When Books Went to War

This book is, in a way, about my father. My father didn’t serve in WWII, the central war in this story. But he did serve in The Korean War. He read a lot, especially novels and biographies. Finally, in his eighties he confessed to me that he encountered two books he had to give up on: Ulysses, by James Joyce and Relativity by Albert Einstein. When I’d ask him how he learned to love reading he always said, “when I was in the military.” He didn’t go into how he received the books he read, or what types of books he read. But he did say that it was a “lot of hurry up and wait” protecting the German borders from Russian invasion. He also paid for his mechanical engineering degree with the GI bill. I was four years old when he graduated, and I still remember the ceremony.

I am truly astounded at a few things about this story. First, that the U.S. Government would so respect the power of the written word, to implement a program working with publishers to create and distribute books for GIs. As I read, I tried to imagine that happening today in our media saturated culture.

Second, I am truly astounded at the reality that a book publishing program, initiated as a response to book burning by the Nazi Regime, created a generation of readers. Millions of men and women serving in the war benefited from popular stories such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Many wrote down how the books kept them distracted, comforted and alive. Then they came home and continued their love of reading, seeking higher education.

We’ve often heard of the label “The Greatest Generation” for those who served in WWII. But I haven’t considered, until reading this book, how both traveling the world and extensive reading may have contributed to shaping this group of young people into the generation it became.

The books concludes with a beautiful symmetry that 100 million books were burned by the Nazi’s during WWII, but over 100 million were published and read by United States GIs. You may be able to burn the paper which books are written on. But you will never be able to destroy the stories imprinted in the minds of humanity.