Research Dossier · Vol. III
Wartime reading with a line back to Intrepid’s own war, 1943–1945
Armed Services Editions were slim, staple-bound paperbacks, cut sideways from magazine printing plates so two books came off one press pass — a cost-cutting trick that happened to leave them shaped to fit a cargo pocket. They were given away free, by the millions, to anyone in uniform. Men reportedly read them to tatters, tore them in half to share a single copy between two readers, and wrote home — and to the authors — to say so.
None of the six books below is known to have sailed aboard Intrepid specifically. But four were genuinely printed in the ASE series and would have been in wide circulation across the fleet in exactly these years; the other two are included, clearly marked, purely for how closely their content brushes up against Intrepid’s own history.
Series letter/number and issue date per the published ASE checklist
An immediate sensation with servicemen — Smith reportedly received sacks of fan mail from the field, enough that the ASE printing was doubled inside a year.
The Navy’s wartime enlisted ranks drew heavily from New York’s outer boroughs. A novel of hardscrabble, turn-of-the-century Williamsburg landed, for a great many bluejackets in the Pacific, as close to their own home block as anything in the series got.
Drawn largely from A Shropshire Lad (1896), Housman’s cycle circles back again and again to young men who die before their promise is spent.
Its best-known lines — the runner who reaches “the fleet foot on the sill of shade,” the soldier “dying in a foreign field” — sit uncomfortably close to Intrepid’s own arithmetic: 11 dead at Truk, 10 at Clark Field, 65 in one evening off the Philippines, 8 more off Okinawa. Housman was writing about an earlier war. The sentiment hadn’t aged.
A gothic novel of a marriage haunted by a dead first wife — a woman, and a memory, that refuse to stay buried.
By early 1945, Intrepid’s own crew had picked up half-joking nicknames — “the Decrepit,” “the Evil I” — for a ship with a habit of nearly dying and coming back anyway, four separate times. A story about something that won’t stay sunk went out to the fleet on a ship with exactly that reputation. Coincidence of timing, but a good one.
A family saga running from 1880 to “the present day” — commercially, Woolf’s biggest seller in her own lifetime.
By the time this edition reached the fleet, Woolf had been dead more than four years. She drowned herself in the River Ouse in March 1941, under the weight of the Blitz and fear of invasion — two months before Bismarck sank Hood, some two and a half years before Intrepid was even commissioned. The book outlived its author into a war she didn’t.
No ASE printing exists for either title — but the ship’s own library was a separate system entirely, and these fit it well
ASE paperbacks and a ship’s library were two different things. ASE titles were current, contract-published books shipped fleet-wide by the Council on Books in Wartime; a ship’s library was a standing collection the Navy itself purchased and issued at commissioning, restocked from Naval Supply Depots at Norfolk and San Diego. A ship Intrepid’s size — closer to a battleship in complement than a destroyer — would typically have carried somewhere around 1,000–2,000 volumes, roughly a third non-fiction and two-thirds fiction, in sturdy hardcover rather than disposable paperback. Both Melville and Verne were decades out of copyright by 1943 and printed constantly in cheap, durable reprint sets — exactly the format Navy purchasing favored, and about as natural a fit for a sea-story-hungry crew as a library list gets. No source found names either title specifically aboard Intrepid; the Intrepid Museum’s own archival finding aid doesn’t inventory a ship’s library at all. The entries below are informed conjecture, not a documented citation.
Drawn from Melville’s own fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard USS United States, 1843–44. Its late chapters — “How Man-of-War’s-Men Die at Sea,” “The Last Stitch,” “How They Bury a Man-of-War’s-Man at Sea” — lay the ritual out almost procedurally: the call of “All hands bury the dead, ahoy!,” the body sewn into its own hammock, the board tilted at the gangway, a white sea-bird the crew takes for the dead man’s departing spirit.
Possibly in a crewman’s sea bag in 1944 — Melville’s chapters describe, almost point for point, what Intrepid’s chaplain and crew carried out again and again: after Truk, after Clark Field, after the two kamikazes off the Philippines that November, after Okinawa. A Melville sea novel was also a natural pick for a Navy-purchased shipboard collection — his Moby-Dick made the ASE list itself (G‑209), suggesting the author was considered solidly suited to a military readership.
Five Union men escape a Confederate prison by balloon and are blown to a deserted Pacific island, where they survive on nothing but engineering and ingenuity.
Also outside the ASE checklists, and the link here is geographic and thematic: a story of men making do on remote Pacific islands, written a lifetime before the Marshalls, the Carolines, and the Philippines became names in Intrepid’s own war. Long out of copyright and a durable, popular adventure title by 1943 — a plausible pick for a Navy-purchased shipboard collection, though unconfirmed for Intrepid specifically.