Maureen Corrigan

When I was growing up, many of the dads in my neighborhood had served in World War II.

True to stereotype, none of them talked much about the war.

Information came sideways.

My best friend's dad, who'd been in the Air Force in China, taught us how to say hot water in Mandarin.

Another dad, an Army vet, let slip that he'd burned his uniform upon returning home, which puzzled us.

And my own dad, a Navy vet, once said something about the funny paperbacks around during the war.

It wasn't until I began researching my book on the Great Gatsby that I realized my father had been one of the millions of servicemen on the receiving end of what's been called the biggest book giveaway in history.

When the U.S.

entered World War II, there was an effort to get books into the hands of servicemen to combat boredom.

The books, though, had to be light and small enough to fit in servicemen's pockets.

That was only one of the challenges faced by a group of publishers, librarians, and booksellers who composed the Council on Books in Wartime.

The distribution program the Council eventually adopted stood in contrast to the Nazi book burnings that began in 1933.

The motto of the Council on Books in Wartime was, Books are weapons in the war of ideas.

America would initiate a program for servicemen that would implicitly affirm the freedom to read widely.

Colonel Ray Troutman is the hero of this story.

In a terrific forthcoming book called A Librarian's War that'll be available in September, Molly Guptill Manning details how Troutman came up with the idea of not just distributing books for the troops, but producing them.

The Armed Services Editions, or ASEs as they were called, were those funny paperbacks that my father had mentioned to me.

Printed on pulp paper, the Armed Services Editions began rolling off presses in 1943.

By the time the program came to an end in 1947, nearly 123 million books were distributed to U.S.

troops.