In the autumn of 1942, Ray Trautman, who held the post of Army Chief Librarian, was nearing the end of a worldwide swing through American military installations when his plane touched down in Australia. His brief at this stop was twofold: assess the reading needs of forces in that part of the war and arrange a meeting with General Douglas MacArthur, the top commander in the Southwest Pacific Theater.
The Pacific had already witnessed several clashes—from Wake Island and Midway to the battles in the Philippines and the ongoing push toward Guadalcanal. It was clear that more would follow. The march toward the Japanese mainland would be marked by amphibious assaults on “one damned island after another,” as one soldier described the campaign. Some islands offered only a single landing point, a fact the Japanese had fortified through years of preparation. For the invaders, the moment could resemble advancing into a firing squad amid bloodstained sands, burning craft, and cries for medics. As Marine E.B. Sledge put it, “Witnessing such sights was not merely dangerous; it was agonizing.” Consequently, from the war’s onset, morale in the Southwest Pacific Area was, in the words of a MacArthur biographer, “bleak.”
Trautman believed that if there were ever a place in need of reading material, it was the Pacific theater. To provide troops with what they most desired and required, he set out to learn precisely what these soldiers longed to read. Officers typically moved within their own circles, but Trautman resolved to spend as much time as possible with the enlisted men out in the field. He wanted to go where the heat bled through uniforms, where rain drenched gear, and where sand clung stubbornly to every bite of rations. These were the men who could most use a morale boost.
To give troops what they wanted and needed most, Trautman endeavored to understand what these soldiers most wanted to read.
News of the Army’s Chief Librarian visiting spread quickly, and soldiers rushed to request their preferred magazines and genres. “I was treated like royalty,” Trautman recalled after the war, humbled by their hunger for anything printed. The majority expressed gratitude for any reading matter, but if a choice could be made, they favored best-sellers, hometown papers, pin-up magazines, Westerns, sports tales, comics, and even Sears Roebuck catalogs (which Trautman called “wishing books”). A soldier remarked in The Library Journal that one could scarcely appreciate the value of a book until experiencing the lethargy and isolation of the Southwest Pacific. Because periods of waiting could be lengthy, it was useful to have compact reading material that could slip into a pocket. Trautman noted the enduring popularity of softcover editions, prized for their portability, even though mainstream publishers frowned upon this format.
At the time, the paperback industry was still in its infancy. The first American paperback houses had appeared in 1939—Pocket Books and Penguin’s New York operation, the latter stemming from Britain’s 1935 venture. Yet publishing powerhouses—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Scribner’s, and Doubleday—shunned paper-covered works, treating them as tawdry, low-brow, and potentially damaging to reputations. In addition, the lower price—often a quarter of the hardcover’s cost—made the profit margin slim, pushing print runs to enormous numbers to turn a profit. Owing to aesthetic objections and financial concerns, traditional houses stuck to hardcovers, leaving Pocket Books and Penguin to specialize in public-domain classics and reissues of genre fiction, notably mysteries, science fiction, and Westerns. For GIs, however, the appeals of these light, portable editions outweighed publisher misgivings. The format traveled well, paired with genres the troops adored, and every portable volume was a treasure on their long journeys. If only there had been more titles and a broader mix of authors and topics.
Not only did soldiers stationed overseas diverge in how they viewed literature, but they also perceived the act of reading through a different lens. Trautman observed that many troops were at remote outposts where the few diversions were military in nature, and where living conditions could be primitive. Some felt utterly stranded, as if marooned on remote islands. In such circumstances, even men who had never opened a book at home were willing to read “to fill the hours when there was nothing else to do,” as one GI told Trautman. One encounter left a lasting impression. Some of the books carried aboard transports were still circulating, and when Trautman approached a young soldier to see what he was reading, the book was Plato’s Republic—translated into a straightforward, basic English. When the soldier learned that Trautman was a librarian, he exclaimed, “Say, this Plato fellow is good! What else has he written lately?” Whether it was Plato or Tarzan, soldiers read and swapped books with a reverence akin to handling fragile relics, since there was no guarantee more would arrive.
Trautman aspired to flood the Pacific with the reading materials the troops craved, yet he faced substantial hurdles. Among the largest was the absence of a reliable storage system for supplies in the Southwest Pacific. The result was a constant destruction of fresh equipment and gear, coupled with a ruinous cycle of shortages. During Trautman’s autumn 1942 visit to Australia, war matériel was unloaded directly onto beaches, exposed to humidity and salt, with the lower layers of containers rusting and rotting as they sank into the damp sand. A sizable fraction of each shipment was damaged before ever being unpacked. The refrain continued: more ships would arrive, a portion of the cargo would fall victim to the elements, and the cycle would begin anew.
Not only did these storage problems impede combat operations, they also eroded morale. While the Special Services Division sought to provide recreational equipment—athletic gear, films, records, musical instruments, and library services—delivering these items proved nearly impossible. With war matériel always in short supply and space aboard ships limited, the Army devised a priority system to ensure weapons and essential equipment were loaded first. Entertainment items ranked low on the list. As Major Ruel D. Harmon, who oversaw Special Services, noted, one of the greatest challenges in the Southwest Pacific was “the difficulty of securing shipping space for Special Services supplies.”
One individual who could sway whether books and recreational materials reached the troops was the theater’s commander, General Douglas MacArthur. Biographer William Manchester described MacArthur as “a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men.” This blend of traits had shaped his four-decade Army career, including time spent as Army Chief of Staff. MacArthur was accustomed to commanding and to getting his own way, and he intended to keep a tight hold on his theater. If Trautman wished to perform his duties and provide soldiers with the books they so desperately wanted, he would need the General’s blessing to prioritize the shipment of reading material.
Anytime Trautman faced an obstacle in getting books to troops, he always found a way around it. He refused to let those who wanted books to go without them.
MacArthur’s reputation as a voracious reader was something of a double-edged sword. His father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr., had built a library of four thousand volumes that the son eventually inherited. Many evenings found MacArthur with a challenging text in hand, rather than light fiction. Trautman hoped that if the General shared a passion for books, he might be more receptive to the idea of arming his men with reading material. Yet MacArthur, hardened by military discipline and the demands of leadership, placed a premium on duty over leisure. Although he had once tempered his stance against recreational offerings at West Point, he remained suspicious of solitary reading and personal pursuits, viewing them as distractions from soldiering. He believed that disciplined, team-oriented athletic culture produced the best soldiers, and that independence in reading did not align with those aims.
When Trautman met with MacArthur, it quickly became evident that the General did not want his troops supplied with books and magazines. He argued that solitary reading ran counter to the Army’s objectives and resisted most forms of entertainment and recreation championed by the Special Services Division, insisting that every cargo inch be reserved for arms, clothing, or sustenance. He would not yield on this point.
Trautman’s task of placing books in soldiers’ hands thus began under a cloud of potential career jeopardy. When he attempted to explain the value of reading materials, the mental armor they offered, and the ways in which MacArthur’s soldiers hungered for them, the General’s fury suggested Trautman’s days in uniform might be numbered. Even though Trautman was modest, courteous, and unassuming, his earnest defense of the books was interpreted as disloyalty. To remain in MacArthur’s favor, one would have to be blindly obedient, or so the biographers suggest.
Clare Boothe Luce, a known acquaintance of MacArthur, later observed that “MacArthur’s temperament was distorted by an ego that demanded not just obedience to his orders but also adulation toward his ideas and his person.” Questioning the wisdom of depriving his troops of reading material ran contrary to hero worship. MacArthur explicitly warned Trautman that a low-ranking librarian would not interfere with his theater’s operations. The General’s anger went so far as to threaten insubordination charges. Trautman yielded.
He left Australia drained, bearing the sting of a missed opportunity. Yet the moment of discouragement gave way to resolve. MacArthur could exercise four-star authority and Supreme Commander power, but Trautman remained the Army’s Chief Librarian, entrusted with fortifying the troops during their bleakest hours. The Southwest Pacific’s morale was the lowest in the Army, and Trautman was convinced that books could lift spirits. Rather than accept an easier route through MacArthur’s approval, he devised a plan to move tens of millions of books and magazines into the Southwest Pacific—and keep MacArthur’s muscle from stopping him. As he would repeatedly prove, whenever Trautman encountered a barrier to getting reading material to soldiers, he found a workaround. He would not permit those who wanted books to be left without them.
______________________________
From A Librarian’s War: The Man Who Fought World War II with Books and Brought the Joy of Reading to Millions by Molly Guptill Manning. Copyright © 2026. Available from Oxford University Press.
