Read Online When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning - Free Book Online

could atomize a man’s body, sometimes resulting in near-obliteration. A man might be talking to a friend one minute and be unable to recognize him the next. Shells and flak ripped through flesh, limbs were severed, and explosions threw mangled body parts into the air and covered the ground with human carnage. Besides the dangers from above, the earth underfoot was riddled with German mines. One wrong step could change a life. This lurking danger became so ingrained in men’s minds that, even years after the war, veterans would think twice before walking across a patch of grass, preferring to instead traverse an asphalt or concrete pathway.
    Being exposed to a stream of death changed the way the men understood the war and their own role in it. Just as they felt they had checked their individuality at the training-camp gates, in combat the men came to the depressing realization that they were mere cogs in the military’s machine. Like broken equipment that was exchanged for new gear, the Army sent in fresh troops to take the place of those wounded or killed in battle. But the very concept that human beings were treated as replaceable—casting off one man after his life was lost or his body incapacitated and plugging in another who might also be replaced down the line—brought on the uncomfortable feeling that the military viewed men as expendable. According to E. B. Sledge, who served in the First Marine Division on Peleliu and Okinawa, this realization “was difficult to accept.” “We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness,” Sledge said.
    The discomforts, dangers, and stressors of war were a brutal yoke to bear. Lacking relief from the strain, some men inevitably reached a breaking point. As Lieutenant Paul Fussell explained, the soldier “suffers so deeply from contempt and damage to his selfhood, the absurdity and boredom and chickenshit” of military life, “that some anodyne is necessary.” While rest periods provided a temporary relief from the fighting, they offered no escape from the servicemen’s surroundings. Letters from home and books were favorite items because they could be carried anywhere and retrieved whenever one needed a moment of solace, even on the frontlines. Yet overseas mail service was notoriously irregular and painfully slow. Americans in North Africa reported going months without mail. Misunderstandings and frustrations abounded. War correspondent Ernie Pyle reported that one soldier in his unit, who had gone three months without a single letter from his wife, became so disgusted by her remissness that he wrote her of his plans to get a divorce. After mailing this letter, the same man received one huge batch of fifty letters covering the entire three-month period. He immediately sent a telegram to his wife to take back his divorce threats.
    In the absence of mail delivery or diversions afforded by sports equipment and movies, books were often the only entertainment the men had. And they were treasured. According to one Army chaplain, books gave the men “something worthwhile to occupy their minds and make it possible for them to more easily keep their minds on something constructive rather than dwelling too much on the destructive aspects of the war itself.” In addition to merely distracting the men, studies dating back to World War I concluded that books had a therapeutic quality, enabling humans to better process the difficulties and tragedies they endured. Army psychiatrists agreed that books helped divert the mind, providing relief from the anxieties and strains of war. Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: “When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs,