Andrew Pettegree - Book At War

33:30You would probably cooperate with people in those countries. So the idea of that world community being torn asunder by war was extremely, extremely antipathetic to these scientists. But I think it was very much the naked aggression of Germany under Hitler and his lack of temperance, not least in expelling German Jewish scientists. I mean, if those scientists had been available to the German war effort, it would have been far more effective. But suddenly, from reading everybody's periodicals, You're not only finding it difficult to get hold of those periodicals in German or Italian, but you're trying to prevent your periodicals being read by them.

34:24So the whole idea of the scientific community being a sort of world community where everyone puts their brains together for the greater good of humanity, that is canceled in 1939. and I think I just had watched actually this last weekend I finally just watched Oppenheimer and you see that tension in the movie where it's like they know what they're doing and they're kind of uncomfortable with it but they go on and I think that that paradox you know you can be seen even through the lens of your book or that movie let's pivot because you know there's this great work being done and then militaries look and say but that's science we don't need that okay I think you tell a great story of, let's see, physicist J.D.

35:11Bernal, who tries to provide meteorological assistance to the military, and they rebuff him with that. Yes, he tries to say, you know, if you know more about the weather, you'll be better off. And the Navy say to him, we don't need that because our men fight in all weapons. I love that. And there is also a problem in military hierarchies in taking advice from civilians. They just don't quite know where to put civilian workers in a military context. Sure. But by 1944, that lesson has certainly been learned because Dwight D. Eisenhower, as the supreme commander of the Western forces for the push into Normandy, did, on meteorological advice, postpone the invasion for necessary days.

36:11And it's almost certain that had he not done so, it would have been a catastrophe with a major storm in the Channel. So they learned that lesson. I mean, in many respects, I think you'll see, having read my book, that the First World War seems like a bit of rehearsal for the Second in terms of the use of technology, the understanding of the capacities and limitations of technology, but also the understanding of the importance of scientific labs and also of libraries. The great thing about libraries and their role in the war is it gave people in the humanities a chance to have their particular specialisms recognized.

36:58the Americans put together an enormous and extremely impressive collection of academic advisors who were philosophers, historians, classicists in familiar disciplines, but then linguists and social scientists and economists. And they played a really important role in the war. I think if you're talking about intelligence, for instance, spying didn't seem to play that important a role in those two world wars compared to analysis of existing resources which were actually open access. Things like guidebooks, technical manuals, and newspapers, which could be used in the most innovative ways to work out what was really going on in your enemy's home country.

37:53And I think you do a wonderful job of pointing out the role of historians, classicists, linguists, and philosophers in the intelligence community, not necessarily in the direct battlefield. There was a couple other things. I loved your story about the Zimmerman telegram. I had never heard that, you know, Germany was going to give Mexico an alliance and give them back the Southwest where I sit here in Phoenix, Arizona. So that was a really interesting story. You know, just kind of interesting to think of the alternative paths of history, if you will. But then also you point out Henry Stimson, he downed the cartography program of the United States between the wars.

38:31And he argued it from a, I'll call it a gentlemanly perspective. I think he said, we don't open other people's mail. Yeah, I mean, cartography was such a shame because it had played a vitally important role in the global war in 1914 to 18, though not perhaps in the Trench War. That was part of the problem. The most visible part of the war was essentially static. So that meant that after Pearl Harbor, America found themselves engaged in a Pacific war, which involved literally thousands of islands and atolls, which were places they knew very, very little about. And so suddenly there had to be a topographical service developed who could make plans and make maps and make charts to enable warfare in these new places.

39:33And this is where libraries came into their own. The New York Public Library, for instance, had a magnificent collection of maps assembled for quite different reasons, but these were put to extremely good use in planning both the return to Africa and the European war, but also the Pacific war. And it also was very important for civilians. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's listening to this show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 in investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management.

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40:48I love the story you talk about. So in full disclosure, I should say for podcast listeners, we're a shareholder of WH Smith, which is a UK listed company. And Andrew, in your book, you tell a very interesting story about the relationship of government publishers and then booksellers like WH Smith, you know, beginning in World War One. Can you teach our listeners, you know, what was the importance of, you know, WH Smith selling books in train stations and places like that at the time. Well, that's very interesting. One of the things that I think you can say of both the world wars is that all the professional professions, all the professional people, whether it was the clergy or lawyers or professors or publishers, all rallied to the flag.

41:41and that was true in the United States, it was true in Britain, it was true in France, it was true in Germany, it was certainly true in Russia. And so this combination of the biggest distributor, W.H. Smith, and the publishers meant that the sort of books that people wanted to read in wartime was often books about the war. John Buchan, for instance, the well-known thriller writer, author of the 39 Steps his major war work was writing a history of the war in parts which could then be distributed to people who wanted to read it and in the second world war everybody wanted to read books about the Finnish resistance to Russia to the fall of France how it has occurred and then of course as the tide turned to the victorious progress of the Russian armies and the American armies and the war in Africa.

42:43So W.H. Smith played an essential role in ensuring that all of this stuff got distributed throughout the country, throughout Britain, and that was because the railways were one of then the major ways of moving freight rather than along the roads, and they owned all the railway bookshops. They still do in many cases, yeah. Yeah, and so they were able to provide this instant service to people who were commuters or were changing trains and would pick up a book on their way. And of course, as you've already mentioned, the absolute crucial aspect then of the paperback revolution of the 1930s, which meant that books were available for 10 cents or sixpence in Britain, whereas the same text in hardback might be 15 times as expensive.

43:42So this empowered people to read a wide range of literature that was available for them in wartime and played a very important role in countries like United States and the UK where they had conscript citizen armies where people thought of themselves more as citizens in uniform than as professional military people. and they remain certainly the Americans every bit as opinionated as soldiers as they had as civilians. So coming back to one of the spiritual themes of your book, reconciliation comes up time and time again. So I have to ask you about this because you point out the messiness of this and I think just so good at contextualizing this.

44:30So Americans hated the book burning that Germany did. So they burned German books instead. They hated what the Nazis were doing with Jews. So they blacklisted German authors in their books instead. Explain this phenomena to our listeners because I mean, it's hypocritical, and I'm saying all Americans did that. For example, many people throughout your book, you explained that like the librarians particularly believed in open information, open reading. And there's even if a book is not right, you still should be able to learn it and study it for the purpose of understanding why it's not right. Back to our discussion on Mein Kampf as an example.

45:10Can you explain why there is this hypocritical stance by Americans like there is for Nazis? Well, I was telling someone this early in the day that one of the things I use in my teaching is a pre-revolutionary facsimiles of newspapers published in the state of Virginia. And on the front, you have denunciations of King George III for his attempt to reduce the Americans to slavery. And on the back page, there's advertisements for the recovery of runaway slaves. And there seems to be no cognizance that this has got it backwards. And you're quite right to say that you can point to this all through the modern era as well.

46:08In America, one of the most powerful figures in censoring reading is the postmaster general, because he can ban from being distributed in the posts anything that they think is unseemly or not to be read. In other respects, wartime brings a certain loosening of the sort of rather more prudish rules which govern, for instance, the contents of public libraries. Librarians are evangelicals. They want more people to read, but they also want them to read the right sort of stuff. They want them to read improving literature rather than the sort of recreational literature they might choose for themselves.

46:54But when they're talking about troops at the front, they think that they should really be allowed to read what they like. So every war brings a sort of loosening of morals, and after the war doesn't really go backwards, or at least it only goes partially backwards to what they've experienced before. I'm going to quote E.H. Anderson from your book, who was the director of the New York Public Library, who said, quote, if Satan should publish a pro-German book, we should certainly want it in our reference library, end quote. And I thought that was a very interesting way of thinking about it. You know, even if Satan published it, I think we'd be interested in having that for a reference library, because the idea is you want to gather a lot of information, what's good and what's bad, to your point, that's not what the librarian's interested in.

47:42They, you know, they have an opinion, but their job is to gather a lot of books and information. The other interesting part, you know, we talk about the German book bands and authors that went away, but they were also trying to cleanse from a pre-Nazi history. Can you explain what they were trying to do to the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Canon? Well, Nazi censorship is very interesting. And I came to the view that the censorship practiced during wartime in the dictatorships and the democracies is not so different as one might expect. For instance, most censorship is concentrated on newspapers, because newspapers are everyday things.

48:28They've got to report on the war. They want to report on the war. They get very excited when their own troops are doing very well. But at the same time, the military doesn't want them to be revealing strategic information or too precise an information on where the front has got to because, of course, their opponents and their enemies will be reading exactly the same texts. So that's always going to be a difficult relationship, but one that the newspapers understand is reasonable. What is of a different order is the Nazi approach to public libraries between 1933 and 1939, when the number of libraries grew enormously, it must be said, by something like 50 % because the Nazis wanted German people to be reading.

49:21They wanted them to have access to the literature, but they wanted them to read a certain sort of literature. And this was often a very traditional sort of tradition looking back to the virtues and great accomplishments of the Germanic peoples throughout the period, not the more cynical, sexualized literature of Weimar. And, of course, they sought to eliminate altogether the works held by libraries of those of Jewish heritage, which, of course, encompassed not only a large number of authors, but also a large number of publishers and the owners of bookshops. So that was a major shift. On the other hand, one of the things you note throughout the history of the Third Reich is a sort of deliberate chaos where Hitler is always setting his various lieutenants and people with responsibilities over this, that, or the other against each other because they have such overlapping jurisdictions.

50:35Sure. And the publishers and the librarians in 1933, very enthusiastic in general about Hitler, because librarianship was at that point a rather conservative profession, rather mostly led by elderly men, very, very different from the American profession of the time. they were sympathetic but they did get a bit weary by how many different authorities had some sort of censorship function these rules were incredibly difficult to follow because they were a very broad bush we can't have communist literature but that doesn't mean that all the Russian authors are banned it was quite difficult you had to be an expert to put these policies into effect And most librarians did not have the detailed knowledge of literature in order to, I mean, who knew which authors were of Jewish heritage and which were not?

51:36I mean, that was not straightforward. This extends later to these overlapping jurisdictions for the libraries and who can say what to them, then turn to now the stealing of books from other libraries. And is it going to be the SS library that gets it? Is it going to be Hitler's personal library that gets it? And there was, you have these overlapping agendas, you know, that, that followed the same overlap of the regulations. One other thing that I, you know, in some cases, I think it's brilliant because it shows you that bad prose is bad prose, but even the Nazis hated some Nazi books. Like you, I think you explained the myth of the 20th century as a book that was written.

52:13It was very pro-German, pro-Nazi and Hitler thought it was unreadable. Yes, this is the book by the Nazis' lead ideologue, Rosenberg. And it sold very well because it was a compulsory purchase for libraries. But I think Hitler wasn't able to get through it from one end to the other. And I think very few people were. This was a real debate in which Joseph Goebbels played a real role. and that was how far literature troops should be ideological and how far it should be recreational. And he came down very much on the side of recreational. In a way, he was more interested in making sure that cinema towed the line.

53:06And so a lot of the books which were produced specifically for the troops were of a very light comic nature just to give themselves some relief from that. And this is a battle he won against others who, like Rosenberg, thought that all literature should be ideologically tinged. Let me ask another question kind of on this same vein because, again, I think you bring up a way of thinking about reading during the war for soldiers and the context of how good or bad that could have been for them. So would you have rather have been a soldier reading a book in, say, the trenches or in conflict, or would you rather be a POW reading that same book?

53:55That's very interesting. Remember that a huge proportion of those who were in the armed forces were not in the front line, competent soldiers. Sure. Often they were very busy. They were repairing aircraft or driving trucks or any of the other multitude of services required to keep fighting men fighting. But it did mean that some, a considerable number, were stationed in places which never became active combat zones. So they had a great deal of time for reading and the extraordinary logistic strengths of the U.S. services in getting supplies to them included lots of books, including the wonderful Armed Service editions, which were a bespoke creation for their servicemen.

54:54They published something like 1 ,000 copies, 120 million, sorry, 1 ,000 editions, 120 million copies of which were distributed free of charge for reading. And he just shows that when a country as rich as America with such a strong industrial base turns its mind to war making over a sustained period, just how effective they could be in logistical terms. Now, would I like to be a prisoner of war? No, certainly not. But many of those who were prisoners of war would afterwards acknowledge that although in many respects their life was enormously diminished by being prisoners, the one respecting which it wasn't was in their reading.

55:43because the prisoner of war camps were allowed to accumulate very considerable libraries. Families also sent books to their own family members who were prisoners and they were treated also as a sort of common resource that you could read. They would lend books to other people, they would borrow them, they would swap. And so the amount of reading matter available in the prisoner of war camps was enormous, particularly when you take into account that by the end of the war, there were over 100 different professional qualifications or courses people could take, which would then be sent back to be marked by people in, say, the University of London, and also a bespoke service to send them the textbooks they needed for those courses.

56:34And those people who took these opportunities to take some form of systematic learning in prisoner of war camps tended to have better outcomes than those who just sat around not doing any of this. And one of the examples from your book, and I love this picture that you provided, I think it's in the second section of pictures in your book, is the Pelican book, Reading for Profit by Montgomery Belgian, who obviously, you know, published his lectures to his fellow officers while they were in prison in Germany. And if I was going to steal a title for my life biography, it might be called Reading for Profit, because to your point, the mind is allowed to wander in a way that the body cannot at times.

57:19or I would say generally always. And I think it's a very interesting concept to think about the context of books. Let's pivot a little bit because again, coming back to this idea of reconciliation, I think you very succinctly explain that reconciling the ownership of books is not only messy, but it's plausibly just impossible in aggregate, not uniquely, but in aggregate. I think the movie that people can go think about this idea of reconciliation, is the Ryan Reynolds movie, The Woman in Gold, and that was tied to art, but books were vastly different because obviously there's just far more of them.

57:58Can you teach our listeners post the war what it was like to even try to begin that process, let alone which jurisdiction and authority or government would decide that process? Yes, so during the course of the war, the Germans having conquered most of the land mass of Europe switch from a policy of destroying the books of their enemies as they did for instance in Poland to try and reduce the Polish people to a sort of agricultural rump so they had no intelligentsia at all they switch from a sense of well look if this is to be the thousand year Reich we have to have study collections so that when our enemies rise up again and we have to deal once again, let's say, with socialism or Freemasonry or the Jewish question, then we need books.

58:57So Hitler came up with this megalomaniac plan to create 10 libraries each of half a million books, which would be brought home from French libraries, from Dutch libraries, from Russian libraries, from Ukrainian libraries. And they went a long way towards collecting five million books from these various places, from private collections as well as public collections. Then there were other books which were confiscated from the property of Jewish families who had been taken off to the camps. They were made available to the German university libraries and the public libraries to restock the damage of the bombing.

59:44So there was an enormous number of other people's books in Germany at the end of the war. But it's one thing to steal all these books. It's quite another thing to catalogue them. So at the war's end, millions of books were still in their packing cases because in the last year of the war, when city centres were being absolutely pounded by allies and Russian bombers, all of the books were moved out of city centres and sent on a sort of crisscrossing Germany for a place of safety, mostly because the threat of bombing was coming mostly from the West, that is the British and the Americans, they were sent eastwards, which meant that come the end of the war and the new distribution of territory, many of these caches of books found themselves behind the Iron Curtain and still haven't returned to Germany now 70 years later.

1:00:48Whereas on the other side of Europe, the books that had come to the sort of distribution centers or collecting centers at Frankfurt, they could be repatriated much more easily because some of them, as I've said, were still in their original packing cases, so you could send whole cases of books back to libraries in France, Netherlands, and Belgium. The real difficulty came, if you're talking about the property of Jewish families who'd been entirely wiped out by the Holocaust, and there was a question, you cannot possibly send these back to Germany, to the perpetrators of these, so where are they to go?

1:01:34And this led to a really difficult conversations and some rather impractical solutions until in the end, about 50 % of the books went to Israel and another large contingent to the United States. We had this discussion a couple episodes ago with Daniel Shulman. What you just said there, the Zionist theme became, for parts of the 20th century, is the new Jerusalem in the US or is it actually Jerusalem itself? And I found it funny that he brought that up. And then you're literally explaining that conflict in the distribution of books. I mean, it was just my, the fact that that was rearing its head in books shows you how important and valuable and treasured books are.

1:02:24I did wanna ask you, can you teach our authors what the Cooperative Acquisitions Project at the Library of Congress is? Oh, my word. I mean, this is a reaction to a different problem, and that is the problem that they had been caught short at the beginning of the war without a sufficient understanding of their enemies and how they were going to carry the war back to these parts of the globe about which they had little collective knowledge. So they determined this would not happen again, And there was an important meeting between librarians which had got major libraries like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford to volunteer themselves as a repository of record for a particular part of the globe.

1:03:19So that one would be, and also for collecting in the languages of those countries. Sure. One would be collecting Arabic books, another might be collecting books from the Indian subcontinent and so on and so forth. And this was assisted in the case of Germany by a sort of book section of what's become known as the Monument Men who were trying to preserve art and sculptures. But now the bookish effort mostly came from the stock of publishers and so something like half a million of these books in multiple copies was taken back to the Library of Congress which then distributed them to interested parties so that the scholarly knowledge of the German experiment with Nazism would not be lost because who knows when those sort of forces would rear their heads again.

1:04:20And I think you point out at the Library of Congress, under that heading, under the Cooperative Acquisitions Project, there is a good part of Hitler's personal library. And I think you mentioned that half the books still have yet to be cataloged today. So the idea of not only, you know, who's going to hold the books, and then the question the librarian always going to ask is, has it been cataloged? Can we itemize it? Can we know what's there? and I think you mentioned the other part of his collection sits at Brown University and so there's also this like institutional want right what if we have it and you again see these like counterbalancing powers and forces one other one that I want to touch on that you point out troops were looting as they went through the cities right in other words they just fought this massive war you know if you're the commanding officer someone steals something that's the least of your worries small beers as they say but when you showed up back in the United States with stolen goods, there were US entities that cared.

1:05:20For example, the customs agent would want you to get taxed on what you brought back. They were a group that would be interested in penalizing you or holding you liable for that. Was the easiest work around for the troops who looted just to give it to a museum because then it sounded more benevolent and you didn't have any taxation problems? Yes, I think that most of the troops who were looting, first of all, they were looting easily consumed booty, such as wine and spirits and beer. Then they were sometimes looting cutlery and crockery for their mums and wives. And probably books came a little bit further down on the scale of things people wanted, because books are heavy.

1:06:08So they're going to, you don't get many books that you can actually physically carry. And so sending home whole libraries was never possible. But, you know, some more sort of attuned to the history of books, some of the troops did bring home very valuable objects, which they were able to conceal for their entire lifetime and only became rediscovered when their family tried to sell them after their death, including sort of enormously valuable, really of incalculable value, manuscripts, sometimes in jeweled bindings, which is probably why they attracted attention. And it was only when these came onto the market in as late as the 1980s and 90s that people became aware that they had survived.

1:07:06And we simply don't know how many of the millions of books that the Russians took after the war as reparations, how many of those still survive and where they actually are. Well, I think, you know, we think about incentive structures a lot. Maybe we should rebrand the war in Ukraine against Russia, and the fighting slogan should be do it for the books. Because to your point, there's vast treasures sitting in some cases at the Kremlin that the world will never see or know because of what transpired after World War II. Andrew, there's a lot we didn't get in our discussion today. I'll note a couple.

1:07:49I was going through my notes here. We didn't talk about your comic books. That was a nice little footnote in the book. on that. We didn't talk about the Dutch and their voracious writing in the resistance and how they kind of stood out as a sore thumb, you know, among other countries. I'm looking more through my notes. We didn't talk about the maps. I mean, you do such a great job of explaining how important maps are, how important was for an officer to walk into a bookstore and go buy a map of a local area that they had no knowledge of. So I think there's just incredible stories coming out of your book.

1:08:21But I I do want to ask you, is there anything that we didn't touch on in our discussion today that you do think people reading your book should be aware of and our listeners should be aware of? Well, thank you. I would think the only thing we didn't really get round to is discussing the Cold War and how in that period, it's really a peaceful period under the nuclear umbrella where nevertheless, books are still used as weapons. in the fight of ideological systems, the sort of Western model against the then the Russian model. And that turns up some very funny stories, really, how, for instance, the Russians don't have much respect for the American and British intelligence services because they've infiltrated them so completely, but they do have an enormous respect for the fictional spies like James Bond, for instance, who really gets under their skin somehow.

1:09:25You tell a great story about Ian Fleming wanting to use a negative review from, I think it was one of the Soviet officials, in the dust jacket of the book. And the publisher decided against it, but Fleming thought it would be perfect branding for one of his newer titles. And I thought the idea of Bond as a continued view of freedom and the allies, I think is just a wonderful way. And given I'm biased, I'm a massive James Bond fan. I'm like your prototypical American boy, thinking that a debonair Brit with an accent roaming the world with multiple passports is still an idealized view of a way to go through life.

1:10:10I was going to ask you, Andrew, where can our listeners follow you going forward? Obviously, this is your life work. You've written about libraries, books. Obviously, I know your work's not done. How can they follow your writing and your work going forward? Well, I'm on Twitter. I've also got a Wikipedia page, and I can be found through my university site if they want to see examples of other aspects of my writing. The name pedigree is quite unusual, so just putting it into a Google search, it will come up pretty easily. And what's your handle on Twitter? I think it's at a pedigree or something like that, but as I said, it comes up pretty easily.

1:10:57I think there's not many pedigrees in the world. Awesome. Well, Andrew, I really appreciate your time. I'm going to give a couple of my takeaways from the book. Two wrongs still don't make a right, even when you try to reconcile things. The book at war is a powerful story to understand the might that books, information and learning provide to all societies acutely at war. It also gives a deeper view into the human soul as past sins are hard to rectify apart from what I would argue would just be forgiveness. If you enjoyed this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to a book with legs.

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