When American servicemen and women sailed across oceans to serve in WWII, they inevitably and understandably carried homesickness, loneliness, and boredom along with them. The Defense Department understood the problem and did what they could to raise morale among the troops overseas to alleviate the social isolation that accompanies deployment, such as the well known USO camp shows by entertainers like Laurel & Hardy, Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney, the Andrews Sisters, and many others. But a far more popular, if less well-known, program did much more to entertain our troops than the USO programs.
In 1942, a non-profit organization known as the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW) was formed by an unpaid group of book publishers, authors, journalists, and librarians to select, publish, and distribute millions of paperback books to our troops overseas. More than 120 million books with more than 1300 titles were distributed free to servicemen and women over the years from 1943-1946. The books were known as Armed Services Editions, were sized to fit in a uniform pocket, and were published at an average cost of 6 cents per book.
The ASE program featured an array of fiction and non-fiction titles, including classics, contemporary bestsellers, biographies, drama, poetry, and genre fiction (mysteries, sports, fantasy, action/adventure, westerns).
Authors selected by the panel included Edgar Allan Poe, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Bram Stoker, HG Wells, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, James Thurber, Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, and HP Lovecraft. By all accounts, this was a hugely successful program. As the books were passed on from soldier to soldier, it is estimated that every book was read an average of seven times.
Before D-Day, commanders ensured that every soldier had a book before setting sail for Normandy.
Many servicemen commented that these were the first books they had read since high school, indeed many reported that these were the first books they had ever read cover-to-cover.
The program took advantage of the then-revolutionary paperback book technology. The books were bound along the short edge, not the long edge. To save printing costs, the books were printed as 2 different books on each half page, then cut in half after printing and binding.
Interestingly, the program revived the reputation of F Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “The Great Gatsby” was one of the titles selected by the CBW. Originally published in 1925, it was panned by reviewers and only sold 20,000 copies while Fitzgerald was alive. Even though Fitzgerald himself considered it his best work, when he died in 1940, the book was considered a failure. But once it was circulated among American troops, its popularity skyrocketed.
Original copies of ASEs can be found in many American university libraries but the only known complete set in existence is in the Library of Congress.