The Story of the Stars and Stripes.Pdf

64533 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES By Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney AIR GUNNER THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES THE STORY OF TRIPES By BUD BUTTON and ANDY ROONEY FARRAR & RINEHAHT. INCORPORATED NEW YORK TORONTO* COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY O. C. IIUTTON AND ANDREW A. ROONEY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY J. J. LITTLE AND 1VES COMPANY, NEW YORK. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TO THE JOES FOR WHOM THE PAPER WAS PUBLISHED WHY A Preface A MN FOXHOLE, gouged from the slope of an enemy hillside, a doughboy peers through the dust an exploding mortar has left and sees a figure in uniform crawling up from the rear. The dough squints at a green and gold patch on the uniform sleeve as the halts figure beside him. The patch says: Stars and Stripes U S Army War Correspondent The Stars and Stripes man talks with the dough awhile and goes off to another place. He is getting the news of the war where the news is. Maybe not there, but somewhere across the war, another Stars and Stripes man drives a jeep down a road under artillery fire so that American fighting men will have their daily newspaper even thousands of miles and three or four years of war away from home. * * * In a Flying Fortress, four miles above the enemy flak, the pilot checks his crew over the interphone after a battle with inter- ceptors: "Tail gunner, you okay?" "You all right, right waist?*' "Top turret?" "Ball turret?" "How about you, Stars and Stripes? How you doing in that left waist?" "Stars and Stripes" is doing all right; he's as scared as the rest, or maybe a little more, but he's doing his job this way so that the American kids who fly the bombers into the flak and the enemy fighters will get an honest report of what they are doing and how. vii Tilt WHY, A PREFACE Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of all the Allied forces, walks onto a field behind the lines to meet with a field marshal, a handful of three- or four-starred generals, and discuss xact terms of the impending surrender of Germany. Beside the supreme commander walks a square-jawed, serious soldier on whose arm there is the green and gold patch. The serious young man is a staff sergeant. He stays with the generals as they talk, takes notes on what they have to say about the men in the line. Before night, the man with the Stars and Stripes patch writes his story and it goes not only to the soldiers' newspaper but to every other paper and press service in the world; and the morning's paper which the doughs read in the lines tells them, as he .said it, what the supreme commander and the generals had to say about what the soldiers are doing. The Rangers landed, the infantry crossed a river, the para- troops came down The Stars and Stripes was there, a collection of possibly the least martial souls on earth trying to put out a civilian newspaper in an army. They were of the army, in the army and by the army, and the army said they'd be soldiers first and news- papermen second. The staffers didn't say anything, because you can't talk back in the army, but they worked out their own compromise. They wore uniforms, some of them learned to fight and some learned to die; and they put out newspapers in London and Rome, Paris and Frankfurt, Casablanca and Lige. They put out papers under shellfire and they put them out from luxurious chateaux, and all the time they did as best they could the one thing the army never could order successfully: publish a good newspaper. They were against commissions for themselves, but a manag- ing editor once told the supreme commander, in answer to a query about the obviously effective treatment of rank in the paper: "Sir, we figured a general has every bit as much rights in The Stars and Stripes as a private does." The supreme commander took a couple of takes on it and let the doctrine stand. That was The Stars and Stripes, daily newspaper of the Amer- ican soldier overseas. The Stars and Stripes also was a variety of other things. It was WHY, A PREFACE ix probably the last refuge of the itinerant American newspaperman whom big business has driven from his desk, because it moved with the battlefront and in moving took along its own peculiar atmosphere of laissez-faire-as-long-as-you-get-the-job-done. It was a collection of privates and corporals and sergeants who took on the whole blasted army, at one time or another, and came close to winning. It was a bedlam. If the city room of any edition of The Stars and Stripes had been a movie set, the critics, no matter what else they said, would have damned it as Hollywood's idea of a newspaper city room, too front-page to be true. The truth was, the staff figured the Hollywood directors of any newspaper pictures they'd ever seen hadn't been very imaginative. The soldiers who set up The Stars and Stripes and published it and somehow, with or without the assistance of the army, got it up to the fighting men every morning, had a simple conception in of their job. Bob Moora, who was co-editor of the first daily London, said it best: after "This is a paper for Joe; after that it's a newspaper; that it's a trade journal whose specialized readers are soldiers; and after that it isn't anything else no matter what the brass says." the American The paper, along that line then, tried to bring he was soldier fighting the war overseas not only news of what the ones doing, but what the units on either flank were doing and overhead and to the rear; what the enemy was doing, and how. Because the war news seemed most important to the Joes, there was more war news than anything else in the paper. Because the second most comic strip "Terry and the Pirates" seemed import- matter ant, "Terry and the Pirates" got into the paper nightly no what else had to be left out. Because the soldiers wanted to know what was happening back home, the paper set up a news bureau in New York, pulled combat correspondents out of the line period- States for two months to ically and sent them back to the report on the home front. Before the job was done in Europe, Stars and to the not to establish Stripes men were on the way Pacific, only hundreds of thousands the paper there but to cable back to the the of combat men due to fight the Japs after the Germans, what war out there was like; and they described it in the intimate terms had learned the hard of easy familiarity with fighting which they way. x WHY, A PREFACE Those things and virtually everything else The Stars and one end: to make it a Stripes staff did or tried to do had paper was for Joe. But to many people The Stars and Stripes many things. Someone was always trying to make it the soldiers' and this service's, or the soldiers' and that service's, the soldiers' and this general's, or the soldiers' and that general's. (They were always soldiers no one the staff careful to put the first.) Virtually except and a fellow named Dwight Eisenhower ever figured it ought to be just the soldiers' newspaper. And there it is: You sit down to write about maybe the most fantastic effort any newspaper ever made, or any army, for that matter publication within an army's doctrined, ordered, pro- tocoled ranks of a newspaper dedicated to the American prin- as involved ex- ciple of a free press and what happens? You get its and plaining it as the existence the paper and people led, you go off on the same sort of tangents that made the staff and The Stars and Stripes whatever else they were. It is difficult to explain, because there was a mercurial units and because pickableupness about the paper and creatures, a set it was illogical, being where it was. A corporal and sergeant up the editorial format of The Stars and Stripes, a private set up its business affairs. They were helped at times by various colonels said and majors. Sometimes it was a corporal or a sergeant who what was what, and sometimes it was a colonel. There never was a time when someone wasn't saying; but there it was, every morn- Parisian come ing, come Luftwaffe, come women, buzz-bombs, come counterattacks, come closeorder drill, come generals, con- it there came to the gressmen or Nazi spies. And with Champs- the Strassen Elysees and Piccadilly Circus, to the Via Napoli and of the Third Reich, an unmistakably American air compounded of Main Street, cosmoline and printer's ink. it was one For the local equivalent of two cents in England a soldier English penny, in France it was one franc, and so on could buy his newspaper anywhere the army was. To combat units delivered free of actually on the line, The Stars and Stripes was for charge. We never had enough newsprint to print a paper every hauled across soldier, because virtually every ounce ot paper was the Atlantic Ocean from the States.

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