the amount they obtained and the use they made of it depended on the initiative and interest of their own Special Services officers. I t was up to them to see that their units were properly supplied. I t was too fluid a situation to admit of close central control over distribution. In all, about 340 portable libraries were distributed by the end of J u n e (including those issued in Hawaii), along with the contents of eight P B kits, several hundred magazine sets, and a thousand miscellaneous magazines—all t h a t was left a f t e r the distribution on the transports. There was some pooling of reading material by groups of units and some rotation of portables; but there was too much duplication of titles to make rotation worth while a f t e r a unit had made one or two exchanges. Three of the 1,000-volume field libraries were issued to divisions, and in June two more were combined with a few portables to form a small base library for the island. Books from the base library were periodically exchanged with portable collections turned in by units seeking fresh material. Although they were not extremely plentiful, owing to the losses sustained in the landing operations, the paperbound books carried in the P B kits were more in evidence during the period of active combat than were the Armed Services Editions and the magazine sets, most of which had been consumed in deck use. There was the usual 60- to 90day lapse of time before the automatically issued material mailed from the Assembly Branch of the New York P o r t of Embarkation began to reach the Tenth Army units in their new location. The P B kits had been supplied in anticipation of this delay. The Armed Services Editions and magazine sets began to arrive in large quantities early in September. I t was f o r t u n a t e t h a t they came when they did, for the fifteen remaining field libraries and several hundred portables were still to be delivered, when the Special Services supply program for Okinawa became a V-J D a y casualty. Special Services supplies were carried as filler cargo on ships loaded with essential war material. A f t e r V-J Day much of the material then on the way to Okinawa was no longer required. Some ships were ordered back to their ports of origin while still en route; others reached the island, only to be sent back without being unloaded. The Special Services supplies on them (one ship contained 1,600 cases of Special Services material) were badly needed, but it would have been necessary to unload hundreds of tons of expensive equipment in order to get a t them, and the facilities for sheltering and reloading the unwanted equipment were inadequate. Nearly all of it would of necessity have

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been left to spoil on the beaches. I t was decided t h a t this loss could not be justified, and so the Special Services supply p r o g r a m f o r Okinawa was a b r u p t l y suspended. I t was not resumed on a regular basis until the following year. T h e Okinawa book-supply p r o g r a m was the only attempt made d u r ing the war to provide hardbound books in really large quantities t o units j u s t in and behind the fighting line. A little less than twenty thousand volumes were provided for a force of one hundred thousand men and p u t into use during the combat period. I t was more than was supplied to any other fighting forces, both in the total amount and in p r o p o r t i o n to the number of men. I t was still not enough: inevitably many units were insufficiently supplied, and some were not supplied a t all. B u t in the main the units whose Special Services officers wanted books and went a f t e r them did get them—and in more than token quantities. In spite of two heavy setbacks a t the beginning—the failure to obtain the necessary funds and the destruction of the Hawaii warehouse with all its stocks—and the a b r u p t shutting off of supplies a f t e r V-J Day, the p r o g r a m was reasonably successful. The books were distributed in combat conditions and they were used. The Okinawa experience proved t h a t it need not be considered t h a t hardbound books are suitable f o r distribution only in the rear areas of a theater. W i t h intelligent planning based on a knowledge of field conditions, full co-operation between the headquarters concerned, and a competent o p e r a t i n g staff, they can be brought up to fighting units on a stabilized f r o n t , and when they are issued to them, there is no doubt t h a t they will be used. Conclusion.—In J u l y , 1945, Poullada, now a m a j o r , was sent first to the Philippines and then back to the W a r Department to d r a f t plans f o r a library p r o g r a m f o r the army forces in the Western P a cific. J a n e Fairweather, the executive librarian, remained in charge pending the appointment of another library officer. E a r l y in the fall of 1945 Lieutenant Eugene McKnight was selected for this post. A college reference librarian before the war, he had served f o r some months as civilian assistant to the Ninth Service Command librarian p r i o r to his enlistment. When he was assigned as library officer, t r o o p strength was beginning to decline in the Hawaiian area, and d u r i n g the fall and winter some of the Central Pacific Area librarians were t r a n s f e r r e d to the Philippines, Korea, and J a p a n to take p a r t in developing the library p r o g r a m s in those areas. With the staging of t a s k forces a t an end, library service in Hawaii became more and more similar in its technical aspects to t h a t a t the posts in the United States.

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I t was possible to place greater emphasis than in the past on the formation of balanced collections and on reference work, readers' guidance, and normal library routines. Y e t the general administrative setup underlying these peacetime refinements remained pretty much as it had been during the war. The basic plan developed by Poullada and his professional assistants was a sound one, and it worked as well in the quiet postwar period as it had in the hecticly active years of 1 9 4 3 and 1944.

XIV

The European Theater THERE

WAS a widespread legend in other theaters that the soldiers—even the combat soldiers—in E T O (the European Theater of Operations) had the best of everything: more creature comforts, more "publicity," and weekends for everyone, first in London and later in Paris. The comments of the men who were there indicate that for most of them it was not so glamorous as that. Certain parts of Ireland, of Devonshire, even of France, it seems, were drearier day by day than anything the men there had ever known. No doubt Assam was absolutely worse; but they had not experienced Assam and did not appreciate their relative good fortune. There is a similar legend concerning library service in E T O . I t is true that an ambitious and well-planned theater-wide library program was put into operation, but this did not take place until the spring of 1945, and the civilian librarians who were the backbone of the program did not arrive in the theater until that summer. There is nothing ironical about the fact that the program did not get fully under way until after V-E Day. We have seen in earlier chapters the almost insurmountable obstacles that impeded the development of library service in theaters engaged in combat or in the preliminary build-up for combat. What matters is that the program had been established and had begun to operate at a time when it was badly needed—when V-E Day threw a large proportion of the three million troops in the theater into a state of psychological unemployment—sick of the present, with its apparently meaningless chores, and anxious about the future. The program could not possibly reach all—or even a large proportion—of the soldiers in the theater who might have benefited by i t ; there weren't enough books, libraries, or librarians for that, and there certainly was not enough time. But the service did reach a sizable fraction of the men for whom it was intended. Nothing comparable to this happened in any other combat theater directly after the cessation of hostilities. I t happened in E T O because, ultimately, E T O did have certain manifest advantages. Its supply line back to the United States was relatively short; and it certainly was the big army theater—and as such favored in troop strength, material,

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Theater

and public attention—for it was only there that the decisive blow against Germany could be struck. T h e development of library service in the theater owed something to these circumstances. More personnel in general meant more personnel in the theater Service Forces headquarters, including its Special Services Division. Thus it was possible for the theater Special Services Division to add a library officer to its staff when the need for a library officer was finally recognized. The library officer in turn eventually had a chance to build up a good staff of his own, and as a result the theater had a library program that was beginning to work in the field when hostilities ceased. Book distribution in the theater passed through three distinct stages. T h e first was pure makeshift: the theater headquarters provided few books, other than V B C donations, and no guidance for their use, and the units depended largely on what they could get from other sources—principally the Red Cross. In the second stage (fall, 1 9 4 3 spring, 1 9 4 5 ) books were handled by the theater headquarters separately from other Special Services items—given special handling and assembled into organized sets before being distributed—and at the same time plans were made for providing organized service. In the third stage, beginning in April, 1945, the quantity both of preassembled kits and of books in bulk was much increased, together with the size of the staff that handled them, special training was provided at the theater headquarters for enlisted unit librarians, and professional civilian librarians were brought into the theater to supervise the operation of libraries. THE

FIRST

PHASE

American troops began to move into Great Britain and Northern Ireland early in 1 9 4 2 ; more than 6 0 , 0 0 0 were in the United Kingdom by the end of that summer. There was the usual tripartite division of our forces—the Army Ground Forces (infantry, artillery, and other combat troops), the Army Service Forces (quartermaster, ordnance, medical, and other supply and housekeeping t r o o p s ) , and Army Air Forces; all Air Forces units in the theater were under the 8th Air Force, which made its first raid over Germany in J u l y of that year. ( T h e 9th Air Force did not move into England from the Middle E a s t until the fall of 1 9 4 3 . ) A Special Services office was established at the theater Service Forces headquarters in London to plan and supervise recreation and welfare activities for the troops and to act as the army's liaison

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agency with the American Red Cross headquarters in the United Kingdom. During this early period, the theater Special Services had neither the personnel, the material, nor the funds to take care of all the recreational and welfare needs of the troops. T h e Red Cross was better supplied with all three, and so, at the army's request, it was the Red Cross that built and operated recreational clubs, organized tours, dances, and other off-duty entertainment activities, and provided reading matter for soldiers in its clubhouses. I n October, 1 9 4 2 , most of the Ground Forces units which had been training in the United Kingdom and some of the Service Forces and Air Forces units left the United Kingdom in one of the three task force convoys which participated in the invasion of North Africa. Shortly before the task force sailed, the 29th Division arrived from the United States. F o r nearly a year its 1 5 , 0 0 0 men and the small administrative headquarters of the V Corps were the only Ground Forces troops in England. I t was not until the latter p a r t of 1 9 4 3 that additional Ground Forces units moved into England—the 5th, 4th, and 28th Divisions. Throughout the winter and the following spring Ground Forces, Service Forces, and A i r Forces troops streamed into the United Kingdom in ever-increasing numbers. B y D - D a y a total of 1,533,000 American soldiers were in the theater. F o r the reasons given in Chapter V I I I , the units that came to E n g land and Northern Ireland in 1 9 4 2 and 1 9 4 3 seldom possessed more reading matter than the individual soldiers happened to c a r r y with them. They were almost entirely dependent on Red Cross facilities for library service—the Aero Clubs located at Eighth Air F o r c e bases and service clubs or leave centers in towns near the Service and Ground Forces units. B y the middle of 1944 there were several hundred Red Cross clubs and centers in the United Kingdom. Most of the clubs had random collections of books acquired from various sources—Red Cross shipments from the United States, gifts from English communities, and Y B C books turned over to them by unit or command Special Service officers. The collections varied from mediocre to bad. This was only to be expected, as the clubs were designed and operated as recreational rooms, not as libraries. A further disadvantage was that the clubs for Service and Ground Forces units were frequently ten or more miles away from the camps where the troops were quartered. Even when they had usable collections, they were too f a r away to be used regularly. Y e t because they did exist, commanders were not encouraged to duplicate their facilities—largely, no doubt, because of

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the shortage of materials. The Air Forces units were somewhat better off, since they had clubs at their bases. B u t the Aero Clubs seldom had enough books, much less new books or organized collections. Toward the end of 19-12 the theater Special Services supply depot in South Wales received a large shipment of VBC books from the United States. E a r l y in 1943 it was announced to the units in the field that the books were available, and then they were issued on a firstcome-first-served basis. T h e 8th Air F o r c e units responded immediately ; they got the lion's share by the simple expedient of sending their own trucks to the depot to transport the books. Most of these books were placed in the Red Cross Aero clubs. Some of the Service Forces units were also well supplied, but owing to a confusion in channels between the theater Special Services headquarters, the V Corps, and the 29th Division, which was dependent upon the Corps for supplies, the 29th Division received none of the books. During its twenty months in England, this division apparently received no hardbound books at all through army channels. THE

"SPECIAL

SUPPLY"

PHASE

In August, 1 9 4 3 , M a j o r (later Lieutenant Colonel) Clarence Linton, chief of the Education Branch of the E T O Special Services headquarters, requested the theater chief of Special Services to let his office assume the responsibility for distributing reading material in addition to its other functions. One of the basic requirements of the education program was an adequate supply of textbooks and supplementary reading material, but Linton was experiencing great difficulty in getting the material he wanted. T h e best remedy seemed to be to make book distribution an Education Branch function and assign qualified personnel to handle it. Accordingly, Linton was authorized to establish a L i b r a r y Service Section in the Education Branch and to assign an officer with professional library experience as head of the section. Since no officers with such experience were then available for reassignment in the theater, the Special Services headquarters requested the W a r Department to send a properly qualified man. Lieutenant Irving Lieberman was eventually selected; he was transferred to the European Theater in J a n u a r y , 1944. As soon as he had been given authority to supervise book distribution in the theater, M a j o r Linton made a thorough inspection of the Special Services depot in South Wales. There he found a few thousand VBC books left over from the shipment received the preceding year and, in another section of the depot, a total of 2 0 0 , 0 0 0 new books in

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packing cases which had never been opened. H e had no idea when these books had arrived in the theater, and no one could enlighten him. The} - were j u s t there. In August, 1942, the L i b r a r y Section in the W a r Department had ordered 100,000 volumes which were to be sent with the Western Task Force when it invaded Africa. The task force convoy had room for only a small proportion of these books, and the remainder were sent to England a t the end of 1942. Apparently these books formed the nucleus of the stockpile Linton discovered the next summer. From time to time other shipments of books must have reached the depot and been similarly stored away. M a j o r Linton temporarily transferred a g r o u p of enlisted men from the Education Branch to the Special Services depot and set them to work sorting the books. After this preliminary sorting had revealed what titles and how many copies of each title were available, the books were assembled into library kits, designated L kits, for issuance to troop units in accordance with their strength. There were ten t3pes of L kits in all, varying in size from 500 fiction and nonfiction titles ( f o r divisions and other large units) to 35 titles f o r small isolated units. A circular letter describing the composition of the kits and announcing the strength basis on which they would be issued to requisitioning units was published to all Special Services officers in the theater in November, 1943. T h e letter stated t h a t special consideration was to be given to the needs of personnel in isolated stations, hospitals, and small units. The assembling of the L kits and the publication of the circular letter concerning them were the first really constructive measures of the theater Special Services headquarters in behalf of library service. The L Kit supply program enabled units to obtain small balanced collections around which larger libraries might conceivably be built, and the strength basis of issue ensured a moderately equitable distribution. Books had at last been recognized as a special type of supply item, and from that time on they were handled separately. But Linton and his staff were unable to go f u r t h e r than this in organizing library service. They were primarily concerned with the theater education program. They did not have the time to do the detailed planning, writing, and selling j o b t h a t was necessary in order to get an extensive library service program authorized in the first place and then to organize, staff, and operate it. Even Lieberman, who was brought over to the European Theater as a library specialist, became so encum-

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bered with his other Education Branch duties t h a t he could not devote himself effectively to planning for library service until he was permitted to establish a separate staff section exclusively for t h a t purpose. I t was too big and too complicated a j o b to be done on a p a r t time basis. PLANNING

A

SERVICE

PROGRAM

In April, 1944, Linton left the "operational" side of the Education Branch to become chief of the Post-Hostilities Education Planning Group. Lieberman, in addition to his other duties, was appointed librarian f o r the group, collecting educational material from American and British sources and assisting in the d r a f t i n g of plans. His principal contribution to the projected program was a f o r t y - p a g e manual for the guidance of unit librarians. The intention of both Linton and Lieberman was to make a centralized library service p r o g r a m an integral p a r t of the general post-hostilities education plan and to encourage the establishment of organized unit libraries wherever practicable while the war was still in progress. The libraries were to be set up in all units of 1,000 men ( t h a t is, of battalion size) and were to consist of a Textbook Kit (samples of all printed materials to be used in the education p r o g r a m ) , an R B L i b r a r y , an Army Vocational Information Kit (a set of vocational books and pamphlets issued by the Information and Education Division to Information and Education officers), and whatever other reading matter was on hand ( L kits, Armed Services Editions, magazines, etc.). Small, independent units were to have access to the nearest organized library whether or not they were administratively connected with the larger unit which operated it. T h e manual contained concise instructions on the processing and circulating of books, notes on space requirements and the dimensions of shelving, and directions on accountability records, classification, and cataloguing. I t also announced t h a t a course would be given for unit librarians at the Army Information and Education Staff School (the A I E S S ) which was then being set up. 1 The library service p r o g r a m could exist only on p a p e r until books in plenty were available and the training program f o r unit librarians went into effect. In August, 1944, Lieberman sent a requisition for 1,600 R B libraries to the W a r Department Special Services Division. Now, requisitions for R B libraries had to be justified, t h a t is, accompanied by a statement concerning their intended use. T h e justification for the E T O R B L i b r a r y requisition was t h a t the libraries were to be used in the post-hostilities education p r o g r a m . T h e procurement and

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fiscal officers of the Special Services Division pointed out that the expenditure of Special Service funds for an education program was unauthorized : the requisition must be forwarded to the Information and Education Division. This was done, but the only action the Information and Education Division could take was to send the theater one thousand Army Education P r o g r a m reference kits containing twenty volumes each. As reference kits they were excellent, but they certainly could not serve as basic library collections. The Information and Education Division did not have the means to supply such collections. When the requisition for R B libraries was disapproved on the technicality that the library program in ETO was an educational and not a Special Services activity, it became clear t h a t Lieberman's section would have to be transferred to the Special Services side of the ETO "Special and Information Services," as General Solbert's headquarters was then called, in order to give it access to W a r Department l i b r a r y funds and materials. It was decided that this organizational change should be made a f t e r the Special and Information Services headquarters moved to P a r i s in the fall of 1944. REORGANIZATION

T r a u t m a n came to ETO in the l a t t e r p a r t of October for ninety d a y s ' temporary duty. In addition to a survey of the distribution of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets which led to a sharp increase in the quantities produced, his principal missions were to see that an independent L i b r a r y Branch was established in ETO and adequately staffed, and to persuade the theater headquarters to requisition civilian camp librarians from the United States to operate the post-hostilities library program. 2 The L i b r a r y Branch was officially established in the second week of November and given an initial personnel allotment of two officers, four enlisted men, and four civilians ; and Lieberman, as branch chief, was promoted to the rank of captain. Lieberman had originally hoped to operate the theater library program with nonprofessional enlisted men and WACs, under the supervision of a small staff of professionally trained noncoms and officers. T r a u t m a n maintained that a program requiring the establishment of nearly a thousand unit libraries could not be properly supervised by the handful of professional librarians who were then in uniform in the European T h e a t e r ; he believed that it would take a minimum of several hundred experienced professionals to organize a really effective theater-wide library service. Lieberman accepted his recommendation with some misgivings, as he doubted whether the theater Service Forces

lQJf.

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headquarters could induce the major commands in the field to accept women librarians. After the approval of the Chief of Special and Information Services and of the theater personnel officer had been obtained, a requisition for 120 civilian camp librarians was transmitted through channels to the Office of the Secretary of W a r with a request that the librarians be recruited by the W a r Department Special Services Division. The Library Branch Staff.—Once Lieberman's office had been established as a separate branch, its staff grew steadily. By the beginning of May, 1945, the Library Branch and the School for Unit Librarians in the A I E S S had ten officers and enlisted men, all professional librarians, assigned to duty, as well as one nonprofessional enlisted man and four civilian clerks. The only library office in the army with a larger professional staff was the Ninth Service Command Library Depot. In assembling his staff, Lieberman had left nothing to chance. He combed the theater headquarters personnel records for the names of professional librarians serving in the theater. He then wrote to each man he wanted, to ascertain whether he would accept a transfer to the Library Branch. Then he would ask the Personnel Branch of the Special and Information Services to request that the man be transferred. On the day the Personnel Branch's request was dispatched to the unit to which the man was currently assigned, Lieberman would put in a long distance telephone call to the unit's personnel officer and urge him to take prompt action on the request. He was "out of channels" in doing this, of course—only personnel officers are supposed to do anything to expedite transfers—but he got away with it, and he got his men. In October, 1944, Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Leslie I. Poste was in charge of the London office of the Library Branch, and Lieberman and Sergeants LeRoy C. Merritt and Edmund Caster were in the Paris office. Caster's primary duty was the consolidation of strength and postal reports for transmittal to the Assembly Branch of the New York Port of Embarkation; he also served as supply man and wangler-in-chief for the office, much as Sergeant Ficker did in the Central Pacific Area Library Headquarters. Merritt was responsible for the supply of reading material—-preparing and justifying requisitions, planning the composition of kits and libraries and controlling their distribution to subordinate commands. He also set up a library for the use of all members of the Special and Information Services staff, reviewed and consolidated library reports and wrote news and publicity articles on library matters for the theater Information and

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Education bulletin and other army publications. Herbert Goldhor, then a private, was transferred to the Library Branch from a combat unit in November. H e assisted Merritt in operating the headquarters library, but his principal task was to plan the training program f o r unit librarians. Lieutenant Joseph A . B a r r y came in January and was made Lieberman's assistant or "executive officer." H e prepared in final form all official papers which emanated from the library office— policy statements, plans, programs, requests f o r funds and personnel, and so forth—and acted as branch chief in Lieberman's absence. Six more men were later assigned to the training program, and three more to the supply program. In the spring and early summer of 1945 Lieutenants Jack B. Spear and Samuel Lazerow were added to the staff as administrative officers. ROOK

SUPPLIES

Let us look at the status of book supply in E T O at the beginning of 1945. The Ground Forces units in France, totaling about 800,000 men, were entirely dependent on Armed Services Editions and magazine sets f o r reading material, apart from the army publications Yank and Stars and Stripes. About 1,700,000 men were in Service Forces and A i r Forces units. Library reports from some 338 Service and A i r Forces units f o r the period July—December, 1944, indicated that 378,000 hardbound volumes were available to them. Allowing f o r the numerous units that failed to report, there were probably about 500,000 hardbound books available in unit and hospital libraries throughout the theater, or one book for every five men. T h e distribution was obviously uneven, more than half the books being in the possesion of hospitals and of the units of the 8th A i r Force. T h e m a j o r i t y of the 338 units reporting had fewer than 1,000 volumes, and 39 had no books at all. Most of the libraries were located in Red Cross clubs, company davrooms, and hospital recreation rooms, and very few were operated by full-time personnel or housed in separate reading rooms. The revised library program envisaged the establishment of libraries containing from 500 to 1,000 volumes in all 1,000 man units and large hospitals, and libraries containing from 3,000 to 5,000 volumes f o r ever}' 15,000 men in large troop concentrations. Special libraries were also required for school centers. T h e requirement f o r the theater according to this plan was 1,250,000 volumes. This quantity was greatly in excess of the theater's normal money credit for reading material, but in the spring of 1945 a supplementary credit was granted in anticipation of the increased needs of the post-hostilities

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period. During the early months of 1945 a total of 1,600 RB libraries were requisitioned, as well as 300 sets of the Encyclopedia Americana, 200,000 miscellaneous hardbound books, and about 400 New Book kits. The New Book kits consisted of 50 new titles each: about two thirds fiction and the rest humor and nonfiction of current interest. They were not preassembled, but were shipped in the original publishers' containers. The purpose of these kits was to provide new material for the older collections in the theater. Five hundred additional New Book kits were made up during the summer of 1945 from books purchased in England, France, and Switzerland. The greater p a r t of the requisitioned material was shipped to the theater Spccial Services depot at Boom, Belgium, in the summer and early fall of 1945. The R B libraries were dispatched direct to the using units. The remaining material was assembled by enlisted men and Belgian civilians into New Book kits and small libraries of about 875 volumes and then issued to the various Armies, Air Forces and Base sections in accordance with their strength. The assembly and the shipment of this mass of material was supervised by Sergeant Eugene Jackson of the Library Branch staff, who had been sent to the depot on extended temporary duty for this purpose. Jackson's warehouse crew consisted of five Belgian civilians and two enlisted men. In addition to supervising the uncrating, reassembling, and packing of the books, Jackson frequently had to identify them as well, since only one of his seven helpers could read English with any facility and the cheap reprints of a title did not always have identical jackets or even the same color of book cloth. To supplement this material, which was as much as could be procured from the appropriated funds allotted to the theater, Lieberman requested that twenty libraries of from 5,000 to 10,000 volumes be shipped from inactivated posts in the United States, and he also began to negotiate with the theater Army Exchange Service for a grant of funds to be expended on the purchase of additional books and magazine subscriptions. The g r a n t was tentatively approved in the late summer of 1945, and Lieberman, who had gone back to the United States for this purpose, ordered 6,000 book club subscriptions (amounting to 72,000 volumes) and 20,000 miscellaneous volumes on the strength of it. As it turned out, the g r a n t was rescinded, but when this happened the Deputy Director of the Special Services Division authorized the use of additional appropriated funds to complete the purchase. The supply of books from inactivated posts was long delayed and never carried out on the scale planned. One library of 4,000 volumes

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was shipped to the theater in June, 1945, but the New Y o r k P o r t of Embarkation had neither the personnel nor the facilities to make further shipments of this nature until the end of the year. There were inevitable delays, too, in getting the requisitioned books from the United States to Boom and from Boom down to the units. T h e upshot was that throughout 1945 it was impossible, except in isolated cases, to supply organized libraries to units of less than 2,500 men. This entailed a considerable thinning out of the service in comparison with the original plan. 3 T h e failure to obtain libraries from inactivated posts early in 1945 was particularly harmful. I t meant that the bulk of the European Theater unit libraries could contain only books that were in print and available in large quantities at the time each mass procurement of books was made. T h e extent of actual library service which the European Theater libraries could render was limited throughout 1945 and most of 1946 by the meager subject coverage and sheer lack of variety in titles which resulted from this situation. A report made by the European Theater L i b r a r y Branch in N o vember, 1945, on distribution accomplished since February shows that approximately 1,000,000 clothbound books had been issued to troop units during that period and that more than half that quantity had gone to Ground Forces (that is, combat) units, which had hitherto been the least well supplied. Allowing f o r the dissipation of materials that was bound to take place in the closing of installations and the reshuffling of units in preparation f o r redeployment to the United States, the total number of books in E T O libraries in November, 1945, was probably not a great deal more than the quantity of one million distributed during the preceding nine months. During the same period 14,752,280 Armed Service Editions were also distributed in the theater. The average troop strength f o r the period was between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000. Notwithstanding the inevitable flaws in distribution which gave some units more and others much less than their share, it is evident that E T O was comparatively well provided with reading matter in the crucial half year following V-E D a y . The gravest deficiency was in the number of generally available titles which (excluding the Armed Services Editions) was only 1,898—hardly enough f o r a small-town library or a county bookmobile.4 THE

TRAINING

PROGRAM

The training program f o r E T O unit librarians has been fully described in the articles by Harold Lancour and Herbert Goldhor listed in the bibliography. Only a brief account can be given here. As soon

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as Goldhor was assigned to the Library Branch, he began to d r a f t a Guide for the Operation of Small Army Libraries to serve as a basic text for the training program. The first and subsequent drafts were analyzed by Merritt, Barry, and Lieberman at a series of staff meetings in J a n u a r y and February, and each meeting produced extensive changes in the contents, organization, and language of the manual. A textbook as well as a manual, the Guide told the reader not only the how's but some of the why's of library service. After a statement of the purpose of the unit libraries, simple and clear instructions were given concerning the cataloguing 5 and circulation of books. The section on technical processes was followed by instructions on reference work, the organization of an information file, and a few helpful paragraphs for nonprofessionals on how to ascertain the contents of a book by examining its title page, table of contents, illustrations, jacket blurb, and so forth. Then a brief editorial on the active function of the librarian and an explanation of the varied purposes for which men read. And last, a statement of what the librarian must do to render satisfactory service with the means at his disposal. Understanding and meeting the individual reader's needs, the use of special collections, the principle of making books readily available (by means of deposit collections, hospital ward circulations, and so f o r t h ) , and careful planning of activities were particularly stressed. The concluding pages of the 46-page manual gave further instructions regarding cataloguing, the arrangement of special collections and co-operation with other army activities. In consideration of the close connection between the library and education programs, Lieutenant Colonel Linton, the director of the Army Information and Education Staff School, had authorized the establishment of the School for Unit Librarians as one of its activities. The staff school then consisted of two sections, one at the Cité Universitaire in Paris, the other in London. The corresponding sections of the School for Unit Librarians were opened on April 2 ; their weekly quotas of students were sixty for the Paris branch and forty for the London branch. Meanwhile, on March 7, 1945, a directive announcing the establishment of library service for all commands in the theater had been issued to the m a j o r Ground Forces, Air Forces, and Service Forces commanders. The appointment of library officers or enlisted librarians to serve on the staff of unit Special Services Offices was authorized for all levels of command down to regiments or units of similar size. It was recommended that qualified personnel be selected for the positions of

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librarian and library officer, and the commands were authorized to permit assigned quotas of officers, enlisted men, or WACs to attend a one-week course at the school. The reader is referred to the articles cited above for full particulars concerning the staff, curriculum, and training methods of the School f o r Unit Librarians. I t was a big project, well organized and ably executed. Its purpose was to teach nonprofessionals how to apply the principles of army librarianship set forth in the Guide; judging by the comments of the civilian librarians who supervised the E T O lib r a r y service, those of their assistants who attended the school benefited by it. According to Goldhor, some 1,400 students attended the school during the 38 weeks it was in existence, in England, Paris, and Oberammergau. Probably less than half of t h a t number actually served as unit librarians after completing the course, and many of these men were soon redeployed to the United States. Nevertheless, the school did serve an immediate practical purpose; at a period when the professional civilian librarians were setting up, moving, consolidating, and reopening libraries in a constantly changing situation, many of them had the assistance of unit librarians who did not have to be trained from scratch. THE

CIVILIAN

LIBRARIANS

I t was the civilian librarians brought over from the United States to act as supervisors who really "made" the E T O library program. Nearly all of them had had several years' experience as camp librarians in the United States. As professionals, they knew what they— and the books—were there for. Thanks to their army experience, many of them had had to organize or to move and re-establish a library at least once, and they knew something about army channels, supply procedures, and paperwork. The technical and much of the administrative responsibility for making the library program work at both the command and unit levels fell to them. I t was seldom a matter of being responsible for one library alone. Many of the librarians had to organize, staff, and supervise from eight to twelve unit libraries a t the same time, and some were responsible for many more. Few had had comparable administrative experience in the past. But they were young, energetic, adaptable and venturesome: they would not have applied for overseas service otherwise. It was a big job, but an exciting one, and the majority of them handled it much more than adequately. The W a r Department Special Services Division was responsible for

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recruiting the librarians. T r a u t m a n ' s office assigned quotas to each of the service commands, and in conversations and letters he and Postell urged the command librarians to select their best librarians f o r t r a n s f e r and not to use the occasion to get rid of people they did not want. Only volunteers were to be selected, and only the best of the volunteers. The theater library officers and their civilian successor, Frances M. O'Halloran, agree t h a t fully 90 percent were both personally and professionally qualified for their assignments and t h a t less than a dozen were obvious misfits or neurotics who should not have been sent a t all. Lieberman had requested t h a t the 120 librarians be sent to the E u r o p e a n T h e a t e r in three groups of -AO each, but because of the complicated processing procedure each librarian had to go through, it proved impracticable to process the librarians in large g r o u p s ; they had to go over singly or in groups of not more than six or eight. F o r some of them, the red tape, delays, and confusion of this "overseas processing" were more harrassing than any of their later experiences. Many of the librarians were " a l e r t e d " to go as early as F e b r u a r y , yet none left the United States before the second week in May. Only 105 finally departed, the last small g r o u p leaving early in September, 1945. A f t e r the librarians arrived in P a r i s they usually attended the School for Unit Librarians f o r a week. Lieberman interviewed each librarian personally and either gave her a definite assignment or let her choose any of the assignments currently available which he considered her qualified to fill. In many cases it was a gamble, b u t it was all he could do. Not until the latter p a r t of August was the processing of personnel organized in such a way t h a t advance information could be transmitted to the theater concerning the experience and qualifications of the librarians who were coming over. When the librarians were sent out to the m a j o r commands on the continent—the T h i r d and Seventh Armies, the 9th Air Force, and the base sections of the theater Service Forces—thev were assigned to those commands and (except f o r those in the base sections) were no longer employees of the theater Service Forces headquarters. T h e personnel policies of the commands varied, but in general the librarians remained employees of the command headquarters and were only " a t t a c h e d " to the lower units. This enabled the command Special Services officer and the command librarian to move the librarians f r o m one subcommand or installation to another according to current needs. A completely centralized personnel system, like t h a t of the Central

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Pacific Area, with all the librarians in the theater directly controlled by the Library Branch at the theater Service Forces headquarters, was not established, probably because it was considered that the m a j o r commands were too big and necessarily too independent to be subordinated to the theater Service Forces headquarters in this way. Thus Lieberman's office had much less direct control over library activities in the field than Poullada's office had in his theater. Lieberman's office furnished books and librarians, trained the enlisted men sent to it for training, and announced general policies. The interpretation and execution of the policies depended on the command Special Services officers and their command librarians. Needless to sav, there were extreme variations, just as there were between the service commands in the United States. The command librarians were generally selected by the command Special Services officers from among the first group of librarians sent to them. Their functions in the summer and fall of 1945, roughly in order of importance, were to induce subordinate commanders to accept book collections and civilian librarians; to help the librarians obtain library quarters and enlisted help; to effect a rapid and even distribution of books to the subordinate commands; and to provide bookmobile service for units which did not have static libraries. To describe the work done in each major command would fill a book. Only a few examples can be given in the following pages. The Reims Assembly Area.6—The most formidable task undertaken in the summer of 1945 was the establishment of service in the Reims Assembly Area. This enormous staging area was set up in May to process troops being sent back to the United States. Some 700,000 men were processed between May and the end of September. The average strength of the Assembly Area after it reached its peak in Jul}' was 250,000 men; the length of time each man stayed in the area varied from a week to a month. The great encampment, clouded with dust in dry weather and almost impassably muddy in wet, was divided into four large subareas, and each of these in turn was divided into four or five smaller camps. The total number of camps in the area was eighteen. Kay McCrary was appointed Assembly Area command librarian early in July. She set to work with four subarea civilian librarians and eighteen civilian librarians for the individual camps. The original supply of books for the Assembly Area was one RB Library for each camp, but additional books were issued later, until the total number of clothbound volumes reached about 35,000. I t was scarcely a tithe of what

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was needed, b u t it was all t h a t could be made available t o the area t h a t summer. T h o u s a n d s of Armed Services E d i t i o n s and magazine sets were also issued. To the librarians fresh from the States and the comparative orderliness of well-run libraries [writes Margaret Hatcher] it was a little strange at first to have pointed out to them, as the library, an empty tent in the middle of a dusty field—a tent that had been so hastily erected that the poles were crooked and the tent sagged and drooped and had a dejected look. In some cases, libraries were established in parts of bombed-out buildings to which a temporary roof or wall had been added to make the building watertight and usable. Others were housed in rusty Nissen huts moved to any place chosen by the librarian. T h e R B libraries were issued to all the camps, and the librarians p r e p a r e d book pockets and c a r d s f o r them as rapidly as they could, aided by soldier a s s i s t a n t s . Some of the a s s i s t a n t s had attended the School f o r U n i t L i b r a r i a n s ; the m a j o r i t y were simply men who wanted t o see the libraries open as soon as possible and were glad to get the assignment. T h e pockets and c a r d s had to be improvised f r o m whatever m a t e r i a l was a t h a n d . One l i b r a r i a n used blank shoe tickets as cards. A s c a n t y number of chairs, tables, and book cases were issued. If you needed m o r e — a n d you d i d — y o u h a d to s c r o u n g e ; and somehow the place h a d t o be made a t t r a c t i v e . Alice Cahill writes: The librarians departed somewhat from their more or less regularly defined library duties and sketched the initial designs for curtains, light fixtures . . . shelves for ivy, and signs to advertise the library and its facilities. . . . [One had to find paint that was no/] olive drab, yellow, or black, so characteristic of any army post overseas, not to mention nails, cloth, and thread. All these were necessary if the design and decoration of the libraries were to depart from the average G I room, and it was the aim of each and every librarian to make her library as little G I in appearance as possible. T h e l i b r a r i a n s managed to get what they needed, says Miss H a t c h e r , as they discovered their persuasive powers and used them. Many strange articles of furniture appeared and no questions were asked. . . . One colonel, on walking into a library, looked at the white paint on the walls of the Nissen hut and said, " I was told there was no white paint in France. Next time I need some, I'll know where to come. Will you join my supply staff?" Outside, the ground was leveled and landscaped with walks and fences. Gravel was laid on the dusty and muddy ground so that the outside of the area was as attractive as the inside. Bright displays of book jackets ap-

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peared on bulletin boards. Soldiers looked in out of curiosity and stayed to marvel. As more books were supplied, the librarians were able to set up branches in the outlying p a r t s of the larger camps. In all, there were some forty libraries and branches in the eighteen camps, not to mention dozens of small deposit collections. In the Reims Assembly Area there were movies, stage shows, and facilities for sports, but reading ( f o r the minority who were within walking distance of a library), writing letters, and talking were the only diversions that could be engaged in at any time of the day, and they were almost the only activities that did not involve hours of standing in line and waiting. Some men would borrow books to read as they "sweated out" a three-hour movie line. The libraries were jammed day and night (except when the electric current failed—not a rare occurrence). The circulation for the entire area, not including the distribution of Armed Services Editions and magazines, was about 1,100 per day. But thousands of men used the libraries every day without checking out a book: it was more pleasant to read in a crowded and colorful library hut than in a drab and equally crowded tent. The attendance figures were staggering. In the Suippes subarea the total attendance for three months was 295,000. In the Mailly subarea, for the same period, it was 200,000. In the less populous Mourmelon Garrison Area, it was 270,000 for a period of six months. In the Sissone Garrison Area it was 550,000 for the same period. Miss Cahill remarks that the most convincing proof of the need that the Assembly Area libraries filled could only have been obtained if each library had been equipped with a device to "record the number of times GI's came to the librarian's desk and said, ' I sure would have gone crazy in this place without these books.' " In October the camps began to close. As each camp closed, its books were packed and transported to the Assembly Area command warehouse, and late in the fall, when only a few camps were left, the books were loaded into a boxcar and sent to the new theater Special Services depot at Blexen on the North Sea. The librarians went on to new assignments, the majority being given bookmobiles and sent to serve Ground Forces units in Germany and Austria. Bookmobile Service.—The bookmobile assignments were physically the most strenuous jobs of all. Lieberman had early hit upon bookmobiles as the best means of serving isolated guard and border patrol units. Throughout the spring and early summer he dickered with the theater Chief of Ordnance (who was responsible for trucks and other

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vehicles) and the theater Chief of Supply, or G-4, to obtain suitable vehicles for conversion into bookmobiles. Eventually thirty-seven ton K-60 trucks, formerly used to carry radar equipment, were secured. During most of July, Spear, Lazerow, and Estcllene* Walker planned and supervised the conversion of the trucks, Miss Walker and Spear d r a f t i n g the designs and Lazerow dealing with the French carpenters commissioned to do the work. The first bookmobile was ready at the end of summer. One civilian librarian and two enlisted men were to be assigned to each bookmobile. The enlisted men were to take turns driving and acting as clerk and warehouse man at the headquarters to which the bookmobile was assigned. Each bookmobile was to carry 1,500 hardbound books, 10 sets of Armed Services Editions, a- variable quantity of magazine sets, and 50 sets of V-Disc phonograph records. The V-Discs were phonograph recordings of radio programs (without commercials) made for the army under the supervision of the Music Branch of the W a r Department Special Services Division and issued automatically to overseas units. In addition to the stock carried in the bookmobile, an equal quantity of stock was to be kept at the headquarters to which the bookmobile was assigned, so that some rotation of titles would be possible. Actually the extra 1,500 volumes only too often duplicated many of those carried on the bookmobile, and so there was not much rotation. In many areas the roads were extremely bad. Jolting over rough roads in cold weather from early morning until late a t night was a tiring experience; and when one did so day a f t e r day it became a grinding ordeal. And there were dangers as well as discomforts. The trucks had had rough use and were not in the best state of r e p a i r ; new p a r t s were hard to get. Breakdowns occurrcd frequently, and not always in populous, convenient places or by day. Elvira Beltramo had one of the hardest assignments—-bookmobile librarian for the 42d Division in southern Austria. In a letter to a friend she described a trip to a little village where a dozen men were stationed to guard a rail block: The road was so bad and there was so much snow that we could not get the the truck through. . . . So we had to take our jeep. For a while I thought not even the jeep could make it, but after digging our way out of several snow banks we made our destination. What should we find out front of headquarters but a weasel (it looks like a tank, with broad rubber belt tracks instead of wheels). We had to take the weasel to the guard post because our jeep would not make it. . . . I am glad we had made the ef-

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fort to get there, as the boys were in bad shape. They needed new reading material and records. They did not even have a cigarette among them, as their rations had not gotten through to them. So we fixed them up with everything including the cigarettes. We always carry several cartons, as we have found in the past that in some of the isolated places it tides the boys over until their rations are sent to them. After several months of straight bookmobile operation, Miss Beltramo supplemented the bookmobile service with deposit collections and static libraries. She established small static libraries in the five places where several hundred or more men were stationed, in each case training an enlisted man to act as unit librarian. Deposit collections of several dozen books were set up for remote isolated units of from eighteen to thirty men. The remaining units, within closer range of her permanent station, were served by the bookmobile, which covered three routes per week, with four stops each. This cut the maximum trip length from two hundred-odd to one hundred miles and gave the librarian four days a week in which to go by jeep to the deposit stations and static libraries and rotate their collections. All this was done with the basic bookmobile stock of about 3,200 volumes, plus new issues of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets. There was, in addition, a large static library at division headquarters. Miss Beltramo's case was extreme, but not unique. Being a bookmobile librarian in the European Theater required stamina and nerve. The practice of breaking up p a r t of the bookmobile collection into static libraries and deposit collections was fairly common when the bookmobile librarian had a large area to cover. The supply situation varied from command to command, depending both on geography and on the energy and administrative talents of the command librarian. By the end of the winter Beth Skoog, the bookmobile librarian at Mellrichstadt, in the area occupied by the Seventh Army, had five thousand volumes at her disposal and kept about two thirds of them out in eight deposit collections. The men in her area were desperately bored; at first, even movies were lacking. They were avid for anything to read, and the men who knew what they wanted and asked for it willingly accepted whatever was recommended as a substitute. The cartoon books were especially popular and were read to tatters. The Seventh Army.—The library program of the Seventh Army, which occupied Wiirtemburg-Baden and Greater Hesse, was launched in July, when four librarians were assigned to the army's headquarters, then located at Stuttgart. Within a month the number of librarians had been increased to eight, and by the end of the year there were

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twenty-two. The command librarian was Nettie B. Taylor. The original plan of the Seventh Army library officer was that each of the first eight librarians should set up a single large library and then establish branches as time, supplies, and the availability of personnel permitted. Most of the cities in the Seventh Army zone were in ruins: Mannheim, S t u t t g a r t , Kessel, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe. The librarians had to scrounge for everything except books : for usable and accessible building to begin with, and then for window glass, light fixtures, paint, furniture, and workmen. To add to their difficulties, there were f a r too many troop units to be served. One librarian that summer was responsible for service to four divisions; naturally she could provide organized service for only one and could give only the most general supervision to the enlisted librarians in the other three. As more civilian librarians were assigned to the command in the fall of 1945, the library program was reorganized. All librarians were permanently assigned to the Seventh Army headquarters and only "attached" to the subordinate regiments or other units. Thus, the army headquarters could transfer them from place to place, and since they were army, not unit, personnel, it could direct t h a t the librarians should be responsible not merely for service to the units to which they were attached but to neighboring units as well. By February, 1946, there were 22 librarians in the entire zone, 10 of whom operated bookmobiles. There were 76 libraries and about 114,000 books. Heidelburg, one of the few undamaged citics in the zone, had a library of 5,000 volumes, housed in one of the university buildings ; the collection included books inherited from prisoner-of-war camps for Americans which had been located in that region. The average size of the other Seventh Arm}' collections was 1,000 volumes. Thanks to the combined resources of static libraries, bookmobiles, and deposit collections, 90 percent of the units in the zone were then being regularly served. The bookmobiles were particularly effective: serving men in isolated units with limited recreational facilities, they invariably ran up higher attendance and circulation records than the static libraries. The unit officers preferred this type of service, too, since the property records for the books were the responsibility of a higher headquarters. The Third Army.—The Third Army, with a troop strength of 500,000 spread out over Czechoslovakia and Bavaria, had four librarians assigned to it in July, 1945—a pitifully inadequate number. During the summer Frances M. O'Halloran was the only librarian for all of the Third Army troops in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Libraries were established wherever space could be found for them. In

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one small Czech town a stable offered the only accommodation. The stalls were torn out, and clothing lockers were broken apart and freshly painted to serve as wall panels. The RB Library cases were repainted in bright red to put some life into the room. Flat paper drinking cups were used as book pockets. In Marienbad, on the contrary, the library occupied part of a luxurious hotel. There were too few books and too few librarians to do anything but the roughest pioneering work until the middle of fall. By the end of November book stocks had been greatly increased, the number of librarians had risen to 31, and 16 bookmobiles had been made available. The Third Army had the largest quota for the School for Unit Librarians, and after Miss O'Halloran was appointed Chief Librarian of the Third Army, in September, she and the other librarians were able to persuade most of the subordinate commanders that only qualified men should be sent to the school and that they should be given only library assignments when they returned. Even when troop strength declined in the winter it was still possible to assign men as full-time unit librarians. It became necessary to hire more German civilians (usually girls or elderly men) as time went on, but in the summer of 1946 there were still nearly a hundred enlisted librarians in Third Army units. Library service was effectively publicized in a series of interviews with librarians broadcast over the AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio station in Munich. It should be mentioned in passing that there was a 2,000-volume library, with a professional librarian in charge, for the use of military personnel and civilians at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials. The library was established in a single room in the Palace of Justice in October, 1945, and it later occupied two large rooms on the ground floor of the Palace. In addition to books from RB libraries and New Book kits, it contained a large number of magazines, and there were English, French, and German newspapers. There were other army libraries in the Nuremburg area, including one at the press headquarters in Faber Castle, a short distance outside the city. This library contained several surplus RB libraries as well as miscellaneous books and magazines. An American educator who attended the trials stated in a magazine article that the only reading matter he could find consisted of copies of Overseas Comics and Reader's Digest.1 Although Nuremburg was not flooded with books, there was certainly much more reading matter about than he believed. The 9th Air Force.—The 9th Air Force (later called USAFE— United States Air Force, Europe) was the principal Air Forces com-

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mand on the European continent in the summer of 1945. Jeanne Lyons, the command librarian, and five others who were to serve as librarians for the 9th Air Force subcommands were sent to the 9th Air Force headquarters at Bad Kissingen in July. There was a good library at the Air Force headquarters, but only a thin scattering of book collections elsewhere. In the twenty months since its arrival in England from the Middle E a s t , the 9th Air Force had increased its troop strength from 25,000 to 250,000. In England the units had depended on Red Cross clubs for hardbound books. In France the Air Force Special Services officer obtained a good many R B libraries and P B kits in the spring of 1945 and established a school for Air Force enlisted librarians a t Chantilly. But the subordinate units were many and constantly on the move and most of this material had been dissipated by midsummer. Within a few weeks a f t e r the arrival of the librarians, large stocks of books were received; by the end of August the 9th Air Force had 40 libraries of 500 volumes or more and 20 libraries with between 200 and 500 volumes. By midwinter more than 100 libraries had been established; then the number dropped as units were redeployed. I n March, 1946, U S A F E had 50 libraries of 1,000 volumes or more. T h e total stock of books was about 60,000 volumes. As soon as a subordinate command accepted a librarian, a shipment of R B libraries was sent to the headquarters of the command. The subcommand librarian visited the installations in the command, established libraries in all the larger installations, and trained unit librarians for them. The smaller installations in Germany were served by one of the two 9th Air Force bookmobiles. Wherever possible, deposit collections were provided f o r small stations less conveniently located. All this was much less simple than it sounds, owing to the wide geographical distribution of the stations in the subordinate commands. In the spring of 1946 the 40th Bombardment Wing had two stations in Germany, one in France, and one in Italy. T h e European Air T r a n s p o r t Service had seven stations, in Germany, France, and England. The X I I Tactical Air Command had 24 stations scattered over the American Zone in Germany. The Air Forces Service Command had 16 stations, similarly scattered. The European Aviation E n gineering Command had 5 stations in Germany and France. And there were several other installations in addition to these. The librarians were supposed to serve only installations within their own commands. The number of librarians was eventually increased t o eleven, but each one still had to cover a very large area. Most of them

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traveled thousands of miles by plane and jeep in the performance of their duties, and even so some could visit particular installations only once every two or three months. A subcommand librarian might spend several weeks at an installation, find a location for the library, set it up, and train an enlisted man to operate it. When she returned six weeks later, the enlisted librarian would have been redeployed, half of the books would have suffered redeployment too, and even the location of the library might have been changed to make room for another activity. Everything had to be done again. As redeployment proceeded, it became more and more difficult to get enlisted unit librarians. The enlisted librarians were replaced by German civilians, some more capable than others, but all requiring closer supervision than the enlisted librarians; which meant more and longer visits from the subcommand librarian. The librarians did a thoroughly good job, but even in 1946 there were simply not enough of them, and they had to spend f a r too much of their time in traveling. CONCLUSION

T h e headquarters of the European Theater Service Forces was moved from Paris to F r a n k f u r t am Main in September, 1945, and the Special Services depot was transferred at the same time from Boom to Blexen, Germany. Frances M. O'Halloran and H a r r i e t L. Rourke, who had been selected to serve as Theater Librarian and Field Service Librarian, respectively, a f t e r the departure of the military staff, were assigned to the theater headquarters shortly before Lieberman left, in February, 1946. After his departure Spear served as Library Branch chief before returning to the United States. Miss O'Halloran became Theater Librarian in March. Toward the end of 1945 an important change took place in the organization of the army in E T O . The Service Forces headquarters was absorbed into the main headquarters of the theater, then called U S F E T (United States Forces, European T h e a t e r ) . This meant t h a t Special Services, and with it the Library Branch, was now p a r t of the top theater headquarters r a t h e r than of a subordinate headquarters. Unified control of all library personnel in the theater was at last possible. This step was taken early in 1946. Thereafter, all librarians in the theater were officially assigned to and paid by the U S F E T headquarters. Librarians continued to be attached to commands and to be directly subordinate to the command Special Services officers, but since ultimate control of library personnel rested with the theater

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headquarters, not with the commands, it was possible to provide service on an economical, geographical basis and to establish uniform policies in all commands. As the theater settled down into a more static situation, "field expediency" and the mere setting up of libraries and keeping them in operation became of secondary importance. More time could be devoted to building up collections according to local needs, to organizing them to render the best possible service, and to co-ordinating the activities of the subordinate commands. Excess stocks were weeded out — p a r t to be redistributed, the rest to be turned over to surplus property disposal agencies. By the spring of 1946 the troop strength of the theater had been reduced from 3,000,000 to about 700,000, and it was soon to drop to 300,000. The number of librarians in the theater was reduced from 105 to 70. There were the 415 libraries of 500 volumes or more in the theater, including branches and deposit collections, and 37 bookmobiles with stocks ranging from 3,000 to 6,000 volumes. Although there was still excessive duplication, the shortage of titles was beginning to be relieved by the shipment of post libraries from the United States (12 libraries, totaling 60,000 volumes, were shipped to E T O in the first half of 1946) and by purchases from nonappropriated funds. A f t e r the spring of 1946 the theater depended largely on nonappropriated funds for its book supply. All nonappropriated funds in the theater were controlled by the theater Central Welfare Fund. T h e Fund allotted the Library Branch $30 per month to spend on books for each of its 250 officially designated libraries and a somewhat smaller amount for magazines and newspapers. In addition, $9,000 was allotted in June, 1946, to pay for six book club subscriptions for each of the 250 libraries. The books were ordered from jobbers and publishers by the theater materials librarian through Army Exchange Service channels. Orders (based p a r t l y on requests made by the librarians in their monthly reports) were placed monthly or quarterly, depending upon conditions in the theater. The turnaround time on these orders averaged three months. ( I t proved impossible to make very large purchases anywhere except in America, since the British booksellers did not have enough books for their regular customers and the English-language books available on the Continent were largely reprints of older titles.) Funds were also made available for library supplies. Distribution was effected through library supply channels: from

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the theater depot at Blexen to the command warehouses and from them to the individual libraries. A s late as the middle of 1947 there were still more than 400 library facilities in the theater, including bookmobiles and deposit collections. T h e stock of hardbound books was about half a million, f o r a troop strength of a little more than 100,000, and the expenditure f o r materials and personnel during the preceding year had been more than $5 per man. T w o thirds had been spent f o r salaries; one third f o r books and other materials. Few libraries in the theater had resources that could match those of the best army libraries in the United States, and not enough had full-time professional staffs; but both personnel and materials were more evenly distributed than they were in the United States commands, thanks to the centralization of control over funds and personnel in the theater headquarters.

XV Censorship and the Soldier Voting Law CENSORSHIP

I T H T H E E X C E P T I O N of its enforcement of Title V of the Soldier Voting Law, for which it was hardly to blame, the army's wartime record on the censorship of library materials was notably clean. Almost no army-wide censorship for moral or political reasons was imposed by the W a r Department, and there was comparatively little locally imposed censorship a t the post level. The testimony of librarians indicates that in 1942 and 1943 about a dozen magazines and newspapers retailing Axis propaganda and not more than three books, clearly not Axis-inspired, were "banned" by the Special Services Division, presumably, in all cases but one, by direction of higher authority. T h a t is, letters were sent to all commands directing that these publications be destroyed if in libraries and that no other copies or issues of them be acquired. 1 Evidently the higher levels of the W a r Department decided sometime in 1943 that army-wide book banning was more harmful to morale than the risk that occasional pieces of undesirable literature might be circulated. At any rate, these appear to have been the only instances of W a r Department censorship prior to the enactment of the Soldier Voting Law in 1944. Of course, the W a r Department was occasionally requested to ban, or at least not to distribute, certain books. Congressmen would write to inquire whether the L i b r a r y Section was distributing such and such a book, alleged to be indecent, and if so, why. In nearly all cases these inquiries were made to satisfy a constituent: the Congressman merely wanted an answer on W a r Deparment stationery to transmit to someone who had asked the same question of him. The stock response of the section chief was that the army regarded soldiers as adults and that its policy was to furnish them the same books that were generally available to adult civilians in the bookstores and libraries of the United States. None of these cases went beyond a single exchange of letters.

Censorship Not all inquiries were so easily turned away as these. Late in 1943 several Serbian-American organizations protested vehemently against the publication of Louis Adamic's Native's Return as an Armed Services Edition. T h e first edition of the book, published in 1934, contained several p a r a g r a p h s in which Adamic appeared to recommend t h a t America a d o p t a semi-Communist form of government. The letters of p r o t e s t quoted a t length from these p a r a g r a p h s , Congressman George A. Dondero repeated the quotations in an a t t a c k on the council's policy, and since communism is always news, the affair got a lot of publicity. As it happened, Adamic had removed these p a r a g r a p h s f r o m a later edition of the book, and it was the later edition t h a t had been reprinted. When this f a c t was divulged, Congress lost interest in the case. Not long a f t e r the publication of Under Cover, Walter Winchell announced, enthusiastically and quite erroneously, t h a t the army had bought 5,000 copies of the book for distribution to soldiers. Several members of Congress, some of whom had been attacked in the book, requested verification of this statement from the W a r Department. An inquiry was sent to the service commands in the United States, and it was ascertained t h a t 82 copies had been purchased by posts from funds a p p r o p r i a t e d by Congress and 305 from nonappropriated funds. No Congressman was foolhardy enough to request t h a t the books be withdrawn from circulation. Only once during the war did Congressional criticism force the W a r D e p a r t m e n t to refrain from distributing a publication. The publication was The Races of Mankind, by R u t h Benedict and Gene Weltfish, a pamphlet issued by the Public Affairs Committee in 1943. A number of copies had been purchased by the Information and Education Division f o r use in orientation courses, and the L i b r a r y Section was considering including one copy of it in each of 500 P B kits which were then being procured. Several members of the House Military Affairs Committee were exercised over the f a c t t h a t the pamphlet cited several army intelligence tests made in the First World W a r , in which some Northern Negroes had made a higher score than some Southern whites. One Congressman also professed to be outraged because an illustration in the pamphlet represented Adam and Eve as having navels, thus implying t h a t they had been born in the normal manner. The I n f o r m a tion and Education Division had purchased the pamphlet because it considered it to be good ammunition against the ignorant racial p r e j udices fostered by Nazi p r o p a g a n d a . I t was not distributed. 2 Censorship by Post Commanders.—The story of censorship by commanders a t the post and unit level is somewhat different, but it could

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hardly be called bad. When Jed Taylor, the former First Service Command librarian, was asked about local censorship in his command, he replied: "We had just enough trouble to know that there had been no real trouble." This seems to have been generally true. One of the worst troubles, incidentally, was caused by the W a r Department inquiry concerning the number of copies of Under Cover which posts had purchased. Some post commanders took the inquiry as a veiled hint to get rid of the books. Possibly this was what inspired the commander of the Crile General Hospital, in Cleveland, to order that the book be removed from the library of that hospital; the incident was reported in the newspapers, but no official explanation of the action was given. Xenophon Smith had to dissuade several Ninth Service Command post commanders from doing the same thing. I t was reported after the war that the commander of a post in another area had not only excluded the book from the post library, but had forbidden all soldiers on the post to possess copies of it—an exceptional case. In the main, commanders and their staff officers had too much else to do during the war—and in most cases too sensible an attitude—to engage in either moral or political censorship of library materials. The selection of reading matter for the post library was the librarian's function, she was supposed to be professionally qualified to perform it, and in nearly all cases she was allowed to perform it without interference. The commander of one general hospital directed the hospital librarian to submit all of her book selections to the chaplain for review. I t was the chaplain's idea. She gave him the initial collection list for the library—3,000 titles. He decided that her judgment could be relied on. At a few posts the Special Services officers were required to obtain the approval of the post G-2 (Military Intelligence) officers before placing or renewing subscriptions to magazines or newspapers, but apparently this veto power was rarely exercised. I t is possible that there will be more interference with the selection of reading matter for soldiers in the peacetime army, as the number of professional librarians on duty declines. There was remarkably little during the war. THE

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The only censorship that really mattered during the war—the onlycensorship that interfered extensively and effectively with the operation of library service and actually prevented many soldiers from getting the reading matter they wanted—was imposed on the army by Title V of the Soldier Voting Law of 1944 (Public Law 277, 78th Congress).

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In June, 1943, Senators Theodore F . Green, of Rhode Island, and S c o t t W. Lucas, of Illinois, introduced a bill to facilitate absentee voting by soldiers and sailors in the 1944 elections. The bill was referred to the Committee on Elections and Privileges, which reported favorably on it to the Senate in November. The bill became the subject of heated discussions in both the Senate and the House during the next three months and was considerably amended before its final passage the following February. Under the Constitution, control of both Federal and state elections is left to the several states. Each state has its own election procedures, and there is very little uniformity among them. The Ramsay Act of 1 9 4 2 had set up procedures for absentee voting by service men, but the procedures were complicated, and insufficient time had been allowed for the distribution and return of ballots. As a result, only about 28,000 soldiers had voted in the 1942 elections. The essence of the Green-Lucas bill was that a Federal short-form ballot should be distributed to all service men desiring to vote and that all state election commissions should accept this ballot form as valid. A coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans, whose principal spokesmen were Senator Robert A. T a f t and Representative John E . Rankin, opposed unrestricted use of the short-form ballot by service men as an infringement of states' rights. Certain practical considerations may have had as much to do with the voting on the measure as the question of its constitutionality. The short-form ballot could be distributed much more easily than the various forms used by the 4 8 states. I t would ensure a larger service men's vote, and apparently it was felt that more service men would vote for their Commander-inChief than against him. At any rate, supporters of the Administration were generally in favor of the short-form ballot, and opponents of the Administration were generally against it. After much debate, a compromise was reached. I t was agreed that the army and the navy should distribute post-card application forms to be sent by service men to their state election commissions and should help to distribute the regular state ballot forms, and that a United States W a r Ballot Commission consisting of representatives of the Secretary of W a r , the Secretar}' of the Navy, and the W a r Shipping Administrator should supervise the distribution of ballots. The use of the Federal short-form ballot was restricted to service men outside the United States whose state election commissions would authorize the use of this form ; some twenty states did. And finally, Title V of the law placed certain restrictions on the dissemination of propaganda to service men. In form, Title V was an amendment to the Hatch Act of

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1939 which limited the participation of Federal employees in political campaigns. Unlike the rest of the Soldier Voting Law, it was a permanent, not a temporary measure. Title V.—Title V was introduced by Senator Taft. He explained, We are in this bill proposing to give the ballot to four or five million men outside the United States who will not be able to hear the candidates speak, who will not be able, in many cases, to know even who the candidates are, and who will be wholly unable to read the ordinary newspapers of the United States or hear any arguments which are made on either side. Nearly every means of communication to the men serving abroad is controlled by the Government of the United States, and it is peculiarly important, therefore, that the Government and Government officials understand that their control of the means of communication shall not be used to conduct a campaign on one side against those who do not have equal facility to reach the men in the armed forces of the United States [ Congressional Record, LXXXIX, 10178].

Senator Taft's position regarding the dissemination of propaganda to service men was well taken. If the arm}' and the navy were to be allowed to help in getting out the vote, due precautions must be taken to ensure that they did not direct service men how to vote. Such precautions were the more necessary, in Senator Taft's view, because he was convinced that the Secretary of W a r and the Secretary of the Navy were already working to re-elect President Roosevelt to a fourth term in order to perpetuate themselves in office. In my opinion [he said] Secretaries Knox and Stimson are today working for a fourth term. I say this in the most kindly spirit. It is only natural that men who have the responsibility which they have are convinced that their continuance in office after the next election is essential to the welfare of the world and of this country [Congressional Record, XC, 621—622], Senator Taft's original proposal was that it should be declared unlawful for army and navy officials to disseminate any literature or other communication "paid for in whole or in part by Government funds, or sponsored by the Government or any . . . department thereof, or cause to be made any broadcast to the armed forces of the United States, containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any election" for Federal office. It was further provided that the United States War Ballot Commission was to review any material submitted to it to determine whether or not it constituted such argument or propaganda. The statutory penalties for violation of Title V were to be a fine of $1,000, one year's imprisonment, or both.

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I t was a poor law, ill-conceived and ill-expressed. Senator T a f t , ordinarily an able legislator, had apparently let his prejudices run away with him. The assumption that the three- or four-man commission could review all literature concerning whose propagandist nature there was any doubt was patently absurd. The prohibitory language was extremely vague and inclusive. When it became necessary to revise the law the following August, Senator T a f t stated that he had intended the prohibition to be applied only to literature printed at Government expense: that is, OWI releases, Army News Service bulletins, and the like. But the law said "paid for," not "printed," thus blanketing in all commercially produced books and magazines purchased for army libraries ; and the word "sponsored" was, quite reasonably, it would seem, interpreted as applying to publications purchased from nonappropriated army funds and publications made available to soldiers through the facilities of the army post exchanges. The language used in defining the prohibited type of literature was extremely confusing: "any general communication, Government magazine, Government newspaper . . . or other literature or material . . . containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any election" for Federal office. The word "calculated" as distinguished from "designed" means apt or adapted to produce an effect even though no express intention to produce that effect is present. The effect of using both words in the law and of stressing them with the phrase "of any kind" was to create the impression that any writing capable of influencing votes was prohibited, whether it was obviously propagandist or not. Could an army officer, who would be subject to criminal penalties if he violated the law, be certain that a judge in court would conclude that a favorable biography of Woodrow Wilson, or even of Theodore Roosevelt, was not calculated to influence votes in an election in which isolationism was an issue? If a work was considered calculated to produce this result, might it not then be judged to be propagandist in effect? For what other purpose could the word "calculated" have been placed in the text? Senator T a f t later disclaimed any such intention and said that the words "argument" and " p r o p a g a n d a " clearly limited his meaning. He never did explain what he meant by using the disputed term. He only denied, after the event, that it meant what the War Department said it meant. Its only purpose, apparently, was to deter enterprising O W I lawyers and W a r Department politicians from trying to find loopholes in the words "propaganda" and "designed." It was the same with the other disputed word, "spon-

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sored." It, too, seems to have been put in " j u s t to make sure." The net result was a law that lent itself to as drastic an interpretation as the French ordinance of pre-Revolutionary times which banned, under penalty of death, all publications that "might tend to excite the public mind." There were some protests in the Senate. Senator Lucas expressed his disapproval of a form of censorship that in effect treated service personnel as a separate class of citizens. Colonel Robert Cutler, representing the Secretarv of War, pointed out the impossibility of the W a r Ballot Commission's reviewing Yank, Stars and Stripes, the thirty magazines included in the unit magazine set sent overseas every week by the Library Section, and the thirty books then published every month as Armed Services Editions, let alone the 1,200 camp newspapers and other soldier publications then in existence. At Colonel Cutler's suggestion Senator Lucas proposed that the army and the navy be authorized to distribute magazines and newspapers for which soldiers had expressed a preference and such books as were judged by the advisory committee of the Council on Books in Wartime not to contain material of the prohibited type. These and several other modifications were accepted by Senator T a f t , but the worst feature of the law, the vague definition of the prohibited type of material, was not touched. The President refused to sign the bill, on the ground that its provisions were too cumbersome to effect their purpose, but he did not veto it. The Soldier Voting Law, therefore, went into force, without the Presidential signature, on April 1, 1944. The President's doubts about the effectiveness of the law proved to be mistaken. Under the machinery set up by the army, the navy, and merchant marine, 2,691,160 service men voted in the general election of 1944—roughly 30 percent of all eligible voters in the services. The War Department Interpretation.—But what concerns us here is the effect of Title V on the Army Library Service. When the provisions of the law were announced in a W a r Department bulletin, the Library Section staff were dismaj'ed. The predominant sentiment was that it would "put the Army Library Service out of business." This impression was only reinforced a few weeks later when the official W a r Department interpretation of Title V, written by Colonel Cutler, was published to all commanders in a twelve-page mimeographed letter signed by the Adjutant General. In a long preliminary statement, the sweeping character of Title V's prohibitions was emphasized, and in view of the criminal penalties

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invoked, officers were admonished to resolve any reasonable doubts in favor of prohibition. 3 Then the "AG l e t t e r " got down to specific cases: what must be done and what must not be done. With respect to magazines, all those for which a substantial number of soldiers had expressed a preference might be disseminated without regard to the political nature of their contents. The L i b r a r y Section of the Special Services Division was directed to publish a provisional list of soldier preference magazines pending the completion of a sampling survey of soldier preferences to be conducted by the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division. Any magazine not containing political argument or p r o p a g a n d a might also be distributed, but it was the responsibility of each commander to ensure t h a t any magazine distributed under his auspices was free from the prohibited political m a t t e r if it was not on the published soldier preference list. Individual soldiers might, of course, buy any magazines they pleased: the prohibition applied only to those magazines purchased from army funds or distributed under army auspices. Newspapers for which a soldier preference had been established might likewise be disseminated without regard to the political nature of their contents. Commanders in the United States were to determine soldier newspaper preferences a t their posts by ascertaining what papers had been customarily distributed to their troops prior to April 1. Overseas commanders were to conduct sampling pools in which soldiers would "express their three preferences among fifteen leading newsp a p e r s " of the United States, with the privilege of writing in one additional paper. The ruling on books was more complicated. Books acquired by the army prior to April 1 were not affected. T h e Library Section was authorized to distribute books selected by the advisory committee of the Council on Books in Wartime in accordance with a list of criteria of which the most important was the exclusion of "political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated," and so forth. Commanders overseas were authorized to supplement the books selected by the Council on Books in Wartime, that is, the Armed Services Editions, with other purchases, but purchases of American books had to be made through the L i b r a r y Section, which was authorized to reject any order "not conforming to the above policy." Commanders within the United States were held "personally responsible" t h a t books purchased under their authority should not contain the prohibited political matter. Similar restrictions were placed on the purchase of books by the Education and Orientation Branches of the Information

The Soldier Voting Laro and Education Division. The restrictions placed on radio broadcasts, motion pictures, and the printing of material in service men's publications were no less stringent. Effect on the Library Service.—The first action taken by the Library Section was to prepare a provisional list of soldier preference magazines. The list consisted of eighteen magazines which ranked high in the latest semi-annual library reports received from posts in the United States and overseas. Ten of the magazines included in the unit set of magazines distributed to soldiers overseas appeared on the list. Men in overseas bases were much more inclined to check as desirable the magazines they were already getting than they were to line them out as undesirable; and so the overseas "vote" accounted for the presence on the list of several publications which did not have extremely large civilian circulations. The unit set magazines on the list were: Life, Readers Digest, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post, New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Omnibook, and Coronet. The other eight were popular publications which were not then included in the unit set because they were not available in lightweight editions: Pic, Colliers, American, Look, Liberty, Click, Redbook, and National Geographic. This left sixteen magazines in the unit set which were not legally established to be soldier preference magazines. They were obviously nonpolitical in nature, so Trautman decided to retain all of them in the set. He sent letters to their publishers, explaining the provisions of Title V and urging them to comply with the law. Each issue of these "nonpreference" magazines had to be carefully reviewed, of course, before it was sent out. Only one issue of one magazine was rejected: the June, 1944, issue of Country Gentleman, which contained an article on national agricultural policy by Clifford R. Hope, a Republican Congressman from Kansas. Meanwhile, the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division set about making a study of magazine preferences with the aid of the National Publishers Association. The study was based on a preference poll conducted at seventeen posts, supplemented by an analysis of post exchange magazine sales in the United States in the period prior to the effective date of the law, of standing orders for magazines from overseas exchanges, and of National Publishers Association data concerning service men's subscriptions. The semi-annual librar}T reports were also taken into consideration. As a result of this study, a list of 189 soldier preference magazines (including fifty periodically published "comic books") was published in the latter p a r t of

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J u l y . Several weeks later the list was expanded to include 212 publications, all of which might thereafter be disseminated by the army regardless of their political content. The Research Branch also conducted a study of newspaper preferences in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. A representative cross-section of between two and three thousand men were questioned regarding their preferences, in accordance with the method prescribed in the A d j u t a n t General's letter. I t was determined that forty papers were desired by a substantial number of men. Only two of these, however, were available to more than a small fraction of soldiers overseas—the overseas editions of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The army post exchanges in England were forbidden to sell English newspapers to soldiers, since a soldier preference had not been established for them. Obviously, it was not practicable to conduct even a sampling poll of newspaper preferences in t h a t theater during the weeks immediately following D-Day. The provisional preference list of eighteen magazines was published in May, and the first expanded list did not appear until July. In the interval, nobody at the service command or post headquarters knew what to do. Some post exchange officers refused to accept delivery of any but the eighteen approved publications ; others took a chance and continued to stock obviously nonpolitical magazines and "comic books"; many ignored the W a r Department directives on the subject entirely. The directives met with the same variety of response in army libraries. "Soldier voting"«officers had been appointed at all posts. Title V was only one p a r t of the law which they had to administer, and the W a r Department's interpretation of Title V was long and complicated. Each officer drew a different meaning from it. In some cases librarians were required to cancel subscriptions to all but the approved eighteen magazines. More often, they merely stacked the nonpreference magazines in a back room in anticipation that they would be named on the next preference list. The librarians at some army technical schools were not allowed to place the Infantry Journal, the Cavalry Journal, or any other military publications on their library shelves. Some librarians were instructed to tear all political articles out of nonpreference magazines before making them available to readers. A few protested so vigorously against the official interpretation of the law that the harried soldier voting officers let them do as they pleased "pending clarification and further instructions." The provisions of the AG letter which caused the greatest trouble, however, were those relating to books. They were frequently taken to

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be retroactive, although an express statement to the contrary was buried somewhere in the twelve pages of the letter. Books on economics and political biographies purchased long before the passage of the law were removed from the shelves of scores of libraries. In the Ninth Service Command the command librarian argued the soldier voting officials into making the tacit assumption that the directive applied only to books purchased from appropriated funds. Since less than a third of the book purchases in the posts of the Ninth Service Command were paid for from appropriated funds, the post librarians were for the most part able to continue buying what they pleased. In several other service commands the sheer complexity of the AG letter had a beneficial cffcct: not knowing what it meant, the commanders and their soldier voting officers simply ignored it. I t is doubtful whether more than half the posts in the country made any real effort to comply with the provisions affecting books. But wherever the provisions were enforced, there was a great deal of trouble. The inconsistency of the provision affecting gift books was especially galling. I t was legal to accept a single copy of Stettinius's LendLease and circulate it to all readers ; but it was illegal to accept " a substantial number" of copies of the book if the responsible officer thought that it contained political matter of the prohibited type, as it certainly seemed to do. The Book-of-the-Month Club was then donating some 1,500 subscriptions to army libraries throughout the world. The original offer of donation had been accepted by the Secretary of War. It was the most valuable donation the Army Library Service had received. Every book sent out in filling these subscriptions was, of course, brand new, and there mere fact that the Book-of-the-Month Club had selected it ensured that it would become popular and talked about. The Book-ofthe-Month Club subscriptions were a real treasure. Obviously, 1,500 monthly packages, frequently containing two volumes each, constituted a substantial number of books, and therefore it seemed evident that the acceptance by the army of any Book-of-the-Month Club selection containing the prohibited political matter would be a violation of the law. Soon enough, the Book-of-the-Month Club did select a book containing the prohibited type of material—Sumner Welles's The Time for Decision. A navy officer advised General Byron, the Director of the Special Services Division, that the navy had declined that month's selection in accordance with the provisions of Title V. Byron asked Colonel Trautman and Trautman's immediate superior, Colonel

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Frederick Warburg, chief of the Athletic and Recreation Service, what action they recommended taking. After some thought, Trautman found a solution for the problem, which met with both Warburg's and Byron's approval. He observed that the navy received its Book-of-theMonth Club selections in bulk and then distributed them to ships and shore bases. The W a r Department, on the contrary, had "merely acted as an agent in transmitting the Book-of-the-Month Club's generous offer to the field." A subscription was given to each individual library, and the books were mailed direct to the libraries by the donor. The acceptance of each monthly package was a matter for local determination by the commanders of the installations concerned. " I t is felt," he concluded, " t h a t the W a r Department would be justly criticized . . . if it interposed any objection to the continued receipt and acceptance of a few gift books by post commanders." Since the one or two volumes contained in the individual monthly packages did not constitute a "substantial number," it was clear that the commanders could continue to accept these donations without placing themselves in jeopardy. Except for the donation clause, the provisions concerning books contained no "outs." No book was exempted because of soldier preference. Everything had to be scanned before purchase, not only works on politics, history, and public affairs, but fiction, too, since Colonel Cutler, now Coordinator of Soldier Voting, had stated that a single political allusion was an occasion for "reasonable doubt." The only course Trautman could take was to adhere strictly to the W a r Department interpretation of the law, resolving all reasonable doubts "in favor of prohibition." In order to relieve post commanders of p a r t of their responsibility, Trautman recommended that his office be authorized to issue monthly lists of books certified to be free of political taint. This proposal was found to be consonant with the provisions of the law, and lists of approved books were accordingly issued in June, July, and August. The lists comprised 207 titles in all; ninety were current Armed Services Editions selections, the rest miscellaneous best sellers, mysteries, and westerns. The lists contained a number of fairly new popular books —Bedford Village, A Bell for Adano, The Apostle, Good Night, Sweet Prince, Here Is Your War—and a good deal of pure trash. But at least they were books that army librarians could safely buy. In compiling the approved lists, the civilian librarians in the Library Section had to scan every page of hundreds of obviously noncontroversial volumes, since even the most innocuous westerns will

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sometimes contain allusions to free silver or some other antiquated partisan issue. T h e y also had to scan all the titles requisitioned by overseas Special Services and A r m y Exchange officers. A number of books on politics, economics, history, and sociology—nearly a hundred titles, all told—were deleted from the requisitions, and a few novels also fell under the ban, notably God's Little Acre, a book calculated to swing votes away from any candidate who approved the status quo in the rural South. The Horse and Buggy Doctor, a work flaunting old-fashioned Republicanism in its very title, also had to be denied to soldier readers outside the United States. T h e chief victim, however, was Stuart Chase. Seven of his books were stricken from an order f o r the Panama Canal Department. The last book barred from distribution by the W a r Department, oddly enough, was AAF: the Official Guide to the Army Air Forces, published by Pocket Books under the sponsorship of the A r m y A i r Forces. This was taken to be a palpable violation of the law, since the copies of the book intended f o r distribution to the army contained a full-page portrait of President Roosevelt opposite the title p a g e : just the sort of thing Senator T a f t had protested against in the hearings on the bill the previous December. T h e book was finally distributed late in August after T i t l e V had been revised. T i t l e V caused some serious inconveniences overseas, particularly in the Central Pacific A r e a , where there was an interruption in the supply of books through the Patten-Snvder arrangement, but the only real misadventure occurred in the North African Theater. A t the end of 1943 and in the early months of 19-44 the North African edition of Stars and Stripes was being printed at plants in Algiers, Oran, Casablanca, Tunis, Sicily, and Naples. I t was a five-column, tabloid-size daily paper and had a total circulation of more than two hundred thousand. Although Stars and Stripes was limited to 8 pages, the presses on which it was printed had a capacity f o r a 16-page publication. Colonel Egbert White, the theater publication officer, decided to use the extra press capacity to print supplements providing the contents of current popular magazines. The first supplement printed was distributed with the January 12, 1944, issue of Stars and Stripes. Its 8 pages contained the first 32 pages of the January issue of Readers Digest printed from stereotypes made from plastic plates which had been flown to the theater. In order to arrange the 32 pages in proper sequence, the reader had only to fold the paper twice and cut along the folds. H e would have to rely on his own ingenuity to keep the pages together. In the next three

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supplements the remaining 96 pages of the issue were similarly reproduced. Within a few months the number of supplement printings had been increased from one to three a week, and in addition to the serial printing of the Readers Digest, eight-page selections from Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post were made available each week. Both publications furnished mats made up in the Stars and Stripes page size, and the printing stereotypes were made in the theater from the mats. In July, 1944, arrangements were being made to increase the number of supplements from three a week to one a day and to add Time and Newsweek to the list of magazines reprinted, when the whole supplement project was discontinued as a result of policy conflicts between Colonel White's office and the W a r Department Information and Education Division over the interpretation of the Soldier Voting Law. The principal matter at issue, apparently, was White's plan to use the Associated Press wire service in addition to that provided by the Army News Service. This plan conflicted with the Information and Education Division's decision, based on the W a r Department's recently published interpretation of Title V, that all wired news for soldier publications should be channeled through the Army News Service in order to ensure that equal coverage was given to all political parties which had candidates for Federal office. The printing of the supplements was also held to be in conflict with the provision of the W a r Department's interpretation of the law which required army editions of commercial publications to be "in the same text as" the regular editions. Only selections from Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post were reproduced in the supplements, thus leaving the door open, at least in theory, to a partisan selection policy. The overseas editions of Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker included in the magazine set distributed by the Special Services Division likewise consisted only of selections from the regular editions. The two W a r Department agencies evidently placed somewhat different constructions on this clause of the interpretation, the Information and Education Division adhering more closely to the letter of the directive than the Special Services Division. Regardless of the legal technicalities, the discontinuance of the widely circulated Stars and Stripes supplements was certainly regrettable ; a compromise between the theater office and the W a r Department office admitting of the continuance of the supplements in an altered form would have been more in the interest of the servicemen. Action by the Council on Books in Wartime.—During the first

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three months of the Soldier Voting Law, T r a u t m a n ' s policy was to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies of the law on all occasions and to request the Coordinator of Soldier Voting to authorize liberal interpretations whenever there was a choice. It was largely due to his insistence, for example, t h a t the second list of soldier preference magazines was made so inclusive. N a t u r a l l y , he did not overlook the possibility t h a t the L i b r a r y Section's compliance with the W a r D e p a r t m e n t interpretation might cause a public outcry which would lead to a revision of the law: he made sure t h a t all replies to civilian criticism should place the onus of responsibility on Congress. Meanwhile he continued to follow the absurd directives (when a Congressman suggested that the Congressional Record be distributed to all army libraries, T r a u t m a n informed him t h a t the publication contained " p o litical argument" calculated to influence votes) and hoped for the best. I t seemed a long time coming. Nobody outside the army grasped what was going on. The magazine banning had been publicized, but it was known t h a t it was only t e m p o r a r y . T h e full extent of the book banning had not been brought t o public notice. The whole business was finally brought out into the open by the only agency concerned with the administration of Title V which was in a position to speak freely—the civilian Council on Books in W a r time, which had been authorized to select books free of the prohibited type of material f o r distribution to a r m y and navy personnel in the form of Armed Services Editions. Fifteen titles which were considered f o r Armed Services Editions d u r i n g the spring and early summer had to be disapproved by the Council's advisory committee under the provisions of Title V,4 and an indeterminate number of titles were not considered at all because of the existence of the law. T h e advisory committee was experiencing considerable difficulty in selecting 32 titles a month which clearly did not contain material of the prohibited type. They felt t h a t their function was to select books for soldiers, not to keep books from them. The}' found themselves obliged not only to ban books, but to ban books precisely, it seemed, because they did deal with the underlying issues of the war. T h e y were extremely a n g r y and they wanted to do something about it. A f t e r not too long a delay something was done, and it proved decisive. On June 18, the Acting Director of the Council, Archibald Ogden, issued a release announcing t h a t the Council had voted a t its last meeting to send a resolution to the President, the secretaries of war and the navy, and other Government officials, " p r o t e s t i n g the restriction placed by the Soldiers' Vote Act on books f o r the Armed Forces and

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terming it an alarming encroachment on freedom." T h e release described the book censorship clauses of Title V and stated t h a t as a result of this provision, as interpreted by the Adjutant General's Office, the following books have already been barred for purchase by the Armed Services: Yankee from Olympus by Catherine Drinker Bowen . . . The Republic by Charles A. Beard . . . Slogum House by Mari Sandoz; and One Man's Meat by E. B. White. Under normal procedures 90,000 copies of each of the above books would have been published for the Army and Navy by Armed Services Editions. T h a t did it. Ten thousand copies of the release were sent out to newspapers and magazines. T h e r e were hundreds of editorials in the p a p e r s of the next few days, almost unanimously deploring, denouncing, and ridiculing the army's administration of Title V. A t first the army was blamed nearly as much as Congress, but by the first week in J u l y most of the fire of editorial writers and columnists was concent r a t e d on the a u t h o r of Title V. Senator T a f t declared t h a t the army had misinterpreted the measure, t h a t the term "political p r o p a g a n d a " showed unmistakably what the law meant, and t h a t , in his opinion, any reasonable doubt should be resolved in favor of publication. The W a r D e p a r t m e n t maintained t h a t it was only complying with the law as written, regardless of what Senator T a f t now said it meant. Obviously, Title V would have to be rewritten before the army could change its official interpretation. A t the suggestion of Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, and M. M. Geffen, the publisher of Omnibook, a meeting was held in New York on J u l y 20 to discuss the question of revising the disputed clauses. I t was attended by Senator T a f t , Colonel Cutler, representatives of the Special Services Division and the Information and Education Division and twenty book and magazine publishers. T h e upshot of the meeting was t h a t Senator T a f t agreed to sponsor an amendment prohibiting only works which "considered in their e n t i r e t y " were "obvious p r o p a g a n d a . " At the same time Senators Green and Lucas, the original sponsors of the Soldier Voting Law, also began to p r e p a r e a revision of Title V, embodying some of the changes suggested by the publishers. When the Senate reconvened in August, the Green-Lucas revision was passed, with Senator T a f t ' s concurrence. I t exempted all literature purchased from n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d funds or sold through army exchanges, and all books, magazines, and newspapers of general circulation, from the provisions of the law ; prescribed t h a t "the selection of such books, magazines, and newspapers, when the selection is necessarily limited by difficulties of t r a n s p o r t a t i o n or other exigencies of

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war, shall be made in some impartial manner . . . such as a preference expressed by members of the armed forces, or the recommendation of expert committees, or otherwise"; and prohibited only the dissemination of material not of general circulation "which, when considered in its entirety, contains political p r o p a g a n d a obviously designed to affect the result" of any Federal election or "obviously calculated to create bias for or against a particular candidate in any such election." In short, the army and the navy might buy anything except one-shot electioneering pamphlets; the overseas magazine set might include only soldier preference magazines (of which there were then 212) ; and anything the advisory committee approved might be reprinted in Armed Services Editions. In the debate on the measure, Senator H a t c h criticized the original Title V as having gone too f a r , particularly in t h a t it treated service men as a class of citizens "separate and distinct from the rest of the nation." Senator Green likewise blamed the law r a t h e r than the army f o r the situation t h a t had developed. Although Senator T a f t had had a m a j o r p a r t in d r a f t i n g the revision, he still held t h a t the army had been at fault. The interpretation of the Act by the War Department [he said] has been so unreasonable that many persons have suggested to me that the course pursued by the War Department and its Morale Division [*ic] is deliberately intended to discredit Congress in order to affect the election. . . . Its representatives cooperated 100 per cent with the extreme New Dealers and the CIO Political Action Committee in support of a clearly unconstitutional Federal ballot. . . . The Department has now set up an organization to get out the vote . . . on a scale which no political organization could possibly duplicate among the civilian population [ Congressional Record, XC, 6938]. Admittedly, the army did its best to "get out the vote"; the declared purpose of the law was to facilitate soldier voting. W h a t is more to the point is t h a t the revised version of Title V was a much better law than the original version and that Senator T a f t himself candidly admitted as much by agreeing to act as one of its sponsors. The restrictions it imposed were reasonable and clearly stated, and they were observed. No further questions were raised about the meaning of the law, and there were no complaints about army electioneering. T h e amended law was enforceable as written. The original version was not. Now, what would have happened if the W a r Department interpretation of the original version of Title V had been a loose one; if, in short, it had been assumed that only obvious p r o p a g a n d a was to be barred,

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regardless of the exact language of the law? One can only speculate. T h e dangerously vague provisions of the original Title V would still be on the books, and the exact text would, of course, be available to all commanders in a W a r Department bulletin. Many commanders—no doubt the majority—would be content to accept a loose W a r Department interpretation, authorizing them to ignore the sweeping language of Title V. But more than a few would be likely to go back to the text of the law itself and enforce all or some of its provisions as drastically as possible—just to be on the safe side. Why risk infringing a Federal statute? Thus, some books would be "legal" at one post and permanently banned at another. The army would be blamed for the situation, and yet as long as the top-level interpretation remained comfortably liberal, there could scarcely be an effective public outcry. If it had not been for Colonel Cutler's logical interpretation of the law and his stubborn insistence that "the way to enforce a law is to enforce it," Title V might have gone unrevised for years and have had a lastingly harmful effect on the armed forces' morale programs—particularly education, library service, and servicemen's publications. One more question has been raised by several commentators. Did Colonel Cutler write his interpretation with the intention of demonstrating that Title V was harmful, unworkable, and absurd and with a view to forcing Congress to revise it? It seems unlikely. He interpreted the law as written, and the criminal penalties invoked gave him ample cause for interpreting it drastically. It was the release of the Council on Books in Wartime, pointing out the unfairness and absurdity of the law as interpreted and citing particularly ludicrous instances of book banning that led to its revision. But unfair and absurd laws are seldom amended within a few months after their enactment. Nobody could have foreseen that a single press release would produce so great an effect. It does not detract either from Congress or from the publishers who wrote the release and deluged their Representatives and Senators with letters, to say that it could only have happened in wartime and in an election year. Indeed, the original measure itself could only have been passed in the same supercharged atmosphere.

XVI

The Western Pacific

I

X T H E F A L L O F 1 9 4 4 the army forces under General M a c A r t h u r

and the navy forces under Admiral Halsev launched their first a t tacks on the J a p a n e s e in the Philippines. A f t e r a h a l f - y e a r of hard fighting the islands were secured in M a y , 1 9 4 5 . S h o r t l y before the reconquest of the Philippines was completed, the J o i n t Chiefs of S t a f f made General M a c A r t h u r commanding general of all a r m y forces in the Pacific. T h e new overall Pacific command was designated A F P A C ( A r m y F o r c e s , P a c i f i c ) , with headquarters in Manila. I t s m a j o r subordinate commands (each p r a c t i c a l l y a separate t h e a t e r in itself) were A F M I D P A C , commonly called M I D P A C (including Hawaii, the M a r i a n a s , and other central Pacific b a s e s ) , with h e a q u a r t e r s in H a waii ; A F W E S P A C , comprising the Philippines and, later, the R y u k y u s , with headquarters in Manila ; and, a f t e r V - J D a y , the occupation commands in J a p a n ( E i g h t h A r m y ) and K o r e a ( X X I V Corps). In J u l y , 1 9 4 5 , Colonel H e n r y W . Clark and M a j o r Rueul D. H a r mon, of the W a r Department Special Services Division, flew to Manila to assist A F P A C in planning Special Services p r o g r a m s for the troops t h a t were to remain in the Philippines and for the combat units t h a t were to p a r t i c i p a t e in the invasion of J a p a n . As General M a c A r t h u r ' s Special Services headquarters did not have a l i b r a r y officer, M a j o r Poullada was summoned from Hawaii, at the instance of Colonel Clarke, to plan the library program for these forces. Poullada flew to M a n i l a , made a rapid survey of the situation, d r a f t e d a tentative plan which was accepted, and then flew back to the Special Services Division office in Xew Y o r k to supervise the procurement of material and personnel for the p r o g r a m . THE

PLAN

Poullada arrived in Xew Y o r k on V - J D a y . A l a r g e p a r t of his plan had been for the combat forces t h a t were to a t t a c k J a p a n , so t h a t it had to be considerably revamped in the light of the new situation. T h e principal features of Poullada's revised plan and the action which the Special Services Division took on them were as follows:

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a. Trained library officers and professional librarians were to be assigned to the forces in the Philippines and the occupied areas. T h e library officers selected were M a j o r Morris A. Gelfand, who had j u s t returned from service with the 9th Air Force in Europe, and Capt a i n (later M a j o r ) Henry J . Gartland, who had been overseas liaison officer f o r the L i b r a r y Section (recently redesignated the L i b r a r y B r a n c h ) since the beginning of 1945. They left the United States f o r Manila in November, 1945, together with several other Special Services officers who had been assigned to duty with A F P A C . Lieutenant Carl Ficker, who had been Poullada's principal enlisted assistant in the Central Pacific Area L i b r a r y headquarters, was also t r a n s f e r r e d t o Manila and arrived there in October. 1 According to the original plan, M a j o r Postell was to have gone out t o Manila by way of Hawaii in August to make preliminary a r r a n g e ments for the p r o g r a m on the spot and incidentally to establish the necessary administrative liaison between the M I D P A C and A F P A C library headquarters, but he had got only as f a r as Hamilton Field, California, when all westward flights were canceled indefinitely because of the termination of the war, and he was sent back to New York. I t was then arranged t h a t Gartland should go to Hawaii in October to do this liaison work, but this plan likewise had to be abandoned, and Gelfand and Gartland were able to spend only a few hours in Hawaii on their way to Manila. Thus, there never was an opportunity to establish closc working relations between the M I D P A C and A F P A C library offices. Poullada had planned t h a t twenty professional librarians with ample overseas experience should be transferred from the M I D P A C bases to the Western Pacific during the fall and winter and t h a t the vacancies thus created in M I D P A C should be filled by librarians recruited in the United States. He considered it essential t h a t only librarians with previous overseas experience should undertake the rugged pioneering work t h a t had to be done in the Western Pacific. As it turned out, largely because of conditions caused by the sudden ending of the war, only eight librarians were sent from M I D P A C to the Western Pacific during t h a t period (November, 1945—January, 1946), and eight more in the spring and early summer. The remaining librarians sent to the Western Pacific in the first half of 1946 went direct from the United States, and none of them arrived there before May. b. A million dollar procurement of books was to be initiated immediately.

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The procurement was to consist of preassembled and preprocessed field libraries and field reference libraries. Each field library was to comprise 10 clearly numbered shelved cases, each containing 100 volumes. Large units were to receive all 10 cases. Smaller units were to receive a smaller number of cases, depending on their strength and on the number of units to be supplied. Since there was to be a minimum of duplication between cases, it would be possible to supply the small units periodically with fresh reading matter simply by rotating cases among them. The field libraries were to contain 85 percent to 9 0 percent fiction and popular nonfiction. They were to be supplemented by the field reference libraries, each consisting of one case containing 100 reference books. There were to be 500 field libraries and 1,000 field reference libraries: a total of 600,000 volumes. T o save working time in the field, the books were to be partly processed before being packed — a book pocket containing a printed shelf-list card and a printed charging card was to be pasted in each. The total cost of procurement, processing, and packing came to a little less than one million dollars — $ 8 0 0 , 0 0 0 for the field libraries and $160,000 for the field reference libraries. After five weeks devoted to book selection (which perforce degenerated into a search for acceptable substitutes for selections which were not available in sufficient quantities), the orders for the libraries were transmitted to the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot at the end of September. The assembled libraries began to move to the West Coast on January 5 , 1 9 4 6 , and they reached Manila, Yokohama, and Inchon (the army port in Korea) in March. c. To fill the supply gap prior to the arrival of the field and field reference libraries, collections already on hand were to be sent to the Western Pacific at once. After the libraries were established, they were to be refreshed by purchases made from local funds rather than by the slower method of requisitioning on the War Department. Four hundred and thirty-four R B libraries, totaling more than 200,000 volumes, and several hundred of the old C kits were shipped to the Philippines, J a p a n , and Korea in the fall of 1945. In October, 1945, due to declining troop strength in other parts of the world, the quantity of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets dispatched to units in the Pacific and in E T O was doubled. And during the winter the Ninth Service Command Library Depot, in addition to its other operations, began to assemble, pack, and ship to the Western Pacific libraries made available through the inactivation of posts in the United States. Between December, 1945, and midsummer, 1946, the depot

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packed and dispatched a total of three 10,000-volume libraries and fourteen 5,000-volume libraries to the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. T h e first of the 10,000-volume libraries reached T o k y o in February, 1946. d. The Library Branch, as the New York War Department office was now called, was to recruit civilian librarians to replace those who were to go from MIDPAC to the Western Pacific and, if need be, recruit librarians directly for the Western Pacific. Recruiting f o r the Pacific proved much harder than recruiting f o r E T O had been. The war was over, and fewer post librarians were willing to commit themselves to a year's duty overseas; hence, a much larger proportion of librarians without previous army experience had to be sent to the Pacific than were sent to E T O . And the processing of the recruits was slow work—too slow, considering the imperative need overseas. Twenty-odd librarians were recruited for M I D P A C in the fall and winter, but the m a j o r i t y of them did not reach their destination until February. Meanwhile, in January the Eighth A r m y , the occupying force in Japan, had requisitioned 9 5 ; and a few weeks later A F W E S P A C , the Philippines command, requisitioned 37. I t proved impossible to fill these requisitions rapidly. In order to get more librarians, the Library Branch obtained permission to recruit men as well as women f o r Japan and Korea. B y the end of April, 65 librarians (including 4 men) had been recruited f o r Japan and Korea and 14 f o r the Philippines, but their processing took from two to four months. By the end of M a y , in addition to the two A F P A C librarians, there were only 6 professional civilian librarians in the Philippines, 6 in Japan, and one en route from T o k y o to K o r e a — a total of 15. A l l but two of them had been transferred from M I D P A C . I t was late summer before the Eighth Army's requirements were substantially met and the Philippines command did not get its full complement until fall. A f t e r this brief summary of the plan and of the W a r Department's action on it, let us see how it worked in the field. This account, too, can be only sketchy, since many of the people who did the work were still overseas when it was written and not enough information was available f o r a detailed report. AFFAC

Lieutenant Ficker arrived in Manila in the latter part of October, 1945. H e was followed a few weeks later by Jane Fairweather, the former Central Pacific Area executive librarian, Jane McClure, a former Central Pacific Area field supervisor, and Gertrude Henrik-

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son, formerly librarian of the 147th General Hospital on Oahu. Ficker was assigned to the A F W E S P A C headquarters, the librarians to the higher A F P A C headquarters. In November, Gelfand and Gartland arrived from the United States. They, too, were assigned to AFPAC. During the next two months five more librarians arrived from Hawaii and the M a r i a n a s : B a r b a r a Bell, Louise Darling, Beatrice Wright, Olma Bowman and Annie Laurie Etchison. These five were to be the complete A F W E S P A C professional staff for many months to come, as the other librarians went to J a p a n and Korea shortly a f t e r the beginning of the year. A f t e r the first few weeks the AFPAC library staff consisted of M a j o r Gelfand, Miss Fairwcather, and Miss McClurc. M a j o r G a r t land was sent to the Eighth Army in J a p a n early in December, on temp o r a r y duty, a f t e r which he was assigned as the Eighth Army library officer, and Miss Henrikson was assigned to the Sixth Army in J a p a n in the middle of December, j u s t before its area was absorbed by the Eighth Army. As a staff section of the m a j o r army command in the Western Pacific, the A F P A C library office was responsible for preparing the "enabling legislation," as it were, for the development of library organizations in the m a j o r subordinate commands; that is, a general directive formulating library policy and standards for the theater and authorizing the employment of civilians and the assignment of military personnel for the performance of library duties. I t was also responsible for assisting the subordinate commands in setting up their programs and f o r reviewing the programs a f t e r they were set up. Theoretically, it could intervene in the affairs of the lower commands only at their request but in fact it always took the initiative in such matters, by recommending t h a t its assistance be requested. Its third function, embracing a multitude of different activities, was to co-ordinate the supply, administrative, and personnel activities of the subordinate commands so as to avert conflicts in their requirements, and in general to act as a channel of information and authority between the commands and the W a r Department. The general directive on library service in the Western Pacific was written by Gelfand with the assistance of the other librarians and was published at the end of December. 2 I t charted the administrative position of library service in the Special Services organizations of the commands, indicated army and non-army sources of reading material, recommended purchases from nonappropriated funds to supplement the preassembled libraries, and set standards for the employment, assignment, and training of library personnel.

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Pacific

T h e a s s i s t a n c e which the A F P A C h e a d q u a r t e r s rendered t o some of the m a j o r commands in setting up t h e i r p r o g r a m s will be described in the l a t e r sections of this c h a p t e r . Only its c o - o r d i n a t i o n of supply a n d personnel need be considered here. T h e A F P A C S p e c i a l Services h e a d q u a r t e r s was in M a n i l a until F e b r u a r y , 1 9 4 6 , in T o k y o therea f t e r . Supplies shipped from the U n i t e d S t a t e s m i g h t come by a n y of f o u r o r five routes, and the l i b r a r y supplies were only filler c a r g o . S h i p m e n t s were not invariably unloaded a t t h e r i g h t p o r t , and the p o r t supply officers were often confused by the m a r k i n g s on the l i b r a r y k i t s : the l i b r a r y officers could never be sure, f o r e x a m p l e , whether a s h i p p i n g document f o r 2 5 R B l i b r a r i e s m e a n t 2 5 sets of 5 cases o r merely 2 5 cases. T h e A F P A C office was deluged, t o o , with conflicting r e p o r t s a b o u t the supply of magazine and A r m e d S e r v i c e s E d i t i o n s sets. An island command would s t a t e t h a t it was being flooded with this m a t e r i a l and t h a t the supply should be diminished. I n t h e same mail would come l e t t e r s from divisions on the same island complaining t h a t no r e a d i n g m a t e r i a l was available. G e l f a n d solved this problem as best he could by sending a form l e t t e r t o all island o r a r e a commands rep o r t i n g an oversupply, in which he requested t h a t t h e local supply officer d i s t r i b u t e the m a t e r i a l to h o s p i t a l s , d a y r o o m s , R e d Cross clubs, and all o t h e r places in the a r e a where a r m y and n a v y personnel cong r e g a t e d . Subsequent complaints of u n d e r s u p p l y f r o m units in the a r e a were redirected t o the a r e a supply officer. All overseas t h e a t e r s had the same trouble a t the end of 1 9 4 5 and t h e b e g i n n i n g of 1 9 4 6 . Demobilization was working t o o f a s t ; the officers and non-coms who had learned how t o handle c e r t a i n s u p p l y j o b s were being replaced by men new to the work who knew t h a t t h e y , t o o , would be replaced within a few weeks o r a few months and were c o r r e s p o n d i n g l y c a r e less. I n spite of these c o m p l i c a t i o n s , the d i s t r i b u t i o n of t h e m a j o r supply shipment« t o the W e s t e r n P a c i f i c was well handled. T h e books were sent out as rapidly as was possible, and t h e y were f a i r l y divided among the W e s t e r n Pacific commands on t h e basis of t h e i r s t r e n g t h . T h e a p p o r t i o n m e n t of the field a n d field r e f e r e n c e l i b r a r i e s shipped from the W e s t C o a s t in F e b r u a r y was as f o l l o w s : TABLE

IV.

Command Eighth Army AFWESPAC X X I V Corps Total

DISTRIBUTION

OF

LIBRARY

Field Libraries 198 225 77 500

KITS

IN

Field Reference 356 450 154 960

WESTERN

Libraries

PACIFIC

Total (In volumes) 233,600 270,000

82,400 596,000

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Figures on the distribution of the 484 R B libraries and of the 100,000 volumes dispatched f r o m the N i n t h Service Command L i b r a r y Depot are not available. In addition to this material from the United States, a large number of books surplus to library needs in Hawaii and the Marianas were shipped to the Western Pacific commands f r o m M I D P A C in the spring and summer of 1946. In order to facilitate the use of the books a f t e r they were issued, A F P A C recommended to all commands t h a t full use be made of all existing agencies f o r book distribution and library service, whether or not they were directly controlled by Special Services. If in any given locality the Information and E d u c a t i o n Division, the Red Cross, or the USO had reading rooms or similar facilities, Special Services officers were to be instructed to furnish books to these agencies in large quantities and not to a t t e m p t to set up separate facilities of their own. Directives were likewise issued by the A F P A C Information and Education Division and the Red Cross and USO headquarters u r g i n g full co-operation with the library p r o g r a m . T h e I. and E . directives also provided t h a t U S A F I textbooks and other reading material distributed by I. and E . should be placed in Special Services libraries when available. The W a r Department L i b r a r y B r a n c h and A F P A C were less successful in co-ordinating the personnel requirements of the m a j o r subordinate commands. If there had been closer liaison between these two agencies and M I D P A C — i n other words, if the plans to send Postell or G a r t l a n d to Hawaii had not failed—the work might have been done more expeditiously, although this is not certain. M I D P A C was the only Pacific command f o r which the W a r D e p a r t m e n t could recruit librarians until personnel requisitions were actually received from A F W E S P A C and the E i g h t h A r m y ; and much planning and negotiating had to be done before these requisitions could be drawn up. They were not received by the W a r D e p a r t m e n t until the end of J a n uary. Thus, if any librarians were to go to the Western Pacific before spring, they could only come f r o m M I D P A C . I t was hoped t h a t M I D P A C could release as many as twenty librarians by midwinter f o r duty f a r t h e r west. B u t not very many M I D P A C librarians were interested in moving on to another overseas assignment now t h a t the war was over, about eight returned to the United States in the winter and early spring, and replacements f r o m the United States were slow in a r riving—six between October and December, fourteen in F e b r u a r y and March and five or six between A p r i l and June. At any rate, only eight librarians could be t r a n s f e r r e d from M I D P A C to the Western Pacific between November and J a n u a r y , and then eight more between March

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237

and June—scarcely enough, as we shall see, for all that had to be done. 3 THE PHILIPPINES

(AFWESPAC)

In a letter to a friend, Jane Fairweather has described the astonishment with which the librarians were greeted when they reached Manila in November, 1945. Everywhere we went people asked us what the rainbow patch on our shoulders stood for, and most people were incredulous to learn of such a thing as library service in the Army. We are most commonly confused with the Red Cross and then the USO. . . . It was gratifying to see how eagerly books were sought after. Even Armed Services Editions were not well distributed and were considered prizes. One of the pathetic sights was a sign in the lobby of the Manila Hotel over a dozen or so different Armed Services Editions informing you that you could take one in exchange for one. Apropos of the shortage of Armed Services Editions, one of the librarians remarked that many of them, along with other army materials, were to be found on the black market. Manila, mostly in ruins, was like a wild frontier town, and in the outlying islands lost Japanese units were still being mopped up. Even as late as the spring of 1946 in many sectors women employees of the army were allowed to travel only under armed guard. The reluctance of some commanders to accept librarians is quite understandable. For unfathomable reasons, Ficker and the two AFPAC librarians who had been temporarily assigned to assist him were not kept at the AFWESPAC headquarters to organize distribution and service for the whole command, but were directed to work exclusively at setting up libraries in the Manila area. This was largely a matter of getting RB libraries and C kits into hospitals and into the hands of large troop units and of training enlisted men or Filipinas to circulate the books. An attempt was also made to equip all books with pockets and cards—probably a mistake in this pioneering stage of operations; the strict accountability rules which applied in the United States were not extended to the overseas theaters until the following spring. About fifteen small libraries were set up in the Manila area, and preliminary arrangements were made for establishing and furnishing the quarters which were to house one of the large libraries to be sent out by the Ninth Service Command Library Depot. But for the time being the AFWESPAC library staff was prevented from doing anything about book distribution in other parts of the command. In December an inspection team from AFPAC surveyed the Special

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Services w o r k being done in A F W E S P A C . M a j o r G e l f a n d was t h e l i b r a r y m e m b e r of t h e t e a m . A s a result of t h e i n s p e c t o r s ' findings t h e initial a d m i n i s t r a t i v e e r r o r was rectified, a n d G e l f a n d ( t e m p o r a r i l y lent t o A F W E S P A C f o r this p u r p o s e ) , F i c k e r , a n d the civilian l i b r a r i a n s set t o work in J a n u a r y t o develop a l i b r a r y p r o g r a m f o r t h e ent i r e c o m m a n d . F i c k e r a n d M i s s E t c h i s o n , t h e executive l i b r a r i a n , were p l a c e d in c h a r g e of t h e c o m m a n d l i b r a r y h e a d q u a r t e r s a n d i t s d e p o t ; M r s . B o w m a n was m a d e h e a d of t h e l i b r a r y s y s t e m of M a n i l a ( t o c o n s i s t of t h r e e 5,000-volume l i b r a r i e s a n d n u m e r o u s smaller b r a n c h e s ) a n d p r o v i d e d with f u n d s f o r the e m p l o y m e n t of fifteen Filip i n a a s s i s t a n t s ; Miss W r i g h t s u p e r v i s e d t h e d i s t r i b u t i o n a n d servicing of field a n d p o r t a b l e l i b r a r i e s in t h e M a n i l a a r e a ; a n d M i s s D u r l i n g a n d M i s s Bell were given c h a r g e of service in n o r t h e r n a n d s o u t h e r n L u z o n . I n F e b r u a r y a requisition was sent t o t h e W a r D e p a r t m e n t f o r 3 7 a d d i t i o n a l l i b r a r i a n s , b u t e x c e p t f o r one l i b r a r i a n who was h i r e d locally in A p r i l a n d one who came in f r o m M I D P A C in J u n e , t h e a d d i t i o n a l p e r s o n n e l did n o t begin t o a r r i v e u n t i l l a t e s u m m e r ; t h e m o s t p r e s s i n g need h a d p a s s e d b y t h e n , a n d t h e requisition was e v e n t u a l l y cut to 28. Between J a n u a r y a n d t h e end of M a r c h , 1 9 4 6 , 6 9 l i b r a r i e s were e s t a b l i s h e d in t h e islands. A p a r t f r o m t h e l a r g e M a n i l a l i b r a r i e s , t h e i r a v e r a g e size was 1 , 0 0 0 volumes. One h u n d r e d t w e n t y F i l i p i n a s ( m a n y of whom h a d h a d a l i t t l e l i b r a r y t r a i n i n g ) were hired t o o p e r a t e t h e l i b r a r i e s u n d e r t h e g e n e r a l supervision of t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l s a n d p a i d f r o m n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d f u n d s . I n t h e s p r i n g , a g r a n t of $ 2 0 , 0 0 0 f r o m n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d f u n d s was m a d e f o r t h e p u r c h a s e of new books. Collections of c h i l d r e n ' s books ( f o r t h e families of soldiers a n d officers) were p u r c h a s e d t h r o u g h a j o b b e r in t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , a n d a b o u t 5 , 0 0 0 volumes of c u r r e n t p o p u l a r m a t e r i a l were o r d e r e d t h r o u g h a n o t h e r j o b b e r . A s u b s t a n t i a ] p a r t of this m a t e r i a l was received in J u n e and July. All t h e a r e a s u p e r v i s o r s p e r f o r m e d v a r i o u s f u n c t i o n s in a d d i t i o n t o their professional w o r k — f r o m o p e r a t i n g warehouses t o p r e p a r i n g p u b l i c i t y m a t e r i a l s a n d d r a f t i n g staff p a p e r s . I n a d d i t i o n , t h e y h a d t o c o n t e n d with t h e c l i m a t e a n d with e x t r e m e l y r o u g h c o n d i t i o n s of life. I n a l e t t e r t o a f r i e n d in the W a r D e p a r t m e n t , Miss E t c h i s o n vividlv described t h e s i t u a t i o n of t h e l i b r a r i a n s in t h e s p r i n g of 1 9 4 6 . Living conditions are overcrowded and the little comforts of life j u s t aren't. We work in sweltering heat all day and sleep under stifling mosquito nets at night. I have seen all our present staff, well acclimated to overseas life, under doctors' care. . . . Most of our jobs entail a great deal of j e e p

The

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Pacific

riding and the roads are simply god-awful. Although the war is over, there is still shooting going on, and it is necessary for some librarians to live under primitive conditions in tents and compound areas, and travel only with armed guard tail gunners ! It can't be stressed too strongly to the girls you recruit that it is a rough life. In the fall of 1945, Okinawa, which had previously been based on MIDPAC for supplies, was made a subcommand under AFWESPAC. With the concurrence of the AFWESPAC Special Services officer, Miss Fairweather was detailed by AFPAC to inspect library facilities and book distribution on the island in January, 1946. Many of the buildings and much other property on the island had been destroyed by a typhoon several months earlier. There were few books other than Armed Services Editions—a few 500-volume collections, one of 1,000 volumes, and one of 1,500 volumes. At Miss Fairweather's suggestion, AFWESPAC sent 20 RB libraries to the island the following month. More books arrived thereafter, and in March, Lieutenant Ficker went to the island and spent five weeks orienting unit Special Services officers and enlisted men and developing a centralized system to ensure the regular rotation of the available collections. The Okinawa commander requested that civilian librarians be assigned to the island and after prolonged negotiations between AFWESPAC, MIDPAC, and the W a r Department, Virginia Yates was transferred from MIDPAC to Manila in June, 1946, and from there to Okinawa in midsummer. JAPAN

(EIGHTH

ARMY)

Shortly after Gelfand and Gartland arrived in Manila, Gartland was sent to Japan, which was then occupied by the Sixth and Eighth armies. ItB libraries had been shipped to Japan both from Manila and from the United States, but Gartland's first inspection tour revealed that only a handful had actually been issued to troop units. He discovered more than 50 in storage at several Sixth Army ports. After a series of conferences, Gartland and the army Special Services officer drew up a tentative plan for issuing this and subsequently received material to corps and divisions in accordance with their strength and geographical location. The army Special Services officer requested AFPAC to furnish a civilian librarian to supervise the distribution of books and develop a library program, and accordingly Miss Henrikson went to Japan about the middle of December. In January the Sixth Army units in Japan were absorbed by the Eighth Army, and Miss Henrikson was appointed executive librarian of the Eighth Army.

The Western

Pacific

After his work with the Sixth Army, Gartland made similar arrangements to get a large number of RB libraries which had just arrived in Yokohama into the hands of Eighth Army units, and selected quarters for the two 10,000-volume libraries which were to be sent to Japan—in the Octagon Building in Yokohama and in the Ernie Pyle Theater in Tokyo. He also organized the distribution of large quantities of extra sets of Armed Services Editions and magazine sets which were delivered to the Eighth Army headquarters in addition to the sets mailed to units. But personnel was even more important than supply. After the Sixth Army units were absorbed, the Eighth Army occupational force was to comprise two corps—the I Corps and the I X Corps—with two divisions in each corps, plus Air Forces units and special troops. There would be books enough for all when the shipments from the United States were received, but to place and keep them in use trained librarians were needed, not only in the corps and divisional headquarters but also in the lower units and hospitals and the centers which were to be established for the families of military personnel. A request for 95 civilian librarians was prepared and approved late in December and forwarded through A F P AC to the W a r Department in J a n u a r y , with a request that special consideration be given to effecting transfer to the Eighth Army of librarians in other Pacific areas. In February and March detailed plans for the utilization of personnel and material were prepared in collaboration with the AFPAC library staff. The Ernie Pyle Library was opened in February. I t was staffed with military personnel, since Miss Henrikson was still the only civilian librarian in the Eighth Army. By the time the Octagon Library opened in Yokohama five weeks later, two librarians had arrived from MIDPAC—Marion Levin and Edmee Hanchey. Miss Levin was assigned to the Ernie Pyle Library, and Miss Henrikson, assisted by Miss Hanchey, supervised both the Octagon Library and the Eighth Army library supply depot which had been established in Yokohama. In May two more librarians arrived from MIDPAC and two from the United States, one of whom was sent on to Korea. In June nine more librarians came in—three from MIDPAC and six from the United States. After that there was a steady flow of incoming personnel, until a peak of 73 was reached in December, 1946. The 2Jrfh Division.—Let us consider the organization of library service in one of the four divisions in J a p a n . The experience of the librarians in this division was not entirely typical, but it does illustrate some of the conditions of the service in that p a r t of the world.

The

Western

Pacific

When Rose Vainstein arrived in J a p a n from Hawaii, in June, 1946, she was appointed librarian of the 24th I n f a n t r y Division, which occupied the island of Kyushu. The 24th and 25th divisions were under the I Corps, whose headquarters were at Kyoto, in southern Honshu. Miss Vainstein found a large number of R B libraries, field libraries, and field reference libraries scattered among the 24th Division units. T h e r e were r a t h e r too many field reference libraries, in f a c t , as the men then on the island—combat veterans about to return to the United States—were interested almost exclusively in recreational reading. In some units the library cases had been opened and makeshift libraries had been established by the Special Services or Information and Education officers. In other units the cases had been stored in warehouses and not opened. In the spring of 1946 full accountability f o r government p r o p e r t y , including library books, had gone into effect in J a p a n . T o many Special Services officers it seemed safest not to let the books circulate until full-time librarians were on the j o b ; they did not want to be held liable in the event that books were lost due to inadequate supervision. T h e I Corps librarian, Edmée Hanchey, had each of the divisional librarians establish a depot for storing and issuing hardbound books, Armed Services Editions, and magazines to the subordinate units. In the 24th Division it was possible to supply each battalion (1,000 men) with a 1,600-volume basic collection consisting of one field library, one field reference library, and one R B Library. There was some duplication between the R B and the field library titles, but as long as the units were spread out, each with its own 1,600-volume collection, the librarian did not find the number of duplicates excessive. These 1,600volume collections served their purpose extremely well. All the books except the 500 R B volumes had been processed and were ready f o r immediate use, and the processing of the RB's went more rapidly because of the printed catalogues t h a t accompanied them. Since the field libraries had been assembled so that each 100-volume case contained a moderately balanced collection of fiction and recreational nonfiction, it was easy to break up this p a r t of the collection into rotating sets for the use of small units. The only conspicuous deficiencies of the collections were shortages of westerns (only 12 or 15 in an entire set—an inexplicable Library Branch oversight) and of books on photography and the Orient (very few titles were available in sufficient quantities when the procurements were made). The 1,600-volume collections were augmented by several shipments of books from inactivated M I D P A C posts in the summer and fall of

The Western

Pacific

1946. T h e M I D P A C collections contained many popular titles which had not been available in sufficient quantities when the R B and field libraries were procured. The division also received two 5,000-volume libraries from inactivated United States posts in the fall of 1946. One was placed in the divisional headquarters library a t K o k u r a ; the books from the other were placed on open shelves in the depot, from which the librarians of subordinate units took such titles as they needed. A t the end of 19-16 small sets of new books began to come in once a month. Miss Fairweather, now chief librarian a t A F P A C , had made an agreement with P a t t e n ' s Book Store in Honolulu and with the Honolulu office of the Snyder Company, according to which Norman W r i g h t of the Snyder office would select twelve " l e a d " titles from the Snyder pre-publication lists, order as many copies as were desired, and have the books shipped on publication from the United States direct to whichever Western Pacific headquarters had ordered them. Since Snyder dealt only with bookstores, the army purchases had to be made through Patten's. The Eighth Army used this method f o r some months, ordering 60 copies each of 12 titles per month and making a monthly allotment of $1,500 from n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d funds f o r this purpose. The system was later adopted by the X X I V Corps in Korea. While it diminished the librarians' freedom to select their own books, it enabled them to obtain potentially popular titles very soon a f t e r they were published. As personnel became available, in the summer of 1946, the I Corps librarian assigned additional librarians to the 24th and 25th divisions. By early fall there were 8 librarians in the 24th Division besides the division librarian. F o u r of them operated single static libraries: the divisional headquarters librarian a t Kokura, the hospital librarian, and the librarians for the division artillery and division special troops. Three of the remaining librarians supervised service in the outlying areas of the island, and one supervised service for all Air Forces units on the island. The librarians were assisted by enlisted men in some instances, but more often by J a p a n e s e girls whose wages came from J a p a n e s e war reparations. T h e static libraries were variously housed. T h e I Corps headquarters library in Kyoto was in a wing of a recreational building, which also housed the Red Cross and other morale agencies. The wing was designed and built for library use, and its f u r n i t u r e was constructed by skilled Japanese cabinetmakers, guided by the librarian's instructions and the photographs and plans in a Gaylord catalogue. T h e

The

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24th Division headquarters library was housed in a converted department store, along with a post exchange, a movie theater, and a Red Cross club. In the subordinate units existing Japanese buildings, converted barracks, or new recreational buildings were used according to circumstances. Buildings, furnishings, and equipment, like the p a y of Japanese personnel, came out of reparations. Small isolated units were served by means of regularly rotated deposit collections of from 100 to 500 volumes. Bookmobile service, which had proved to be a godsend in E T O , was out of the question because of the poor condition of the roads. Use of the libraries varied inversely with the availability of other recreational facilities. In the 24th Division a regimental library at Kamota, a rather dreary place with few attractions besides the P X , recreation hall, and library, invariably had the highest attendance and circulation records. KOREA

(XXIV

CORPS)

T h e establishment of library service in Korea can be only sketchilv surveyed. In J a n u a r y , 1946, J a n e McClure, the second A F P A C librarian, was sent to Korea to survey library needs and establish a program. A F W E S P A C had shipped 16 R B libraries to Korea shortly before, and two months later 80 more R B libraries, 77 field libraries, and 154 field reference libraries were received from the United States. They were followed by three 5,000-volume libraries dispatched from the Ninth Service Command Library Depot. A f t e r surveying the installations in Korea, Miss McClure prepared a plan of organization, the substance of which was published in a directive issued in the latter p a r t of March. The American-occupied area was broken down into five subareas, to each of which a civilian librarian was to be assigned. Through these subarea librarians (corresponding to the divisional librarians in J a p a n ) , 1,600-volume collections were to be issued to the individual base libraries, which were to be operated by enlisted men under the general supervision of the subarea librarians. Eventually 43 base libraries were established. Books were also to be issued to the six hospitals in Korea. In addition to these smaller collections, a 10,000-volume library was to be established at the X X I V Corps Headquarters in Seoul and 5,000-volume libraries at two other large centers, Pusan and Inchon. The first two of the six civilian librarians who were to be assigned to the X X I V Corps did not arrive in Korea until early summer. They were Robert C. Tucker, who succeeded Miss McClure as corps librarian, and Dorothea Wilson, who was assigned to the library in Seoul.

m

The

Western

Pacific

In the interim Miss McClure and a staff of four enlisted men and one Korean woman did what they could to get the program started, with the co-operation of the corps, divisional, and unit Special Services and Information and Education officers. But more than one librarian was needed to establish effective service f o r an entire army corps under the conditions then existing in southern Korea. T h e roads were bad, buildings and equipment were scarce, there was a confusing turnover of personnel in the units, and, as newsp a p e r reports indicated, the general state of morale was extremely low. T h e best the corps librarian and her staff could hope to do was to set u p the framework of a library organization, get the books out to the subordinate commands, and encourage the command and unit Special Services and Information and Education officers to do the rest. Sheets of simple directions f o r the operation of small libraries were mimeographed and sent out to the using units with each collection of books. Designs were furnished f o r the quarters which were to house the larger libraries and wherever possible elementary training was given to the men who had been appointed unit librarians. By the middle of May the books were fairly well distributed, but the extent of library use and even the existence of usable libraries depended on local circumstances beyond the headquarters' control. In Seoul, space for the X X I V Corps L i b r a r y was found in a modern six-story building, the rest of which was occupied by a general dispensary. The Japanese Army headquarters in Korea had occupied it during the war, and it was one of the few buildings in Seoul t h a t still had central heating: the heating plants and fixtures in the other buildings had been torn out and melted down f o r ammunition. During the spring months the library staff devoted all the time it could spare to sorting out and combining into a single 10,000-volume library the contents of three 5,000-volume libraries which had been sent to J a p a n from the Ninth Service Command L i b r a r y Depot. Characteristically, nearly half the time devoted to this p r o j e c t was taken up in p r e p a r i n g the accountability records of the books. T h e library was officially opened the first week in June, and when Dorothea Wilson, the second librarian from the United States, arrived a week later, she took charge of it. In June, a f t e r several months of dickering between the corps librarian and the fiscal and Special Services officers of the corps and its subordinate commands, $1,000 was allotted from local funds for the purchase of technical library supplies, magazine subscriptions and new books.

The

Western

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When Miss McClure's temporary duty in Korea was over (it had been extended from the sixty days originally stipulated by the X X I V Corps to six months), she was succeeded as corps librarian by Robert C. Tucker, who had previously served for two years and a half as an enlisted librarian in E T O . Three more librarians arrived that summer, and with personnel to do the work, it finally became possible to carry the program beyond the pioneering stage. CONCLUSION

T h e post-hostilities program for the Western Pacific was ambitiously planned and efficiently carricd out. Its execution required the co-ordinated effort of the Library Branch in the W a r Department and five army headquarters overseas—MIDPAC in Hawaii, A F P A C in Manila and later Tokyo, A F W E S P A C in Manila, Eighth Army in Tokyo, and the X X I V Corps in Korea. Considering the complicated channels through which these headquarters dealt with each other, the enormous distances supplies and personnel had to travel, and the confusion involved in simultaneously demobilizing a combat army and setting up an army of occupation, it would not be surprising if the program had broken down completely. I t was certainly a difficult undertaking. T h a t it was in the main successful was evidence not only of good planning and excellent field work but also of the Western Pacific commanders' recognition of the morale value of library service. T h e most serious shortcoming of the program sprang from the fact that that recognition had not been accorded sooner. As in E T O , a year elapsed between the initial planning of the program and full operation on the scale intended. In E T O the planning began in the spring of 1 9 4 4 ; in the Western Pacific it did not begin until August, 1945. T h a t time lag could not be made up. Although the field libraries were selected, procured, processed, and shipped with less delay than attended any other Library Branch procurement, they did not reach the Western Pacific until March, 1946, and the librarians did not arrive in large numbers until midsummer. Essentially, it was not a post-hostilities, but a post-demobilization program. Relatively few of the soldiers who had served throughout the war in the Pacific got the full benefit of it. The tardiness in planning the program entailed another disadvantage. The war was over before the Library Branch began to recruit librarians for the Western Pacific. Not many post librarians desired overseas assignments then. The result was that many of the librarians who went to the Western Pacific had had no previous army experience. Even when they were otherwise well qualified, they still had everything

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to learn about army ways and army organization, and it took time. The program was aided immeasurably by the presence of the nucleus of experienced army librarians who went to the Western Pacific from Hawaii and the Marianas. In the Philippines the program was working effectively as early as March not only because the library officer and his executive librarian knew their jobs but also because the four librarians in the subordinate commands knew theirs, too—how to obtain and distribute supplies through army channels, how to j u s t i f y requests for funds, how to d r a f t directives for their commanders' signature, how to train and supervise nonprofessional assistants. All of them had had previous overseas experience in MIDPAC. Progress was slower in J a p a n largely because the Eighth Army had to wait until June before it received its first sizable contingent of librarians. The program was probably most successful in its supply phase. The shipment and allocation of the material went off with very few hitches, once the books were available. The field libraries and field reference libraries were ready for use as soon as they were taken off the ships and they could easily be broken up into deposit collections for small units. The less flexible R B libraries supplemented the field libraries handsomely in spite of some duplication, and thanks to the excellent work of the Ninth Service Command Library Depot in packing and shipping large libraries, the preassembled sets did not have to be used for the one purpose they could not fill—providing stock f o r large static libraries. By midsummer A F W E S P A C was beginning to obtain new books through nonappropriated fund purchases, and the other commands followed suit within a few months. At the end of 1946 there were 350 libraries in the F a r E a s t Command, as the Western Pacific areas (including the Marianas) were now called. The total stock of books was in excess of 700,000, and about 125 civilian librarians were on duty. The only serious handicap of the postwar library service in the command was the difficulty experienced in recruiting enough librarians from the United States to fill all vacancies. As in the European Theater, relatively few installations had the full-time service of professional librarians.

XVII

End of the War and Afterward

I

N T H E L A S T Y E A R of the war there was a general improvement in the standing and efficiency of Special Services throughout the army. The overseas supply situation was better, and consequently the commanders were more willing to consider the staff and t r a n s p o r t a t i o n requirements of their Special Services officers than they had been earlier in the war, when Special Services supplies were too meager to seem worth bothering with. Not t h a t it was simply a matter of increased supplies leading to an enlargement of staffs: the positive morale value of Special Services was more clearly recognized by commanders in general than it had been in 1941 and 1942. An i m p o r t a n t f a c t o r in the general improvement was the School for Special and Information Services a t Lexington, Va. With the cooperation of the W a r Department Special Services and Information and Education offices the commandant of the school had recruited a competent military faculty, and a first-rate curriculum had gradually been developed. T h e purpose of the school was to teach officers the objectives and potentialities of morale work. The lesson stuck as often as not, and the result was t h a t an increasing number of Special Services officers in the United States and overseas were properly prepared for their assignments. 1 THE

LIBRARY

BRANCH

In the W a r D e p a r t m e n t , the gain in the prestige of Special Services was felt chiefly in the form of large appropriations and a larger personnel allotment. T h e L i b r a r y Section was affected along with all the other sections of the division. In the spring of 1944 there were three officers, one civilian librarian, and one enlisted librarian in the section, in addition to seven or eight clerical workers. Another civilian and another enlisted librarian joined the staff t h a t summer, another officer in the fall, and two more officers at the beginning of 1945. Finally, in the spring of 1945, in a reorganization of the Special Services Division, the operating sections in the Entertainment and Recreation Service—library, music, entertainment, handicrafts—were elevated to branch status. Many matters which had previously been referred to

End

of the War and

Afterward

higher offices in the division f o r final action could now be handled directly by the chiefs of these activities. Their freedom of action in dealing both with other W a r D e p a r t m e n t offices and with agencies outside the W a r D e p a r t m e n t was considerably enhanced. T h e increase in personnel enabled the L i b r a r y Branch to expand its activities. T h e organization of the t r a i n i n g p r o g r a m f o r hospital librarians, commenced in the winter of 1944-1945, has been mentioned in Chapter VII. T h e acquisition and distribution of occupational materials in co-operation with the A d j u t a n t General's Office and the Assembly B r a n c h of the New York P o r t of Embarkation began about the same time. T h e r a t h e r inadequate library report forms were revised and the r e p o r t s for the fiscal years 1944 and 1945 were tabulated in full. T h e r e p o r t s for the earlier years of the war were never completely tabulated. In 1944 and 1945, several officers in the branch spent a good deal of time d r a f t i n g revisions to a r m y regulations affecting library service and a t t e m p t i n g to obtain the concurrence of higher offices t o the revisions—a laborious and often fruitless process. One of the few concrete results of this work was the authorization of the payment of assistant librarians from a p p r o p r i a t e d funds (See p a g e 50 above). Several new d r a f t s of the accountability regulation were prepared in 1944 and the spring of 1945 only to be rejected by higher offices in the W a r D e p a r t m e n t . Then the battle of accountability was fought again in the fall and winter of 1945. This time M a j o r Poullada, who had been assigned to the L i b r a r y Branch t h a t summer, d r a f t e d a regulation which contained some of the features of the somewhat relaxed accountability regulation which had been in force in the Central Pacific Area during the war. M a n y changes were made in the d r a f t by the Office of the Fiscal Director before t h a t agency finally approved it in the spring of 1946. T h e new regulation was better in some respects t h a n the old one; the inapplicability of strict accounting procedures t o field libraries f a r from normal post facilities was a t last officially recognized, and there were several other good features. B u t f r o m the point of view of army librarians in the United States the new regulation was f o r the most p a r t as g r e a t a t r i a l as its predecessor. Still in force a t the end of 1948, it embodied nearly as many hindrances to the free circulation of books as the wartime regulation. L i b r a r y books were still nearly as closely accounted f o r as machine guns—much more closely, by the way, than office chairs and desks. Librarians employed to select books and facilitate their use still had to spend much of their

End

of the War

and

Afterward

time keeping records which had no relation to library use except as a deterrent. Owing to the distinction which the new regulation made between "permanent" and " f i e l d " libraries, accountability was less troublesome to the librarians in overseas commands. Books in field libraries (defined in the regulation as "bookmobiles, traveling libraries, portable libraries, field collections, deposit collections, and libraries aboard troop t r a i n s " ) did not have to be accounted f o r individually. L a t e in 1946 a W a r Department directive authorized overseas commanders to classify the libraries in their commands as field libraries if they considered it in the interest of efficiency to do so. Subsequently all but a handful of libraries in the European Theater and all but two in the F a r East commands were classified as field libraries. PROCUREMENT

OF

BOOK

KITS

One of the major activities of the L i b r a r y Branch in 1944 and 1945 was the selection and procurement of the R B libraries referred to in earlier chapters. T h e initial selections were made by the civilian librarians in the branch, nearly all of whom had had previous experience as post or command librarians and returned to that work after their tours of duty in the L i b r a r y Branch. Their selections were reviewed by Trautman and Postell, and then the final list was transmitted through the Special Services Division Fiscal Branch to the purchasing officer of the division. H e in turn transmitted it through Quartermaster channels to the Jersey City Quartermaster Depot, which ordered the books and employed commercial packing firms to build shelved book crates and assemble the books into the required number of libraries. A f t e r assembly, the libraries were shipped to the several ports of embarkation to be used in filling requisitions. I n 1945, owing to the paper shortage, not to mention the delays incurred in transmitting the orders through channels, each list of five hundred titles had to be accompanied by a list of one hundred or more substitutions f o r titles which might go out of print or out of stock before a firm order could be placed by the quartermaster depot. Usually a second, then a third, and sometimes a fourth list of substitute titles had to be called f o r by the depot before a total of five hundred titles could be found which were available in the desired quantity. Those second and later substitution lists inevitably contained a good deal of dross—books whose principal charm was availability; 1945 was a bad year f o r mass book buying. In 1944 the interval between the Special Services Division's issuance

250

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Afterward

of a procurement request and the delivery of the libraries to the ports was about six months. In 1945 the depot's book and magazine procurement procedures were reorganized and the interval was cut to three months. I t was the heaviest book-buying year the Library Branch had. Between J a n u a r y and December a total of about 2,500,000 volumes in R B libraries and other special collections were purchased for the European and the Western Pacific theaters. 2 While it was procuring new books for the overseas theaters, the Library Branch was also engaged in making arrangements for the disposition of used books rendered surplus by the closing of posts in the United States. I t was plainly desirable to ship the surplus libraries as units from closing posts either to branches of other posts or to overseas installations, rather than to break them up and redistribute them piecemeal. In theory, however, only books purchased from appropriated funds, and hence Government property, could be shipped at Government expense from one post to a n o t h e r ; books purchased from local funds and g i f t books were to be turned over to the custodian of the post welfare fund for disposition. In practice, many complete libraries were shipped from post to post in 1944 and 1945, simply because the supply officers who did the shipping were not aware of the fact that only a third or less of the books in the libraries were Government property. A f t e r many months of dickering with other army agencies, the Library Branch succeeded in obtaining official authorization for this practice in a W a r Department circular published in May, 1946. During t h a t year a total of 1,121,000 volumes were shipped from inactivated posts. F o u r hundred and one thousand were sent to overseas theaters, chiefly the Western Pacific and E T O ; 458,000 were transferred to the Veterans Administration; the remaining 262,000 were declared surplus to government needs and turned over to state educational systems, in accordance with a plan drawn up by the American Library Association. PERSONNEL

POLICY

In November, 1945, T r a u t m a n was separated from the service and Postell succeeded him as chief of the Library Branch. 3 In the course of 1944 and 1945 Postell had gradually taken over most of the responsibility f o r maintaining contact with the service command librarians and for the general supervision of personnel matters, while T r a u t m a n had devoted his time to budgets and the overseas supply programs. Postell's concentration on personnel matters was all to the good, for a f t e r 1945, with the post-war shrinking of army a p p r o p r i a -

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251

tions, the problem of maintaining adequate service in the United States with reduced personnel became increasingly important. Postell's policy was to "stretch" the trained personnel at the post level as f a r as possible by encouraging the centralization of post service. Many posts already had centralized systems, but in 1946 a definite effort was made to extend this type of organization to all posts where it was feasible. The L i b r a r y Branch recommended that each large post place a senior librarian in charge of all library activities and give her a P-2 or higher rating. Thus, administrative authority would be centralized in a professional chief, an opportunity would be afforded f o r the promotion of librarians of outstanding ability, and economies in operation could be effected by means of centralized cataloguing, the elimination of duplicate purchases of expensive books, and so forth. The chief advantage of centralization was that it would ensure the continuance of professional supervision of the service at a post as long as one professional librarian was still there, even though most of the libraries on the post were operated by nonprofessionals. F o r by the beginning of 1946 cuts in funds, and the civilian personnel ceilings established by the W a r Manpower Commission, were compelling post Special Services officers to eliminate many professional positions. Another measure aimed at keeping the service on a professional basis was a reclassification of the Civil Service ratings f o r library positions. Taking cognizance of the technical and administrative responsibilities of service command librarians and librarians in charge of large post systems, the new classification authorized ratings as high as P-4 for the former and P - 3 f o r the latter. The reclassification was a strong inducement to the army librarians who held administrative positions to remain in the service as a permanent career. There were several other important developments in 1946. M a j o r General Russel B. Reynolds, who had served during the war successively as commanding general of the Sixth Service Command, Chief of Personnel f o r the A r m y Service Forces, and Chief of Personnel for A F W E S P A C , was appointed Chief of Special Services. The appointment of a man of his caliber was evidence that the General Staff did not intend to let Special Services slip back into the obscurity of the prewar Morale Branch. In June the A r m y Service Forces and the service commands were abolished. Special Services (the word Division was offiically dropped at this time) became an administrative service directly under the W a r Department General Staff, and the nine service commands were replaced by six army areas. 4 This expansion in the area supervised by the librarians in most of the regional commands

252

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of the War

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Afterward

incidentally enabled them to retain their ratings in spite of the general decrease in the number of army installations in the United States. FUNDS

The library service suffered some setbacks, however, in the early postwar years, principally in the United States. With the closing of installations, the number of librarians at United States posts (not including air bases) had dropped to 180 by the end of 1946, and there were only 146 in June, 1947. F o r a troop population of about half a million it was hardly enough, but worse was to follow. In June, 1947, the House Appropriations Committee deleted the item for the pay of civilian librarians from the army appropriation bill. I t is evident from the questions put to the Chief of Special Services in the subcommittee hearings on the army appropriation that some of the Congressmen believed that Special Services should revert to the prewar condition of the Morale Branch. The frank admission that there had been no Army Library Service to speak of before the war was apparently taken as conclusive evidence that none was needed now, in spite of all testimony to the contrary. The Chief of Finance and the Chief of Special Services carried the case to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which authorized the transfer of several hundred thousand dollars from the library materials appropriation in order to keep about a hundred librarians on the Federal pay roll; the rest would have to be paid from nonappropriated funds or dismissed. In the United States (conditions were different overseas), the librarians who were retained on duty and paid from nonappropriated funds were no longer Federal employees, with conditions of employment approximating those of regular Civil Service workers, but were simply post employees whose status and j o b tenure depended almost entirely on local conditions. In all too many cases, of course, the librarian was dismissed and replaced by an untrained enlisted man. In either event, the library service tended to become purely a post concern ; since the army area headquarters no longer supported the service with personnel funds, its influence on the conduct of the service was likewise diminished.5 Furthermore, the librarians who were still paid from appropriated funds had no assurance that their jobs would not be cut out of the appropriated fund budget the following year. In staying in the army service they were definitely taking a chance. Thus, the Army Library Service at United States posts was dangerously weakened in what had

End

of the War and

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Afterward

been its strongest feature—the presence of professional librarians a t all posts but the smallest. TABLE

V.

NUMBER

A N D S O U R C E S OF P A Y

OF A R M Y

U N I T E D STATES

December, 1946 June, 1947 December, 1947

Appropriated Fundi

Nonappropriated Funds

180 131 43

... 15 47

LIBRARIANS

OVER8EA8

Total

Appropriated Fundi

Nonappropriated Fund*

Total

Grand Total

180 146 90

263 233 36

... ... 133

263 233 169

443 379 259

As shown by the table j u s t above, the overseas theaters were less badly affected by the cut in the appropriation for librarians than were the United States posts. This was p a r t l y because nonappropriated funds—army exchange and motion picture profits—were more plentiful overseas. As the only source of many commodities, the overseas exchanges were usually well patronized, and for similar reasons motion pictures produced larger profits overseas than in the United States. Another reason was a difference in the method of handling nonappropriated funds, which requires a brief explanation. In the United States, in the later years of the war, a per capita limitation was placed on the amount of nonappropriated money which could be spent at the post where it accrued. Monies in excess of the specified per capita amount were turned over to the Army Central Welfare Fund, a W a r Department agency. The Army Central Welfare Fund, in turn, made grants of money f o r welfare purposes to posts which were short of funds. The general effect was to spread the profits acquired at big posts, so that enlisted men in general would benefit from them, not merely those who were lucky enough to be assigned to a "rich" post. Unfortunately, it was not the policy of the Army Central Welfare Fund to make grants for the pay of personnel, and so it could not fill the g a p created by the cut in library personnel funds. Overseas, on the other hand, all profits were assigned to the theater Welfare Fund, which then made grants both to the various Special Services sections a t the theater headquarters—entertainment, library, and so forth—in accordance with their budgets and to the installations on a per capita basis. The budgets of the theater library sections were chiefly for the p a y of post personnel. Owing to this centralized control over nonappropriated funds the library service was more generously supported overseas than in the United States, and since the

End of the War and

Afterward

librarians continued to be theater employees regardless of the source from which they were paid, the theater headquarters had more influence on the conduct of the service at the post level than the corresponding army area headquarters in the United States.® Appropriations for reading matter also declined a f t e r the war, although this was not quite so serious a m a t t e r as the cut in personnel funds. In 1946 and the first half of 1947, in some army areas appropriated money continued to be suballotted to the posts, as had been done during the war. In others, it was spent by the army area librarians for books which were then issued to the p o s t s ; the Sixth Army Area, for example, issued monthly kits of twenty-five books each to all libraries. A f t e r .Tune, 1947, all appropriated funds for reading matter were spent by the Library Branch in the Department of the Army, and allotments for this purpose were no longer made to the army areas. Most of the Library Branch's funds were spent for a new type of book kit designed to take the place of Armed Services Editions. A jobber was employed to pack and ship monthly sets of hardbound books to each of seven hundred-odd overseas bases. T h e titles—25 for each monthly set—were selected by the L i b r a r y Branch. Before packing the sets, the jobber furnished each book with a pocket, charging cards, a set of commercially printed catalogue cards complete with classification numbers, and an acetate cover. When the contract with the jobber was renewed at the end of 1947, several overseas theaters and several army areas purchased additional sets from nonappropriated funds. Notwithstanding the reduction of funds and the resultant cuts in personnel, the Army L i b r a r y Service was still in a reasonably strong position in 1948. T h e service was generally accepted by post as well as higher commanders as a necessary morale activity—partly because book clubs, paper books, library extension work, and the wartime popularity of reading had made America a good deal more book-conscious by the late forties than it had been a decade earlier, p a r t l y because most commanders had served overseas during the war and had witnessed—and often enough experienced themselves—the soldiers' response to Armed Services Editions and the magazine sets. The fact t h a t trained librarians were an essential p a r t of the library service likewise seemed to be accepted, if not to the same extent. I t was significant that the Department of the Army continued to request appropriated funds f o r librarians a f t e r it had voluntarily eliminated the appropriations for many other types of civilian employees. I t was significant, too, t h a t between f o r t y and fifty posts in the United States were still willing to pay professional librarians from their own non-

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255

a p p r o p r i a t e d funds, and t h a t the large overseas commands were spending money freely f o r library personnel. There were some weak points, however. Army regulations still did not actually require either posts or army areas to have librarians on their Special Services staffs. One large army a r e a — t h e F o u r t h , covering all of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico—was without an army area librarian from the spring of 1946 until the end of 1948, and many sizable posts also dismissed their professional librarians when funds declined. T h e continued effectiveness of the Army L i b r a r y Service, then, a p peared to be largely a question of f u n d s — p a r t i c u l a r l y funds f o r personnel. I t seemed probable t h a t the service would continue to function effectively as long as the D e p a r t m e n t of the Army Special Services and fiscal officers were able to obtain a p p r o p r i a t i o n s f o r the payment of a moderate number of post librarians in addition to the administrators on the higher levels. B u t if, in the f u t u r e , t h a t budget item should be reduced to a fraction or struck out entirely, it was open to question whether many commanders—in the United States, a t any rate—would long continue to use n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d funds f o r the p a y of professional librarians. T h e m a j o r i t y would probably be inclined sooner or later to follow the example of Congress and reserve such funds as they had for more essential purposes. But in 1948 such an outcome seemed very unlikely. This was p a r t l y due, of course, to the enactment of the new Selective Service Law as a result of the tense international situation: even those Congressmen and army officers who were skeptical of the regular establishment's need for a library service p r o g r a m would presumably g r a n t t h a t it had a legitimate place in the "semi-civilian" army t h a t a p p e a r e d to be in prospect. Yet even in normal circumstances it seemed improbable t h a t the service would ever again come so near to extinction as it had in the 1930's. I t had proved its value in the war years and in the immediate postwar period, and there appeared to be little danger of its being allowed to lapse entirely.

XVIII

Conclusion HEADERS

I

AND

SITTERS

N C H A P T E R I it was pointed out t h a t army libraries had other

a t t r a c t i o n s f o r soldiers besides books and magazines; usually they had comfortable chairs, good lights, tables t h a t could be used f o r writing letters, and compared with b a r r a c k s and dayrooms they were havens of peace and quiet. Men came to the libraries to sit as well as to read. Army librarians differ as to the success of the Army L i b r a r y Service in making readers out of the " s i t t e r s . " Nearly all can point to men who first began to read books with enjoyment in army libraries and to men whose reading tastes broadened and matured while they were in the service. Yet it a p p e a r s to be the opinion of the m a j o r i t y t h a t this type of individual development was exceptional r a t h e r than typical, j u s t as it would be in almost any random g r o u p of young men who had finished their formal education. One of the service command librarians, in discussing this question, pointed out t h a t the leisure of army post life a f t e r working hours, combined with the opportunities p r o vided by Special Services, led many men to engage in recreational activities t h a t they had seldom, if ever, found time for in civil life: men who had seen only five or six movies a y e a r a t home never missed a change of shows (three a week) in the army ; men without any previous interest in the t h e a t e r faithfully attended every USO variety show, play, or concert t h a t came along. These men had four hours to kill every night, and they took a d v a n t a g e of every recreational o p p o r t u nity. Reading a magazine or a book in the post library was one of the available diversions. " T h e y were exposed f o r the first time to certain cultural p u r s u i t s t h a t they knew little about before," the librarian remarked. " T h e y found them a t least not bad. One would scarcely expect them to become devotees in this short time." Although complete unanimity is wanting, the consensus is t h a t the Army L i b r a r y Service did not effect a n y t h i n g like a revolution in reading tastes or an enduring mass conversion to reading as a pastime. Where books were accessible and other diversions were limited, soldiers

Conclusion

£57

were inclined to read more than they had read when civilians, but they were men, not boys, and their tastes and the range of their interests were fairly well established. Those who had intellectual curiosity and leisure exhausted the libraries' serious fiction and nonfiction and called f o r more. Those for whom reading books was mainly a substitute for other pastimes read cartoon books, westerns, whatever was rumored t o be "sexy" or otherwise sensational or simply whatever was recommended as new or popular, according to their tastes and their educational levels. Thanks to the relative scarcity of other forms of entertainment, particularly a f t e r dark, the "sitters" or casual readers usually f a r outnumbered the men who read from choice. Hence the uniformity in the mass demand. Both a t posts with well-stocked libraries and at those which had only Armed Service Editions and a few shelffuls of worn discards, the books regularly asked for by the largest number of readers were action stories of all types (but particularly western novels), novels t h a t dwelt on sexual relations, collections of cartoons, short stories, and broadly humorous anecdotes ( H . Allen Smith rather than Thurber or Benchley), any books that had been filmed, and current bestsellers, regardless of subject or author. No doubt some of the impetus given by army libraries and Armed Service Editions to book reading as a pastime will carry over into the civil life of men who discovered that some books can be as entertaining and as readable in their way as illustrated magazines and the newspapers. But by and large these were the men who were responsible for the "army popularity" of the standard male mass-appeal literature referred to above. There was a rather handsome proportion of good or well-written literature in Armed Service Editions. The widespread distribution of these literary works has had no tangible influence on postwar reading tastes. The Army Library Service did, however, have one very important cultural effect, even though it cannot be spelled out in statistics or clearly inferred from publishers' lists or public library patronage. T h a t was its service to the "readers" as distinguished from the "sitters"—the small minority of men to be found in every camp and in nearly every army unit, for whom reading was not only a pastime but a real pursuit—a normal and important p a r t of their daily lives. A student of public opinion has written that investigations in his field have repeatedly identified a certain group of people who engage in all sorts of cultural activities, in the broad sense, more than does the rest of the community. They read more and listen more and talk more; they have more

258

Conclusion

opinions and they feel more strongly about them; they join more organizations and are more active in them; they know more about what is going on. They are the people whose interests range outside the home and the street and the town in which they live. They are the culturally alert members of the community. . . . They are generally more sensitive and responsive to the culture in which they live—and book reading and library use are . . . one manifestation of that general characteristic. 1 I t is possible that the chief cultural contribution of the Army Lib r a r y Service was t h a t it gave many of the men who composed this segment of the army population at least a limited opportunity to keep in touch with books and the world of ideas. We have seen in earlier chapters t h a t there were all too many blind spots in the United States and overseas, where the limitations were conspicuous and the opportunity practically invisible. Yet wherever the Army Library Service functioned effectively, it did enable many men to keep their intellectual interests from going stale. An intellectual who retains his alertness, his interest in ideas, his consciousness t h a t his interest is shared by others will be a better soldier than one who is cut off from all intellectual stimulation and consciously stagnates. So complex an organization as a modern army has a definite need in all ranks (although certainly not in all jobs) f o r men who are intellectuals in the broad sense defined above. Sergeants and m a j o r s who had been authors, scholars, or educators in civil life were not freaks in the wartime a r m y ; when properly assigned, they were p a r t of the picture, and not an unimportant p a r t . F o r men of this type a library of sorts was nearly as necessary as three meals a day. Service to this minority cannot be adequately measured by circulation figures or the length of book reserve lists. But it was a vital service in the wartime army, not only for military morale but also f o r the postwar civil culture in which many of these men were to play a significant role. In peace as in war, the object of the Army Library Service is to support military morale as well as can be done through the provision of library service and the distribution of books. Both readers and sitters have to be served—and in the peacetime army provision must be made for soldiers' families as well. The sitters will always predominate — t h e men who only wander into the library when they have nothing else to do—and they may be even more predominant in peace than in war. But as long as the army continues to assign its soldiers with care and to place a premium on technical knowledge, administrative intelligence, and educated or educable minds, it will need to provide library service for students and serious readers no less than for men who read

259

Conclusion

only f o r momentary diversion. Intelligently stocked and competently managed libraries serving a wide variety of purposes are as necessary in a military as in a civil community, and ultimately f o r the same reason. T h e same needs e x i s t — f o r recreational reading, information, and enlightenment—and it is in the interest not only of morale but also of military training t h a t these needs be served a t least as adequately as they are in most of our big cities. THE

LIBRARIANS

Between 1941 and 1946 more t h a n 1,200 librarians were employed by the Army L i b r a r y Service ; the m a j o r i t y of them served f o r a t least a year or two, and some f o r a much longer time. Some of these wartime librarians were among the 259 who were still in the Army L i b r a r y Service at the end of 1947 ; many had married soldiers, and left library work when their husbands returned to civil life; about 70 were then working f o r the Veterans Administration L i b r a r y Service; the remainder had presumably gone into public, school, or other types of library service. The work of the wartime a r m y librarians in the United States and overseas has been described in earlier chapters. L e t us now consider the effect of the army experience on the librarians themselves. W h a t qualities were most needed for success in army library work and therefore the most likely to be brought into play and given o p p o r t u n i t y f o r development in several years' experience as an a r m y librarian? W h a t effect did this experience have on the librarians' conception of library service? Both of these questions were asked in a questionnaire sent to two hundred-odd army librarians and former a r m y librarians a y e a r a f t e r the end of the war. 2 They can best be answered in the words of the librarians themselves. F o r most of the women who were employed as post librarians, army employment was a step upward, both in p a y and in responsibility. One librarian wrote: For those of us who had been working in larger libraries under the direction of a department head it was a golden opportunity to get out on our own and prove that we too could make a library go. By having to operate and be responsible for all processes we were forced to put into play all the techniques which the library schools had taught us, many of which we had never had occasion to exercise before, working in one small phase of a larger library set-up. The librarians not only were forced to a p p l y all the techniques thev had learned a t library school. If they were to make the most of their

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Conclution

opportunities they had to develop rapidly into organizers and administrators. In the words of a service command librarian, Very few of them had had real administrative or organizing experience when they came in. On their level of previous employment they had ordinarily dealt with other librarians in an established system. They did not know, except academically, about the fighting, bleeding and dying that my friends tell me goes on at higher levels to obtain the budget, build buildings, deal with the board, etc. . . . and it often made for shock and unhappiness when they ran head on into these problems for the first time. The librarians had other problems to face besides their technical and administrative responsibilities. They had to learn how to work harmoniously with hostesses, Red Cross directors, G r a y Ladies, and other post civilians who could help or hinder them in many ways and who did not necessarily take library work or the library profession very seriously. The hospital librarians and those who served overseas sometimes discovered t h a t the Red Cross workers who had been on the scene before them regarded them as interlopers who were taking over the job from the pioneers who had done the real spade work. In the United States, hostesses and librarians usually worked in the same service club building and lived in the same guest house. F o r most of the librarians, the necessity of working and living a t close quarters and on an equal footing with other civilians who did not share and often did not sympathize with their professional interests was a new experience. I t was not always agreeable, but it was certainly broadening. They also had to a d a p t themselves to living in a predominantly male society. "You need maturity," wrote one of them, "and the kind of poise that demands respect, so t h a t you won't be bowled over by the undue amount of attention that every half-way personable woman receives when there is an abundance of men." This aspect of army life also required a rather radical a d j u s t m e n t ; it was not an unmixed blessing. Going into the Army Library Service meant much more than a change in jobs. I t was a plunge into an entirely new environment. 3 The librarians who answered the questionnaire were in general agreement as to the personal qualities most needed f o r success in their work. They were adaptability in the broadest sense of the word (including emotional stability, physical fitness, and what some of them called a sense of proportion or a sense of relative values), initiative, resourcefulness, a personable or a t least a well-groomed appearance, and the combination of traits that enter into the ability to get along with people (variously described as a liking for people, an outgoing personality, and a sense of humor).

Conclusion M a n y librarians stressed the f a c t t h a t while one needed professional t r a i n i n g t o begin with, it was not enough in itself; t h a t it meant very little if it was not accompanied by the necessary personal qualities. One overseas librarian wrote: " I cannot emphasize too greatly the need f o r 'well-rounded' people—not people who are running away from life. W e need librarians who are more interested in the borrowers t h a n in worrying about whether the next catalog entry begins two or three spaces a f t e r a period." Another observed: " F o r the nervous individual or f o r the person who sees each disappointment as a m a j o r crisis, a r m y l i b r a r y work is a very poor field. T h e successful army librarian needs t o be socially adaptable and good a t meeting people as much as or more than she needB to be a library technician." And t o bring all her qualities fully into play, to give them meaning and direction, the librarian had to have a genuine "enthusiasm f o r the work. This includes some underlying belief in the influence of reading on the human mind. There must be something bigger than the personal likes of the librarian to pull her through the tough situations t h a t are bound to arise." T h e librarians agreed t h a t the age limits set by regulations * were desirable. Girls under twenty-five were more likely to lack steadiness and a sense of personal responsibility, and sometimes (especially overseas) the glamor of rank and other army circumstances was too much for them. Those over f o r t y were often too set in their ways or not equal to the physical strain. Some of the librarians emphasized the qualities needed in the administrative aspect of their work. The job of the Army librarian [one of them wrote] is to sell the library service as well as administer [that is, operate] it. She should be capable of representing the interests of the library in contact with the administrative officers of the installation. Much of the success of her efforts will depend on her ability to impress the needs of the library on the officials in control. Others spoke of " a flair f o r administrative work, including organization and publicity" and "the ability to make decisions, to express oneself clearly, to supervise personnel, to organize work and plan ahead." I t is impossible to estimate how many army librarians possessed the combination of qualities required for success in their work. I t is safe to say t h a t a h a p p y few "had everything" from the s t a r t and t h a t many more developed the qualities they needed under the pressure of circumstances, even as thousands of soldiers did. This was why a d a p t ability, including emotional balance, was the first requirement. N a t u r a l l y , there were some failures. There were simply not enough

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qualified women available for all the jobs t h a t had to be filled, j u s t as there were not enough qualified quartermaster officers, mess sergeants, and combat infantrymen. T h a t was one of the conditions of the undertaking. When one service command librarian was asked what qualities she had learned to look f o r in interviewing applicants, she replied: " J u s t one spark of vitality!" With dozens of jobs crying to be filled, she sometimes had to waive even t h a t . T h e Army Library Service had its share, even though it was small, of librarians whose devotion to books and professional routines masked a dread of personal contacts and ordinary responsibilities, librarians who were fussy about trivialities and inept in dealing with anything else. There were occasional failures on the higher levels, too. Some women who had run a post library with moderate efficiency were simply lost in overseas command jobs in which they had to plan and supervise the establishment and the operation of a dozen or more libraries in different installations. The command librarians had to deal constantly with librarians and staff officers on different levels of command from their own, and inter-level relations required good judgment and diplomacy as well as drive. I t was disastrous to burn one's bridges by making a personal issue of policy differences between two headquarters, equally disastrous to commit one's own headquarters to a policy without the assent of one's chief, or at least a well-founded assurance t h a t he would assent. The command positions called for a rather high order of administrative ability, yet it was rarely possible to select the personnel for them. Frequently, both in E T O and later in the Western Pacific, the command librarian for a corps, division or Air Forces command was simply the librarian who had got there first. The f a c t t h a t most of them performed their duties capably testifies to the generally high level of ability among the army librarians. Failures on the command level were serious not only because they affected so many people but also because it was usually very difficult to replace an unsuccessful command librarian. I t could only be done if her supervisor (the command Special Services officer) and the chief theater librarian agreed t h a t she was incapable and another librarian was available f o r the job. The first of these conditions rarely obtained. The result was t h a t the service in several large E T O and Pacific commands in 1945 and 1946 was below the norm for those theaters. Yet notwithstanding the fortuitousness of the assignments, the number of poor command librarians was small—possibly six or seven out of thirty-odd—and the number of inept librarians at the post and unit level was certainly f a r less than the number who were fully ca-

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pable. In the main the Army L i b r a r y Service a t t r a c t e d women who were adaptable and had initiative, and f o r most of them it provided all the o p p o r t u n i t y they could desire f o r the f u r t h e r development of those qualities. T h e r e was less agreement among the librarians who answered the questionnaire as to the effect of their experience on their conception of library service; or r a t h e r , there was a g r e a t e r diversity of answers, f o r nearly all (106 out of the 113 who answered the questionnaire) agreed t h a t the army experience had materially affected their views. T h e i r remarks were confined to their views on public library service. T h e i r r a t h e r diverse comments are summarized in the following p a r a g r a p h s . E a c h statement is followed by one or more quotations. T h e sequence of ideas in the numbered p a r a g r a p h s and the general conclusions express the a u t h o r ' s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of the trend of the librarians' comments. I t is not suggested t h a t all the librarians who answered the questionnaire would agree with this i n t e r p r e t a t i o n . 1. Public libraries are needlessly d r a b and comfortless. T h e i r interiors should be more inviting; small libraries and branches, p a r t i c ularly, should look less like studies, more like club reading rooms or lounges. Reference rooms and reading rooms should be separated, and the long bleak tables should be banished f r o m the l a t t e r . More color is needed on the walls in the form of drapes and p i c t u r e s ; some chairs t h a t are not s t r a i g h t and armless should be provided; smoking should be allowed in a t least one reading room. T h e ideal of tomb-like quiet p u n c t u a t e d only by whispers and hisses of " h u s h " and " s h u s h " should be abandoned. I have learned that if a library is comfortable, and the appearance is attractive and home-like, it attracts about double the number of patrons. A library should be a place where a person feels free to relax, read, or write in comfort, and smoke if he desires. There should be no "Quiet" signs. Order will be maintained because the atmosphere is one of order and because the majority want it. It [the Army Library Service] has proved the need for comfort in the library, attractiveness, accessible stacks and for the patrons the added enjoyment of smoking. Since this library's beginning . . . there has been no destruction due to carelessness with cigarettes, and during this time approximately 2,000,000 people have used the library. In appearance and comfort for libraries my views changed completely. The old formal library . . . now gives me the creeps. 2. An effort should be made to cater to the tastes and interests of all groups in the community both in book selection and in a t t i t u d e

Conclusion t o w a r d the p a t r o n . R e c r e a t i o n a l m a t e r i a l should not be limited t o the high school classics a n d t h e books listed in t h e monthly selection guides if o t h e r m a t e r i a l is in d e m a n d . One's own t a s t e s should n o t be forced u p o n the p a t r o n s ; one's recommendations should be a d j u s t e d to their level of interest a n d a p p a r e n t intelligence. Even if the level seems juvenile o r u n c u l t i v a t e d t h e r e is no excuse f o r a d o p t i n g a p a t r o n i z i n g o r s l i g h t i n g tone. I have learned that my obligation to the library patron who does not have high literary taste is as great as my obligation to the Harvard graduate. We need to be less prissy in manner, less dictatorial about what people should read, more casual in our attitude toward noise, smoking, etc. My experience has made me far more liberal from the viewpoint of book selection. If more public libraries actually attempted to appeal to and attract their patrons—lure them into the library as Army librarians did —their buildings and appropriations would increase considerably. Book selection should pay much attention to public demand and not be j u s t for material that the public should have—old argument. Admittedly the books may be trash, but the majority of readers soon realize that for themselves when they read the books. For instance, 75 % of the men didn't finish Forever Amber. . . . When they had been brought into the library by the use of best sellers in the library publicity, they would often stay and be attracted to other, better books. 3. Superfluous t e c h n i c a l processes should be cut t o the minimum in o r d e r t o get new books on t h e shelves p r o m p t l y and t o allow more time f o r p e r s o n a l work with t h e p a t r o n s . Less emphasis on technical processes—more exchange of ideas between librarian and borrower. I n other words, individual reading guidance. We had thousands of new books and thousands of borrowers, all at the same time. We had to ask ourselves this question each day: What technical processes must be done in order to have the necessary records, and what can we eliminate ? Some of us merely accessioned the books, wrote the accession number in the books and put them in circulation. Then we shelflisted as we had time, and finally cataloged, using very simple cataloging. We considered a catalog important but not important enough to hold back the books when the men wanted and needed them. I have come to the conclusion that a librarian should question the importance of each technical process before continuing it. For example, what patrons other than those doing advanced research, ever use the paging on a catalog card? A librarian should consider the needs of her patrons and streamline her processes accordingly. I have much less respect for the old technical, elaborate forms of classification and cataloging than I had before: I believe that for the purpose of

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unspecialized libraries not meant for scholars they are more a nuisance than anything else and cry for some form of revolutionary revision. For almost two years we got along without any real card catalog, and we never had a complete one, yet our patrons were able to use the library satisfactorily. We had, of course, only 10,000 volumes at the most. The large majority of our users seemed to like to browse through the shelves, or, if they had special wants, there was little hesitation about asking the librarian. Frequently, too, use of the card catalog would have been of no help because the men were so vague in their requests that they had to be told what it was they wanted. Our catalog, when completed, contained author and title entries for most books and a system of what I called "general subject reference cards" to replace regular subject entries. 4. Accessible l o c a t i o n s a n d convenient open h o u r s will a t t r a c t a l a r g e r n u m b e r of a d u l t s t o public l i b r a r i e s . I feel that there is a definite need in community life for informal reading rooms with simplified catalogs spaced in location very much like schools for elementary children ( t h a t , near to home). Libraries of this type should have informal furniture and plenty of space for informal conversation about books as well as reading. Library hours should be based on the requirements of the patrons rather than the convenience of the staff. In the matter of hours, circulation procedures and other rules and regulations governing the use of the library—time them to the patrons' not to the librarian's convenience. 5. T h e l i b r a r y should be m a d e a definite p a r t of t h e community by c o - o r d i n a t i n g its activities with t h o s e of o t h e r o r g a n i z a t i o n s a n d services. The combination of the library with other recreational services proved of great value in drawing new patrons to the library for information and for reading matter. City and county public libraries might do well to study this phase of Army library service in an effort to coordinate their work with the recreation and information services of the city governments and chambers of commerce. The librarians in any community should be canvassed as a large agency does its salesmen to find out the various community contacts which each one has, so that individual members of any staff who are members of other organizations can serve as a liaison between the library and the component parts of the community. 6. I n general, all these means should be used t o m a k e libraries b o t h more a t t r a c t i v e a n d m o r e u s e f u l t o t h e public as a whole a n d a t the same time every e f f o r t should be m a d e t o i n f o r m t h e public of t h e li-

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brary's resources and services—and its financial needs. Public awareness of the libraries' attractiveness and usefulness will be reflected in larger library appropriations. But the librarians must take the initiative: it cannot come from outside. Our personnel should be as friendly as possible and be willing to "sell" our services eagerly rather than wait for the patrons to approach them. I feel that it is high time for more personnel work to be done in libraries, even going back further than the library to the choice of applicants for library schools. The day of the inarticulate librarian is over. High scholastic ratings may be one indication of a candidate's qualifications, but they can be and are misleading, for they provide us with many introverts who are unwilling and unable to come out of their shells to meet the public more than half way. Library publicity will have to be more in line with commercial practice if reading is to compete with the many other leisure time activities which are constantly being presented to the public. Some of these suggestions may be dismissed by enemies of change as mere day-dreaming divorced from the realities of library insurance (smoking), municipal politics (accessible location), the prejudices of library and education boards (censorship), and funds (open hours, numerous copies of new books). In any case, whether these ideas are sound or impracticable, they are not brand new. Perhaps the most important change which took place in the thinking of these librarians was not their adoption of any one of these specific ideas, but rather the underlying change in viewpoint which is implicit in all their comments: a heightened awareness of "the public"—of the variety and individuality both of the men and the women who use or might use libraries and of their purposes and needs. No one who has worked any length of time in an army librar}' will soon forget the mature men (from privates to colonels) who found real solace or stimulation in apparent trash, the Ph.D.'s disguised as p.f .c.'s, the soldiers' wives learning sewing and child care from books, the patrons who knew exactly what they wanted, but not the catalogue word for it, the urgency of reference questions on which anything from a bet to the choice of a career might depend, the dismaying expressions of surprise t h a t a librarian could be helpful, or human. The army experience gave many librarians an inescapably close view of a much wider cross-section of the adult American population than they had ever observed in libraries. F o r the best of them t h a t revelation has brought with it both an enthusiastic desire to give this larger public the service it needs and a rather troubled awareness t h a t public libraries and librarians are not particularly well equipped to provide that service.

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Conclusion

T o sum up, the Army L i b r a r y Service made no startling innovations in library practices. I t merely emphasized and strongly reinforced certain existing tendencies: the attempt to make libraries comfortable and attractive at the expense of nineteenth-century ideals of institutional dignity; the emphasis on extension—on bringing books to potential patrons instead of waiting for patrons to discover the resources of the library unaided; the subordination of record-keeping and elaborate processing to prompt circulation and personal guidance; the policy of supplying new books while they are still new and in demand; the use of libraries as centers f o r education and other cultural activities ; the distribution of free paperbound materials. The last was certainly an innovation in the scale on which it was carried out. T h e Army Library Service influenced its librarians chiefly by the unique experience it afforded them. More than a thousand librarians were thrown on their own and given a large measure of professional and administrative responsibility comparatively early in their careers—while they were still young and before their thinking and their whole conception of what libraries might accomplish had been stereotyped by years of working in subordinate positions. They were continually faced with personal, technical, and administrative problems which they had to solve with little or no aid from other librarians. They were compelled by circumstances to develop their initiative, resourcefulness and powers of persuasion to the utmost. They had to deal directly and constantly with an extremely varied public which would not be ignored and which made its wants known. The net effect of this experience has been to make these librarians—many of them, at any rate—less subservient to traditional usages and time-worn rules than they might have been in other circumstances, and to make them bolder and more effective in dealing with people, more alive to their responsibility to the broad general public, and more convinced of the public's need for their service. THE

SERVICE

The Overseas Theaters.—In reviewing the wartime history of an army activity, one inevitably asks two questions: " W h a t worked?" " W h a t are the stumbling blocks that should be avoided?" Let us look at the stumbling blocks first. The library service in overseas theaters was too often controlled by men who were either indifferent to it or, with the best will in the world, simply did not know what to do about it. Many of the high-ranking Special Services officers in the theater and m a j o r command headquar-

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ters were specialists in athletics or Army Exchange work. Few of them appreciated the need f o r appointing a qualified library officer or employing a civilian command librarian. W i t h o u t a specialist to assist them, they were inclined to let their supply officers handle books as they handled routine supplies or simply ignore them. They did not know what items or quantities to requisition from the W a r D e p a r t ment or how to supplement W a r D e p a r t m e n t requisitions by direct purchases f r o m the United States. F o r the men in those theaters for whom books were a boon—including thousands who had never willingly read a n y t h i n g but newspapers before—this was a misfortune. I t could have been obviated by a clause in the Mobilization Regulations requiring the assignment of a qualified library officer to the staff of each theater Special Services officer in time of war. T h e qualifications needed were administrative ability and an intelligent interest in the work, including an unshakable conviction t h a t it was worth doing. T h e safest means of ensuring t h a t these qualifications were met would have been to require t h a t all theater library officers should have a background of experience in library administration. Another handicap was t h a t women civilian librarians were not sent to combat theaters until late in the war. T h e question whether they had any place in a combat theater was hotly debated many times, both in the W a r D e p a r t m e n t and in the theaters. Those who said " y e s " generally lost the argument. One cannot help surmising t h a t those who said " n o " were influenced more by an undervaluation of the need for library service than by fears f o r the librarians' safety. There were female Red Cross workers and female nurses in all combat t h e a t e r s — and in the actual zone of combat. There were numerous female American clerks and stenographers in the noncombat areas of the l a r g e r theaters. T h e r e a p p e a r s to be no valid reason f o r not sending women civilian librarians a t least as f a r as the r e a r areas of combat theaters. Really effective organized service is impossible without them. Hastily trained enlisted men can help a g r e a t deal, but they need professional guidance on the spot, not merely from a remote higher headquarters. W i t h reference to the civilian librarians, it is u n f o r t u n a t e t h a t so many of them were sent overseas without receiving any orientation a t all in army organization and in the special problems of army library work. Many of the inexperienced girls fresh from library school turned out well, but the overseas command librarians had to devote too much time to teaching newcomers the rudiments of their jobs. They could have been used more effectively from the s t a r t if they had been re-

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quired to work several months at army posts in the United States before going overseas or had been given a practical training course a t the School for Special Services. A third bad stumbling block overseas was the f a c t that a fully effective system of shipping hardbound books from the United States was not placed in operation until after the war. T h e 1,000-volume collections of preassembled and preprocessed blocks which were sent to the Western Pacific at the end of 1 9 4 5 could be used as soon as the cases were opened, and since each case had a roughly rounded collection, a set could be divided among several small units without first being opened and reassembled. Collections of this type are the ideal means of supplying a newly established theater with hardbound books. Shipments of unassembled books in bulk should not be made until a theater library officer has been appointed and has a warehouse a t his disposal to receive them and a staff to handle them. The fact that this relatively simple method of book supply was not adopted much earlier sprang from another serious flaw in the wartime library setup—the W a r Department L i b r a r y Section's ignorance of conditions in overseas theaters. Chiefs of W a r Department agencies must visit " t h e field" and discuss problems on the spot if they are to plan effectively. The C kits originated by the Special Services Division's Plans and Training Section and the 100-volume R B kits originated by the L i b r a r y Section were, by and large, a waste of money. The 500-volume R B libraries were fairly serviceable. The Armed Services Editions were a brilliant success. All four were shots in the dark. From 1 9 4 3 until nearly the end of the war, more than half the working time of the L i b r a r y Section staff was devoted to the selection and procurement of reading matter for the overseas theaters. A great deal was accomplished; yet there can be no doubt that the needs of the theaters could have been met more promptly and more effectively if there had been closer contact between the theater Special Services officers and the L i b r a r y Section staff. Until the end of 1944 there was almost no contact at all. Another handicap for the overseas service was the absence of any requirement, or even recommendation, that the theaters accept at least a minimum supply of books in proportion to troop strength. A clause to this effect in the Mobilization Regulations would not have meant shipping books to a theater instead of bullets. T h e a t e r Special Services officers could nearly always obtain some shipping space for recreational items, but their judgment in allocating that space to various items was not always sound. Having no objective standard for their

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guidance, they sometimes went in too heavily for a few recreational items at the expense of the rest. T h e Mobilization Regulations could have supplied such a standard without infringing the necessary right of theater commanders to allocate the lion's share of shipping space to the military supplies most urgently needed. A purely permissive recommendation might have been enough. The exact quantity to be obtained would have depended upon the theater library officer's j udgment of current needs and of his own distribution facilities. But a qualified officer should have been there, and the basic directives of the W a r Department should have given him a mark to shoot at. As f o r the things t h a t "worked" overseas, the outstanding success was the automatic distribution by mail of Armed Services Editions and the overseas magazine sets. T h e magazines were generally less in evidence than the books because of two factors that could hardly be controlled: they were inevitably more flimsy than the books and therefore did not last as long, and because of the light weight of the magazine packages it was much too easy to pilfer a package (usually only a heavy envelope), rip it open, remove what one wanted and throw the rest away. But by and large automatic issue did work, and for four reasons: the portability and the sheer quantity of the packages, the policy of shipping the material to all theaters and units whether it was requested or not, and the use of postal channels which skipped the usual supply routines. Another success was the centralized theater library organization developed during the war in the Antilles Department, Hawaii, and the Marianas, and in the European and Western Pacific commands in 1945 and 1946. Experience has proved it to be a sound system. Although there are certain important local variations, its principal features are ultimate control of the professional civilian librarians by the theater headquarters, regardless of the type of funds from which the librarians are p a i d ; close relations between the theater headquarters and the m a j o r subordinate commands, facilitated by the assignment of a traveling "field service librarian" to the theater headquarters ; the organization of service in the field on a purely geographical basis (even though assignments of personnel are to commands, they are usually responsible for service to units of other commands in the same area—a situation which is possible only when the theater headquarters retains control of the librarians) ; organized training courses f o r enlisted librarians when there are too few professionals to operate all the libraries ; the establishment of central warehouses for the distribution and processing of books both a t the theater headquarters and in the

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subordinate commands; the distribution and rotation of deposit collections (or the provision of bookmobile service) from these central supply points; and the use of local fund purchases to supplement the standardized book kits issued by the War Department. The system is satisfactory in time of peace, and it worked equally well in the overseas commands that applied it during the war. The United States.—Library service was naturally much more highly developed in the United States throughout the war than it was in most overseas areas. Thanks to the library service directive issued in the fall of 1940, the larger posts and those of medium size were assured of an initial supply of books and of the service of professional librarians, and similar provisions were later made for all general hospitals. Except for the pay of the librarians, which came from appropriated funds and was channelled down from the War Department, the maintenance of the service at these posts and hospitals was almost entirely an installation responsibility; even the use of appropriated, in addition to local, funds for the purchase of books was a matter for local decision. The service command librarians played an extremely important part in getting the libraries started and in encouraging the installation librarians and officers to maintain high standards of service, but in nearly all commands they were counselors only, not arbiters. Because of the policy of decentralization which prevailed in the United States, they seldom had as much direct influence on post library activities as the corresponding library administrators had in the Antilles and Hawaii. In the last analysis, the success of the library service at a post depended upon the ability of the librarian and the attitude of the post Special Services officer and the commanding officer. As we have seen in Chapter VI, the general level of the service in the United States was high. Nevertheless, there were two serious weaknesses to which attention should be called. The first may be traced back to an oversight in the original plans made for the Army Library Service in 1940. The plans contemplated only the needs of the large reception and training centers to which the draftees were to be sent. Little thought was given to the provision of service at small posts. Throughout the war the service was generally less than adequate at posts and hospitals too small to have professional librarians—posts with less than 2,500 enlisted men, post hospitals with less than 1,000 beds. A simple remedy could have been found for the hospital problem : army regulations should have authorized the assignment of a professional librarian to all hospitals with 500 or more beds.

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T h e problem of the small posts called f o r a more radical solution. Even if librarians had been authorized f o r posts of 1,500 men, hundreds of posts with only a few hundred or 1,000 men would still have been left unserved. How were they to spend money wisely f o r books— how, indeed, spend any money for books—without a librarian to ask f o r the money, do the selecting, and place the orders? How were they to see t h a t the books were efficiently handled and circulated when they had no one qualified to do the j o b ? T h e answer given in regulations was t h a t the service command librarians should p a y special attention to the needs of such posts, but no official provisions were made to implement t h a t requirement. In order to furnish service f o r small posts, regulations should have explicitly authorized the service command lib r a r y offices to establish library extension systems comparable to those of the American county and regional libraries. E a c h command library office should have had a traveling field supervisor whose sole responsibility was to look a f t e r the needs of the small posts. R e g u l a r training courses f o r enlisted post librarians should have been conducted. And, most important of all, the command library offices should have been allotted funds to purchase books f o r these p o s t s : not merely their initial collections, but replacements as well. I n other words, some of the a p p r o p r i a t e d funds suballotted to the posts f o r the purchase of recreational material should have been held and spent f o r them a t the command level. A small warehouse and a working crew should have been provided for the storage, assembly, and shipment of the books. If feasible, bookmobile service should have been provided f o r the very smallest posts and f o r isolated detachments. Nearly all the service command librarians were conscious of the need f o r such a centrally operated system, and several of them employed one or other of these measures a t various times, but only one Service Command—the Ninth—succeeded in establishing an effective, large-scale extension system. T h e rest never obtained the staff, facilities, and funds which such an undertaking required. I t is probable t h a t they failed to do so largely because a centralized p r o g r a m of supply and supervision a p p e a r e d to their commanding generals and Special Services chiefs to run counter to the general policy of decentralizing responsibility f o r operations to the post level. So it did, yet the example of the Ninth Service Command shows t h a t it was possible f o r a service commander to make an exception to the general rule when it was plainly in the interest of efficiency to do so. T h e other commands might have been equally successful if regulations had explicitly authorized the establishment of service command extension systems f o r

Conclution

273

the benefit of posts t h a t did not have professional librarians. The section of AR 2 1 0 - 7 0 on the duties of the service command librarians should have been a few lines longer. In the immediate postwar period, with less than a hundred professional army librarians at posts in the United States and with only six instead of nine regional commands, the need for an active library extension p r o g r a m at each regional headquarters was as great as it was during the war, but the headquarters still lacked the personnel and funds to c a r r y out such a program on a really effective scale. Another weakness during the war was the W a r Department's method of allotting a p p r o p r i a t e d funds f o r reading matter to the service commands and through them to the posts. As is explained in the Appendix, funds a p p r o p r i a t e d for this purpose were made p a r t of a bulk allotment f o r the purchase of all authorized recreational supplies and equipment, and the commanders did not know what proportion of the bulk allotment had been a p p r o p r i a t e d for each type of recreational commodity. Inevitably, only a modest proportion of the book and magazine appropriation for posts in the United States was spent for reading m a t t e r in the later years of the war, when few new libraries were being established. Two simple remedies might have been applied. Commanders were told how much money should be spent for the initial collections of libraries, but they were not given a similar objective scale for maintenance spending. A directive such as was issued by the Central Pacific Area, stating t h a t replacements should normally be purchased at the rate of 5 percent of the total collection per month, might have been sufficient. Secondly, unless overriding policy considerations are involved, it would seem desirable t h a t reading m a t t e r appropriations should be reserved f o r reading m a t t e r alone. I t would have been helpful if these appropriations, relatively small as they were, had been assigned a separate "spending p r o j e c t " number when they were allotted to the lower levels of command, instead of being pooled with funds appropriated f o r the purchase of other recreational material. 5 The Library Section in the W a r Department endeavored to assist the service commands in coping with some of the difficulties referred to above, but unfortunately it did not have a very clear conception of them. The section was hampered until quite late in the war by the smallness of its staff. I t could not perform all its proper functions, and the most important of those t h a t were slighted was the gathering of information about the work and the problems of the post and service command librarians. The section should have fully mastered the d a t a

Conclusion contained in the semi-annual post library r e p o r t s , both f o r its own guidance and f o r the guidance of the service command librarians. T h e reports contained a wealth of evidence on the p o s t s ' personnel and fiscal needs and on other aspects of the library service—evidence t h a t would have been useful in making and j u s t i f y i n g policy decisions, in p r e p a r i n g budget estimates, in evaluating the work of the service command librarians and in explaining the service both to other army agencies and to the general public. Imperfect as they were, the reports would have yielded much helpful information f o r librarians and Special Services officers on all levels, if they had been methodically tabulated t h r o u g h o u t the war and thoroughly analyzed by a librarian trained in statistical research. Yet this work was not begun in earnest until the fall of 1944. By then the a r r e a r a g e was too large to be worked through : the r e p o r t s f o r the period p r i o r to J u h r , 1943, are still to be properly tabulated and anatyzed. This omission was not due to an oversight. T h e potential value of the reports was recognized. B u t d u r i n g the g r e a t e r p a r t of the war the section's officers had to choose between concentrating on overseas procurement and supply—book kits, magazine sets and Armed Services Editions—and concentrating on the study of the activities and needs of the United States post libraries. T h e section could not perform both functions adequately, and there was no doubt t h a t the need f o r the former was more urgent. Civilian Relations.—The relations of the Army L i b r a r y Service with civilians and civilian organizations require a few words of comment. In 1940 the American L i b r a r y Association sent Carl H . Milam and L u t h e r L. Dickerson to Washington f o r the purpose of urging the a r m y to make adequate provision f o r library service in its plans for expansion. If the association had not taken this step, it is extremely doubtful whether the Morale B r a n c h ' s plans f o r library service would have been as ambitious as they were. Some of the consultants' recommendations were overlooked, but the essential features of their p l a n — the scale of book a p p r o p r i a t i o n s , the employment and r a t e of p a y of professional librarians, and the assignment of a W a r D e p a r t m e n t lib r a r y officer—were accepted. T h e revival of the Army L i b r a r y Service as a professionally directed and professionally operated activity, a f t e r a decade of inertia, was largely due to this expression of informed public interest a t a critical moment. 6 I t was likewise the informed interest and initiative of another civilian organization, the Council on Books in W a r t i m e , in co-operation with the army and the navy, t h a t brought the Armed Services Editions p r o j e c t into being. H u n d r e d s of

Conclusion

275

unit libraries in the United States and abroad were composed entirely of books donated by individuals and libraries at home. I t was vigorous civilian criticism which freed the Army L i b r a r y Service from the burdensome censorship provisions of the Soldier Voting Law, and the protests made by the American L i b r a r y Association and individual civilian librarians when the library personnel item was deleted from the army budget in 1947 had much to do with the restoration of the item by the Senate Appropriations Committee. T h e moral is that active public interest, whether it takes the form of criticism, counsel, or direct support, is essential to the well-being of any public agency. T h e survival of the Army L i b r a r y Service is assured, but it will really thrive—remain abreast of the times and continue to learn from and contribute to developments in parallel civilian fields—only so long as that part of the public which appreciates its purposes retains an active and vocal interest in it.

APPENDIX:

Expenditures for Reading Matter

T

H E P U R P O S E of this appendix is to indicate approximately how much money was spent by the Army Library Service for reading matter and technical supplies during the war period, that is, the fiscal years 1941-1946. T h e figures must be largely conjectural, since the army's official records of wartime expenditures of appropriated funds for recreational activities were not detailed enough to reveal the amount spent for each recreational commodity. During the greater p a r t of the period funds for reading matter and technical supplies were a subdivision of a subappropriation, and official fiscal records did not descend below the subappropriation level. Because of the conjectural character of the following figures, they have not been cited in the main text of this book. They are presented here solely to suggest the scale of the army's expenditures for reading matter. Authoritative verification of the estimates does not seem feasible; communications to the writer from the Office of the Chief of Finance and from the wartime New York Army Finance Office state that it is impossible—or totally impracticable—to produce statistics on this subject based on the actual records of disbursements. No attempt is made to estimate expenditures for buildings and furniture or for the pay of civilian librarians. This writer believes that the pay item amounted to about $8,000,000 in the sixyear period, but does not have sufficient evidence from personnel records to attempt to substantiate this conjecture. I t may be estimated that the total expenditure of the Army Library Service for reading matter and technical supplies during the war period was a little less than $21,000,000—certainly not a niggardly expenditure for six years' supply to an army whose average annual troop strength for the period was about 4,500,000. Roughly speaking, it represents an expenditure of about 75 cents per man per year. The total is admittedly only the most general approximation. The actual expenditure may have been several million dollars more or several million dollars less. The remainder of the appendix explains how the total was arrived at. EXPENDITURES

FOR

UNITED

STATES

POSTS

For the first two fiscal years of the war period ( J u l y , 1940-June, 1942 *) appropriations for reading matter can be safely used as a guide in estimating what was actually spent at posts in the United States. As noted in Chapter I I I , allotments of appropriated funds were based on the service

278

Appendix

club building program: $7,280 was to be spent for reading matter and technical library equipment for each old-style SC-3 club to be built, $18,300 for each of the new-style SC-3's, about $4,000 for each SC-4, and about $2,000 for each OM-1. The money was allotted to the service commands in accordance with their construction plans, and we have seen in Chapters IV and VI that it was spent partly at the service command and partly at the post level, the proportions depending on the policies of the several service commands. It was clearly stated in the service club authorizations how much was to be spent for reading matter and technical equipment for each type of club, and unless a club had been authorized very near the end of the fiscal year, the prescribed amount of money was duly spent. Money left unspent reverted to the Bureau of the Budget which reserved it for reappropriation to the army in the next fiscal year.With the appropriations tied so closely to the building program it stands to reason that nearly all the money appropriated for the initial collections of libraries and allotted to the service commands was spent for that purpose. A small proportion not allotted to the service commands was spent by the Library Section for reading matter for troops going overseas. The total appropriations for the two years were $1,160,686 and $622,688, respectively. 3 There was a sharp increase in the reading matter appropriation for the fiscal year 19-13: the amount appropriated for United States posts was $3,784,585. The principal reason for the increase was the Library's Section's contention that $1.00 per man per year was needed for the maintenance of post libraries—that is, for the purchase of new books, current magazine subscriptions, technical supplies, and the replacement of lost and worn books—but the total sum included items for traveling libraries and the rebinding of books in addition to the per capita figure. Of that year's appropriation, in addition to the estimated normal expenditures, which will be indicated presently, about $250,000 was spent by the Library Section for 1,100 traveling libraries and about $600,000 was spent at the post level for libraries in improvised quarters which had not shared in the appropriations of the two previous years (see pp. 28 and 29 above). The appropriations for the three following years were also large, owing mainly to the per capita maintenance item, which was $1.00 per man in 1944, 75 cents in 1945, and 42 cents in 1946. The totals were $2,656,000 in the 1944 fiscal year, $2,842,000 in 1945, and $1,130,000 in 1946. But the relation of appropriations to actual library expenditures was not the same in these fiscal years and that of 1943 as it was in the first two years of the war period. In the first two fiscal years of the war period control over the expenditure of appropriated funds in the field was rather closely centralized in the War Department agencies that had justified the appropriations to Congress. The Library Section was frequently called upon to authorize the

Appendix

279

expenditure of trifling amounts for post libraries if that expenditure was not plainly authorized by the directives governing the establishment of libraries. The system was too centralized to be effective when billions of dollars were being spent by thousands of purchasing officers in all parts of the country. A more flexible system was therefore put into effect at the beginning of the fiscal year 1943. Thereafter, as a means of ensuring that appropriated funds should be spent as the Congressional appropriations committees intended, the total army appropriation for each year was broken down for spending purposes into numerous "projects," each with its own number. Generally speaking, each of these spending projects corresponded to a budget item which had been separately presented and "justified" to the House and Senate appropriations committees. In the 1915 budget, for example, there were seventeen separate projects for ordnance expenditures: No. 120 for ammunition, No. 133 for tanks and other combat vehicles, No. 134 for other motor vehicles, and so forth. At first, funds in each spending project could be spent only for the articles or purposes named in the project. Later, transfers of up to 10 percent (and for one short period up to 20 percent) could be made with the permission of the Bureau of the Budget. Thus, if funds in P r o j e c t 133 were exhausted before the end of a fiscal year and there was a surplus in Project 134, the army could request the Bureau of the Budget to authorize the transfer of as much as 10 percent of Project 134 funds to P r o j e c t 133 (provided also that the total transferred did not exceed 10 percent of the amount originally appropriated for Project 133). But if still more money was needed for Project 133, a request for a special appropriation to make up the deficiency had to be presented to the Congressional committees with a full explanation of its intended use. Unused funds in a project amounting to more than the 10 percent which could be legally transferred to other projects, reverted to the Bureau of the Budget reserve for reappropriation to the army the following year. 4 Congress allowed overseas commanders considerable latitude in spending appropriated funds, but in the United States the responsible officers on all levels of command were required to adhere strictly to project limitations in obligating (that is, authorizing the expenditure of) the funds allotted to their commanders. Prior to the fiscal year 1943, funds for reading matter were allotted to the field as two of some dozen separate subdivisions of the general appropriation for the "welfare of enlisted men." The subdivision 2-02 was for expendable reading matter (chiefly magazines and newspapers) ; the subdivision 2—30 was for nonexpendable reading matter (chiefly books); the funds in these subdivisions could not be spent for any other purposes. Unfortunately, when the fiscal system was changed at the beginning of the fiscal year 1943, the use of these specific designations for funds for reading matter was abandoned. Funds for reading matter were pooled with funds for athletic equipment, musical instruments, and phonographs,

280

Appendix

theatrical equipment and several other recreational items in a single spending project—No. 101. In other words, these diverse recreational materials were so closely related in purpose, and the amounts appropriated for them were so small (relatively speaking), that it was not considered necessary to give them separate fiscal handling. Before the new system went into effect, the Library Section requested that a separate project number be given to reading matter funds, but the request was disapproved. When Project 101 money was allotted to the service commands and through them to posts and newly activated units, 5 it was left to the responsible officers at each level to determine what proportion of their 101 allotments should be expended at that level for each approved recreational item. Substantial sums of 101 money were doubtless spent during the 1943 fiscal year and later for the initial collections of new libraries, but comparatively little seems to have been spent for the maintenance of existing library collections—the principal purpose for which the "library" part of 101 funds had been appropriated. At any rate, there seems to have been a considerable disparity between the size of the last four wartime appropriations for reading matter for posts in the United States and the amount actually used each year by the post libraries. The Library Section officers did not realize the extent of this disparity when they made the calculations on which the appropriations were based, since the official reports of Project 101 expenditures did not distinguish between reading matter and the other supplies and equipment for which 101 funds might lawfully be spent and, owing to a chronic shortage of personnel, none of the semi-annual reports of post libraries which the section received were completely tabulated until the beginning of 1945. Thus, there was a reciprocal want of exact information regarding the composition of 101 funds when they were suballotted to the lower levels of command. The officers on the lower levels did not know the proportionate amount which Congress had appropriated for each specific type of commodity covered by the general project number, and, conversely, the officers on the War Department level, who had justified the appropriation to Congress, were unable to learn the specific amounts spent on the lower levels for each type of commodity, but only the total spent for all types. The Library Section's annual budgets for posts in the United States were perforce based largely on conjecture. It does not follow that the libraries were left without money after they were established. They had another source of money for reading matter— local nonappropriated funds—a source which the librarians themselves preferred whenever they had adequate access to it. As was explained in Chapter IV, the nonappropriated funds available to post Special Services officers came from the profits of post exchanges, post theaters, guest houses, and service club cafeterias (the last two were operated in the early years of the war by Special Services officers, and later by Army Exchange Service officers). It was plainly desirable to support post recreational activities

Appendix

281

for enlisted men wherever possible with this money which they themselves had supplied, and directives and informational bulletins to this effect were issued early in the war. 6 Librarians preferred this source of revenue because local fund purchases involved less red tape than those made from appropriated funds. Moreover, books purchased from local funds, if lost or damaged, could be stricken from the library records more easily than could books purchased from appropriated funds, since they were not classified as government property. Thus, the general pattern was that post library collections were established on appropriated funds and maintained thereafter chiefly with nonappropriated funds. The scale of maintenance depended first on the availability of local funds and secondly on the "library-mindedness" of the officers who controlled the funds. The librarian's ability to "sell" her service had much to do with the latter, although not everything. Libraries at large posts were sometimes lavishly supported. With a few exceptions, this was notably true of staging areas, which, accommodating a constant flow of troops on the way overseas, usually had large post exchange, cafeteria, and theater profits. The libraries at Camp Myles Standish, a staging area for the Boston Port of Embarkation, received $500 a month each from nonappropriated funds. At Camp Kilmer, N.J., a staging area for the New York Port of Embarkation, the average expenditure per library for books alone was $300 a month in 1942 and 1943; in 1944 it rose to $500 a month, and in the same year $1,500 was spent for newspaper subscriptions for the four camp libraries, and $2,000 for magazine subscriptions, all from local funds. At smaller posts, the provision made for libraries was variable. With less local money to draw on, some activities were likely to be slighted, and when this was the case the library might well be one of them, no matter how good a case the librarian made for its needs. Appropriated funds should have been drawn on in such instances, but the general policy of supporting post activities from local funds tended to militate against such use. The policy was not a hard and fast rule, but it was sometimes so interpreted, with the result that some libraries serving posts or post areas which accommodated large numbers of troops had to make shift on monthly nonappropriated fund allowances of $25 or $50, with extra grants when the magazine subscriptions expired. Posts too small to have a librarian might be even less well off if their Special Services officers were not interested in supporting the libraries. 7 The average, then, for these four years when the chief library expenditures were for maintenance rather than for establishment, was at best only fair in comparison with the Library Section's conception of what should be spent. Let us begin with the figures for the last two years—the only years for which there are reliable consolidated reports. A tabulation of semi-annual library reports from United States posts for J a n u a r y - J u n e 1945, indicated that the average monthly expenditure per library during that period

Appendix

282

was $97 for books, $41 for magazines and newspapers, and $34 for supplies and equipment—a total of $172. T h e consolidated r e p o r t stated that expenditures for the preceding half year had been almost exactly one third less. T h u s the monthly average for the year was $144. T h e tabulation was based on reports from 456 libraries in the nine service commands and the Military District of Washington. The total amount for the full fiscal year was $789,000—$316,000 in the first half and $473,000 in the second half. I n the second half of the year 32.9 percent of reported expenditures came from a p p r o p r i a t e d f u n d s ; no percentage was given for the first half of the year. If one third is added for Air Forces libraries in the United States-—the proportion usually added for the Air Forces in L i b r a r y Section estimates—the total expenditure for the year was a little more than $1,000,000. T h e Library Section's tabulation of reports for the fiscal year 1946 reveals a slight d r o p in expenditures, owing, no doubt, to the closing of posts and the redistribution of stocks; the total for non-Air Force posts was $670,000, of which 26 percent ($174,000) came from appropriated funds. With the addition of one third for air bases, the total for the year was a little under $900,000. T h e semi-annual reports for the fiscal year 1943 were tabulated only in p a r t , and it does not a p p e a r t h a t those for 1944 included expenditures for the initial establishment of libraries. T h e total reported for that year —$408,000 for all posts (including air bases)—seems unbelievably low. Since it is probable that more libraries were established in those years t h a n in the fiscal year 1945, it is conceivable that expenditures were as high as $1,200,000 each year, but this is simply a guess. T o the estimated sum for 1943 should be added the $250,000 spent by the L i b r a r y Section for traveling libraries and the $600,000 expenditure resulting from the J a n u a r y , 1943, f u n d s directive. Thus, the expenditure of a r m y f u n d s , both appropriated and nonappropriated, for reading matter and technical library supplies and equipment for United States post libraries f r o m J u l y , 1940, to J u n e , 1946, may be very roughly estimated as follows: Fiscal Year

Amovnt

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946

$1,160,000 620,000

2,050,000 1,200,000

1,000,000 900,000 T o t a l $6,930,000

T h i s total includes a few h u n d r e d thousand dollars spent for reading matter for overseas forces in the fiscal years 1941 and 1942 and does not include n o n a p p r o p r i a t e d f u n d s spent during the same two years. T h e fig-

283

Appendix

ures for 1943 and 1944 are, of course, extremely dubious, and those for 1945 and 1946 may be incomplete: the reports were not audited, and the librarians' records of expenditures may not have been entirely accurate. EXPENDITURES

FOR

OVERSEAS

THEATERS

Wartime reading matter expenditures for the overseas theaters corresponded much more closely to the appropriation figures than did the expenditures for United States posts. The Library Section initiated most of the expenditures, and the appropriations were based on its own procurement plans rather than on estimates of what other agencies which it did not control might or should spend. Only a small proportion of Project 101 funds for overseas theaters was allotted to agencies outside the War Department Special Services Division. One fraction was incorporated in the Finance Department General Allotment given to theater commanders for expenditure within the theaters. This was a bulk allotment which Congress authorized the theater commanders to spend without regard to project limitations; their fiscal officers merely indicated the applicable project numbers in reporting the expenditures. 8 This Finance Department General Allotment was one of the sources of the money which the Central Pacific Area library headquarters used in buying books in Honolulu. The 14th Anti-Aircraft Command probably drew on the same source for its purchases of books and other recreational supplies in Australia, referred to in Chapter IX. No doubt this allotment was also used occasionally for books purchased in the United Kingdom and India. The total of these F D G A expenditures for reading matter cannot be determined. An allotment of Project 101 funds was also made to the various ports of embarkation for use in filling routine requisitions which did not have to be transmitted to the Special Services Division for approval, and a third fraction went into an emergency reserve fund controlled by the director of the Special Services Division. The remainder, probably amounting to three fourths of the total appropriated for the overseas theaters, was spent under the direction of the various Special Services Division sections and branches which had prepared the budget estimates on which the appropriations for recreational material were based, each section spending its proportionate share after the deductions described above had been made. In the case of reading matter, first priority was given to the magazine sets and Armed Services Editions, and what was left went into RB libraries, RB kits, P B kits, and the filling of requisitions for books in bulk or for specific titles. The magazine sets and Armed Services Editions took so much that requisitions for kits and miscellaneous books sometimes had to be scaled down or canceled. Sometimes the Library Section went over its budget and had to draw on the emergency reserve fund. An example of

Appendix this was the $120,000 purchase made for E T O in the summer of 1945 (see p. 196 above). Except for the reserve f u n d and the allotments to ports and to the F D G A , there was no pooling of the overseas Project 101 funds: the general practice was that each section should obligate only that portion of the whole which it had justified in the Congressional hearings. I t should be noted, too, that the Library Section's d r a f t s on the reserve fund were not infrequent and may have fully compensated for all deductions. On the whole, then, the appropriations would seem to be a reasonably accurate record of actual expenditures. They were as follows: FUcal Year

1943 1944 1945 1946

Amount

$1,497,525 2,966,942 5,575,000 4,000,000 (estimated) Total $14,039,467

8

This total does not include nonappropriated f u n d expenditures made in Alaska, Panama, the Central Pacific Area, and the Marianas. Expenditures from nonappropriated funds were also being made in E T O and the Philippines by the spring of 1946. Although the expenditure figures cited are only conjectural approximations, it seems reasonable to infer from the above account that the last four reading matter appropriations for United States posts in the war period were larger than they need have been in view of the availability of local funds, whereas the appropriations for overseas areas were insufficient. I t also seems clear that much more appropriated money should have been spent for the libraries of small United States posts, which had little local money, than was spent. No doubt more would have been spent if funds for books and magazines had not been indistinguishably pooled with funds for other recreational items which were more attractive to the average post and unit Special Services officer than reading matter. Yet the officers can hardly be blamed for not spending more for books and magazines; they did not know what proportion of the bulk 101 allotment had been appropriated for this purpose and they were not given an objective scale for spending. Even the service command librarians did not know officially what proportion of 101 funds had been appropriated for reading matter, although the chief of the Library Branch succeeded in conveying the information to some of them unofficially. As noted on page 254 above, several years a f t e r the war the Department of the Army Special Services ceased to suballot funds for reading matter to the lower levels of command. I n the absence of a separate spending project number this was the best means of reserving them exclusively for the purpose intended by Congress.

Notes to the Text CHAPTER

i:

AEMY

READING

AND

THE

ARMY

LIBRARY

SERVICE

All books and articles pertaining to the Army Library Service which are cited in these notes are listed in the bibliography beginning on page 305. Newspaper stories and government publications are identified in the notes referring to them and are not listed in the bibliography. Former Army officers and enlisted men are referred to by the rank which they last held while on active duty. 1. Not being directly responsible for personnel in the field, the Library Section of the Special Services Division was never able to assemble accurate figures on the total number of professional librarians in the Army Library Service; only estimates were possible. The highest figure given in official releases during the war was 600. My estimate of the total employed a year or more is based on the fact that, in the rough Library Section figures on personnel, book stock, and circulation at United States posts, the Fourth Service Command usually accounted for one fourth of the grand total. According to Frances E. Slinger, the former Fourth Service Command librarian, 270 librarians were employed by the Fourtli Service Command and the T h i r d Army Area (the regional command which succeeded it in 1946) from 1941 to 1946 inclusive. To this number 20 may be added as the estimated number of librarians newly employed by air bases in the Fourth Service Command area a f t e r their administrative separation from the service command in J u l y , 1944. On this basis the total number of army librarians employed at posts in the United States in the war period was 1,160. Of the librarians who served overseas, nearly all who went to the European Theater had previously served in the United States, but at least l o in the Antilles and Panama, 30 in Hawaii and the Marianas, and (by the end of 1946) approximately 50 in the Western Pacific had not. Not counting the 50 newcomers in the Western Pacific, the total with roughly a year's service or more, according to this calculation, would be 1,205. For the number of books purchased see Paul E. Postell's article, "Books — f r o m Jungle to Post." Postell's estimate is lower than that of his predecessor, Ray L. Trautman, who believed that the total purchased was about 16,000,000. The number of donated books is likewise an estimate. Five million books were donated to the army through the 1941 and 1942 Victory Book Campaigns, according to the official reports of the campaigns. According to Wallis E. Howe, of Pocket Books, Inc., 16,000,000 Pocket Books were sold to the army and the navy between J a n u a r y , 1942, and June,

Notes to Paget

286

3-12

1946, approximately 90 percent of this quantity going to the army. The Information and Education Division's official records indicate that it distributed some 170,000 volumes to Information and Education officers during the war; many of these volumes were placed in army libraries. Fourteen million paperbound United States Forces Institute textbooks were also distributed by the Information and Educational Division. The Office of the Chief of Chaplains reports that it issued 10,000,000 Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant Testaments. I n addition to hardbound books, the American Red Cross purchased 5,000,000 paperbound books for distribution to soldiers overseas, and civilians and business firms bought millions more to mail to individual soldiers. Howe estimates that a total of 50,000,000 Pocket Books went to soldiers through one channel or another. 2. The studies of soldiers' reading were made by the Research Branch of the Special Services Division and were described in the Branch's Report No. 20, "Use of Camp Library by Enlisted Men," and Report No. SWPA-5, "Report on Reading Preferences of Enlisted Men." Report No. B-26, "Leisure Time Activities and Preferences of Enlisted Men," lists letter writing as the most popular pastime, followed by listening to the radio, reading magazines, seeing movies, reading a book, playing cards, dating, and dancing. 3. The Morale Branch was renamed the Special Service Branch early in 1942. A few months later it became the Special Service Division; then, in November, 1943, the Special Services Division. 4. This area was called the Communications Zone and was usually divided into base sections, which corresponded roughly to the service commands in the United States. CHAPTER

II :

ANTECEDENTS

The section on library service in the First World War and on its effect on the library profession is based on interviews with Carl H . Milam, Luther L. Dickerson, and Louis J . Bailey and on the following printed sources: Koch, Larson, and Utley (for titles of these articles see the Bibliography). The section on the Army Library Service between 1921 and 1940 is based principally on interviews with Luther L. Dickerson and Elizabeth H . MacCloskey (Sixth Corps Area librarian during p a r t of this period) and on correspondence with Colonel Joseph I. Greene, U.S.A. (Retired). The figures on army library budgets of the 1920's and 1930's are drawn from copies of old reports preserved by Kate McDaniel. Colonel Greene points out, incidentally, that the army's technical libraries—at the War College in Washington and at the various service schools—expanded steadily during the 1920's and the 1930's. T h e y contained much general as well as technical reading matter, and as a rule they were open to both officers and enlisted men. M a j o r General Russel B. Reynolds, in testifying before the House subcommittee on military appro-

Xotet

to Page» 20-30

287

priations in 1947 (see note 6 to Chapter X V I I ) , remarked that the prewar library service was "no library service at all except at our service schools."

CHAPTER

III:

THE

PERIOD

OF

EXPANSION

Sources: Interviews and correspondence with Luther L. Dickerson, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dollard, Major Howard Haycraft, Carl H . Milam, Elizabeth Evans Mischler (formerly librarian of Fort Hancock), Lieutenant Colonel Paul E. Postell, and Colonel Ray L. Trautman. 1. MR 1-10, paragraph 30. 2. The nine corps areas were redesignated service commands in the March, 1942, reorganization of the army. For the sake of consistency the latter term is used in this book for all of the period 1940—July, 1946. 3. The recommendations of Milam and Dickerson, with accompanying correspondence, are on file at the Executive Offices of the American Library Association. 4. Although there were some disadvantages in the Library Section's lack of authority over library personnel in the field, the general policy of decentralization was certainly sound. If War Department approval had been required before any important action could be taken in the field, the library service would soon have bogged down in red tape, and officials in Washington would have had to make decisions about matters concerning which they could not have full information. So long as the regional commanders had qualified library specialists on their staffs, it was much better to leave most of the policy decisions and program planning to them. But in matters affecting libraries there was probably too much decentralization from the command to the post level in the United States. 5. These figures are based on an inter-office memorandum by Captain Trautman to Colonel Livingston Watrous, dated September 20, 1941. The number of libraries which had received or were scheduled to receive funds was 22 less than the 145 for which Congress had appropriated funds. The discrepancy is due to the fact that appropriations were based on expected rather than actual authorization of buildings. Under the fiscal system then in force the funds for the 22 libraries which were not constructed would revert to the Bureau of the Budget reserve for reappropriation the following year. See the Appendix. 6. The amendment and the directive were, respectively, Changes No. 2, AR 850-80, December 24, 1942, and Letter, Office of the Director, Special Services Division, S P S P E 461, January 25, 1943. 7. The reclassification of librarians became effective in July, 1942. At about that time the Library Section became part of the Education Branch. The chief of the Education Branch agreed to resubmit the case to the Civilian Personnel Division, but when that agency declined, on apparently reasonable grounds, to make another field study of army library jobs, he did not pursue the matter further.

288

Note»

to Page»

32-52

8. When the assignment of activities to the two divisions was under consideration, the chief of the Library Section requested that his section be placed in the Special Services Division. His request doubtless had some bearing on the final decision; but according to a former member of General Osborn's staff the principal issue at the moment was which division should control radio broadcasting. CHAPTER

IV : T H E

SERVICE

COMMAND

LIBRARIAN'S

Sources: Interviews or correspondence with Aline C. Whiteside, J e d H . Taylor, H a r r y F. Cook, Mary Evalyn Crookston, Mary Frances Slinger, Agnes Crawford, Elizabeth H . MacCloskey, Sybil O. Tubbs, Xenophon P. Smith, Wendell B. Coon, and Elizabeth H . Bock and with post librarians from all commands. Limitations of space and lack of detailed information concerning some of the commands have made it impossible to give a full account of the library organization in all nine service commands. The object of this chapter is merely to illustrate certain aspects of the command librarians' work, with special emphasis on their activities in setting up post libraries. Although the actual instances given in this chapter are drawn from only five of the nine service commands, I received helpful information from the former librarians of three others—the First, the Third, and the Seventh. 1. The qualifications of post librarians were graduation from college and an accredited library school, or the equivalent in experience (the "equivalent" clause was later dropped), one year's experience (other than clerical) in library work, age, 25 to 40 years, and sex, female. 2. The distribution of army librarians in the United States in June, 1944, when the Army Air Forces Library Service was established, was as follows: Service Command

1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Military District of Washington Total

Librarie» controlled by A.S.F.

40 34 42 99 20 21 46 96 92

Libraries controlled by A.A.F.

6 10 5 75 5 9 36 73 67

Total

46 44 47 174 25 30 82 169 159

13

2

15

503

288

79T

Notes

to Pages 5£—89 CHAPTER

v:

DONATED

BOOKS

AND

SERVICES

Sources: Interviews and correspondence with the following: Louis J . Bailey, Ethel S. Brown, Mildred Bruder Buchanan, Luther L. Dickerson, Marie D. Loizeaux, Carl H . Milam, Grace M. Sherwood; and the following literature: American Library Association, Bruder, Connor, Forbes, LeMay, Loizeaux, Methods of Distribution, Rhode Island State Library (for titles of these publications see the Bibliography). 1. The book collections of the Red Cross clubs might have rendered greater service if each overseas Red Cross headquarters had employed a few professional librarians to inspect them and see to their needs. CHAPTER

VI:

POST

SERVICE

Sources: Interviews and correspondence with librarians and with former soldiers; answers to a questionnaire sent to numerous post librarians; mimeographed reports of army library conferences; recollections of my own brief experience as an enlisted librarian and as a post library officer; and the following articles: Barrett, Boisclair, Chandler, Davis, Dunham, Etchison, Evans, Hennessy, Library at Ft. Monmouth, MacCloskey, Stockford, Zimmerman (for titles of these publications see the Bibliography). William C. Haygood, Felix Pollak, and several other professional observers furnished revealing comments on the place of the libraries in camp life. CHAPTER

VII:

ASPECTS

OF

HOSPITAL

SERVICE

This chapter is based on the same general sources as is Chapter VI. 1. The Reconditioning officers of general hospitals and convalescent centers had duties similar to those of the post Information and Education officers, but more inclusive. Their function was to help the patients prepare for their return to army duty or to civil life, as the case might be: it involved army orientation, off-duty education, vocational guidance and cooperation with the occupational therapy department. 2. I n one month in 1943 the average circulation of books in all Fourth Service Command installations was about one per registered borrower; in hospitals alone it was not quite three per borrower. In the first half of 1945, the average book-stock turnover (circulation divided by total book stock) of all Ninth Service Command installations was about 30 percent. Eleven of the sixteen large hospitals in the command had above-average turnovers, varying from 40 percent to 81 percent; only five were below average. CHAPTER

VIII:

OVERSEAS

BOOK

DISTRIBUTION

My account of Special Services and library supply is based largely on interviews with the following men who were officers in the Special Services Division during the w a r : Lieutenant Colonel Edwin A. Leibman, Major

Xotes

290

to Pages

95-101

Rueul D. Harmon, Lieutenant Colonel Evaristo M u r r a y , M a j o r H o w a r d H a y c r a f t , Colonel Ray L. T r a u t m a n , and Lieutenant Colonel P a u l E . Postell. For events which took place a f t e r the beginning of 1944 I have drawn partly on my own recollections: I was assigned to the Library Section in J a n u a r y , 1944, as Assistant Executive Officer and served there until J u n e , 1946. I have also obtained information for this chapter f r o m the men named in the notes to Chapters I X and X. 1. In theory the theater Special Services requisitions to the W a r Department were based on the requisitions of units to the theater headquarters, but in fact the requisitions of the units were influenced by advice from the theater headquarters on the availability of materials, and t h a t in turn depended on what the War Department had made available. T h e unbalanced requisitions which some theaters sent to the W a r D e p a r t m e n t faithfully reflected the requisitions of the units. Some theater Special Services officers considered it their responsibility to r e j e c t extremely lopsided requisitions (such as that of a unit Special Services officer—a band leader in civil life—who wanted to expend his entire quarterly allotment on musical instruments) ; others were less conscientious or were not authorized by their commanders to make such decisions. T h e Library Section probably blamed some theater Special Services officers for errors which they themselves recognized but lacked the authority—or the o p p o r t u n i t y — to correct. 2. The Special Services Division's liaison with overseas theaters was quite inadequate until almost the end of the war. Not many of the division's officers made trips overseas, and very few of those that did had sufficient technical information to understand the nature of Special Services supply problems in the field. Yet the specialists in the division's operating sections were almost entirely dependent on these occasional travelers for their information. 3. The 150 R B libraries procured in 1943 and the 170 procured in the spring of 1944 consisted of about 35 percent fiction and 65 percent nonfiction. In the 350 procured in the fall of 1944, the ratio of fiction and nonfiction books was reversed, on the basis of evidence concerning reading interest furnished by overseas library reports. In the R B libraries procured in 1945, the proportion of nonfiction (other t h a n humor and best sellers) was reduced still f u r t h e r . The selection, ordering, and assembly of books for RB libraries are described in Chapter X V I I . CHAPTER

IX : B O O K

DISTRIBUTION

IX

THE

PACIFIC

THEATERS

P a r t of the information contained in this chapter and Chapter X is derived from supply records which were available in the War D e p a r t m e n t Special Services Division in 1945. But for the most p a r t my account of the situation in the several theaters is based on correspondence or interviews with the officers and enlisted men referred to in the text and with several informants who have requested that their names be withheld. M a n y minor and some rather important overseas commands and bases are not touched

Notes

to Pages

291

109-113

on at all because of the sketchiness of my information concerning them: the Persian Gulf Command, the Air Transport Command bases in the North and South Atlantic, and others. Sources for the Alaskan Department: Lieutenant Colonel John T. Carlton, Frederick A. Wemmer, Corporal Vernon Metz, Xenophon P. Smith, Master Sergeant Robert E. Kingery, Corporal Bernard Kalb (38th Special Service Company). South Pacific Area: Sergeant Elias Jones, Sergeant Francis E. Stark, Sergeant John Hedges, and others; typescript history of South Pacific Area Service Forces activities on file in Historical Division, Department of the Army Special Staff. Southwest Pacific Area: Major Everett T. Moore, Major Roy E. Langfitt and Brigadier General Ken R. Dyke (theater I. and E. staff) ; Major George Kern (theater Exchange and Special Services staff) ; Sergeant Martin P. McDonough, Colonel Henry Disston, Major Leon B. Poullada; article by Aaron N. Maloff (for title see the Bibliography). 1. The Information Centers operated by base and unit Information and Education officers also received copies of I. and E. publications produced at the theater headquarters and of the overseas printings of Time, Newsweek, and the weekly New York Times Overseas Edition (a 12-page tabloid). Other publications printed at various times in some of the overseas theaters were Readers Digest, the Chicago Overseas Tribune (like the Times, a 12-page weekly tabloid), and the European Edition of the New York Herald Tribune. The magazines were usually printed from plastic plates shipped to the theaters by air. Owing to the scarcity of paper these editions seldom had press runs of more than a few thousand until after V-E Day. The only important exception was the magazine supplements of the North African edition of Stars and Stripes, described in Chapter XV. CHAPTER

x:

BOOK

DISTRIBUTION"

IX

THE

EASTERN

THEATERS

Sources for China-Burma-India: Lieutenant Colonel G. Edward Clark, Sergeant Joseph W. Rogers, Lieutenant Guy Henle, Captain L. P. Greiper, Captain Eugene B. Vest, Robert C. Lewis (theater Red Cross chief), Lieutenant Colonel Paul B. Zimmerman, Major Louis J . Shores, and others. Mediterranean Theater: Colonel Leon T. Davis, Major Warren L. Perry, William E. Stevenson (theater Red Cross chief), Lieutenant Colonel Raymond J . Novotny (Fifth Army Special Services officer), Colonel Roger W. Whitman, Major Harry C. Bauer, Sergeant Robert Griswold, Colonel Egbert White (theater publications officer), and others; articles by Wheeler, Baatz (for titles see Bibliography) ; typescript history of Mediterranean Theater Special Services activities on file in Historical Division, Department of the Army Special Staff. Africa-Middle-East Theater: Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy C. Hinchcliffe, Major Hall F. Achenbach, Sergeant David Wilder, Thomas H . Vail Motter and others.

Notes

292

to Paget

121-l^S

1. I n the article listed in the bibliography. Private Wheeler was reported missing in action in October, 1944, a few weeks a f t e r this article was written. CHAPTER

XI:

THE

OVERSEAS

MAGAZINE

SET

Sources: Interviews with the officers in the Library and Distribution sections of the wartime Special Services Division and correspondence with Colonel Joseph I. Greene of the Infantry Journal. 1. Only three army agencies had to do with the establishment of this system: the War Department Special Services Division, the Special Services Supply Division of the New York Port of Embarkation, and the Army Postal Service. The latter agency, of course, was the one that counted, since it controlled the channels that were to be used. From its point of view, the object was simply to relieve the unbearable strain placed on its facilities not only by the Library Section magazine subscriptions but also by the subscriptions placed by or for individual soldiers. The concurrence of the theater commanders, who in theory controlled the flow of all materials to their theaters, was not required, since they did not control the mail dispatches. Thus this important policy decision was made independently on a rather low level of the War Department for purely practical reasons. The only way the Army Postal Service could hope to diminish the total volume of magazines being mailed overseas was to distribute the packages provided by the Special Services Division. The same argument was used for distributing Armed Services Editions by mail: it would reduce the volume of books mailed by civilians. Without this spontaneous action on the part of civilians the army's mass distribution of books and magazines by mail might not have got beyond the planning stage. In this respect the well-meaning donors of "Maudie" books and ladies magazines were as helpful as anyone else; inappropriate as such contributions seemed to the men who received them, in the long run they were not futile. 2. The number of different magazines then in the set was 29, and in the case of the most popular magazines two or three copies were included. But since many were monthly publications, the average contents of a weekly package was 25 pieces. The rate of dispatch was then about one magazine per week for every three men. At the end of 1945 it was a little more than one magazine per week for every two men. 3. The average cost of purchased copies was a little higher. But in September, 1944, more than one third of all copies of Esquire, Coronet, the Saturday Evening Post, and Country Gentleman were free, as well as a substantial number of Readers Digest copies and all copies of the McGraw-Hill Overseas Digest and of Science News Letter. CHAPTER

XII:

ARMED

SERVICES

EDITIONS

Sources: in addition to officers in the Library and Distribution sections of the wartime Special Services Division, the following have been consulted

Kotes

to Pages

H2-157

298

either personally or in correspondence: Lieutenant Colonel Evaristo Murr a y ; Malcolm Johnson and Irene Rakosky (Council on Books in Wartime) ; Philip Van Doren Stern, H. Stahley Thompson, Ben Zimmerman (Editions for the Armed Services, Inc.) ; numerous former soldiers and army librarians. A History of the Council on Books in Wartime 191+4—1946 and the pertinent records of the Council and of Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., have also been consulted. The article by Poullada has some interesting speculations on the effect of Armed Services Editions on soldiers' reading habits. A slightly different version of this chapter was printed in the final catalogue of Armed Services Editions (Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., a History, together with the Complete List of 1324 Books Published for American Armed Forces Overseas, New York, Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., 1948). 1. There were two Armed Services Editions production programs. In the first or "wartime" program, 119,904,263 volumes were produced between September, 1943, and September, 1946, at an average cost of 5.9 cents per volume, or $7,151,186.19. In the second or "postwar" program 3,046,768 volumes were produced between September, 1946, and September, 1947, at an average cost of 10.9 cents per volume, or $385,067.50. About two thirds of the cost of the postwar program was defrayed by Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., out of the surplus it had accumulated during the war. The army's share in both programs was about 81 percent— 98,000,000 volumes in the first program and roughly 2,500,000 in the second. Its total outlay on both programs was a little more than $6,000,000. As stated on page 151, the total number of titles, including 99 reprints of earlier selections, was 1,322. The figure given in the council's final catalogue—1,324—is based on the fact that two copies of Webster's New Handy Dictionary were included in Series " V " and two more copies in Series " E E . " For convenience in assembling the sets, the two copies were given separate numbers; this led to their being counted as two "originals" and two "reprints" rather than as one each. 2. The most regrettable elimination from the point of view of the army office was that of Farrell's Studs Lonigan. 3. Some authors of long books did their own cutting: Francis Hackett {Henry the Eighth), Jean Stafford (Boston Adventure), Wallace Stegner (Big Rock Candy Mountain). Forever Amber was abridged to about half its original size by A. H . Lass, head of the English Department in a Brooklyn high school. Two of Amber's husbands (Luke and Gerald) were eliminated in the process, but there was no bowdlerizing. 4. Since the Armed Services Editions packages followed postal rather than normal supply channels, it was necessary for a command Special Services officer to go down to the units if he wanted to find out whether the books were being received: for they would not pass through his warehouse. On one Pacific island the Special Services officer failed to do this. He complained to a visiting officer from the Army Service Forces head-

Notes

£94

to Pages

159-172

quarters that the thousands of men on the island did not have a scrap of reading matter. On his return to Washington the A S F officer urged that the mail distribution of Armed Services Editions be abandoned. M a j o r Rueul D. Harmon of the Distribution Section of the W a r D e p a r t m e n t Special Services Division was then about to go out to the Pacific. H e was asked to investigate the situation and recommend a remedy. His remedy consisted in introducing the island Special Services officer to the island Postal officer, who had distributed several tons of Armed Services Editions and magazines during the preceding six months. 5. A Pocket Book edition. Armed Services Editions were not manufactured until some months a f t e r the fight at EI Guettar. 6. M a j o r Everett T . Moore and Sergeant Joseph A. Groesbeck. I t should be noted that Groesbeck was in a Service Forces unit. The combat units in the European Theater were less well supplied. CHAPTER

XIII : O V E R S E A S

SERVICE

Sources: the September, 1944, issue of the Antilles D e p a r t m e n t Poster; a report on Hawaiian D e p a r t m e n t library activities written by Captain Poullada in February, 1942; a similar report written by M a j o r Morris A. Gelfand in May, 1946; notes on the Okinawa book supply program written by Lieutenant Carl Ficker; numerous issues of the C P A (later M I D P A C ) Catalog Card (an entertaining and informative library newsletter, published monthly from 1943 until several years a f t e r the end of the w a r ) ; articles by Poullada and J a n e Fairweather ( f o r titles see the Bibliogr a p h y ) ; letters to the chief of the Library Section written by Agnes Crawford, Poullada and others; and interviews or correspondence with the following: Agnes Crawford, Carl W. Hull, D r . Hervey P . Prentiss, Sergeant Benjamin H . Avin (an enlisted librarian at Galapagos I s l a n d ) , M a j o r Leon B. Poullada, J a n e Fairweather, J a n e McClure, E d i t h Shumaker, Lorna Swofford, Mary Walther Oswald, Sheila Dove Poullada, Jeanette Sledge, Annie Laurie Etchison, Edmee Hanchey Elliott, Lieutenant William E . Bartels, Lieutenant Colonel Harold B. Bachman, and Lieutenant Colonel J o h n T . Carlton. 1. The Hawaiian D e p a r t m e n t was renamed the Central Pacific Area in 1943. In 1945 a higher headquarters, A F M I D P A C or M I D P A C (United States Army Forces Middle Pacific), was established at Fort S h a f t e r on the island of Oahu. Under it were two subordinate headquarters—the Central Pacific Base Command (Hawaiian Islands and p a r t of the old South Pacific Area) and the Western Pacific Base Command ( t h e Marianas and a few other islands). 2. Beginning in J u l y , 1943, the library headquarters catalogued all titles before distributing them. A stencil was made for each title, and enough cards were run off to supply a set of author, title, and s u b j e c t cards for all libraries which were to receive copies of the book. In the opinion of

Notes

to Pages

295

178-192

Poullada's professional assistants, the decision to provide central cataloguing necessarily entailed the further task of cataloguing the existing stocks of libraries which had not been previously catalogued. Poullada questioned whether this back cataloguing should be done in all post and hospital libraries, since in some cases it would mean several months of desk work for librarians who did not have enough trained assistants to handle the daily circulation work adequately. In this instance he accepted his assistants' judgment with some misgivings. Problems of this sort frequently occurred in all overseas theaters. Time and again one had to decide whether to meet current needs at once in a rough and ready way or to neglect them in order to provide better for later needs. The decision was particularly hard to make because one could never be sure how long the need would last—how long the library or libraries concerned would continue to serve a large number of troops. 3. Poullada planned to use Hawaii as a staging area for librarians who were to serve the army forces as they moved into the Western Pacific. The problem was how to transfer experienced librarians to other areas without severely depleting the Central Pacific Area staff. The solution was to establish more library positions than were actually needed in Hawaii, fill them, and then transfer groups of librarians to the new commands farther west. Because of the slowness of recruiting from the United States, it proved impossible to fill all the positions which had been established by the spring of 1945. There were 45 positions, but only 34 librarians. Nevertheless, that total of 34 did contain a modest surplus to the minimum personnel requirements of the Central Pacific Area library organization, and when the Marianas opened up Poullada decided that he could offer the new command nine librarians (including two in key administrative positions) without gravely weakening his own program. CHAPTER

XIV:

THE

EUROPEAN

THEATER

Sources: interviews or correspondence with Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Linton, Major Irving Lieberman, Sergeant LeRoy C. Merritt, Sergeant Eugene Jackson, Captain Samuel Lazerow, Captain Jack B. Spear, Lieutenant Theodore Josephs (29th Division headquarters), and numerous soldiers and librarians who served in the theater; also articles by Helen Adams, Elvira Beltramo, Olive Branch, Martha Davis, Marjorie Derby, Herbert Goldhor, Margaret Hatcher, Elizabeth J . Hodges, Harold Lancour, Major Irving Lieberman, Lieutenant Leslie I. Poste, Robert C. Tucker (for titles see the Bibliography). 1. The splitting of the Special Service Division in the War Department at the end of 1943 into Special Services Division and Information and Education Division was carried out in most of the theaters in 1944. In E T O both Special Services and Information and Education remained under a single chief, Brigadier General Oscar N. Solbert, and the Library Service Section was kept in the Education Branch.

296

Notes

to Paget

193-207

2. In 1942 Trautman had requested authority to send women librarians to combat theaters, but notwithstanding the precedent set by the Red Cross in sending women to all theaters, whether combat or not, his request had been disapproved by the representatives of the several theaters in the Operation Division of the War Department General Staff. The Marianas and the Philippines were the only overseas areas in which Special Services women librarians were employed while hostilities (in the form of "mopping u p " operations) were still in progress. 3. The following comment by Joseph B. Rounds illustrates the scarcity of books in many small units in the summer and early fall of 1945. The company he describes was a Seventh Army Signal Corps unit which left the theater in October, 1945. "On the continent our company had no contact whatever with the Army Library Service except for those books provided in the Armed Services Editions. After the war in Europe was over . . . a library of approximately 1500 volumes was set up for the company and it was used widely and well. . . . The books in this collection I managed to get together by demanding, begging and searching in our company and through the efforts of professional friends in the United States who sent a large number of volumes for our use. . . . This library was definitely a company creation and the help we received from higher headquarters was nil." 4. This is the total given in a consolidated theater library report for the period January-September 1945, prepared by I.eRoy C. Merritt. 5. The War Department Library Section had the H. W. Wilson Company prepare a printed pamphlet catalogue of the contents of each of the two large RB Library procurements made early in 1945. Each catalogue consisted of two parts: a dictionary catalogue and a classed catalogue. Fiction as well as nonfiction titles were classified according to subject. Copies of the catalogue were distributed to all units which received the libraries. 6. There were many other E T O Service Forces installations besides the Reims Assembly Area: assembly or staging areas in and around Antwerp and Marseilles and in England, hospitals in England and on the continent, and numerous service, property-guard, and graves registration units in all parts of the theater. Library service was eventually provided for nearly all of them, even the small graves registration units, and each type of installation presented its own problems. Since there is a space for a detailed description of only one Service Forces activity, that one has been chosen which affected the greatest number of soldiers. 7. J . Frank Dobie, "Samples of the Army Mind." The magazine sets referred to in this article were not the unit magazine sets described in Chapter X I I , but special monthly sets for Information and Education officers in the E T O which were issued by the Information and Education Division during most of 1945. They consisted of 50 magazines not included in the unit magazine set.

Note to Page 212 CHAPTER

XV:

CENSORSHIP

AND

THE

SOLDIER

VOTING

LAW

Sources: My information concerning censorship prior to the Soldier Voting Law is derived from interviews and correspondence with service command and post librarians, as is most of my information concerning the effect of Title V on the Army Library Service in the field. The Senatorial debates on Title V and its revision are reported in the Congressional Record, Vols. L X X X I X and XC. For the action taken by the various War Department agencies I have drawn on interviews and correspondence with Cutler, Trautman, Postell, and Charles Dollard (formerly chief of the Research Branch), and on my own recollections. Philip Van Doren Stern, Malcolm Johnson, and Irene Rakosky have furnished information concerning the attitude of the Council on Books in Wartime and its advisory committee on book selection. The History of the Council on Books in Wartime, 19Jf2—19J/6 gives an accurate account of the action taken by the council. Colonel Egbert White furnished information concerning the magazine supplements of Stars and Stripes, although his account of the reasons for the termination of the project differs from that which I have given. There is a reference to Cutler's work as Coordinator of Soldier Voting in H e n r y L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy's On Active Service in Peace and War (New York, H a r p e r , 1948), p. 340. The following are a few of the documents and newspaper articles pertaining to censorship and the Soldier Voting L a w : United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Elections: 1944, No. 3; Army and Navy Voting in 1944. Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1945. United States, War Department, Bulletin No. 5, 1 April, 1944 (text of the law). United States, War Department, Circular No. 128, 3 April, 1944 (the first implementing directive). United States, War Department, Letter, AG 014.35 (28 April 1944), Restrictions in new "Federal Voting L a w " on dissemination to members of the armed forces of political argument or political propaganda (the "AG letter"). United States, War Department, Bulletin No. 18, 20 August 1944 (text of revision of Title V). United States, War Department, Circular No. 348, 26 August 1944 (revision of the implementing directive). " 'Under Cover' Banned at Crile General Hospital," New York Times, February 19, 1944. "Ban on Books by Army and Navy Is Opposed by Literary Council," New York Times, June 18, 1944 (the council release). "Says Army Defeats Hatch Act Intent," New York Times, July 11, 1944 (interviews with Senator T a f t and a War Department representative).

m

Notes

to Pages

212-226

" C e n s o r s h i p a n d S e m a n t i c s , " Saturday Review of Literature, J u l y 15, 1944. " T h e T a f t - A r m y meeting," Saturday Review of Literature, J u l y 29, 1944. " A letter f r o m S e n a t o r T a f t , " Saturday Review of Literature, August 19, 1944. My article, " C e n s o r s h i p a n d the Soldier," is a slightly condensed version of this c h a p t e r . 1. I have been unable to find copies of the letters r e f e r r e d to. T h e list of Axis-inspired publications included several t h a t were p r i n t e d in G e r man a n d several in I t a l i a n . Of t h e other publications, one was D a l t o n T r u m b o ' s pacifist novel, Johnny Got His Gun ( N e w York, Lippincott, 1939). T h e second was the late T o m W i n t r i n g h a m ' s New Ways of War ( L o n d o n a n d N e w Y o r k , P e n g u i n Books, a n d W a s h i n g t o n , D.C., T h e I n f a n t r y J o u r n a l P r e s s , 1940), a work on "tactics for the civilian" simultaneously published in E n g l a n d a n d the U n i t e d S t a t e s when a G e r m a n invasion of E n g l a n d seemed imminent. T h e author was a former Communist; possibly someone in a u t h o r i t y in the G o v e r n m e n t regarded the book as being essentially a guide to r i o t e r s ; it seems a r a t h e r f a r - f e t c h e d view. A second I n f a n t r y J o u r n a l P r e s s edition was issued in J u l y , 1942, a n d reprinted in November, 1942. T h e t h i r d book b a n n e d was Forward—March! an expensive two-volume pictorial history of the F i r s t World W a r , edited by F. J . Mackey (Chicago, Disabled American Veterans of the W o r l d W a r , D e p a r t m e n t of Rehabilitation, 1935). T h e initiative f o r this banning came f r o m the chief of t h e L i b r a r y Scction. H e did not o b j e c t to t h e contents of t h e work, but only to the methods used by certain agents in promoting its sale. 2. See B e r g e n E v a n s , The Natural History of Nonsense (New York, K n o p f , 1946), p p . 8 - 9 , 191. I n 1946 the U n i t e d S t a t e s Armed Forces I n s t i t u t e edition of Economics: Principles and Problems, by P a u l F . Gemmill and R a l p h H . Blodget, was w i t h d r a w n by the I n f o r m a t i o n and E d u cation Division when D e W i t t E m e r y , the p r e s i d e n t of an organization called the N a t i o n a l Small Businessmen's Association, alleged t h a t it was "communistic." See Publisher's Weekly, C L ( O c t o b e r 12, 1946), 2216. 3. T h i s s t r o n g language echoed S e n a t o r T a f t ' s own words in Senatorial d e b a t e : " I f t h e r e is a real question as to whether it is political p r o p a g a n d a it ought not to be sent. . . . I say t h a t if t h e r e is any doubt a t all it ought not to go out u n d e r G o v e r n m e n t sponsorship paid f o r by the U n i t e d States G o v e r n m e n t . . . . S u p p o s e it could not go out, who would be h u r t ? " (Congressional Record, L X X X I X , 10297). 4. C l a p p e r , Watching the World; Stettinius, Lend-Lease, Weapon of Victory; Welles, The Time for Decision; J o h n s t o n , America Unlimited; M e a d , Tell the Folks Back Home; G r e w , My Ten Years in Japan; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus; B e a r d , Basic History of the United States a n d Th,e Republic; W h i t e , One Man's Meat; C h a n g , Chiang Kai-Shek; Dos

Notes

to Pages

299

230-2^7

Passos, State of the Nation; Carlson, Under Cover; Chase, Rich Poor Land; Sandoz, Slogan House. CHAPTER

XVI:

THE

WESTERN

Land,

PACIFIC

Sources: Correspondence or interviews with M a j o r Leon B. Poullada, M a j o r Henry J . Gartland, M a j o r Morris A. Gelfand, Annie Laurie Etchison, J a n e McClure, J a n e Fairweather, Gertrude Henrikson, Rose Vainstein, Edmee Hanchey Elliott, and Louise D a r l i n g ; a copy of the revised plan which Poullada d r a f t e d for the Western Pacific in August, 1945; letters and reports sent to the Library Branch by Gelfand, Gartland, Lieutenant Carl Ficker, Miss Etchison, and Miss Fairweather; and the articles by J a n e Fairweather, Gertrude Henrikson, Percy Hylton (on the IX Corps in J a p a n , 1946), and Paul E. Postell (for titles see the Bibliography). 1. When Gartland and Gelfand returned to the United States in 1946, and Ficker was reassigned, they were succeeded, respectively, by Gertrude Henrikson, J a n e Fairweather, and Annie Laurie Etchison. 2. Circular No. 31, General Headquarters, U.S.A.F., Pacific, 27 December 1945, "Library Program for Army Forces, Pacific." 3. Gelfand inspected the M I D P A C library facilities in May, 1946, when he was returning to the United States and discussed the paralyzing shortage of librarians in the Western Pacific with the M I D P A C Special Services chief. Partly as a result of his analysis of the relative needs of the Pacific commands, the transfer of five of the eight librarians who l e f t M I D P A C in the spring and early summer was effected soon afterward. CHAPTER

XVII:

END

OF

THE

WAR

AND

AFTERWARD

Sources: My own recollections of the Library Branch in 1945 and the first half of 1946; interviews with librarians still in the army in 1947 and 1948, the Congressional hearings on the Military Establishment Appropriation Bill for the fiscal year 1948, and the articles by Paul E. Postell. Needless to say, the opinions expressed on the postwar status of the library service, its fiscal resources, and its future are my own and do not necessarily coincide with those of my former colleagues who still see the Army Library Service from the inside. I t should be noted that this chapter deals only with the army. When it was written, in the fall of 1948, the effects of the establishment of a separate Air Force on the library organization overseas were j u s t beginning to be felt. As recounted in Chapter IV, library service for air bases in the United States had been independently administered since the middle of 1944. In the summer and fall of 1948 separate Air Force command librarians were similarly appointed in the Philippines, Alaska, and other overseas areas, and both the administrative and the fiscal connection between the Air Force commands and the Army Library Service was terminated. Thereafter, the only morale agency that continued to be unified,

300

Notes

to Pages

2Ì7-250

at least at the top level, was the Army-Air Force Troop Information and Education Division, the postwar successor to the old Army Information and Education Division. 1. The school was discontinued in the fall of 1945. A School for I n formation Services was established at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., the following year, and in 1947 a School for Special Services was established at Fort Monmouth, N . J . The latter school provided twenty hours of instruction on the Army Library Service for officers and a somewhat longer course for enlisted men. 2. Some of the commercial packers were inefficient, and by no means all of their errors were caught in time by the quartermaster depot's inspectors. If a packer did not get the books for the cases he was filling lined up properly on his workmen's feeder shelves or tables, the number of books in each case might be right, but there would be duplications, and corresponding shortages, of titles in those cases. Reference should be made here to J . H . P. Pafford's Books and Army Education, 1944—19^6; Preparation and Supply (London, Aslib, 1946, 72 pages, paperbound), a clear and concise account of the selection, assembly, and distribution of the unit libraries of 400 volumes each provided by the British War Office for the use of troops during the "release period" (the British term for the period between the cessation of hostilities and the beginning of demobilization). These unit libraries served a different purpose from the American Army's RB libraries. They were intended to provide supplementary reading in connection with the "release period" educational program. Reading for recreation was a secondary consideration, and only about 30 fiction titles—chiefly standard works, from Defoe to Forster—were included in each set. Since they had to serve a definite educational purpose, the British unit library books were much more carefully selected than were the contents of the RB libraries; nearly all of them had to be specially reprinted. The books were partly preprocessed—a three-figure Dewey classification number being lettered on the spine of each. They were packed in sets of 40, to facilitate handling, rather than in the semi-permanent shelved cases used for the RB libraries. A manual of instructions for untrained soldier-librarians and a printed catalogue similar to the 1945 RB Library catalogues were provided. During the war, books for recreational reading were provided by the British equivalent of Special Services, through an agency called the Services Central Depot, which distributed donated books and sold new books, special reprints, and magazines to British Army, Navy, and Air Force units. The units paid for this material from their unit recreational funds. 3. In June, 1946, Postell was separated from the service and employed as civilian chief of the Library Branch. Thereafter the staff consisted of three professional librarians and four clerks. Postell resigned in September, 1948, and was succeeded in December by Mildred Young, who had

Notes

to Pages

301

251-256

been chief of the Library Branch's procurement section for two years and, prior to that, a post librarian at Camp Buckner, N.C. 4. The First Army Area comprised the old First and Second Service Commands; the Second Army Area, the Third and F i f t h Service Commands ; the Third Army Area, the Fourth Service Command; the Fourth Army Area, the Eighth Service Command; the Fifth Army Area, the Sixth and Seventh Service Commands; the Sixth Army Area, the Ninth Service Command. The librarians and Special Services officers of these commands were officially " a r m y " rather than "army area" librarians and officers, but for the sake of clarity the latter designation is used in this book. 5. I n some army areas the professional librarians at large posts supervised the libraries operated by enlisted men at smaller posts in the same region. 6. For General Reynolds' testimony before the House and the Senate appropriations committees see United States, House of Representatives, Military Establishment Appropriation Bill, 19^8, hearings before subcommittee, 80th Congress, 1st session (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1947), pp. 480, 484; Senate hearings, same session, p. 107. I n Europe, control over nonappropriated funds was vested in the headquarters, European Command; in the Western Pacific it was vested, not in the top command ( F a r Eastern Command), but in the m a j o r subordinate commands (Philippines-Ryukyus, Marianas, 8th Army, and X X I V Corps). CHAPTEE

XVIII:

CONCLUSION

Sources: articles by Bennett, Boardman, Bressler, Carnovsky, Jacobs, Jamieson, McGlennon, Rodabaugh, Sheahan, as well as most of those referred to in the notes to Chapter V I ; the unpublished essay by Dorothy F a y n e ; for titles see the Bibliography. The heading of the section "Readers and Sitters" was suggested by a phrase in Elizabeth H . MacCloskey's "A More Serious Army," an article that anticipates nearly all that is said there. I t should be pointed out that very few scientifically controlled surveys or statistical studies of soldiers' reading tastes were made during the war period. Both the War Department Library Section and the service command librarians periodically distributed library report forms. The War Department forms were quarterly at first and then semi-annual (the present form is W D AGO Form 2 8 2 ) ; the service command forms, monthly. The successive War Department forms were usually the product of a double compromise—first between the Library Section and the Control Branch of the Special Services Division and then between the Special Services Division and the Control Division of the Army Service Forces. The Control Division had the last word; its policy, quite understandably, was to discourage War Department agencies from burdening the field with

302

Note»

to Pages

256-260

nonproductive paper work. It did not authorize the inclusion of detailed questions concerning reading tastes in the library report forms, partly on the ground that they had dubious objective value and partly because research into soldiers' attitudes was not a function of the Library Section. Consequently the War Department forms were calculated only to ascertain the nature of the mass demand for books; they gave no clues to the background of the individual readers or to the factors other than accessibility that determined their choice of books to read. Some of the service command report forms gave detailed circulation breakdowns month by month for each post. In a few headquarters the completed forms for the entire war period have been preserved. A study of them in relation to the fluctuating strength, personnel composition, and function of the posts submitting reports might yield interesting results, even though the breakdowns were by the ten Dewey classes rather than by specific subjects or by levels of reading difficulty. 1. Berelson, "The Public Library, Book Reading, and Political Behavior," The Library Quarterly, XV (October, 1945), ( p p . 298-299). 2. Copies of the questionnaire were sent to 238 librarians; 113 filled them out and returned them. The average age of the 113 librarians when they were employed by the army was 31 % years, and the average length of their army service was three years. In view of their comments on public libraries (summarized on pp. 263 if.) it should be noted that only 39 had previously been in public library work; 25 had worked in school and 18 in college libraries; 12 had worked in Federal, state, or county libraries, and 6 in special libraries; 9 had had other than library jobs (most of them were teachers) and 4 had not been employed before. In short most of them wrote from the point of view of professionally interested library patrons. The average previous salary of the 113 was $1,719. From J u l y , 1942, on, the starting pay for army librarians was $2,400, including eight hours of overtime per week. 3. Another novelty in the experience of the army librarians was the wearing of the army hostess-librarian uniform. The uniform was designed early in 1942. The Morale Branch had little voice in the matter, since the selection of uniforms for army employees is a responsibility of the Heraldry Section of the Office of the Quartermaster General. Two uniforms were designed—a medium-dark blue available in either wool or rayon and a blue-striped seersucker for summer wear. The winter uniform—in color and cut, even to the shape of its hat—was almost identical with the uniform then worn by TWA airline hostesses. The summer uniform required almost daily laundering to be presentable (another summer uniform, made of balloon cloth and pale blue in shade, was designed in 1944 after a pattern submitted by an army hostess). The hostess-librarian emblem was sewn on the left shoulder of all uniforms: it was a rainbow-shaped patch composed of different-colored segments representing the colors of the nine arms of the service—green for infantry, gold for quartermaster, blue for cavalry,

Notes

to Page»

303

261-277

and so forth. Most overseas commanders authorized hostesses and librarians to substitute slacks for skirts during the working day. Later in the war the uniform minus the emblem was worn by the USO-Camp Shows actresses who went overseas. 4. The main qualifications as prescribed during the greater part of the war by AR 210-70 were (1) United States citizenship; (2) graduation from a college or university of recognized standing and from an accredited library school; (3) one year's experience, other than clerical, in library work; (4) age at selection, 25 to 40; (5) sex, female. The qualifications of previous experience, the age limits (particularly the lower), and the possession of two degrees (both A.B. or B.S. and B.S. in Library Science) were frequently waived—the latter, however, only when a year of library science had been included in the four-year college course. 5. As noted on p. 254, above, reading matter appropriations were spent entirely at the Department of the Army level in the fiscal year 1948 and thereafter. In the absence of a separate spending project number, this was the best means of reserving them solely for reading matter, since it meant that the spending was controlled by the same agency that had prepared the budget on which the appropriation was based. 6. Early in 1942 the executive secretary of the American Library Association asked Trautman whether the army would permit a group of civilian experts to make a survey of the Army Library Service. Several high ranking officers in the Special Service Branch, as it was then called, vetoed the proposal emphatically, regarding such a survey as "civilian interference." One of Trautman's later chiefs, Colonel Frederick W. Warburg, took precisely the contrary view, and in 1944 advised all the section chiefs under him to establish relations with the principal civilian agencies which had a professional interest in their work. As a result of this suggestion an advisory committee of librarians was appointed, under the auspices of the Joint Army-N'avy Committee on Welfare and Recreation, to consult with the Library Section staff regarding its problems. Meetings were held in the summers of 1944 and 1945. The members of the committee were Carl H . Milam, Carl Vitz, Ralph Dunbar, and Ralph Ulveling. Ulveling made an inspection of library facilities in the European Theater in the spring of 1946, when he was president of the American Library Association. In reporting on his inspection to the director of the Special Services Division, he pointed out the difficulty of maintaining strict accountability for library books in overseas theaters. His statement on this subject was extremely helpful to the Special Services Division in gaining War Department approval for the relaxation of library accountability overseas (see page 249). NOTES

TO

THE

APPENDIX

The sources on which this appendix is based are cited in the text and in the following notes. 1. The fiscal years of the Federal government begin in July and end

Notes

to Pages

278-284.

in the following June. They take the date of the years in which they end; thus the year J u l y , 1940-June, 1941, is called Fiscal Year 1941. The figures given for appropriations are based on an informal running record kept in the Special Services Division during the war years. They were first published in Houle's The Armed Services and Adult Education, p. 155. Owing to a clerical error made in the Library Branch when the information was transmitted to one of D r . Houle's colleagues, the figures given in Houle for the 1943 appropriation for United States posts and for the overseas appropriations for 1943, 1944, and 1945 are incorrect. 2. For the reappropriation of funds see United States House of Representatives, Military Establishment Appropriation Bill, 1946, hearings before subcommittee, 79th Congress, 1st session (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1945), pp. 817-818. 3. Only $250,000 was appropriated for reading matter and technical library equipment at the beginning of the 1941 fiscal year. It was supplemented during the year by a series of deficiency appropriations, each of which in turn was based on current estimates of the exact number of service clubs to be authorized before J u l y , 1941. 4. F o r Congressional policy on the "transferability" of army appropriations see United States House of Representatives, Military Establishment Appropriation Bill, 1945, hearings before subcommittee, 78th Congress, 2d session (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 24, 28, 48—53, and the House hearings on the 1946 appropriation referred to above, pp. 817-818, 837-839. 5. Recreational supply funds were allotted to newly activated units on a per capita basis which varied at different times from 25 cents to more than a dollar per enlisted man. Some p a r t of this money went into reading matter expenditures, since many units obtained newspaper and magazine subscriptions for their davrooms, as well as other recreational items, but the total amount spent for this purpose cannot be ascertained. I t may have amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year. 6. See Notes on Morale Activities (the Morale Branch house organ), February 15, 1942. 7. The Ninth Service Command's practice of making monthly purchases of books from appropriated funds and shipping them to all posts in the command was the best solution for this problem, but the Ninth was the only service command that had the staff and facilities to do this regularly. 8. See United States House of Representatives, Military Establishment Appropriation Bill, 1945, hearings before subcommittee, 78th Congress, 2d session (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1944), pp. 49, 52. 9. The sum of six million dollars was originally appropriated for the fiscal year 1946, but the appropriation was reduced by about one third a f t e r V-J Day.

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Houle, Cyril O., and others, The Armed Services and Adult Education. Washington, D.C., American Council on Education, 1947. Hylton, Percy, "A Librarian in J a p a n , " Library of Congress Information Bulletin, August 12-18, 1947, pp. 8-9. Jacobs, Willis D., "Throw It over Here," Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, X X X I I (Fall, 1946), 526-533. Jamieson, John, "Armed Services Editions and G. I. Fan Mail," Publishers Weekly, C L I I (July 12, 1947), 148-152. "Books and the Soldier," Public Opinion Quarterly, IX (Fall, 1945), 320-332. "Censorship and the Soldier," Public Opinion Quarterly, XI (Fall, 1947), 367-384. Julson, Lloyd, "Library at War," Library Journal, L X V I I I (April 1, 1943),280-281. Koch, Theodore Wesley, Books in the W a r ; the Romance of the War Library Service. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1919. Lancour, A. Harold, "Army Library School Tries New Methods," Library Journal, L X X I (February 15, 1946), 239-243. Larson, Cedric, "Library Program for the U.S. Army; 1917-18 and 194041," Wilson Library Bulletin, XV (January, 1941), 363-366. Leigh, Randolph, Forty-Eight Million Tons to Eisenhower. Washington, The I n f a n t r y Journal Press, 1945. LeMay, Geraldine, "Good Neighbors," Library Journal, L X V I I I (November 1, 1943), 883-884. Lieberman, Irving, "Soldiers Do Read in the European Theater," Library Journal, L X X I (March 1, 1946), 439-441. Liebling, A. J . , "Cross-Channel T r i p , " in The New Yorker Book of War Pieces (New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 312-338. "Library at Fort Monmouth," Wilson Library Bulletin, X V I I ( J u n e , 1943), 807-809. Loizeaux, Marie D., "We Want Books," Wilson Library Bulletin, XVI ( J a n u a r y , 1942), 357-359. MacCloskey, Elizabeth H., "A More Serious Army," Library Journal, L X V I I (February 1, 1942), 117-119. McGlennon, Rose, "The Military Library Illumines Postwar Planning," Wilson Library Bulletin, XX (September, 1945), 43-49. Maloff, Aaron N., "Target for Today: an Airborne Circulating Library," Library Journal, LXX ( J u l y , 1945), 615-616. Marshall, George C., Report on the Army, July 1, 1939, to June 30, 1943. Washington, D.C., The I n f a n t r y Journal Press, 1943. General Marshall's Report: the Winning of the War in Europe and the Pacific. Washington, D.C., The I n f a n t r y Journal Press, 1945. "Methods of Distribution; Manual for State and Local Directors: Victory Book Campaign," ALA Bulletin, X X X V I (February, 1942), P a r t 2.

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Nelson, Otto L., Jr., National Security and the General Staff. Washington, D.C., The I n f a n t r y Journal Press, 1946. Pafford, J . H . P., Books and Army Education, 1944-1946; Preparation and Supply. London, Aslib (Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux), 1946. Pattillo, Manning M., and Fred F. Wilson. "Books Where They Are Needed," Library Journal, L X X (July, 1945), 618-622. Poste, Leslie I., "6819th Army Information-Education Staff School," Library Journal, L X X I (February 15, 1946), 326-328. Postell, Paul E., "The Future of the Army Library Service," Library Journal, L X X I (December 1, 1946), 1676-1678. "Army Libraries since V-J D a y , " Wilton Library Bulletin, X X I I (November, 1947), 243-248. "Books—from Jungle to Post," Army Information Digest, I (November, 1946), 27-32. Poullada, Leon B., "Army Library Service in the Pacific," Library Journal, L X X I (April 1, April 15, 1946), 439-441, 562-566. Rhode Island State Library, "Summary of Report for 1946," Library Journal, L X X I I (January 15, 1947), 133-135. Rodabaugh, Delmar, "A Seabee Library on Iwo J i m a , " Wilton Library Bulletin, XX (April, 1946), 600-602. Sheahan, Ruth L., "Air-conditioning," Library Journal, L X X I (December 15, 1946), 1795-1796. "Army Library Service Is Changing," Library Journal, L X X I I (October 1, 1947), 1338-1340. Shores, Louis J . , Highways in the Sky. New York, Barnes and Noble, 1947. Stockford, Dorothy, "The Army Can Read!" Library Journal, L X V I (May 15, 1941), 429-432. "Library Service at Fort Dix, N . J . , " New Jersey Library Bulletin, X I I (n.s.) (February, 1944), 134-137. Tucker, Robert C., "Langford Lodge, Country Club of the E T O , " Louitiana Library Association Bulletin, I X (March, 1946), 81-84. Utley, George Burwell, F i f t y Years of the American Library Association. Chicago, The American Library Association, 1926. Wheeler, Joseph T., "G. I. Joe and the Library," Wilson Library Bulletin, X I X (November, 1944), 206-208. Yale, John R., "Army Vocational Information Kit," Occupations, X X I I I (March, 1945), 324-328. Young, Mildred S., "The Soldier Still Gets His Books," Library Journal, L X X I I I ( J a n u a r y 1, 1948), 17-19. Zimmerman, Janet K., "Library Service at Fort Monmouth, N . J . , " New Jersey Library Bulletin, X I I (n.s.) (February, 1944), 138-142.

Index AACS, tee Army Airways Communication System A A F , tee Air Forces, A r m y AAF: the Official Guide to the Army A ir Forcet, why banned, 224 Accountability f o r government property, 17, 54, T6; net effect, 77; extended overseas, 237; battle over: features of relaxed regulation, 248; books purchased f r o m local funds less subject to, 281; statement leading to relaxation overseas, 303 Accra. Africa, showplace of the command : recreational facilities, 125 f. Achenbach, Hall F., 126, 291 Actresses, uniforms, 303 Adak, Alaskan Department, library service, 102; morale p r o g r a m : officers, 103 f. Adakian, The, 103 Adamic, Louis, 213 Adams, Helen, 295 A d j u t a n t General, signer of W a r Dept. interpretation of S V L Title V, 218 A d j u t a n t General's Office, 71; Morale Branch (q.v.), 7; Army Library Service an activity of, 15 Advertising eliminated in lightweight magazines, 132, 136 A.E.F. University a t Beaune, 14 Aero Clubs, Red Cross, 189,190 A F M I D P A C , tee Army Forces, Middle Pacific A F P A C , see Army Forces, Pacific Africa-Middle-East Theater, area, 89; reading material, 124-27; magazines by plane to, 130 Africa, North, see Mediterranean Theater A F W E S P A C , see Western Pacific areas Age limits set for librarians, 261, 303 AIESS, see Information and Education Staff School, Army Air Force, 134, 136,137, 140

Air Force, Europe ( U S A F E ) , 207; tee alto 9th Air Force Air Forces, A r m y : in U.S., 7; overseas, 8; crossing of wires between A r m y Service Forces and: resulting confusion, 51; 1944 reorganization, 52; library service and personnel, 52 f., 299 {tab. 288); donated books and services, 56; redistribution stations : branch libraries, 73; in European Theater (q.v.), 188 ff.; sponsorship of its Official Quide, 224; usual proportion f o r expenditures, 282 Army Airways Communications System units, 102,113,114, 115, 171 Technical Libraries depot, W r i g h t Field, Ohio, 164 Troop Information and Education Division, 300 Air transport, regular use in Antilles Dept., 162; library service to planes bombing J a p a n , 180 Air Transport Command, 125, 129 A kits, 92 Alaskan Department, 48,89 ; library and recreational officers and services, 1014; when military situation static, 105 Aleutian Islands, included in Alaskan Dept., 101; library and recreational services on Adak, 103 f.; retaken from J a p s , 105 Algiers, headquarters a t : book supplies, 120 American, 130, 136, 220 American Library Association, 47, 250; "enlarged program" planned by, 15; sponsored Victory Book Campaign, 61 ; Milam and Dickerson sent as consultants to Morale Branch, 21, 274; protest against deletion of personnel item from army budget, 275; inspection of library facilities by civilian experts, 303 American N'ews Company, 40, 98, 128 American Red Cross, tee Red Cross

310 American Women's Volunteer Services, 57 America Unlimited (Johnston), 298 Anchorage, Alaskan headquarters, 102 Antilles Department, 91; enlargement of, and new name for, Puerto Iiican Dept. (g.v.), 1 6 1 ' 1 6 5 • library organization and service, 161-67, 270; for Spanish-language troops, 165-67; Panama Dept. compared with, 168; source material in Potter, 294 Apostle, The ( A s c h ) , 2 2 3 Appropriations committees, tee under Congressional Armed Forcet Digest, 136, 140 Armed Forces Institute, U.S. ( U S A F I ) , 69, 71; textbooks and other reading material, 31, 236, 286; why its Economics withdrawn, 298 Armed Forces Network, 31, 207 Armed Servicet and Adult Education, The (Houle), 304 Armed Services Editions (Council Books), 1, 73, 74, 142-60, 292-94; final catalogue, x ; distribution to, and valued in, overseas theaters, 6, 94, 109-27 passim, 155, 157-60, 176-97 patsim, 232,235,237,240,269,270; distribution in hospitals, 86; a wonderful expedient, but did not fill all needs, 124; automatic mail distribution commenced, 128; co-ordinated and guided by Council on Books in Wartime: types of cooperative agencies involved, 142, 274; printing and paper firms co-operating, 142, 147, 150, 151, 156; considerations which influenced selection of titles, 142, 151 ff.; achievement in quantitative terms: costs, 142, 145 f., 147, 156, 293; why the Library Service's outstanding achievement, 142, 149, 160, 269, 270; conditions creating need for, 143 f.; the army's plan and the council's co-operation, 144-47; advisory committee on selection, 145, 151; cont r a c t : books to be kept out of civilian market, 146; protected against postwar dumping, 147; size: format, 147, 151, 156; financing, 148; action of army and navy agencies concerned, 147-50; a co-operative endeavor: work done by certain key men, 149 ff.; titles of selections as classified by the council, with examples, table, 152 f.; reasons why some rejected, 154; A S E

Index branch of council incorporated, 154; books packed and distributed at New York Port of Embarkation, 155; notable mass distribution before the invasion 158 f.; postwar project, 156 f., 293; effect of Soldier Voting Law's censorship, 218 f.; books approved under provisions of the law's Title V, 223; those disapproved, 226, 298; what might be reprinted after revision of Title V, 228; postwar kits to take place of, 254; effects of soldiers' response to, 254; proportion of good literature in: has had no tangible influence on postwar reading tastes, 257; kept intellectual Interests from growing stale, 258; funds priority given to magazine sets and, 283; two production programs compared, 293; final catalogue: other source materials, 293; tee also Council on Books in Wartime Army, where responsibility for morale vested, 7; 1942 organization change: the three headquarters: their responsibilities, 7; growth figures, 1939-45, 20; command system, decentralization policy, 24, 287; for services and other titles beginning with Army, see reversed title, e.g., Air Forces, A r m y ; Library Service, A r m y ; Service Forces, A r m y ; etc. Army Areas, six: the nine service commands replaced by, 34, 251; what each area comprised, 301 Army Forces, Middle Pacific, where established, headquarters, 230, 291; working relations between A F P A C and, 231, 236; librarians sent to Western Pacific, 231, 233, 234, 236, 240, 246, 299; books transferred from, 236, 241; two subordinate commands, 294; see also Central Pacific Area, Marianas Islands Army Forces, Pacific: MacArthur's new overall Pacific command, 230; its maj o r subordinate commands, 230; service and personnel, 233-37; responsibilities, 234; co-ordination of supply and personnel, 235 f.; its Special Services headquarters, 235; later called F a r E a s t Command, 246; see also Western Pacific areas Army News Service bulletins, 217, 225 Arts and crafts, 71 Askew, Sarah B., 57, 58

Index Assembly Branch, tee New York P o r t of Embarkation Associated Press, 225 Aswell, Edward C., 151 Athletic and Recreation Service, A r m y : Library Section made p a r t of, 31 f., 288; sections composing: move to New York, 33 Athletics, tee Recreation Atlantic, 138 Australia, 108 Automatic mail distribution, tee Mail distribution Avin, Benjamin H., 294 Axis-inspired publications, 212, 298 Bachman, Harold B., 181, 183, 294 Bailey, Louis J., 106, 286, 289 Baker & Taylor, 40 Ballot, Federal short-form: the essence of Green-Lucas bill, 215; use in 1944 elections, 218; see also Soldier Voting Law Banika, in Russell Islands, 106, 127 Barry, Joseph A., 195, 198 Bartels, William E., 294 Baseball, 130 Base sections, overseas, 286 liasic History of the United States ( B e a r d ) , 298 Bauer, H a r r y C., 123, 291 Bavaria, Third Army in, 206 f. Beard, Charles A., 227, 298 Bedford Village (Allen), 223 Belgium, E T O depot at Boom, 196, 197, 209 Bell, Barbara, 234, 238 Bell for Adano, A ( H e r s e y ) , 223 Beltramo, Elvira, bookmobile librarian in Austria, 204, 295 Benchley, Robert, 257 Benedict, Ruth, and Gene Weltfish, 213 Benêt, Mrs. Stephen Vincent, 155 Berelson, Bernard, 302: quoted, 258 Beveridge, William M., 48 Bibles, 286 Big Rock Candy Mountain (Stegner), 293 Bizerte, North Africa, 122, 127 B kits, 93, 120 Black market, Manila, 237 Blexen, Ger., E T O depot, 203, 209, 211 Blodget, Ralph H., and P. F. Gemmill, 298

311 Bock, Elizabeth H., 288 Bookmobile service, 41, 72; Ninth Service Command, 48, 75; Mediterranean Theater, 124; European Theater's personnel, equipment, collections, 203 ff.; reasons for popularity, 206; Air Force served, 208; why none in J a p a n , 243; tee also Traveling libraries Book-of-the-Month Club, book club subscriptions donated, 63, 165; selection containing prohibited material, 222 Books, number, type, and source, for army libraries, 1, 13, 285 f.; whether needed and read by soldiers? 2, 6, and why, 3; difficulties in shipping to overseas theaters, 10; types found a t older posts, 12; book depots, 13, 16, 47; sorting, processing, distributing, 13, 47 ff.; First World War, supplies and distribution, 13-15; a f t e r the war, 16; accountability (q.v.) as hindrance to free circulation, 17, 54, 76 f., 237, 248, 281, 303; lists, guides, procedures, in re-selection and purchase of, 26, 38 ff., 45 ff.; a radically different method of receiving, 46; centralized procurement by service commands, 49, 50; placed in day rooms and other halls, 58; selection based upon readers' interest and needs, 67 ff.; detail work upon receipt at post, 67; average turnover in hospitals greater than in post libraries, 81, 289; preassembled, for overseas distribution, 92-100 passim, 290 (see also Kits); requisitioning by overseas units, 95, 99, 290; semi-standardized lists of magazines and, for overseas orders: publishers' shipments, 96; large number sent overseas, 99; Alaskan supply, 101 ff.; importance of books sent to soldiers from home, 123; the A S E program, 142-60, 292-94 (see Armed Services Editions); paper book purchasing system antedating ASE, 143 f.; because paper bound expendable, restrictions to prevent loss unnecessary, 143; postwar dumping of surplus, 146, 147; navy's centralized procurement system, 154; men became readers through constant bombardment of, 159; program proving that quantities of hardbound books could be supplied in and behind fighting line, 185; E T O supply, with statistics, 195 ff.; disposition of surplus, from in-

312 Books (Continued) activated posts, 196, 250; censorship prior to 1944,212 f., 298; effect of that imposed by Soldier Voting Law (9.1».)» 212-29 passim; procurement for Western Pacific, 231; children's books, 238; America made more book-conscious than it had been, 254; broadened conception of public library needs, 264; method of shipping overseas: need for directive re allocation of space, 269; see also Readers' tastes; Reading materials; Technical libraries donations: Red Cross purchases and funds, 1, 63, 84, 286; First World W a r drives, 13; gift books and f u n d s : condition, suitability, 54; local drives: commands that benefited, 55-60; windfall produced by radio s t u n t : gifts of Pocket Books, 58; Chicago's the biggest drive, 59; Victory Book Campaigns (q.v.), 60-62; librarians' skill in conducting: civilians' desire to give, 60; Book-of-the-Month Club subscriptions, 63, 222; Rhode Island's gifts, 123; estimate of numbers donated, 285 f. Books and Army Education . . . ( P a f f o r d ) , 300 "Bobks—from Jungle to P o s t " (Postell), 285 Books in the War (Koch), 12 Boom, Belgium, Special Services depot, 196, 197, 209 Boorkman, Charles J., librarian F i f t h Service Command, 36, 43 Borinquen Field, P u e r t o Rico, 125, 162 Boston Adventure ( S t a f f o r d ) , 293 Boston Port of Embarkation, staging area, 281 Bougainville, Solomon Islands, 107 Bowen, Catherine Drinker, 227,298 Bowman, Olma, 234, 238 Boyd, Sally, 167 Branch, Olive, 295 Branch libraries, 13, 73, 74; buildings, 27; processing centers taken over as, 4«; European Theater, 203 Brisbane, Australia, 89 Brooklyn Public Library, 57 Brown, Ethel S., 289 Buchanan, Mildred Bruder, 59, 289 Buckner, Simon Bolivar, 181 Budget, Bureau of the: unspent funds revertible to, for reappropriation, 278,

Index 279, 287; transfers made with permission of, 279 Budget Advisory Committee, 84 Buildings, tee Libraries, housing Buckley, Dunton, Inc., 150 Bundy, McGeorge, and H . L. Stimson, 297 Burma, 89; Ledo Road area, 116 f.; tee alto China-Burma-India Theater Byron, Joseph W., 43, 222; director Special Services Division, 31; responsibilities, 32 Cahill, Alice, 202, 203 Cain, James Mallahan, 88 Calcutta printings of periodicals, 115, 118 California, University of: School of LIbrarianship, 173 Camps, tee their names, e.g., Grant, Camp Canal Zone, tee Panama Canal Dept. Candide (Voltaire), 159 Cargo space, tee Transports Carlisle Barracks, Pa., 300 Carlson, John Roy, pseud., 299; tee Under Cover Carlton, John T., 102, 181, 183, 291, 294 Carnegie Corporation of New York, vill, 13 Carrier War (Jensen), 138 Cartoon books, 205, 257 Cate of the Lucky Legs, The (Gardner), 97 Caster, Edmund, 194 Catalogue Card, CPA, 294 Cavalry Journal, 221 CBI Roundup, 115 Censorship, attitude toward, and extent of, by War Dept. prior to 1944, 212, 298; by commanders at post and unit level, 213; results of Title V of the Soldier Voting Law (q.v.), 214-29, 297 f.; titles and authors of materials prohibited to army and navy readers, 213 f„ 220-27 passim, 298 "Censorship and the Soldier" (Jamieson), 298 Central African Division, Air Transport Command, 125 Centralized service, 72-75; Ninth Service Command, 46, 272; Its Library Depot, 47, 48 ff., 178, 194; Fort Monmouth library as example at large post, 75 f.; reasons for success of overseas organi-

Index zation, 270; need for, in regional commands in U.S., 272 Central Pacific Area (formerly Dept. of Hawaii), 89, 91, 99; conditions on the islands after attack on Pearl Harbor, 169; post of librarian pressed upon Poullada, 170; his library organization and service, 169-86, 200 f„ 270, 294 f.; post and hospital service, 171 ff.; achievements, 172, 176; training of nonprofessionals, 172; librarians, 173 f., 178, 185; procurement: the Patten-Snyder arrangement, 174 ff., 181; funds, 175, 182; Area's primary mission the training and staging of task forces: their field libraries, 176 ff.; supplies for Makin Island: for troops moving to Kwajalein, 177; service to invasion forces: on the way to and in the Marianas, 177-81; and Okinawa and other islands in Ryukyus group, 181-85; inconvenience caused by censorship, 224; bases in new overall Pacific command, 230; funds for use of, 273, 283; higher headquarters MIDPAC established in 1945: its two subordinate headquarters, 294 Central Pacific Welfare Fund, 182 Central Welfare Fund, Army, 253 ETO, 210 Chaffee, Camp, Ark., 74 Chait, William C., librarian Second Service Command, 35, 52 Chang, 298 Chantilly, 9th Air Force school at, 208 Chaplains, 7, 17, 106, 286 Chase, Stuart, 224, 299 Chiang Kai-Shek (Chang), 298 Chicago Overseas Tribune, 115, 221, 291 Chicago Public Library, value and extent of book drives and services, 59 Chief of Staff, place in army organization, 7; commanders responsible to, 7, 8 Children's books, 238 China-Burma-India Theater, headquarters: area, 89; triple mission, 113; supply and distribution of reading material, 110, 113-18 Civilian Defense Volunteer Organization, 57 Civilian relations of the Library Service, 21, 274 f., 303; see also American Library Association; Council on Books in Wartime

313 Civil Service ratings for library positions, 251 Civil War, 12 Civilian Personnel Division, job analysis of library positions, 29, 287 C kits, 93 f., 107, 232, 269 Clapper, 298 Clark, Donald Henderson, 68, 87 Clark, G. E., 118, 291 Clark, Henry W., 101, 111, 230 Clement, J . W., Co., 157 Cleveland Public Library, 106 Click, 220 Clubmobile service, Red Cross, 119, 122 Clubs, see Service clubs Colliers, 130, 136, 220; printed as supplement to Stars and Stripes, 225 Collins, James L., 161, 162 Combat troops, organization: personnel, 5 ; amount of reading in the field : need at rest centers, 6: commander of, while in training in U.S., 7 ; for service to, see also Overseas theaters Combined Operations : the Official Story of the Commandos, 144 Comics, popularity, 136, 137, 220; Spanish-language, 167 ; "pony" size magazines, 133 Commanday-Roth Company, 151 Command librarians, see Librarians Commission for Training Camp Activities, 12 Communications Zone, overseas, 280 Communistic, publications attacked as being, 155, 213, 298 Community, making the library a definite part of, 265 Congressional Appropriations Committees, hearings, 252, 301, 304; restoration of personnel item to budget, 275; items presented and "justified" to, 279 Congressional Record, source material re Soldier Voting Law, 216, 228, 297; not distributed to soldiers because of the law, 226 Congressmen, extent of interest in book censorship, 212, 213, 216; see also Soldier Voting Law Connor, John M., director Victory Book Campaign, 61 Consultants to Morale Branch (q.v.) proposals: those accepted, rejected, 21 ff., 29, 274 Contract Bulletin, 40, 45

Index Convalescent or reconditioning centers, 81, 83; library service, 82 f. Cook, H a r r y F., 288; librarian Second Service Command, 35; establishment procedures, 42 f.; chief librarian, Air Forces, 52 Coon, Wendell B., 288; librarian Ninth Service Command, 37, 46, 46, 48 Co-ordinator of Soldier Voting, 223, 226 Coronet, 134, 220, 292 Corps Areas, redesignated Service Commands (q.v.) in 1942 reorganization, 7, 287; number into which army forces divided, 15; librarians, 15; difficulties in way of library program, 17 ff. Cosmopolitan, 134, 220, 225 Council books, usual name for ASE, 160; see Armed Services Editions Council on Books in Wartime, use of books for hospitals approved, 86; agency which co-ordinated and guided the Armed Services Editions, 142, 274; by whom, and why, formed, 145; plan for A S E presented to, 145; objectors and their reasons, 146; won over by Norton, 147; project established as an activity of: manager-management committee, 147; first contract with army, 148; one of most efficient and best co-ordinated programs, 149; Norton's standing and influence, 150; official history, 150, 293, 297; ASE titles as classified by, 152 f.; attached as distributor of communist propaganda: effect upon book selections, 154 f.; ASE branch incorporated in order to dissociate it financially, 154; selection limited to books free of material prohibited by Title V of Soldier Voting Law (q.v.), 218, 219; difficulties experienced: anger re types of books necessarily banned, 226, 298; action taken: effects upon press and government officials, 227, 229; resulting revision of Title V, 228; informed interest and initiative, 274; records of, as source material, 293; see also Armed Services Editions Country Gentleman, 134, 137, 138, 220, 292 Cousins, Norman, 227 Crawford, Agnes D., 288, 294; librarian Fifth Service Command, 36; difficulties encountered, 43; librarian Puerto

Rican (later Antilles) Department, 161-67; service for foreign-language troops, 166; return to U.S.: successor, 167 Crile General Hospital, Cleveland, 214 Crookston, Mary Evalyn, 288; librarian Third Service Command, 35 Cuneo Press, 147 Custer, Fort, Mich., hospital, 84 Cutler, Robert, 297; interpretation of Title V, Soldier Voting Law, 218, 223, 229; at meeting to discuss revision, 227 Czechoslovakia, Third Army in, 206 f. Darling, Louise, 234, 238, 299 David, Leon T „ 120, 124, 291 Davis, Martha, 295 Decentralization of authority, army command system, 24, 287 Delhi, India, 89, 113, 114, 115 Department of the Army, new title for W a r Dept. (q.v.), 255 Deposit collections, 13, 47, 48, 72 f., 74, 75; why Government owned books prohibited, 77; in ETO, 205, 206, 208 Derby, Marjorie, 295 Detective Story, 130, 135 Dickerson, Luther L., 286, 289: W a r Department Library Specialist, 15, 16, 17, 18; consultant to Morale Branch (q.v.), 21; experience, 21, 22; plan recommended to Morale Branch, 21 ff., 29, 274 (its present location, 287) ; recommendation re book drives, 60 Disston, Henry, 111, 291 Dix, Fort, 58, 63 Dobie, J . F r a n k , 296 Dollard, Charles, ix, 287, 297 Donated books and services, see Books: donations Dondero, George A., 154, 213 Dos Passos, 298 Douglas, Lloyd, 167 Doicnbeat, 136, 137 DuBois, Isabel, chief navy librarian, 145, 149; reasons for book rejections, 154 Duffy, Olive, 174 Dumas, Alexander, 167 Dunbar, Ralph, 303 Dyke, Ken R „ 291 East China, 117 Eastern theaters, see

Africa-Middle-

Index East; China-Burma-India; Mediterranean, theaters Economict . . . (Gemmill a n d B l o d g e t ) , 298 Editions f o r the A r m e d Services, Inc., why i n c o r p o r a t e d , 184; o p e r a t i o n s continued a f t e r w a r , 156; tee alto A r m e d Services E d i t i o n s ; Council on Books in W a r t i m e Editions for the Armed Servicet, Inc., a Hutory . . . with . . . List of . . . Bookt Publithed . . . ,293 E d u c a t i o n , tee I n f o r m a t i o n a n d E d u c a tion Division E d u c a t i o n a l facilities a n d p r o g r a m s , First W o r l d W a r , civilian o r g a n i z a tions providing, 12-15; p o s t w a r a r m y p r o g r a m , 14 f . ; a r m y activities, 15-19; officers assignments a n d d u t i e s , 15; Adak p r o g r a m , 104; British " r e l e a s e p e r i o d " p r o g r a m : unit libraries f o r , 300; tee alto L i b r a r i a n s : O r i e n t a t i o n and T r a i n i n g ; Technical l i b r a r i e s E d u c a t i o n B r a n c h , Special Services, 31; in E u r o p e a n T h e a t e r , 59, 190 ft.; tee also I n f o r m a t i o n and E d u c a t i o n Division Education of Henry Adamt, The, 115 Education P r o g r a m , A r m y , 193 Education Section, Morale Branch (