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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Andrew Pedigree, coming to us from Scotland.
He is a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
He's a leading expert on the history of the books and media transformations.
And he wrote an interesting book that caught my attention called The Book at War.
Andrew, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Well, thank you very much, Jim, for inviting me.
I'm very pleased to be here.
Well, we're glad to have you. This is certainly a topic that caught my attention because I am a reader.
I did a lot of reading while on ship and come from a family of some librarians.
So maybe this was all kind of natural that this one caught my attention.
But it's a larger issue than that in terms of being personal because as you explain in The Book at War,
you see it on all sides here from how it was used in propaganda, how it was used in supporting war efforts.
Talk to us a little bit about what got you into this topic and some of the things you took out of it.
Well, I suppose in a way I've always been a part-time student of particularly the Second World War.
I spent two years living in Hamburg in the 1980s when, of course, it was still quite raw for the Germans.
And my father was a navigator flying anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic.
And so, you know, he had a very dangerous war and we were lucky he'd survived it.
So this has always been in the back of my mind, but it came to the front of my mind when with my
St Andrew's colleague Arthur Devadron, we wrote a book on the history of libraries.
And that did have to come into the 20th century.
In fact, we had a whole section on libraries called Surviving in the 20th Century.
And it was not just the challenge of different technologies, it was the fact that libraries were being born.
A lot of libraries have prestigious places in the center of town.
They were something which gathered civic pride.
So, of course, when we had bombing, they naturally suffered.
But then I wrote that chapter, but then I thought, this is not the end of the story.
Books are not just victims, they're also protagonists in war.
And that's what I really wanted to get into.
The extent to which print was not only essential to the successful waging of war,
but also played a role in creating the ideologies that meant that young men were prepared to go to war
and to stick at it.
And this is true from the American Civil War onwards.
So print plays a huge role in bringing about wars.
If you use the word propaganda, it sort of has a negative connotation to it.
But it's more than that.
It's really about how the expression of ideas occurs, supporting the ideals of whatever country it is
as to why it's necessary to go to war.
And you write on both aspects of that from, we'll call it democracy size,
maybe from the Nazis and the fascists as well.
Tell us how, certainly in World War II, how everybody sort of used this media as a method to engage the country.
Yeah. Propaganda is, as you say, a loaded word.
But the best propaganda is always things which were not written as propaganda,
which were written as works of entertainment.
But yet had a vision of what a young man wanted to be embedded into that.
You can see this in the Boys' magazines in England and the United States in the late 19th century,
where they had this picture of this sort of young, brave, but kind, physically fit young man.
And of course, that's exactly the sort of person that a lot of boys want to be.
And patriotism was deeply embedded in the psyche of most people in this era.
They felt deeply committed to their country, whether that country was the United States.
There was enormous pride at the growth of American power.
And indeed, a great deal of support for America becoming an imperial power.
Americans were very disdainful of the British Empire, whereas the Germans were very jealous of the British Empire.
So the whole idea of domination of the rest of the world was deeply embedded in this literature, which was being read.
And then, of course, we get another sort of literature, which is catastrophe literature.
And it's very amusing to follow the development of this in England, because we go from novels predicating a French invasion of Britain to novels predicating a German invasion.
And that, of course, is a reaction to the development of this rather unstable, great power in the middle of Europe, where the borders between states were very much up for negotiation and very porous.
It's very different being a continental power like America, where the borders are fairly fixed, an island power like Britain, where the borders are not under challenge, and France, a very well established nation, where, of course, Germany just sprawls across the whole of Central Europe,
with many ethnic Germans in countries which are not part of Germany.
So there's always going to be a difficulty with that power becoming a serious military and naval player, as it does in the late 19th century.
One of the topics you explore, and we won't go into this because we'd go down a rabbit hole of each of these historical figures and leaders, but you point out that so many of the 20th century leaders were somewhat bookish,
very, you know, you turn to books to gain knowledge about maybe what their expansion plans were.
Well, that's something that only occurred to me as I was writing this book that Churchill Hitler Stalin Stalin was an extraordinary, extraordinarily intellectually, the motivated man and I did not become a revolutionary to probably become an academic and we've been saved a whole lot of trouble.
But Charles de Gaulle was a very successful author of a strategic work on on bank warfare, and Roosevelt was very aware of the importance of books he was a major collector, and of course wrote very pithily to express his, his, his, his faith in the role of print as a as a sort of cornerstone of civilization.
And no one has really remarked on this before the fact that this is this is bookish people and bookish nations lined up against each other.
Britain had in the 19th century, probably the world's largest publishing industry, but Germany was also in its heels, particularly with the quality of German technical institutions and German universities, which meant that they had to be able to do
what they came to have a tremendous role in the development of science and engineering as the 20th century dawns and of course that had a direct impact on war.
And you write a whole section of the book and the mobilization of knowledge the battle of science and spooks in academia which is interesting. How, you know, how maps and geographic territory, topography, all way way into how you one way wages war, I suppose.
So it's not just books as mobilizing the populace, but as a repository of knowledge to use in war.
Yes, yes, that's, that's a that's a critical point. And of course those two come together. When you have these great academies of military learning.
And then, when you have a Lynn West Point is a particular example of that they had one of the best libraries in the United States very, very quickly.
And I'm going to see the change in the study of history in those institutions from a concentration on French in the beginning of the 19th century because of course Napoleon was the greatest battlefield general of his age and so people thought we want to read we want to find out what was his secret and serve men that all these
Americans had to learn French in order to be accepted for West Point or they had to take courses there. And that was not easy for some of those who came from less elite backgrounds.
So yes, military education is very important to this and increasingly so as we get to the modern era is the size of the armies continues to grow and where not only do we have officers who educated but also the citizen armies who have a high level of literacy as well.
And I can also write on it. And I think it highlights the importance of military leaders and looking at book at the importance of the book about we mentioned the bombing of libraries but book banning books and burning books to try to steal or eliminate a culture.
Again, I think that doesn't it doesn't that highlight the importance of the written word.
And I think with the Nazi conquest of most of the European land maps in the second World War you saw that taken to extremes where first of all they seem determined to destroy cultures completely, not just Judaism but also the polls for instance they were to be restricted to three or four years of primary
education and otherwise they were to be a purely sort of surf population. But then halfway through that process they completely change gears and they say no, if this is to be a thousand year right we need to have a literature on all these enemy ideologies so instead of destroying
they started shifting vast quantities of books back to Germany to be the basis of these new libraries. But of course you can steal as many books as you like if you're the dominant military power but you can't necessarily catalog them.
So, by the time 1945 came and of course Germany was suffering its own terror by a bombing. You see all of these books, Christ, crossing Europe in in packing cases and the search for safety with the result them, many of them didn't get out of their packing cases before the
end of the war. And when the allies got there they often were able to repatriate large batches of books so the libraries were from from which they've been stolen in the Netherlands and France particularly.
But on the Eastern front he was a very different matter, because the places of safety to which the Germans had sent many of these books were now in Russian occupied lands. And so they never came back at all.
You know, veteran radio listeners were talking to Professor Andrew pedigree, who wrote the book at war he's a professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. And, and while the monument men is a movie and the United States and gets remade every couple of
decades because it's kind of sexy about US soldiers trying to find lost arts the Nazi has stolen a similar movie isn't being made about the books that we're stolen if you will so the book at war that we're talking about highlights and maybe down the road it'll be a movie but at the
moment is just the written word.
I want to talk before we run out of time about the importance of books for the boys.
Yes, because I think again this really drills it down to the, the GI Joe, the, the, the enlisted men in particular while, while officers often have reading lists they have to go through.
It's, it's the, it's the guy on the front line who's using these tools as well. Talk a little bit about what you're uncovered and wrote about as it relates to the books for the boys.
Well, in, in many respects I found when I was writing this that it seems if the first world war which in many respects was organizationally chaotic was a rehearsal for the second and this was true books as well.
When America comes into the war, its librarians organized this enormous effort to raise books for the boys. But of course what they're doing is they're having the cupboards of middle class households being turned out for unwanted books, mostly hardbacks, which of course is not exactly
the largely working class boys who are doing the fighting want to read. And what makes all the difference is that between the two wars and that brief 20 year interval we get a revolution in the publishing industry with the arrival of paperbacks.
And this is exploited both in Britain with the ubiquity of penguin books, both fiction and nonfiction, and also in the United States with one of the greatest initiatives, intellectual initiatives of the war, which is the American service editions.
Now here was a joint effort between the army and the Navy to take recent fiction and some nonfiction titles and print them in special editions, which were in a oblong shape, fitted into the pocket of your service trousers and sit a penguin.
And then you these would be printed up in large editions, they printed something like 1000 different titles, and that amounted to over 123 million copies, which were then distributed free of charge free of charge to American servicemen, wherever they were placed on the globe.
You know, if you think about that a little bit, Professor, the value to the community at large, where so many men are reading of all all shapes and sizes and demographics are reading some of the same literature some of the same stories.
It seems to me it's a, it causes a bonding it cause a commonality that maybe we all missed today a little bit but it. What an effort, amazing effort.
Yeah, and of course it brings home something which I'm sure sure I don't need to tell your audience that, you know, military service is intermittently terror terrifying, but also has long periods of rather boring leisure where you know nothing's really happening I mean some servicemen will have will have been stationed in in places where they were there just in case and the war never came to them.
So, for many servicemen and this particularly applied to those who'd been taken prisoner the prisoners of war.
War was an opportunity to gain a reading type of habit which they may not have had.
Whereas, in other parts of the population and this is particularly among women on the home front. They found war brought so many new things to do.
Many women lost their domestic servants to war work so they had to shop and cook and clean and garden which they may not have done before the war.
So there were many people in war time who actually read a great deal less than they read in peacetime, but the opposite was true of many soldiers.
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's sort of the different facets of this diamond if you will.
Before we run out of time I do want to get your thoughts as to you talked about the revolutionary change that hard covers to paperbacks created.
Well, we're in another time now and unfortunately we're, you know, we've had the 20 year war in Afghanistan for the United States and coalition forces, Ukraine's now fighting a war.
Unfortunately, it seems the world's always at something like this, but we've got another revolutionary change in in the books and reading, and that's the whole digitalization of it.
What's your thoughts as you have the benefit of history. Now you get to look forward and say how do you think it's impacting things.
Well, my, my interest in the history of communication goes all the way back to the beginning of print where I wrote a book on the transition from manuscript to print.
And what I can tell you is that every technological innovation is accompanied by a large false prophecy.
The people who supported print really supported it because they thought it would be more cheaper titles for themselves and they didn't anticipate the birth of the pamphlet.
The youth officials would make of print and the different genres and the different types of readers who then joined the reading community.
And we've been through that all again.
When radio came along, that would kill the book when cinema came along when television, the microfilm was meant to kill the book. Then the CD wrong. Remember the CD wrong. Where's that gone.
And, you know, one of the things I, I have no lack of confidence about is the durability of the physical book.
And I can tell you that although there is a very fine reading of the book on the audio book and it's obviously available for I read it 95% of the copies board of the book at war will be in its print version because print is so flexible.
The book is such a great invention. You don't have to read it from page one all the way through.
You can consult it. You can, you can pick out a chapter, go back and find something.
It's a reference tool. Whereas, you know, if we go back to scrolling on your on your on your computer, you're going back to the technology of 2000 years ago, when they gave it up because scrolls you can only read in one way.
So, good luck at the history to today. I appreciate it.
Professor Andrew pedigree.
Professor modern history at the University of Scott University of St. Andrews in Scotland. We appreciate the time that you've given to veterans radio today to give us a chance to look at inside the thinking of the book at war, which is available from all your normal retailers online and in person.
Thanks for spending a little time with us today.
Well, this has been a great deal of fun, Jim. So nice to meet you and my respects to all your listeners. And just to tell you that the film rights are still available for the book of war.
Stop recording there.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to veterans radio today. I am Jim Fawcone. It's been a pleasure to be your host. I'm a veterans disability lawyer at legal help for veterans. And you can reach us at 800-69-348-00 or legal help for veterans dot com on the web.
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