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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
I'm Andrew Pettegree, Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and I'm here to talk about my new book: ‘The Book at War’.
Here's the question – should we regard books in wartime as innocent victims or as guilty parties, an essential part of the warmaking process? For most bookish people, even to ask this question might seem almost an act of sacrilege. To many people, libraries are essential markers of a civilised society, which is why any attempt to close public libraries is greeted with outrage – we have seen in many parts of the United Kingdom in the last decade. Of course, libraries are especially vulnerable in time of war, particularly to modern weaponry. For the last 150 years, artillery bombing and guided missile systems have taken a severe toll on library stock – a problem exacerbated by the fact that libraries often occupy prestigious buildings in the centre of cities. Sometimes they're simply collateral damage, but we can also find many examples where libraries are specifically targeted in conscious efforts to destroy the cultural capital of a defeated people.
The Nazi destruction of Jewish texts and the total elimination of Polish libraries are two modern examples, but the tradition goes back to the appropriation of Aristotle's books by the Roman General Sulla, or Napoleon sending out his Book Squads to choose the choicest items from conquered European land, so the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Bombing, looting, deliberate destruction – this forms the dominant narrative when people write about books in wartime, where books pay the price for the aspirations of their rulers. There is more to it than this. And in ‘The Book at War’, I lay out an alternative narrative explaining how books were not always victims, but also played an essential role in the waging of war and indeed, in fuelling the ideologies that resulted in conflict. Books, then, were not just mute victims. They were also, in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘weapons in the War of Ideas’.
Books were essential to war-making – from the dawn of print to the war in Ukraine, books were always weaponised. When war came, scientists, topographers, publishers, librarians, and readers all became essential parts of the war-making machine. It was Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, and a powerful ally of President Roosevelt, who warned Americans that waging war in the 20th century required the best possible library resources. This was the hard learned lesson of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which committed Americans to a Pacific war that would be fought over islands and atolls which most Americans had scarcely heard of. When President Roosevelt delivered his weekly wartime radio talks, he urged his listeners to have an atlas or globe to hand.
The importance of books had already been grasped in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Between 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler vastly expanded Germany's public library network, while in three decades after the Russian Revolution, literacy rates were hugely improved. Hitler and Stalin knew the power of print because they were both bestselling authors. This was also true of Winston Churchill who had lived from his pen for 40 years before becoming Prime Minister. From the leaders downwards, this was a very bookish war. ‘The Book at War’ attempts to do justice to the complex role of books in wartime. Whether this was providing comfort for populations on the home front and troops in the front line, or the use of print for scientific discovery, intelligence, and planning campaigns. We also consider how warfare changed the reading priorities of the populations. And in the process reshaped the publishing industry. For publishers, war created a challenging environment – losing key staff to the forces, changing demand as readers yearned for war related material, and most of all, severe paper rationing. Their warehouse stock, too, was vulnerable to bombing. In December 1940, a German raid on London destroyed 6 million books, the entire stock of several publishers and wholesalers. But this was not all bad. As much of this was slow moving or unsaleable stock, and thanks to compulsory war insurance, the publishers received the full value for books they might never have sold. The Second World War also occurred just as the paperback revolution was getting underway, and it transformed both reading at home and supplying books for the troops. For the cost of one new hardback novel, you could buy 15 Penguins. They were cheap, they were light and easy to send by post. So popular were they with the troops abroad that a large pocket on combat trousers became known as the Penguin Pocket.
The American Army and Navy distributed 122 million copies of the paperback armed service editions to their troops, and these were free of charge. Many GIs would learn the reading habit on service abroad. For academics, too, war opened new opportunities for historians, economists, and linguists, work in intelligence – while the scientists turn over their labs to war work, geographers found themselves in a special demand. War in its essence is all about topography, whether that is disputed borders or the meticulous surveying of the Normandy beaches before the allied assault in 1944.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, outside the war zones, life could go on pretty much as before, but modern warfare engaged the whole population. Women in particular had their lives turned upside down and many read far less than in peace time. Conversely, troops on detachment and prisoners of war read much more. Book drives for the troops were a constant feature in all the competent nations as civilians also rummaged through their cupboards to find books, magazines, and newspapers to be pulped and recycled for the war effort. These paper drives resulted in the destruction of over 100 million books in Britain and Germany – more than libraries lost to bombing. Happily, librarians were on hand to examine donations and ensure that nothing of real value was destroyed.
If anything, the Cold War period accentuated the role of print in ideological conflict. War was made with words rather than artillery or bombs. Not all of this propaganda was well conceived – when the CIA dispatched Bibles across the Iron Curtain by balloon, littering the Czech countryside, this was something of a misfire. At least in Fleming's ‘James Bond’ novels got under the skin of the KGB, prompting a wave of communist Bond clones.
And so it goes on, right down to the present. The war in Ukraine is fought with modern weapons, but the role of books seems not to have changed so much. The first Russian assaults destroyed over 300 libraries. Now they are rebuilding these collections in occupied territory as Russian collections. As in earlier wars, the assault was prepared by a wave of anti-Ukrainian novels. Now, Ukrainians are retaliating. Public libraries in the west of the country are offering language classes to the Russian-speaking refugees from the east and Ukrainians are giving up their Russian books to be pulped for the war effort. So here, as in every war, we have books as both victims and protagonists and that's the story I tell in ‘The Book at War’.