How Army Librarian Ray Trautman Took On MacArthur to Get Books to GIs

In September 1942, Army Chief Librarian Ray Trautman flew into Australia on the final leg of a world tour of US installations—and left facing a threat of insubordination charges from General Douglas MacArthur. The weapon Trautman had proposed shipping to the front lines was books.

The confrontation appears in "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, published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Manning's account reconstructs how Trautman, a humble, soft-spoken librarian, set out to flood the Pacific theater with reading material against the explicit wishes of its supreme commander.

The Pacific war was brutal. The island-hopping advance toward Japan meant amphibious landings, in one GI's words, on "one damned island after another," with blood-stained sand, burning landing craft, and cries for medics. Marine E.B. Sledge wrote: "To witness such a scene was worse than personal danger. It was absolute agony." One MacArthur biographer described morale in the Southwest Pacific Area as "bleak."

What did soldiers actually want to read?

Trautman made a point of circulating among enlisted men rather than officers, and the response was overwhelming. "I was treated like royalty," he recalled after the war.

Soldiers' requests, as recorded in Manning's account, included:

• best-selling novels and Westerns
• home-town newspapers and sports stories
• pin-up magazines and comics
• Sears Roebuck catalogs, which Trautman called "wishing books"

"You would have to [experience] the lethargy and isolation of the Southwest Pacific to realize the value of a book," one soldier told The Library Journal.

Paperbacks suited the troops' mobile lives, but the format was in its infancy. Pocket Books and Ian Ballantine's New York outpost for Penguin Books—founded in England in 1935—had launched in 1939, yet powerhouses like Random House, Simon & Schuster, Scribner's, and Doubleday shunned paper covers as lurid and reputationally harmful. At a quarter per copy versus $2 to $4 for hardcovers, print runs needed to exceed 100,000 or 150,000 copies to turn a profit.

The reading itself could be surprising. Trautman once asked a young soldier what he was carrying: Plato's Republic, "done in basic English." On learning Trautman was a librarian, the soldier exclaimed: "Say this guy Plato is good! What else did he write lately?"

Why did MacArthur refuse?

The theater's supply system was in chaos. Matériel unloaded off the Australian coast sat stacked on beaches, where humidity and saltwater rotted containers before they were unpacked. Cargo space was rationed by priority, and entertainment ranked low. Major Ruel D. Harmon of the Special Services Division said "it was very difficult to get shipping space for Special Services supplies."

MacArthur, biographer William Manchester wrote, was "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." An avid reader himself—he inherited his father's library of four thousand books—he distrusted solitary reading as a military value. Biographer Geoffrey Perret noted that MacArthur "became convinced that the men who had taken part in organized sports made the best soldiers." Independent reading and writing did not make the list.

When Trautman argued that his men hungered for books and that reading provided mental "armor," MacArthur fumed. Surviving in his good graces required being "blindly subservient, even obsequious," as Manchester put it. Clare Boothe Luce, an acquaintance of the general, said his "temperament was flawed by an egotism that demanded obedience not only to his orders, but to his ideas and his person as well." MacArthur threatened insubordination charges. Trautman backed down—and left Australia drained.

How did it end?

Disappointment gave way to determination. Trautman held the rank of Chief Librarian of the entire US Army, and Manning writes that he hatched a scheme by which "tens of millions of books and magazines found their way to the Southwest Pacific—and MacArthur could not do a thing to stop him."

Manning's portrait of a junior officer who repeatedly found ways around command obstacles—because "he refused to let those who wanted books to go without them"—adds a supply-line chapter to the cultural history of the war, one in which Plato and Tarzan shared the same cargo holds.