Review - "The Book at War," Andrew Pettegree

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Book at War. Andrew Pettegree

February 19, 2024

 

“Books…played an essential role in maintaining civilian and troop morale.”

                                                                                                                                Andrew Pettegree (1957-)

                                                                                                                                The Book at War, 2023

 

This book will appeal to those with an interest in books and war, especially the Twentieth Century’s two world wars. Professor Pettegree, a professor of modern history at St. Andrews, mentions Carl von Clausewitz’ On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; he touches on Herodotus and Caesar; and he spends some time on the American Civil War. He notes that it was ten years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabinin 1852 that Lincoln allegedly asked: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” He concludes with a mention that the war in Ukraine caused one resident “to use his personal library to block the window as blast protection.” 

 

Since the advent of the printing press, books in war time have been used in many ways: To instruct; to provide comfort to combatants and civilians (132 million copies of 1,322 titles were produced in Armed Services paperback editions during World War 2); as propaganda: Churchill, “We must add to…the power of ideas;” they have been censored and destroyed. “…in Smolensk the Germans burned down all the libraries and twenty-two schools before they abandoned the city with the loss of 646,000 books.” Less well known – at least to me – was that T.S. Eliot black-balled the publication of Animal Farm in 1944. In all, the author estimates that a total of 500 million books were destroyed during the World War 2. 

 

We read of a September 2, 1914 meeting at Wellington House in London attended by James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and twenty other prominent authors who committed “unambiguously” to assist the war effort. And we learn that three to four million books, many “read almost to destruction” were left behind in German POW camps in 1945. The Nazis, committed to genocide of Europe’s Jews, were intent on dismantling their culture, which included the destruction of entire libraries. After the war Allied forces were ordered to eradicate ideologies that had contributed to Nazi resilience: “This was an uneasy time for occupying forces that had gone into the war celebrating books as beacons of freedom, but ended as their destroyers.” In a humorous aside, Pettegree writes: “In 1952, comics were removed from on-board bookshops of the Pacific fleet, on the grounds they were too graphic for marines and sailors.”

 

Of personal interest were books mentioned by Professor Pettegree that my father had mentioned in letters to my mother when he was serving with the 10^th Mountain Division during World War 2: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith; Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit; Anne and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, and the poems of A.E. Housman. 

 

The Book at War is divided into six main headings: “…building a fighting nation; libraries as munitions of war; books on the home front; providing books for troops; book plunder and destruction in wartime; reconstruction of book stocks, and the war for ideological supremacy in the Cold War.” Readers will not be disappointed with this unique perspective on war and literature.