When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning Page A

that road with steel until you’re killed or captured, holding up the enemy for a few minutes or even a precious quarter of an hour.
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    Reviews pegged the book as the most significant personal war experience yet published. It was well deserving of the “Distinguished Service Medal, the ‘I’ for Imperative,” one newspaper said.
    About four months later, the council announced that John Hersey’s
Into the Valley
would be its next Imperative. Hersey told of his experience as a war correspondent on Guadalcanal, where he accompanied a company of Marines on a mission to take the Matanikau River from the Japanese in October 1942. According to Hersey, after a long march into the dense jungle, enemy snipers opened up, Japanese machine guns rattled off rounds, and mortars were lobbed—their shrill whistling gave a brief, terrifying warning that a shell was about to burst. Hersey watched as Americans were unable to set up their own machine guns quickly enough and were forced to retreat, carrying injured and dying men back to camp.
Into the Valley
provided a realistic account of what battle was like, describing acts of heroism on the part of the Marines without overly romanticizing their experience.
    In May 1943 the third Imperative was selected—Wendell Willkie’s
One World
. The book told of Willkie’s tour of Allied nations during the fall of 1942 as an American ambassador at large, and recorded his impressions of the leaders and people he encountered. Willkie urged Americans to shed their isolationist tendencies and recognize that countries needed to cooperate with one another to achieve peace and maintain it after the war. The fourth Imperative, announced in July 1943, was Walter Lippmann’s
U.S
.
Foreign Policy
. This book argued that America’s failure to readjust its foreign policy to account for its acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and Germany’s aggression during World War I rendered it completely unprepared for war in 1941 and threatened its ability to make peace. Lippmann provided a brief history of America’s diplomatic relations and wars, challenged America’s fondness for isolationism, and urged Americans to recognize their commitments to the world. The book was lauded for making foreign policy accessible to the masses, and widening the area of discussion from small groups of intellectuals to hundreds of thousands of people.
    The fifth Imperative was another of John Hersey’s,
A Bell For Adano
, which was the only work of fiction endorsed under the program. This book challenged Hitler’s propaganda about America’s heterogeneity being its weakness. (In September 1941, Goebbels had declared that the “America of today will never be a danger to us. Nothing will be easier than to produce a bloody revolution in the United States. No other country has so many racial and social tensions. We shall be able to play many strings there.”) The hero of Hersey’s story is an Italian American GI who takes part in the invasion of Sicily and wins the trust of the Italian locals because of their shared heritage. Hersey advanced the notion that America’s armed forces had an advantage in the world war precisely because they represented a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities.
    The sixth and, as it turned out, final Imperative book was named in September 1944, Edgar Snow’s
People on Our Side
. Snow, a war correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post
, took a seventeen-country tour from April 1942 through the summer of 1943. Primarily focusing on his experiences in Russia, China, and India, Snow described the political, economic, and social problems that plagued these nations.
    It is not entirely clear why the Imperative program came to an end. Selection of a seventh book began, but the War Book Panel voted in equal number for two books, and it seems this tie resulted in a stalemate. In the spring of 1945, the panel selected Ralph