Servicemen who relished a good read could turn to substantial novels like those of Hervey Allen and C. S. Forester.

For those in grim surroundings, laughter could be the best palliative.

Cartoon ASE's could raise chuckles and entertain those who had difficulty reading.

Picture the men in a combat troop waiting for H-Hour and discussing . . . Greek philosophy? No doubt there is truth in the stereotypical image of fighting men as lacking literary interests; nevertheless, many soldiers overseas used the opportunity provided by ASE's to delve into ancient classics like Homer's Odyssey and Plato's Republic.

The ASE selection committee chose novels by writers like Dickens, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf who had earned a place within the literary canon-or who might reasonably be expected to do so, over time.

One remarkable characteristic of the ASE's is that so many of them are in any reckoning serious literature. This was not an accident. The Council on Books in Wartime made sure that the ASE's boasted a good sampling of serious modern fiction, from Thomas Mann to John Steinbeck.

Armed Forces personnel did not have to limit serious reading to fiction. Curious servicemen could read Joseph C. Grew's essays on the Japanese and Margaret Mead's anthropological studies.

Shakespeare was considered a little too serious for ASE's, but playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and George Bernard Shaw made the cut.

The strong demand for short-form reading material resulted in ASE collections of stories and verse which existed as such in no other form. These specially prepared anthologies were popular: short stories could be as brief as a magazine article, a valuable attribute to a service personnel on the move. ASE short story collections ranged from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe to the short stories of Hemingway.

There were fewer ASE collections of poetry than of short stories, but the books selected were just as eclectic, ranging from Carl Sandburg to the creatively titled A Wartime Whitman.