The Story Of The Stars And Stripes

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

MN A 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
figure halts 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 morn-
ing'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 news-
paper 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
of their job. Bob Moora, who was co-editor of the first daily in
London, said it best:

"This is a paper for Joe; after that it's a newspaper; after
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 paper, along that line then, tried to bring the American
soldier fighting the war overseas not only news of what he was
doing, but what the units on either flank were doing and the ones
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
comic strip "Terry and the Pirates" seemed second most import-
ant, "Terry and the Pirates" got into the paper nightly no matter
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-
ically and sent them back to the States for two months to report
on the home front. Before the job was done in Europe, Stars and
Stripes men were on the way to the Pacific, not only to establish
the paper there but to cable back to the hundreds of thousands
of combat men due to fight the Japs after the Germans, what the
war out there was like; and they described it in the intimate terms
of easy familiarity with fighting which they had learned the hard
way.

x WHY, A PREFACE

Those things and virtually everything else The Stars and
Stripes staff did or tried to do had one end: to make it a paper
for Joe. But to many people The Stars and Stripes was 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
careful to put the soldiers first.) Virtually no one except the staff
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-
ciple of a free press and what happens? You get as involved ex-
plaining it as the existence the paper and its people led, and 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 un-
pickableupness about the paper and its creatures, and because
it was illogical, being where it was. A corporal and a sergeant set
up the editorial format of The Stars and Stripes, a private set up
its business affairs. They were helped at times by various colonels
and majors. Sometimes it was a corporal or a sergeant who said
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-
ing, come Luftwaffe, come Parisian women, come buzz-bombs,
come counterattacks, come closeorder drill, come generals, con-
gressmen or Nazi spies. And with it there came to the Champs-
Elysees and Piccadilly Circus, to the Via Napoli and the Strassen
of the Third Reich, an unmistakably American air compounded
of Main Street, cosmoline and printer's ink.

For the local equivalent of two cents in England it was one
English penny, in France it was one franc, and so on a soldier
could buy his newspaper anywhere the army was. To combat units
actually on the line, The Stars and Stripes was delivered free of
charge. We never had enough newsprint to print a paper for every
soldier, because virtually every ounce ot paper was hauled across
the Atlantic Ocean from the States. We tried to turn out one copy
for every five or six men.

WHY, A PREFACE xi

At that modest sales price, the S&S in three years turned up a
bookkeeping profit of three million dollars. That was possible
because we paid for our plant facilities on reverse Lend Lease,
or, as in Germany, just walked in and took over without bother-
ing about a landlord; because we had no salaries to pay, and be-
cause the army maintained our rolling stock. Inasmuch as the
army was getting a good many $75-10-$ i5o-a-week newspapermen
at the prevailing wages for privates, corporals, and sergeants, we
never felt any qualms about boasting of our three-million-dollar
profit.

It would be presumptuous to think one does justice to The
Stars and Stripes in writing about it. We can only tell a little of
The Stars and Stripes as we saw it. It is worth telling because the
publication of the soldiers' daily newspaper may have been an im-
portant thing in American newspaper history. It was an attempt
at a free-press in a part of the world where most of the free press
had ceased to exist. It also sought to carry the American tradition
of a free press even into the sphere of martial law, an alien grain
of sand in the oyster military although the product wasn't neces-
sarily always a pearl.

For a long time The Stars and Stripes was part of the free
press. Eventually the soldiers who published it lost their fight
against martial law and the paper became pretty much of a mili-
tary house organ. But that happened only long after S&S had spun
its pin-wheeled way into the hearts of the doughboys and had
established itself as the complex, unreasonable creation about
which it is so difficult to tell.

It's probably best and easiest to start with the editorial rooms,
which the officer in charge, whichever colonel or major he might
be, entered only rarely, and then by arrangement.

CONTENTS

WHY, A PREFACE vii

CITY ROOM 3

COUNTRY WEEKLY 18

PLACES OF BUSINESS 24

COMBAT 34

CHARACTERS 79

THE BRASS 1 1 1

SOLDIERS FIRST 13

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 1 5 2

SECRETS 167

PUBLIC RELATIONS 187

PUBLIC SERVICE 215

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES 223

THIRTY 237

THE STORY OF
THE STARS AND STRIPES

CITY ROOM

if ou WALKED into a room which for one arrested
moment was like any other newspaper editorial office in the
world. Then you began to see it.

Two men sat on opposite sides of a blocky double desk, bent
over typewritten sheets, and in the glare of green-shaded lights,
moved pencils through written words. At a desk shoved close to*
them a third man hammered a typewriter as if he hated it. A
bonfire of wadded newspapers burned briskly beneath his chair.

As you watched, he erupted to his feet, kicked over the chair
and glared through thick-lensed glasses and a bang of stringy
black hair at the other men in the office until the paper burned
out. He sat down, turning to kick the charred paper away, and
one of the men at the big city desk said:

"Fleming, you're fidgety/'

Against a window on the far side of the room, from whose
unwashed panes the bleak light of a courtyard seemed to have
turned away in despair, a round-faced man sat behind a desk
which bore a sign: "Combat Censor." While the fire burned, he
played an invisible violin with an invisible bow, and when Flem-
ing was bawled out for being fidgety, he smirked assent and
waggled a censorious finger.

To the right of the censor, a reporter still in the flying jacket
he had worn to Wilhelmshaven with the bombers that morning
searched for words he couldn't find on the keyboard of his type-
writer.

Beyond him, beneath the dusty shelves of a bookcase that
held no books, a square-faced kid talked into a telephone, took
notes when he listened. In the center of the room, between you

3

4 THE STORY OP THE'STARS AND STRIPES

and the city desk, a lean, young individual bent his blond head
over the photograph of a Hollywood bathing girl, sneered at her
curves and turned to another one. Beside him, a man in a black
coat, brief case under arm in the salesman's unmistakable pose,
leaned forward and said, "But, Mr. Price . . ."

The individual looking at the photographs sneered at an-
other one and spoke from the side of his mouth: "The Associated
Press* idea of cheesecake is an enKy for the old ladies' home!"

To your left, on a desk in front of a pigeonholed wall, a
man poked through the contents of a photographer's bag with
one hand and with the other spread shaving cream on his face in
ruminative strokes.

In the corner beyond the photographer, a chunky individual
sprawled on the floor, belly down, and peered appraisingly down
the sights of a German M-42 machine gun from whose sides a belt
of cartridges gleamed evilly.

There were half a dozen other men in the room. They were
prosaically using typewriters to turn out stories which the next
morning would be The Stars and Stripes. One of them wore his
jacket, and as you looked at him you realized that everyone in
the room wore khaki.

Maybe that was the strangest thing about The Stars and
Stripes: the people who published it wore uniforms, and they were
soldiers. Maybe that was even stranger than that the staff was only
partially affected by being soldiers, or even that the army itself
didn't always remember the staffers were soldiers. (Actually, the
army managed to remember whenever it really wanted to.)

There were the usual desks and chairs, and the conventional
mass of desk for the copyreaders. There were typewriters, even if
some of them sometimes had Germanic script characters, or
Arabic, or French, and there was the typewriter noise. Most of all
there was the smell of a newspaper office, which superficial people
or people too lazy to search have described as the smell of printer's
ink, but which is much too complex for that. It is a smell of a
little ink, but also of old paper, and sweat and dust, of tobacco
smoke cured into the wood and walls, of rain-wet clothes which
have dried where they hung, and of an old pair of overshoes.

There were the usual things of a newspaper office, but you
kept seeing that machine gun, and the khaki uniforms, and after
you looked awhile you saw a coat hanger in a corner, but there

CITY BOOM 5

were two steel helmets on it along with an old straw hat with a
blue band.

You looked at the walls, and they were crazy with circus-size
enlargements of shapely bathing queens, with black newspaper
headlines which told of news gone by and some that never hap-
pened and never went out of the office with the glass-studded
remains of a thrown glue pot, with last year's calendar, with a
photograph of Elm Street, in Dubuque, with new and old type-
written notices from colonels that this would be printed, or
would not be printed, depending on which colonel signed it.

A soldier with the green and gold patch of The Stars and
Stripes came past you in the doorway and said to the desk, "I've
got a piece on the Special Services educational program," and be-
hind him came another man with the same patch, whose tanned
face was long unshaven and in whose eyes there was a certain
tiredness you never saw in the other kind of newspaper, and he
said in a bitterly weary tone, "Goddam jeep shot right to hell out
from under me. How much do you want on this river crossing
story? Those guys rate; a lot of 'em never got over."

That was the city room, heart and core, of The Stafs and
Stripes, the daily newspaper of the American soldier overseas.

England, France, Africa, the Pacific, Italy, Belgium, Ger-
many it was the same. The dimensions of the room, the lights,
the typewriters, the faces and names of the individuals those
things might change, but they were only superficial, they didn't
matter; the atmosphere was identical. It was a newspaper edi-
torial office, and it was army, and it was a madhouse.

The Stars and Stripes, from the day it began publication as
an eight-page weekly in London, was mad, unreasonable, implaus-
ible of behavior in the midst of an army's orderliness, a refuge for
eccentrics.

But at the same time it was a well-written, well-edited, color-
ful, accurate, professional newspaper with (whether or no you
wanted to admit it) higher editorial and moral standards than a
great many civilian papers.

It was, on the authority of the army's high command, "the
most important single factor" affecting the morale of the men who
smashed and conquered Axis Europe.

Reporters wrote stories while other reporters built fires
under them, but the paper went to press on time and in the morn-

6 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

ing did its job of making the American soldier abroad the best
informed soldier in the world.

Some of its staff didn't know an "about-face" from a "parade
rest/' but those same individuals jumped with the paratroops, in-
vaded with the Rangers, were gunners with the bombers, and
came back to write of what other men had done. The only com-
pulsion that sent them to do those things was their own.

Just as the city room was the heart of the hub of the paper,
iso the city desk was the nerve center of the editorial rooms them-
selves. The man on the city desk ran The Stars and Stripes, and as
a sergeant or corporal or whatever he happened to be at the time
probably wielded more immediate influence over the welfare and
morale of the four million American citizens fighting in Europe
than any general except Eisenhower. A lot of generals didn't like
to believe that, but the privates in their commands could have
told them it was so.

It was around two city desk men that The Stars and Stripes
first was set up in London as a daily: Bob Moora, former New
York Herald-Tribune desk man, who handled all the wire copy
which poured into the first city room in London over the wires of
British and American news agencies, and Bud Hutton, one-time
Scripps-Howard city editor and transferee from the Canadian
Army where he had been a battle photographer.

The quiet, courteous Moora and the vitriolic, nervous Hut-
ton set down the principles of the first daily paper which were
to guide it and all subsequent editions even when the army said
otherwise across the war. They established the format by which
what happened to a soldier or a group of soldiers on any given
morning was translated into a news story by a soldier-reporter in
the afternoon, condensed and shaped by copyreaders in the eve-
ning, and appeared in the soldier's newspaper the next breakfast-
time.

The authors of this book first met in typical SbS fashion and
under circumstances which should serve to tell of life on The
Stars and, Stripes city desk.

Rooney, battery clerk in a field artillery outfit which boasted
huge 155-millimeter howitzers, each morning filled out field re-
ports: "On hand, 12 cannons; 1,042 bullets." The howitzer men
didn't like having their big guns referred to as cannons, liked
less their ammunition called bullets, so when a request for news-

CITY ROOM 7

papermen came through channels, Andy was shipped off to The
Stars and Stripes at his own request and with the artillery's bless-
ing. En route, he fell in with Dick Koenig, a private answering an
SfrS call for photographers.

Koenig, a mild, unpushing sort of fellow, had worked in
commercial studios but he wasn't too sure about his ability as a
news photographer. Gradually he confessed this feeling to Rooney,
who with no reluctance whatsoever admitted to Dick that he had
worked on a college newspaper at Colgate and thereafter had put
in four or five days as a copy boy on the Albany (New York)
Knickerbocker News.

They came together to the Times of London building which
housed The Stars and Stripes in England, stumbled their way
through the twisting dark corridors, and arrived outside the city
room door just as a pastepot splattered violently against it. A fig-
ure fled wildly from the room and from inside snarled a voice:

"And don't come back here, you illiterate baboon, until
you've got it right!"

Andy peered around the corner of the door. A tall, hard-faced
individual with a sneer just below a black mustache was standing
at the huge city desk, tugging at his hair. Rooney turned to
Koenig, fishing in his pocket for a coin.

"I'll flip you, Koenig/' he said. "Heads, I'm the photographer
and you're the reporter. Tails, the other way around."

They flipped and entered to find that the individual with the
mustache and the sneer was the city editor, and that it was for
him and Bob Moora, who sat quiet and unperturbed across the
desk, that they were now working.

Koenig worried about it, but Rooney today swears he just
looked around the room and saw a dozen marks on the walls which
were unmistakable remains of violently hurled pastepots and fig-
ured the thing was commonplace so he might as well stay and have
fun.

Koenig became one of the paper's photographers and took
scores of pictures of the army preparing for the invasion of the
Continent. He also took one picture of Fortresses flying ahead of
their vapor trails, which was reprinted throughout the world. But
his fame and his claim to a place among The Stars and Stripes
people came from a picture he not only did not make but for
which he didn't even unsling his camera.

S THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STKIPES

At impressive Armistice Day ceremonies in London, British
and Americans joined in a huge parade. Koenig was assigned to
get pictures. Four hours later, while the desk fretted and Benny
Price swore his photo department couldn't make the job at that
late hour, Koenig stumbled wearily into the city room. Benny
grabbed at his camera and film holders while Moora demanded
angrily where the hell he had been.

"I was trying to get pictures. Awful crowd," Dick sighed.

"They better be good," snarled Price as he headed for the
door. Benny stopped cold, however, when Dick replied:

"There aren't any pictures. I got caught in the crowd and
there were so many people I couldn't get my camera out."

Even the patient Moora exploded.

Moora and Hutton made a team as "the Desk." Charlie
AVhite, who started The Stars and Stripes life to which he inevit-
ably referred with a sigh as "my punishment" as a rewrite man,
tried hard for a month to work directly under them and then
begged for a job that would move him from that third desk shoved
close against the two larger ones.

"Monday, one of those two guys chews my behind," Charlie
pleaded. "Next day he shuts up and the second one starts. Next
day the second one's fit to live with but the other one isn't again.
And I want out, because, by God, yesterday they both hit me at
once and to hell with it."

Moora was a normally quiet, solid type of newspaper desk-
man. He knew his business, thoroughly, from one end of the edi-
torial office to the other and knew engraving and composition as
well. In addition, as long as the two were together on the desk,
Bob was a patient man, poised and deliberate, and where Hutton
rasped the skin off the staff's collective back, Moora caught them
licking their wounds with calm and effective suggestions for cor-
rection of the things which had brought about the skinning. Thin,
32-year-old Moora was a staff sergeant when he and Hutton, a
corporal, set up The Stars and Stripes daily. Eventually the staff
decided Moora ought to have a commission because we needed
someone in the shop to compromise with the army when the army
demanded that something should be signed only by an officer.

The greatest compliment ever paid him, Bob held a year or

CITY BOOM 9

so after he had been commissioned, came the day an exasperated
colonel said:

"Moora, you're no officer. You're just a Joe with an officer's
uniform."

Hutton, on the other hand, remained to the end an e,n-
listed man, although, as with virtually every man on the staff,
he was offered commissions. A nervous, tough Scotch-Irishman,
who could do any job on the paper as well as anyone available aad
then told you how well he did it, the city editor became a master
sergeant. The staff said that was perfect, in view of the tradi-
tionally malevolent character attributed to master sergeants in
any army.

The staff felt Desk was a good team, although it was kind
of like working for a firm composed of Simon Legree and the
Great White Father, which was apt to be confusing.

It was with the support and demand of the staff that the
paper got off to a policy: "No matter who was sitting there, the
paper was put through 'the Desk/ and nothing went except
through 'the Desk.' "

It was simply sound, professional doctrine, but it worked out
well in helping to keep the paper as long as possible in the format
originally laid out by General Marshall in prescribing that The
Star and Stripes should be published by the soldiers with "a mini-
mum of official control" beyond broad policy and security. There
were a lot of people who sat in positions of authority in the
United States forces overseas and swore great oaths when they ran
up against the policy of "clear it with the Desk."

Harry Harchar had the toughest time. Harry was a major,
and executive to Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn, the titular pub-
lisher, but he admitted he knew little about the editorial end of
the newspaper business. Nonetheless, from time to time it was felt
necessary for him to exert some influence "down at the Times/'
as the business and administrative offices referred to the editorial
department. (The editorial department had seen to it from the
beginning that the administrative offices were somewhere else,
some four miles across London, as a matter of fact.)

Thus, Harchar came to the Times, sat around the office for a
while whistling and reading advance proofs of the comics.
Whistling, as singing, was verboten in the city room. Make any
noise you want to working or getting mad, was the rule (the

10 THE STORT OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

"getting mad" part was to cover the Desk) but no noises not con-
nected with the business.

At Harchar's first whistle, one staffer or another would stare
hard. Eventually Harchar would feel the stare sometimes he f d
try for five minutes not to and look up, appear suprised and stop.
In a few minutes he started again, and this time Moora would
turn slowly, clear his throat overnoisily. That usually worked. If
Harchar forgot and resumed, Hutiion and Moora together cleared
their throats and stared. At that, Harchar would convey the mes-
sage he had for the editorial department. Usually it was, "Inspec-
tion tomorrow/' or in that vein. Sometimes, however, it was that
a certain story had to be published because Special Services had
demanded it.

As soon as it became obvious that the request or order from
on high was to deal with editorial matters, the Desk would begin
to burn, visibly and audibly, snarling epithets about "brass-bound
bastards trying to foul up the soldiers 1 newspaper." (The staff
could get very pious and righteous about "the soldiers' news-
paper.") Moora would begin patiently, "Now, major, I think
that's all right for some camp newspaper, but not here."

"It's an order from the High Command!" Harchar would
claim, but his heart wasn't in it and he knew damned well it
wasn't an order.from the High Command and if it had been, and
Tvas that kind of order, he knew very well the sergeants and the
corporals probably would say to hell with it anyway.

The major turned, each time, and walked out of the editorial
rooms, and that was that until the next one.

The weekly Stars and Stripes and the first daily were printed
in London. From there a task force of soldier-reporters went to
Africa and set up The Stars and Stripes at Casablanca and Algiers.
IVhat then became the North African branch of the SA-S went on
to Sicily and Italy, and eventually wound up in Rome. Mean-
while the progenerator of World War II's daily established an
offspring in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the vast pool of Amer-
ican manpower there awaiting the invasion of Europe. When the
invasion came, the paper was published in Cherbourg, in Rennes
at the base of the Brittany peninsula, in Paris, and in Liege, Bel-
gium. When the southern portion was cleared by the Allied in-
vasion there on August 14, 1944^ editions were set up in Marseille
and Nice, and from there subsequent editions worked their way

CITY ROOM 11

northeastward with the advancing armies to Besan^on, Dijon, and
Strasbourg on the Rhine. After the Allied crossing of the Rhine,
in March, 1945, the Lige edition was too far behind the troops
to service them and so was the one at Strasbourg. The staffers
moved the editions designed for front-line troops to Pungstadt, a
suburb of Frankfurt which had been by-passed by the war, and
to Altedorf, farther east and south, so that today's paper would
reach the doughs today.

Sometimes the paper lurched its way to press through falling
bombs, enemy gunfire, or robot bombs; sometimes it limped to
the press on crutches hastily extemporized by the staff after a flat
army order had kicked the legs from under a story; every once in
a while it went to press with no interruptions, no typographical
errors, no complaints from the army, and just about every one
of those times it was a. lousy paper.

The procedure was roughly similar in each edition. . . .

Somewhere along the firing line American doughboys moved
to the attack in early-morning darkness. With them was a Stars
and Stripes reporter and, whenever we had one, a photographer.
The reporter got what he could on the line, then usually stopped
back at divisional headquarters where the over-all picture was a
good deal clearer and where the perspective wasn't quite so nar-
row from the sniped-at shelter of an old barn or maybe a stone
fence.

Writing a story at the divisional headquarters, the reporter
handed it to a courier in a jeep who started for the nearest Stars
and Stripes office, anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles away
depending upon the sector involved. If the distance was longer,
the reporter was apt to take his story back to a corps, or army head-
quarters where it could be censored for security and then
telephone to the editorial office, where the rewrite man recorded
it with headphones and typewriter.

Simultaneously from the army headquarters and from Gen-
eral Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters, other Stars and Stripes
reporters gathered the over-all picture of the day's news, of which
possibly the divisional attack was the highlight, and sent by courier
or telephone to the city room their stories of it.

"Hello, Desk? This is Russ Jones. Here's the First Army pic-
ture . . . Yeah, the Second Division is spearheading. Hodenfield is

12 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

with them and his story ought to be in pretty soon . . . It's all cen-
sored . . . Dictate it to Larsen? . . . Any mail for me? Okay, Carl.
First Army Headquarters . . /'

"Okay, so you're an MP. So I was drivin' too fast in the black-
cut. Lissen, Mac, I gotta get this story in to Stars and Stripes . . .
My name's Blackov, and I'm a courier ... So press priority doesn't
mean anything. You want your goddam paper in the morning,
don't yuh? . . . Okay, thanks . . . Every son of a bitch in the Ger-
man Army shoo tin' 88s at this lousy jeep and I get back here a hun-
dred miles from the war and some MP says did I know it isn't safe
drivin' fast in the blackout? . . ."

"Hey, Carl? Take Russ Jones on 23, will you? He's got the
First Army story . . . Charlie, Hoden field's story come in yet? . . .
As soon as it does, take that stuff of Jones's, put it with Hoden-
field's and wrap 'em up together for the lead, will you? . . . Here's
the AP and UP copy if you want to look at it. Same thing."

Across the war-battered city of Lige, from which the smoke
of bombed and gutted buildings has never ceased to rise for two
long months of the winter war, sounds a far-off drone, like a big
truck speeding down a distant highway on a quiet night.

The drone grows louder, and here and there around the city
room of The Stars and Stripes a jaw muscle tightens and one or
two men look toward the windows. The drone becomes a thunder-
ous roar, swelling in volume until you can feel the desk shake a
little beneath your moist palms. A rewrite man steps quickly to
the window, peers carefully past the edge of blackout curtain.
Straight over the requisitioned newspaper building which houses
the army's paper comes a German robot bomb. The Germans have
been sending them by the dozens in a steady stream to try and
paralyze Lige, supply center of the lines resisting von Rundstedt's
desperate winter offensive.

Just as the roar of the bomb seems to enter the very room,
it terminates abruptly in a terrible silence. The staffers dive be-
neath desks, and all over the area everyone who isn't in a shelter
is doing more or less the same thing. The buzz bomb's jet engine
has cut out and it is diving earthward. A shattering roar which
seems to amplify itself in waves of sound shakes the building, and
through a slit at the side of the blackout curtain you see an ugly
red glow drive away the darkness, surge, then dwindle to the

CITY ROOM 18

flickering red of a buzz-bomb fire. A block away men and women
are dead and others are dying, and even as the rescue trucks race
through the debris-strewn streets, another distant buzz bomb
begins its horribly impersonal drone over the city.

"One of those bastards is going to hit this place yet . . . wish
we'd published in the basement instead of the top floor."

"Okay, Russ, I can hear you again . . . No, a block away . . .
Okay, 'push two and a half miles . . .' "

Downstairs a corporal-sports editor named Charnik takes a
look at the page form of type whose inverted letters are carrying to
the soldiers news of the sports world back home. There isn't much
sports news from the soldiers themselves these days. The soldiers
have another job.

In a little cubicle adjoining the city room, The Stars and
Stripes' own teletype system clatters off an editorial from the main
office in Paris and a query as to whether Liege has heard from
Ernie Leiser, combat correspondent with the Ninth U. S. Army,
who went off to cover a river crossing two days ago and hasn't been
heard from since. The query finished, the teletype montonously
pounds out a staff story from the Seventh Army front which the
paper published in Strasbourg has teletyped to Paris for relay to
the other papers.

'7 wish Kenny Zumwalt would stop going up to the lines on
his day off. Hell of a way for a copyreader to spend his day off. He
goes up there and gets wound up in some scrap and can't get back
to the office in time the next day, and then he thinks he ain't
gonna get chewed out because he was up seeing what war was like
so he can handle the stories more intelligently he says. He'll find
out someday . . . from a German 88. . . ."

"Brownie, you got that air story done yet? Well, let's see it
and then go downstairs to the composing room and see if you can
help Charnik get sports and the editorial page off the forms. We're
getting a little late. . . ."

Under the green-shaded lights around the 'copy desk, tobacco
smoke swirls thick, eddying every time a buzz bomb lands near
and the staff dives for doubtful shelter beneath desks. Between ex-

14 THE STORY OP THE STABS AND STRIPES

plosions the copyreaders' pencils race through typewritten ver-
sions of what has happened in the world today, and what the
doughboys are doing and how, and what Congressman Zilch said,
who had triplets in Keokuk, Iowa, MacArthur's communique, how
many miles (the doughboys' favorite reading) the Russians gained
up to last night.

As the hands of the clock on the wall spread out toward ten,
the noise of the typewriters comes faster and stops completely only
for the closest of the buzz bombs. A Belgian youth, who knows
eleven words of English all of which end with goddam, and whose
expression has never lost the one it acquired the first day he was
hired, shuttles between the desk and the composing room bearing
copy for the machines below.

One telephone or another almost continually is ringing.
Sometimes it is the faint, tentative jangle of an army telephone,
routed through an army switchboard, bringing the voice of a sol-
dier-reporter in the field. More frequently it is the brash clanging
typical of the Belgian telephone which never again will be the
same after the language that has gone into it these past months.

From the Ninth Air Force comes a story of the day's fighter
and medium bomber attacks, because the Liege edition services
the Ninth Air Force and that news must be in the gunners' and
pilots' paper before they go out to fly again tomorrow morning.
From Communications Zone headquarters another staffer calls
with maybe a story on how many tons of shells and fuel the GI
truckers have wrestled over icy roads and through drifting snow
to the line troops who are halting the German push. Over the tele-
type now comes a story of the heavy Flying Fortress bombers based
in England, which the London edition has sent out as its con-
tribution to the mutual news service.

The pencils race through the written words. The typewriters
chatter. The voices blur into the telephone mouthpieces.

"There goes that goddam teletype. Busted again. Crandall,
call Paris and get the rest of this last story over the phone. That's
all we need to lock up. Tm going downstairs to the composing
room . . "

A buzz bomb lands close enough to crack the windowpanes.

CITY ROOM 15

"If that Nazi bastard cuts the power lines tonight and makes
us late to press, III . . . I'll . . ."

"You'll leave his name out of the paper, huh?"

"Okay, Charlie, you sit in while I'm downstairs. And, oh yeah,
when Crandall gets Paris, tell them to get some newsprint to us
somehow . . . we got two days' left . . /'

"Tell 'em for chrissakes to send )2-inch rolls . . . the last six
truckloads were toilet paper . . ."

In the composing room, Belgian linotypers who, before The
.Stars and Stripes came to their battered city, probably hadn't read
ten words of English in their lives, turned the typewritten Ameri-
can language into more or less reasonable facsimiles in lead. If
they thought the letters "GI" stood for "GONE," and didn't know
what either meant, or if they saw nothing wrong in hyphenating
the word "this" when they came to the end of the line so that
pne line ended in "th" and the next line began "is" there wasn't
much you could do about it. They punched out the type and it
went to the forms.

Carl Larsen or maybe Charlie Kiley or Bill Spear searched
his memory as the type arrived at the form, said "ici" and pointed
graphically to the type and then to the hole in the page where it
should go. Somehow the Belgian understood, even when Carl, or
whoever it was, varied the routine and said "voici" instead of "ici."

(We had our troubles with foreign languages. Sometimes we
found among our civilian help someone who spoke English.
Eventually the staffers learned a little of whatever language was
necessary, depending upon the locale, and the civilian help learned
a little English. In Paris, staffers figured they'd found a gem in a
civilian courier who ran uncensored war dispatches from the edi-
torial office to the office of the chief press censor at the Hotel
Scribe. He spoke English flawlessly, although with a slightly
clipped and faintly guttural accent.

(For two months the efficient, English-speaking courier car-
ried uncensored stories in which frequently there were phrases or
items of more or less militarily secret nature, to and from the cen-
sor's office.

(There was considerable shock when Lieutenant Colonel
Llewellyn, who had employed the civilian courier and had beamed
with satisfaction over his "discovery," was informed one afternoon

16 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

by the Criminal Investigation Corps of the army that the courier
would not report for work that evening. He was in prison. The
courier was a German army captain who had stayed behind when
the Wehrmacht left Paris.)

So the paper went to press, which in Lige meant going to
a sleek, streamlined press made in Germany and used throughout
the occupation by German forces holding Belgium. Circulation
men took the paper as it slid off the rollers, bundled it into jeeps
and trucks, and took off in the early-morning darkness toward the
flickering red of gun blasts in the eastern sky. In the city room,
the noise of the typewriters died away, someone brought in coffee
and sandwiches, four copyreaders started a poker game and in-
vited the censor to play. The Belgian copy boy went home. At the
city desk an argument began over the relative merits of living in
Albuquerque or in Racine, Wisconsin. In the sports department a
reporter who had watched Marlene Dietrich putting on a show
for combat troops just behind the lines the day before resumed
his argument about legs with the sports editor, who once had din-
ner at a table next to Betty Grable. The buzz bombs droned on.

There were other men and other offices to The Stars and
Stripes. There were a corporal, Ralph Noel, and a sergeant, Bill
Gibson, who kept books on three million dollars; there was Ser-
geant Jake Riller, who ruled perhaps the biggest circulation area
in the world and whose men worked literally day and night that
the Joes in the lines might have their papers. But their offices were
for business, and were pale with reality; they were full of the neat,
orderly sounds of adding machines and coins. People sat at desks
in them.

Even in those Stars and Stripes editions which had modern
buildings, as at Lige or Paris, the editorial rooms somehow were
disreputable and dilapidated. It might have been that the first
editorial home, in London, was ramshackle and old and lent an
aura to all succeeding establishments, or it might have been simply
that The Stars and Stripes people were the kind of people who
made nice gleaming places well worn upon entrance and brought
with them an unpressed atmosphere. Not that it made much dif-
ference.

Bleak London fog or Irish rain, African heat or Normandy
mud, West Front snow or lilac spring in Germany, The Stars and
Stripes always was so far above or below, depending on where

CITY ROOM 17

you stood its surroundings that the surroundings never made
much difference. We moved with the war, and tried to publish as
we moved, and when we had run out of Old English letters, and
French, and Arabic, and were using Germanic script, we started
wondering about how the masthead would look in Chinese or Jap-
anese characters.

But that was afterward. It all started very simply.

COUNTRY WEEKLY

FRANCIS MCDONNELL, an easygong,

good-looking kid from Minneapolis who left an administrative job
with a midwestern packing house to be a private in the 34th In-
fantry Division, stared at the sign on the door.

McDonnell was a little puzzled, because he had gone to one
office in the big stone and brick building at 20 Grosvenor Square,
in London, and a soldier in that office told him The Stars and
Stripes had moved out of it two hours before and were on the next
floor. That was where Mac stood now, and stared at the sign so
swiftly applied. He shrugged and opened the door. From the win-
dow side of an ornate mahogany desk, Major Ensley Llewellyn
lifted his thin, high-cheekboned face, peered a moment, waved
bony fingers toward a chair. His voice scratched:

"Helloooo. Sit down. What can we do for you?"

Mac tried to salute and sit down simultaneously, and just
barely made the chair. The major slapped both palms on the edge
of his desk, leaned forward and looked hard at McDonnell.

"Why, uh, I'm McDonnell, from the Northern Ireland office,
major. When you inspected us last week you told me to come over
to London today."

"McDonnell!" The major's voice crescendoed, his eyes dilated
and there was as much of a smile as he ever managed on his lips.
"Glad you're here. Got a job for you." He stood up and began to
pace the room, swinging his thin frame as he pounded one hand
in the other palm.

"McDonnell, you're just the man to take over our circulation
here. Just the man."

18

COUNTRY WEEKLY 19

"But, major, I was business manager over in Ireland. I "

"Oh, yes. Yes. Thinking of someone else. Fellow with an Irish
name or Scotch, Mac . . . Mac . . . Oh, yes. Well, take over our
business office. That's what you're here for, McDonnell. We'll
keep sending the papers to Ireland, but the big stuff's going to be
here. Someday we're going to invade Europe from England, Mc-
Donnell, can't tell you when, of course; secret. But someday, and
right now, The Stars and Stripes has to start organizing its business
office. Brought you from Ireland to get things straightened out.

"Look around and tell me what you think, Mac. Change
what has to be changed. Yes, sir, look around."

The major went back to his desk, on which the calendar said
June 20, 1942, and which was to be moved to a dozen offices be-
fore that invasion materialized. The major started to write, looked
up and saw Mac still sitting there. He didn't see the dazed look
in Mac's eyes.

"Okay. Let's go."

Private McDonnell left the office as bewildered as all the long
succession of Stars and Stripes executives would be for as long as
there was a Stars and Stripes, anywhere. When he had sat shaking
his head and rubbing suddenly fierce fingers through his hair in
spasmodic gestures for ten minutes, he went to work resignedly.

He looked at the filing system, which for the first eight issues
of the weekly Stars and Stripes had been ample; but now the cir-
culation was climbing past ten thousand copies, and Mac knew
the filing system had to be something better than a large drawer in
a cabinet in Grosvenor Square, London.

He went back to the major's office and said, tentatively,
"About this filing system, major. I might as well begin . . ."

"Good boy, McDonnell. Don't think so either. Good. Change
it."

Mac left. That afternoon he installed files.

The following morning, McDonnell went back to the major.
The method of collecting subscriptions by the year from soldiers
whose bases would change constantly was bad.

"Good, McDonnell. Fine. Change it."

Now, the answers to those two problems, other people on the
four-man business staff which started The Stars and Stripes heard
for themselves. The answers the efficient McDonnell, who re-
mained a private for a year and a half while he managed what be-

20 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

came one of the largest newspaper businesses in the world, got to
his next two questions to Major Llewellyn were heard only by
Mac and G. K. Hodenfield, one of the paper's first two reporters,
who happened to be there that afternoon. Both of them swear it's
the truth.

Back a third time to the major's office went McDonnell.

"Major, the way we handle our records with the army is going
to get muddled someday. Let's "

"Good boy, Mac. Dandy. Know just, what you mean. Go
ahead, change it, Mac, change it."

Mac went out. It was beginning to lick him. Certainly Major
Llewellyn was busy with the daily growing detail of starting a
newspaper within the confines of an army. But surely there must
be some point at which Private McDonnell (he capitalized the
"private" in his mind) would get a "No." Or maybe at least a
chance to say . . . Mac sighed. He went back to work for a couple
of hours.

He worried about circulation. The Stars and Stripes delivered
its paper each week to the United States forces in Northern Ire-
land via army airplane to Belfast, thence by jeep to the divisional
training areas. That was all well and good in fine weather, troops
got their papers every Saturday. But Mac was worrying about the
traditionally bad English weather: what about when planes were
grounded and bundles of papers lay at an airfield waiting for clear
skies to Northern Ireland? The thing was unsound, and Mac was
worrying too much about it to fix the way S&S records should be
handled or much of anything else.

Twice he started, changed his mind, but finally he shoved out
of his chair and strode through the major's doorway.

(Now, McDonnell swears this happened, and Hodenfield, who
was in the office at the time, swears it happened, and all there is
to do is tell it, adding the parenthetical protestations of truth
which are spaced all through the story of The Stars and Stripes.)

"Major," began McDonnell, his brow creased in obvious
worry, "there's something I've been worrying about. Now, this
English weather "

Mac never finished.

"Fine, McDonnell. Fine. Know just what you mean. Fix it
up, Mac, fix it up!"

McDonnell's face blanked. His eyes, which had grown wide in

COUNTRY WEEKLY 21

two days, grew wider. He stepped back half a pace, half lifted his
hands as if to ward off a blow at which the major banged him off
a snappy salute turned and fled. The major swung calmly back
to Hodenfield.

And never as long as he knew the major did McDonnell's
countenance quite lose the surprise and shock it first acquired
when The Stars and Stripes was eight weeks young.

That was the way it started out. As a matter of fact, with
variations, that is the way it always was. The business office, itself,
was pretty sane, but in its connections with the office of whatever
major or colonel happened to be officer in charge of S&S you
always felt there was a sort of weirdness, the kind of liaison that
two double-jointed universal joints, never quite meeting, might
n;ake.

The weekly, bless it, somehow just grew, and in growing
fostered that haphazard, erratic air which always got The Stars and
Stripes wherever it was going. It was hand to mouth, and a flat-
bed press thumping away. It was a horse opera, with Don Quixote
riding off rapidly in all directions and someone paying the mort-
gage just as the heroine started into the buzz saw.

Mark Martin, a Des Moines newspaperman turned infantry
lieutenant, put out Vol. i, No. i of World War II's army news-
paper. With him there were Benny Price, who'd been a cub sports
reporter on the Des Moines Register and Tribune; Russ Jones,
a Minneapolis reporter and feature writer; Hodenfield, another
lowan who had worked for the United Press; McDonnell, and a
business office crew which included Einar Eeg, Hal Brauetigam,
who took pictures all week and distributed the paper on Saturdays,
Dean Hocking, who had to balance the meager income against the
major's desire to "buy automobiles," and George Petrakis, who be-
came probably the only first sergeant in the army to be sent to the
infantry when, three years later, the cry went up for manpower on
the firing line to halt the last Nazi offensive in Europe.

The paper was established under circumstances as vague as
those under which it ran. The newspaper business at home was
filled with rumors that Bertie McCormick, of the Chicago
Tribune, was trying to publish an overseas edition of his anti-
administration paper. About the same time according to what

22 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

spokesmen for the War Department have since said, and it's prob-
ably true the army realized that it was going to send a lot of
Americans to Europe who had been used to their own newspapers.
That realization coincided with the birth of an idea under the
balding pate of Ensley Llewellyn.

The Tacoma, Washington, advertising man had come to Eng-
land to be a press censor but when he began to espouse the project
of an American newspaper for American soldiers abroad, and cited
The Stars and Stripes of World War I, the idea fell on receptive
ears, which already had heard Bertie McCormick's strident de-
mands.

In that eerie sort of coincidence which marks the paper, Mark
Martin simultaneously was ordered to start a local paper for troops
in Northern Ireland. The plans were unified, Washington blessed,
and the flat-bed in the printing shop of Hazell, Watson & Viney
began to thump.

It wasn't a very good newspaper. It was a pretty good country
weekly, but in the first months of 1942 that was about the kind
of army we had in Europe, a sort of country weekly kind of army.

By early summer, however, the manpower and the war-
machine power were beginning to pile up, and the paper began to
acquire a staff to cover what the growing power looked like.
Although Mark Martin lost a lieutenant's argument with the
major and left the paper for the Rangers,' the paper thumped
along with a new man coming in every third or fourth day: Mark
Senigo, Bob Collins, Ralph Martin and a couple of fellows from
the Canadian Army who'd come over before the Yanks and got
tired of waiting for the Dieppe raid which then took place as soon
as they transferred . . .

The reporters and editors played blackjack on Monday, went
out in the field on Tuesday and Wednesday, wrote on Thursday,
set up and published the paper on Friday, and on Saturday and
Sunday they joined the circulation men in distributing The Stars
and Stripes to the soldiers and sailors who already had subscribed
to it, getting up in new mess hall tents across England and
beginning

"Fellows, I'm from The Stars and Stripes. Er. The newspaper
of the Armed Forces in the European Theater of Operations. Now
this paper ..."

That was about as far as it got. Someone mercifully hollered

COUNTRY WEEKLY 23

"How much?" and the staffers took down subscriptions for eight-
een shillings, and that included Yank, the army magazine. The
nascent American Army abroad wanted a newspaper, even a
country weekly.

All summer the flat-bed in Hazell, Watson & Viney's Soho
printing plant banged away. Soho is strictly Jack the Ripper
territory, but the Yank newspapermen felt at home; as a matter
of fact, they usually slept in their smelly little cubbyhole of an
office because by the time they got through playing cards or put-
ting out the paper it was too late for them to catch a bus back to
the billets in which the army wanted to keep them.

The first sergeant in charge of the barracks in which they
were supposed to sleep grew weary. Every time he tried to dis-
cipline a Stars and Stripes man for being out of his bunk at night,
the man produced, and with injured innocence, the completely
valid excuse that he had worked late "at the office." There was
no precedent for that in the army in which the first sergeant had
learned about soldiers, and finally he gave up:

"You guys don't bother me for nothing, and I don't bother
you," he offered. 'Til okay slips for your clothes and whatever
army stuff you need, but you feed yourselves and sleep yourselves
and stay to hell out of my hair.

"Working late at the office!"

He made a first sergeant's noise and The Stars and Stripes
staff continued sleeping in the office until the respective members
could find small apartments or furnished rooms or friends who
had either.

Maybe they were only putting out a country weekly, but the
staff of the old paper earned the gratitude of a long line of Stars
and Stripes men for the precedents they set: they confounded the
army by being willing to do more than ordered, they confused it
by being individuals, they goaded it into turning them loose to a
form of pasture.

The weekly set the basic format of dingy city room, suste-
nance unto one's self, and confusion to military precedent. It was
like that all the long way to Hitler's Germany and then the
Pacific.

PLACES OF BUSINESS

JL HE Times of London is an institution. From the
drab and motley cluster of brick and wooden buildings in the
dingy shadows of Queen Victoria Street, on the edge of London's
old city and just off the Thames, the Times does grammatically
as it considers right, and in so doing molds an important (THE
important, the Times is apt to feel and not without a lot of
justification) portion of British public opinion. The Times does
not hurry. Through its intricate, winding hallways linking the
buildings which have been expanded with empire and time,
Times editors walk with thoughtful mien, and they do it in fresh
linen, with neckties, and coats. Sometimes, they do it with morn-
ing trousers, even in rationed wartime. The editors and subeditors
are served tea in their offices at four on silver and china tea sets.

Maybe the Times is best summed up: its readers open their
paper first to the editorials.

When The Stars and Stripes became a daily, on November 2,
1942, it was at the Times, the first in a long line of journalistic
step-parents to the daily paper of the army.

When the Stars and Stripes staff first clattered through their
building, the sober editors of the Times looked up disapprovingly
from under their green eyeshades. Times reporters, busy writing
out their reports in longhand, lay down their pencils and pens as
the unconscious Americans hit the floor, where only toes previ-
ously had tread, with heavy GI heels, making more noise than
the building or any of its occupants had heard since the last nail
(or wooden peg) was hammered in place hundreds of years before.
There was a lot of walking to do to get where you were going at
the Times.

24

PLACES OF BUSINESS 25

The course from the street, near Blackfriars Bridge, to the
SfcS office in the Times led through hundreds of feet of narrow,
winding corridors, up and down flights of wooden steps and
around little corners.

Strangers groping their way to the office often felt like drop-
ping small bits of paper, Boy Scouts of America-like, so they would
be able to find their way out. The second night of the occupation of
the Times, Bob Moora and Russ Jones started out to find a short
cut from the editorial offices to the pressroom, some four floors
below, and eventually wound up in a black maze, literally unable
to retrace their steps. They stood there and hollered for help until
a small, gray Times employee came along and, completely un-
perturbed, led them back to the city room.

The labyrinth, which would have driven any intelligent
American laboratory guinea pig insane, was some protection,
thbugh, from the thousands of screwballs who tried to get up to
the office. Some of the Belgian bicyclists who wanted to insert ads
in the paper, the refugee Poles who wanted to find their cousins
from Scranton, and the soldier with the self-heating bedroll for
tired and cold soldiers got to know their ways to the editorial
rooms, but thousands more must have given up, discouraged. We
never found any parched skeletons, though, on the way out.

The Times got the Stars and Stripes daily printing job by
underbidding all the other London papers for the job. It was on
a reverse Lend-Lease basis, but they were doing it cheaply. It was
almost a gesture of goodwill to their American allies. "Sure we'll
print your little journal for American soldiers," they said in
effect. What they definitely did not understand was that within a
year and a half The Stars and Stripes would dwarf the Times'
own circulation and would be published by a high-powered staff
from whom "The Thunderer's" own editors frequently borrowed
.stories.

It probably was a merciful thing that the Times didn't
realize what was happening until it was too late to stop it. From
its venerable presses was coming an American tabloid newspaper,
comic strips, pin-up photos of semidressed femininity, black head-
lines on page one; six days a week, four pages a day except Monday
when there were eight and every one of them blatant by Times
.standards.

That first month of November, 1942, full of bold news for

26 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

bold American headlines, such as the invasion of North Africa,
gave the Times an idea of what it was going to be like. Before
December, every newspaper in Fleet Street was sending a mes-
senger boy to wait at the Times' pressroom, not for a copy of the
Thunderer, but for The Stars and Stripes. So, too, the American
news agencies. The British press picked up leads on stories, and
frequently stories intact, albeit injecting into them the unique
style of London journalism.

The Stars and Stripes was particularly proud of its roundup
on the day's bombing activities during that period of the war when
there was no fighting in Europe except that in the air; the paper
literally was an Air Force trade journal. As such it had to know
its business. The air story often ran for 1,500 words and included
a meticulous report of heavy and medium bomber missions, their
targets, and the background down to the number of tons that
target already had absorbed, fighter-bomber sorties, strafings, aerial
minelaying and just about everything else. The roundup was so
capably handled that most London papers and American news
bureaus there waited for it before writing their final stories of
the night, sometime along about 11:30 P.M.

The Times, from the first day of war, had begun its air story
with a simple introductory sentence and then had printed ver-
batim the RAF communique, later adding whatever the Ameri-
cans might have done. Its air editor finally got around not only to
the SbS treatment of the story, but one evening broke down
enough over a glass of mild-and-bitter to confess that he was
"finding actually more enjoyment these days in treating the sub-
ject in your ah American manner. With some reservations, of
course, some reservations."

The air war, then, accounted for the reproductions of diving
fighters, burning bombers and formations which covered part of
the walls of the Stars and Stripes office. The rest of the walls were
covered with a miscellany of items stuck up haphazardly with
paste. The pictures were predominantly "cheesecake," the trade
term of Sergeant Ben Price, the Des Moines picture editor, for
choice items from his stack of Hollywood girls more or less out
of bathing suits.

From the walls the Times could have and probably did
draw its own image of things to come after that first month. The
Times people were very obliging, but they first began to realize

PLACES OF BUSINESS 27

they were in for real trouble the day the switchboard operator
heard a voice from SW make a request.

"Would you please tell the department in charge of knocking
down walls that we would like to have the wall knocked down
between our two offices?" the voice asked.

The operator, not realizing how surprised she was for a
minute, said she would. Fifteen minutes or so later, two grayed
men in overalls came into the city room, crowbars, sledges, ham-
mers and saws over their shoulders. The Desk was a little taken
aback, but pointed, and they dutifully knocked down the wall
which time, the blitz and generations of Times men had left
.standing. That made the SfrS offices in the building into one large
room.

It was about thirty feet wide and twice as long. As you came
in at one of two doors the other was bolted shut and carried a
nostalgically huge poster of a dish of American ice cream there
was a small rectangular niche about five feet deep and six feet
wide at your left. There, for some reasons, the light switch had
been placed conveniently behind a desk and a heavy wooden
cabinet. On the far side of the room was the Desk.

The city editor, through whom came all stories other than
those from the news wires, sat on one side of the double desk.
With the aid of the five telephones in front of him he sent reporters
out to cover this largest local news beat in the world the whole
British Isles, the seas around them and the flak-filled sky all the
way to Berlin.

The news editor, who handled all the wire copy, the news
from home and the stories from other war fronts, sat across from
him. Six other desks of varying sizes and states of disrepair were
.scattered around the room.

On a small shelf, nailed to the wall between the two win-
dows, was the complete office library. There were eight books:
a Jane's Fighting Ships, a Webster's dictionary, a Tacoma, Wash-
ington, telephone book, a 1939 World Almanac, Jane's Aircraft
of the World, a French-English-German dictionary, an Official
Officers' Guide Book and a volume entitled The Fox of Peapack.
Over the library, for handy reference, someone had scribbled in
foot-high black crayon letters "IT'S ADOLF NOT ADOLPH."

Running up the middle of the city room was a pipelike affair
about six inches in diameter. It served as the office bulletin board

28 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

although structurally its function was to hold the wooden ceiling
off the wooden floor. Toward the top of the pipe, near the ceiling,
there was a wicker wastebasket, wired fast. Ben Price tied it to the
top of the pole one day when an order came down for all Stars
and Stripes men to get an hour's exercise every day.

Price and a couple of staffers used to drag out a new case of
pastepots every few days and get their exercise by tossing a few
of the glass "balls" through the (waste) basket.

The boys got the greater part of their exercise in climbing up
to retrieve the glass pastepot-balls until one day Charlie White
staggered into the shop and through the thick lenses of his glasses
turned red eyes on the basket. Charles was no athlete, but some-
how the pastepot he grabbed from Ham Whitman's desk sailed
truly through the air and into the basket. Charles was pleased,
but irritated.

"Hell of a basket," he grumbled. "It's got a bottom." He
climbed on a chair, jerked the basket down and kicked vigorously
at its bottom. The kick carried too far. As a matter of fact, it
carried Charlie's foot, ankle and knee on up into the basket,
and carried Charlie completely off his feet so that he wound up
threshing on the floor, the basket jammed up around his waist.
In the confusion he lost his glasses, and his myopic eyes spun
wildly as he kicked and wrestled with the basket.

At the height of Charles's battle with the wicker waste
basket, Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn walked into the office, and
where never in a sober moment would he have thought of salut-
ing, Charles suddenly was seized with a self-martyring urge to
stand up and salute. He did, and as he stood there, the basket still
around his leg, glasses lost, thin hair mussed, coat up around the
back of his neck, eyes glaring wildly, and his balance a precarious
thing, the character of Hubert, Dick Wingert's cartoon hero, was
born.

The thing had an aftermath. Because Charles had destroyed
the bottom of the basket, when it was replaced on the pipe, the
pastepots went right through, and, nonbouncing, splattered glue
and glass across the room each time the mob exercised.

This, presumably, was the army.

On the walls, finally, in addition to the cheesecake, there were
dozens of clippings, memos, pictures, and odds and ends of printed
material. There were weekly notices of inspections and various

PLACES OF BUSINESS 29

formations, which eventually, as they were disregarded, came to
have, you felt, a sort of pleading note in them. Sort of please,
fellows, come on up to inspection this week.

One of the staffers' favorite headlines pasted to the wall was:

YANKS GET
ABBEY FOR
GI CHAPEL

It came from the first Thanksgiving in England. For the tra-
ditional American services, the friendly Britons gave up their
most precious religious symbol, Westminster Abbey. It was a
good story; it was worth a top head on page one. That meant
thirty-point type, a size that simply doesn't permit the word
"Westminster" to be squeezed into one line. The resourceful
Desk solved it with their headline describing the venerable abbey
as about to become a GI chapel. It shocked a few chaplains, but
most of them understood there was no disrespect involved, and
there had been a neat job of head writing.

Just behind the desk was the favorite clipping of the city
editor. It served as text when anyone turned in a paragraph or
more of meaningless copy, and it had been clipped from the
November 25, 1941, issue of the very Times itself. It read (and
there were a couple of staffers who came to be able to recite it
by heart):

With a British Armoured Unit

LIBYA, Nov. 23

The battle of the tanks in Libya is still going on furi-
ously. At the time of writing the issue is still in the balance.
The Germans are fighting furiously to destroy the British
tank forces and to break through the ring. The British are
fighting with equal fury to prevent them. Both sides have
given and taken some very hard knocks. The tank battles are
an affair of sudden onslaughts in unexpected places. The bat-
tle is joined, broken and rejoined. Sometimes small groups
only are involved; other times, large groups . . .

It went on like that.

When the staff first moved into the offices there was just one
electric light in the middle of the room. The Desk wanted a low,
green-shaded light over each desk. The meticulous Times mainte-
nance men obliged with a network of wires and lights.

80 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Suspended from all sections of the ceiling and hanging at
ruled heights above the desks, the wires presented a maze too
intriguing to anyone who'd spent half an hour in the Lamb and
Lark, the pub across the street, before coming back to the office
late at night for extra work. You'd start one hanging light swing-
ing in great circles, then another and another and when enough
of them were wound around each other, the whole complex
structure would come down. Next day the maintenance men
would be upstairs, surveying the tangled mess, the chunks of
ceiling plaster, and the blown fuses. They would say sadly, "The
blast of those bombs is enough to shake down almost anything."

Which was all right and logical on nights when there was
an air raid. But sometimes the lights came down after a raid-free
night, and they said the same thing, and the staff finally decided
they were simply nice, understanding guys who maybe had
wanted to do the same thing in the staid Times all their lives
but hadn't dared.

At frequent intervals, we received a formal announcement
that "General Somebody" was coming down to the office to look
around. There could have been no more absurd place for a mili-
tary inspection; but one time the staff was told "for sure" that
Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, one of the army's most in-
specting generals, was to visit us. We were ordered to take down
the ridiculous display on the walls and clean up the office. Some
of the memos and pictures pasted on the walls were part of the
office, though, and taking them down was out of the question,
even for General Lee.

Ben Price walked over to Fleet Street. He visited half a dozen
little bookstores, buying road maps, maps of the canal system in
Afghanistan, terrain maps of the territory adjacent to Shanghai,
and weather maps showing general pressure areas between Iceland
and England. He came back and the staff went to work hanging
the maps from hooks or with thumbtacks on the walls.

With straight faces the staff explained to the officer in charge
that no one could kick about legitimate maps in any newspaper
office. General Lee, of course, like the others, never arrived. Most
of the maps came down, and the urgent memos, the cheesecake,
and the outdated headlines were visible again in all their dusty
yellow uselessness. The weather map of the North Atlantic

PLACES OF BUSINESS 31

stayed. Ben said we might need to know someday how the weather
was there.

The Times people never really got used to The Stars and
Stripes. They tried, and some of the compositors eventually be-
came as one with the staff. But mostly the Times just wondered.

In the first few days strange things happened in the compos-
ing rooms with compositors who never had worked for any paper
except the Times. There was, for example, the mysterious disap-
pearance of a particularly choice bit of cheesecake which had
been sent up to the engravers one night. Somehow the picture
and engraving disappeared completely, and there always has
been an argument as to whether some venerable Times worker
secretly slipped the picture of the seminude Hollywoodite into his
pocket to contemplate in some lonely place or whether the Times
man was a reforming purist who thought that in the best interests
of the soldiers of England's ally the photo should be destroyed.
If he simply wanted the picture for his own he was easily satis-
fied, because after that first week none ever disappeared again,
and if he was a reformer he quickly gave us up for lost.

That first week at the Times was something English type
compositors are going to talk about for a long time. On the sixth
night, one linotype operator was carried off screaming mad, and
he's in the booby hatch yet shouting about "the language of
Shakespeare." Another compositor, setting heads, saw unfilled
orders piling up and piling up and suddenly and stiffly fainted
dead away; but in general they became familiar with what the
editors wanted, and Jimmy Frost, the composing room foreman,
and Bill Jolley, a stone man, got to be so expert in the American
way of newspapering that they were worried about their postwar
return to the Times.

Just as the Times became a little proud of the army paper it
housed, so the army paper was proud of the Times. The staff
learned the Times folklore complete through constant contact
with the Thunderer's staff in the building this was after Times
editors decided we'd been there long enough for them to stop
bowing stiffly from the waist when we passed in the corridors
and in the Printing House Square pub, Alf Storey's Lamb and
Lark. There was a great store of Times stories, and probably the
one the S<2rS liked best was that of the man with the little black
bag.

82 tfHE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

When a new managing director was appointed by the Times
board of directors, he started a thorough check through the books
and offices of every branch of the organization. The new manager
noticed an obscure little man in an oversized overcoat and carry-
ing a little black satchel entering the building one Friday, and
made a mental note to find out who he was. The following Friday
he saw the little man again, and this time started asking who he
was. The old-timers admitted they had seen the little man for
years, but no one knew exactly who he was or what he did. He
came Friday nights, carrying his black satchel, and left Monday
mornings.

Over the weekend, the manager was checking some ledgers
and came upon a small but inexplicable item. He asked one of
the bookkeepers about it and was told the money went for meals
brought in Saturday and Sunday from a small restaurant around
the corner; the meals went to the little man who appeared each
Friday night at the office.

On the third weekend, the manager searched through the
dozens of little offices off the rabbit warren of corridors. Beyond
one door he found the little man, with a little lunch spread out
before him, his little black satchel at his side.

The little man was from the Bank of England. In the little
black satchel he had five thousand pounds in cash.

Back at the turn of the century, along about the time of the
Boer War, the Times wanted to send a man off to cover a big
story on the Continent in a rush assignment. He had to leave on
a Saturday afternoon, but there were no boats to the Continent
that day because of a storm. Charter a boat, ordered the editor.
The business office ruefully replied that there wasn't enough
money in the place, it had been sent to the bank in the morning.

To prevent that ever happening again, the Times had asked
that a representative of the Bank of England be on hand Friday
evenings and stay until Monday mornings with five thousand
pounds in cash.

Long afterward, when the Times had its own boats and had
fully-manned bureaus on the Continent, no one had bothered to
countermand the order, and the little man was still coming every
Friday evening.

Stately Times, whose subscribers will doubt the world's end
until they read it in your pages, institution of British dignity with

PLACES OF BUSINESS 83

morals like the collars of your directors, you were very kind; and
if you were an old gaffer, the people who came to, your house to
work were brats, and you were very indulgent. You nodded and
smiled when the people in Fleet Street got to calling your musty,
cobblestoned old courtyard "Stars and Stripes Square/' instead of
the Printing House name it had borne so long. You even asked
one of the brashest of the Americans to write book reviews for
that book review section which is the double-distilled synthesis of
Times conservatism and backed him up when he lampooned
stuffed shirts. You gathered up the pieces when they were broken
and you set the precedent for all the rest to come. As it was in
the beginning, so always was The Stars and Stripes, and so the
Times was home.

COMBAT

, OF COURSE, is the ultimate expression
of war. That's why you're there, to fight. And no matter how
difficult, tedious, exhausting any other job of war may be, it's the
combat man's task that is most difficult, if only for one reason:
his price for failure, or even just for bad luck, is death.

That was why The Stars and Stripes was written, edited, and
published first for the men in combat, and then for others. And
because the Stars and Stripes staff was putting out a paper pri-
marily for the fighting men, the staffers themselves went into
combat on land, at sea, and in the air.

Stars and Stripes reporters felt the necessity of seeing with
their own eyes, hearing with their own ears, and feeling with their
own viscera what happened to men who were killing and might
be killed. The staffers wanted to let the men know, as best they
could, that the soldiers' newspaper was really the soldiers' news-
paper. It was a moral urge, maybe a little intangible; but it was
more compelling than any other. (To be perfectly accurate, the
number of staffers who saw and were part of actual combat was
not great, chiefly because there was no need for a great number;
and there were plenty of deskmen whose jobs did not demand that
they go out with the fighting men, and there were plenty of
reporters who somehow or other managed to stay clear of the
places where men were being killed.)

But for those who went, there was a second, and more ob-
vious, reason getting stories. The stories were where the fighting
was. You could get them by waiting at an air base or at a division
command post in the ground war, but the best way, the most

34

COMBAT 85

certain and accurate way, was to get out there where whatever
was happening was happening and get back to tell about it.

Finally, there was a sort of personal issue involved. You
wanted to know what it was like, and you wanted to get the stories,
and you wanted the guys who were fighting to know their news-
paper was there some of the time anyway, and you also wanted
to be sure about yourself. You wanted to go there so that you
would have the answers, which you wouldn't write anyway, to
letters unknown soldiers might send to The Stars and Stripes
abusing the staff for sitting around the office.

But going out to where the gunfire and the dead were wasn't
all there was to combat, and the staff never forgot it:

London, July 18, 1944

U. S. LIVES PAY THE PRICE FOR "THE HILL"

It Had to be Taken, So Yanks Write Out the Check in Blood

By Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney

WITH u.s. FORCES IN NORMANDY To the division it was "Hill 192, a
heavily defended elevation commanding Saint-L6 from the east/' To
most newspaper readers it was "a Nazi strongpoint."

But to the dirty, unshaven Americans who peered up at its hedge-
bristled slope and knew what waited in the dark-green shadows where
the hedgerows met, it was always simply "The Hill."

In the morning the shadows on the hill ran down toward the
northern base, in the direction whence the doughboys had come
some score of days before. Then the hill frowned, lowering on their
new day, souring it even before the rain came, as the rain always did.
In the afternoon, the shadows slanted over to their left flank, and if
there was enough sun they could see it glint on the ripening cherries
of the square orchards which made up the hill. Evening and night
were worst; the hill was all black, a lump in the dark, and not even the
flash of artillery shells bursting on its brow could make it seem real
and part of the war.

The hill was squared with hedges, and the hedges were filled with
machine guns and mortars, with snipers and observers who called back
to the artillery and heavy mortars on the southern slope. Defending it
part of it is better were German soldiers in long green jackets
which fastened beneath the crotch, and helmets which fitted close and
had three straps about the backs of their heads. They were German
paratroops, fighting in the line elite soldiers, tough guys.

Overlooking the valley of the River Elle, commanding the lateral
east-west highway from Caumont to Saint-L6 and beyond, covering the

36 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

avenues of approach from the north, 192 meters above sea level (thus
its official name), fortified since D day, an observation point into
Saint-L6 and for miles every other way, held by a battalion and a com-
pany on the hill proper, gi/ battalions more on the lines forming its
east and west flanks. That was Hill 192 to the division and corps and
army.

It had to be taken before the advance could go on. On Monday
night, the men on the bottom northern slopes of the hill prayed hard.

It was 4 A.M. when the battalion and company commanders, the
platoon and squad leaders wakened those who had slept and led them
back with muffled footsteps and no words 200 yards from the lines they
had held so long. It was 0520 when the artillery began.

All across the Normandy sky the muzzles flared red, and their
noise rolled across the wet countryside. The 1055 and the 155 hows and
Long Toms and some eight-inch hows. They began it, and as the hands
of the clock crawled around to straight up and down, the 755 and the
three-inchers, the infantry cannon companies and all the mortars
joined. Their flashes grew paler against the early sky and the first ten
per cent of what would total nearly 25,000 rounds of ammunition
were on.

On the easy slope at the base of the hill, out of the orchards and
the shelter of the hedgerows, moved the first and second battalions of
the division's right-flank regiment and on the left flank, one battalion.
In their van went teams of men who had in the two weeks before
come out of the lines and trained and rehearsed this job until the
squad leaders knew by heart every step they would make, every bush
they would pass, on the way up the hill if they got up the Hill.

HERE ARE THE TEAMS

The teams were a rifle squad, a Sherman tank, four engineers who
knew demolition, and in reserve, one hedgerow behind all the way,
was another M-4 tank. Behind and around them came the infantry,
and the forward artillery observers. Behind them more infantry, and
the mortars, and after that the rest of the division but there was a lot
more space between the infantry and the others than the words tell.

The infantry-tank-engineers teams came to the first hedges. The
riflemen laid down a fire against the places which hid German
strength. The tanks fired their 758 and machine guns. The engineers
took explosives from a box on the tank's side, touched them off at the
roots of the three-foot thick, nine-foot high hedge and the tank went
through, grinding down dugouts that hid Nazi paratroopers, firing on
the next hedge row where there were more Germans and more ma-
chine guns.

COMBAT 37

That was the way it started. The artillery churned the hill, its-crest
and all the slopes and the reserve areas beyond. The shells killed.Ger-
mans and kept more Germans belowground. That could be planned
beforehand. The tank teams went in, the infantry moved up as the
barrage rolled ahead. The wire men came in and laid their wire.

STUFF ROARS OVERHEAD

Swoooshswoosh the big stuff went overhead, with a singing and
almost a rhythm, although you can't really write the sound, and at
0601 there was the first burping stutter of a German automatic pistol,
sharp and clean, like a nervous woodpecker. The enemy guns had been
waiting, and almost immediately on the line of the first khaki figures
slipping along the hedges they dropped heavy oil shells, which burst
with a pillar of orange flame and black smoke and threw blazing oil.
From far back, the 1055 and the 1555 turned to counterbattery, and
there were no more oil shells.

At 0631, Private Lester Robbins, 38-year-old man with a Red
Cross on his arm, led back the first casualty from A Company of the
left center, a man with shell fragments in his shoulder. In five hours
one of every twelve men would be a casualty of some sort, by the
day's end slightly more than one in ten.

Now the men of A, B and C companies, E, F, G companies to the
right, were through the first hedgerows, flattening out in the second of
time after the 88s' whistle, taking the silent mortars as they came. The
artillery had pushed some of the Germans down into their holes, and
the doughboys simply pulled the pins on grenades, held them an eter-
nity and dropped them in the holes.

The light began to break through the mist about 0712 and took
away the false feeling of being hidden the infantrymen had when it
was darker. On the northwest side of the hill, and on the east slope,
about in the middle, the ground was bright with the light of two
burning American tanks. Away to the east, one company from a re-
serve battalion had cleaned up a strongpoint the Germans had ringed
with wire and mortars.

SHELLS FALL REGULARLY

On the line of Americans, going uphill, the mortar shells fall regu-
larly, and from there back to the base of the slope they plump down
and munch at the hedgerows shielding the khaki forms. At 0912 the
report comes to the CP of Major Olinto M. Barsanti, of Tonopah,
Nevada, that F Company has a platoon in the little woods to the right
crest from which German artillery observers have been pouring shell-
fire down the division's shirtfronts for day*. E Company also from

88 THE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

the battalion on the right is across the road junction west of ten
houses named Cloville. Company A of the first battalion is in the
diamond-shaped woods covering the hill's major crest, and B is mov-
ing without loss through German strongpoints, taking prisoners and
killing paratroops almost as it has practiced.

Now the fighting has spread out not only horizontally, east to
west, but up and down the hill, with pockets here and there, and lone
paratroopers holding out in trees and holes.

Noon comes and goes, and another stage of the barrage unrolls
before the infantry. Time schedules have been altered and realtered
todaythey were so planned that they could be because the Nazi
paratroops have fought bitterly in spots and have held up the advance.

THE FIGHT Is WON

In the early afternoon, although you can't see it all, the fight is
won. There is enough strength in the woods and along the crest so that
the division will roll onward, down the southern slope and across the
Saint-L6 road, and the next day it will clean up the pockets and make
the Saint-L6 position firm.

All that is because a kid named George Rivers asked an engineer
to drag him to a gateway where he stayed with his wounds, firing his
BAR, until he died. And because a second looey named Paul Bielic
stood up to mortar fire so that the artillery observers could be up with
the doughs and direct the fire. It is because Sam Francis, a first lieu-
tenant, and Herb Lindgren, a staff sergeant, were willing to fly
through rain almost within slingshot distance. of German small arms,
to spot resistance. It is because George Hatch, a sergeant, pushed his
tank forward until the 88s stopped it. It is because Hugh Lind and
Henry Cox have enough faith in something plus the Red Crofcs on
the white bands around their arms to walk among the tracers that
wounded men may not die and dying men may do it with less hurt.

The hill is the division's, and no longer frowns with sullen men-
ace on the men below it to the north, because of those names and the
things they did, and the scores of others in their jobs for whom they
stand. Most of all all the other branches of the service will tell you,
and the look in their faces is the ultimate proof most of all it is
because of the infantrymen, who would not stop.

(The unit referred to in the above story was the Second Infantry
Division. It remained simply (t the division" in The Stars and Stripes
because of censorship restrictions.)

The staffers who went to the bombers or the infantry always
could leave after any one mission, or one battle. The airmen .and
the tankers and the infantry had to stick. They couldn't decide,

COMBAT 80

whenever they wanted to, that they would go back to an office and
write a story. They had to stay for the next haul to Berlin, or
the next barrage, or the next attack, and for them there was no
surcease until they were hit or the outfit was relieved.

The staff remembered that, to its everlasting credit, and took
some of the potential pompousness out of its attitude of "I've-
been-there" with, for example, the sign on the censor's desk:

Combat Censor

Or the brand-new, never-used steel helmet which Joe Fleming
wore around the office one night which bore the neatly printed
legend on the front:

Combat Rewriteman.

From time to time, the policy of sending experienced news-
papermen scarce within the army's personnel to combat from
which they might not return was questioned, but early in the
paper's history the Desk settled that argument with the dictum:

"Very simple solution to the possibility of any of you guys
getting knocked off and not getting back. Don't let it happen.'*

Tom Hoge, one-time infantryman with the 2Qth Division,
tried his best to carry out that order during the airborne attack
in Holland on the Arnhem bridge, which ultimately failed. Tom
flew out to cover the drop from a bomber, planning to write his
story on the way back to base.

Over the drop zone, as the British and American paratroopers
plunged out toward the ground, flak batteries opened up on the
huge air armada. The Fortress in which Tom was flying was hit
and plummeted earthward. Four parachutes opened in the wake
of the bomber as it screamed into the ground.

That night, when word got back to the office, the city room
was maybe a little noisier than usual. The Stars and Stripes had
lost other men, in the Mediterranean theater, but this was Hoge's
first big combat assignment; it didn't seem too probable that Tom
could have got to an escape hatch from his position up front in
the plane where he was watching the airborne drop. The boys in
the office felt badly about it and so they were noisier than they
ordinarily were.

Black-haired, grinning, Irish Tom Hoge, however, had been
one of the four men in the stricken plarte who got a chance to

40 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

pull his ripcord. In the three months following that morning of
the airborne attack, Tom went through one of the weirdest war
experiences any Stars-and-Stripeser ever had. The first inkling the
office had that Tom was all right came in a January communica-
tion from the International Red Cross. It was "believed" Tom
Hoge might be alive and a prisoner of the Germans.

The International Red Cross didn't know it, but their use
of the term "believed" was precisely correct: Tom did get out
of the falling plane, was taken prisoner. But he wouldn't stay
prisoner. In machine-gun circled captivity, starving and wretched
and cold, the Stars and Stripes staffer was just as difficult for his
German captors to handle as Stars-and-Stripesers were at any time
for the American Army to handle.

Through the long winter months, staffers in Paris or London
or Liege occasionally lifted a drink to Tom Hoge. Tom needed
their good wishes; he and a thousand or so other American pris-
oners of war were in a camp on the eastern edge of Germany.
Tom told about it a long time later.

"Unfed and with no water," Tom said, "the Germans
marched us or transported us crammed in freezing boxcars from
one prison camp to another. Finally we were dumped into a stalag
in the far east of Germany proper.

"We existed on what by courtesy was called 'soup;' it was
made of boiling potato peelings in water. We got a couple of
slices of bread a day. Sometimes we got coffee for breakfast. The
coffee was made from the used grounds our German guards had
boiled for their own coffee. Maybe it tasted so bad because, in
addition to being old grounds, the coffee in the first place had
been ground from roasted barley.

"It was the Russian drive of the late winter toward the Oder
River which eventually liberated us.

"As the Soviets drew nearer and the sound of their cannon
and the rumble of their tanks came through the barbed wire of
our stalag, we were ordered to be ready to march out to a prison
camp farther into Germany. The first sergeant who acted as leader
of our group of American enlisted men PWs told us to fake mass
illness. We were all supposed to get dysentery at one time. It
worked a little bit but finally the commandant of the camp strode
into our enclosure, coldly adjusted the monocle in his eye and
said in clipped Prussian accent:

COMBAT 41

" 'You will be ready to march in thirty minutes. If you are
not you will all be shot.'

"We figured he meant business, and our first sergeant advised
us to fall in. Hope of escape faded. We trudged off, still freezing,
still ill-fed, to the new prison camp. But the Russian advance
swept forward, and suddenly the Soviet tanks were almost upon
us. The German guards and officers fled. Allied prisoners took
over administration of the camp and the little near-by town. Then
we found out there, were still retreating German forces between
us and the Russians.

"Not taking any chances, we organized the defense of the
town, using what weapons the fleeing Germans had left. Finally
a couple of us set out to try and locate the Russians. We filtered
our way through the German units, and those were the longest
hours of anyone's life, because freedom was so near but could be
gone forever if we made a mistake.

"Finally we located the Russians, or maybe they located us,
and from then on it was just a question of waiting to be for-
warded to an American area so I could get my story back to the
Desk."

And that was the way Tom Hoge came out of captivity.
Shifted about behind the Russian lines, he and some of the others
eventually wound up in Odessa where they contacted American
and British units. Tom figured the best way to get his story back
was through the Rome edition of The Stars and Stripes, to which
he sent it for forwarding to the main office in Paris.

It was typical of the staff's attitude that Tom addressed his
first and subsequent stories, as well as his supplementary cables
of information and a request for further orders, to the city editor
who had been running the paper when he flew off to combat five
months before. Tom couldn't know that the man who'd been
city editor even then was jumping into action with the para-
troops.

Tom's experiences as a prisoner of war, of course, were no
different from those of thousands of other PWs. They were the
kind of experiences the people back in the United States got bored
with hearing after a while. The important thing about the story
was that even in the winter bitterness of a German prison camp,
The Stars and Stripes though it wasn't planned that way had a
staffer with the guys for whom the paper was written.

42 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Never with the first-person-singular, never with the "I-was-
there" attitude, but simply with the self-restricted task of being
there so that they could write about what the other people were
doing, Stars and Stripes men went to combat, to captivity, and
even to the lists headed "Killed in Action."

Paul Connors, who covered the Air Force for Warweek, the
propaganda supplement inserted into The Stars and Stripes, was
shot down during an Eighth Air Force bomber mission and still
is listed as missing in action.

Mostly, though, the staffers went out to the war and got back
with their stories. Some held it was good luck, but Russ Jones,
who viewed all life with a dim light, held:

"Any sonofabitch who's worked on this paper long enough
to draw an assignment covering combat already is too goddamned
mean and ornery to have anything happen to him."

There might have been something to that; Russ spent time
with the infantry, and once rode into a fortress town on the out-
side of a tank at which German 88s were shooting "to find out
what it felt like to the doughs who have to."

Simply because The Stars and Stripes presented, as part of its
coverage of the air war news, a daily story on what the Royal Air
Force, or the Canadian Air Force, had done in the preceding
twenty-four hours, G. K. Hodenfield decided someone from S&S
ought to fly with the heavy British night bombers. Without any aid
from the army he made arrangements, flew with a Lancaster
bomber crew one night to Berlin. His story helped the Yanks, who
were flying the Forts and Libs to Berlin in daylight, understand
what was happening in the rest of the war.

Hodenfield he kept his first name, Gaylord, carefully con-
cealed put in a good many hours and days being shot at. He
went to Africa in November, 1942, to help set up the African
Stars and Stripes and in the course of covering that war was with
the infantry in the days of Kasserine Pass.

Back again in England, Hod did occasional training stories,
flew with the RAF to Berlin and finally disappeared in mid-May,

1944-

It was June 8 before the office heard from Hod again: The
Desk got a thousand words signed "Hodenfield" telling the epic
of the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions' preinvasion assault on the
big German coastal guns of Pointe de Hoe which commanded

COMBAT 48

both beaches selected by the Americans for their landing on
coastal France.

The Rangers went in from night-riding assault boats a couple
of hours before the first waves of infantry debouched on Utah
and Omaha beaches.

Hod was with them.

They scaled 150 feet of sheer rock cliff, and when the first
Rangers to reach the top of the rope ladders crumpled under
point-blank machine-gun fire, others took their places. Inch by
bloody inch they gouged a toe hold atop the cliffs, and began
their task of neutralizing the fire of the huge coastal guns so
deeply set in concrete and steel that they were virtually impervi-
ous to aerial bombardment.

For fifty-eight hours the Rangers fought against a superior
force which held the advantage of position. Sixty per cent of the
kids with the diamond-shaped gold and blue patch on their left
shoulders were casualties.

But as Hod said in his first story, "The coastal guns which
could have smashed the invasion were neutralized. The Rangers
tied down in combat the gun crews who otherwise might have
been hurling high explosives into the assault waves on both
beaches/'

EVERY RANGER A HERO ON THE FRENCH BEACH

By G. K. Hodenfield
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

WITH u.s. RANGERS IN NORMANDY, June io (delayed) "Over and beyond
the call of duty" is the army description of an act of heroism worthy
of a special award. It's hard for an observer with the Rangers to draw
a line for rt duty" and classify those which are "over and beyond."

There was, for instance, the man whose assault craft was blown
up in the water. He managed to swim to shore, picked his way four
miles along the cliffs under German sniper fire, scaled a loo-foot
-cliff, reported to the commanding officer of the Rangers, took a tommy
gun and within ten minutes had cleaned out a German machine-gun
nest.

He was killed later while exposing himself to give protecting
fire for some men moving into a new position.

Then there was "Pops," a staff sergeant just old enough to be
called "Pops." He was cornered by the Germans not far from where

44 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

some of his men were pinned down by a machine gun. The men
heard the Germans ask Pops to surrender.

They peeked over the top of their shell hole and heard him tell
them to "go to hell." Then he threw a hand grenade that killed three
of four Germans. The fourth killed him with his rifle, but he never
lived to report it.

Behind the German lines, but within view of the Ranger out-
posts, was a German ammo dump. It was well dug in and mortar
fire couldn't touch it. It was too close to the Ranger line to call for
naval artillery.

There was only one way to get it sneak through the lines, plant
a bangalore torpedo and try to get back. A private who had been
busted from staff sergeant two weeks before took the bangalore and
blew up the dump. To do it he had to jump from shell hole to shell
hole for the first 100 yards and then run across open ground for 25
yards more. He was under heavy machine-gun fire coming and going,
and how they ever missed him will always remain a miracle to those
who saw it.

A Ranger chaplain landed on our beach, one of the hottest
landing grounds on the entire front. All during the time his men
were coming ashore he walked from one fallen soldier to another,
giving first aid to those who were still living and saying a few last
words for the dying.

All through the hail of fire that rained down the beaches he did
what he could and didn't leave the beach until all his men had
crossed it to the comparative safety of the cliff edge.

What is "line of duty" for a company aidman? The Ranger
company aidmen were on the go night and day, bringing in casualties,
treating men in the field, carrying litters from one outpost to the
other. Because they were aidmen they were unarmed.

The captain was standing in a pillbox, trying to spot a German
artillery position for the navy. He had radio contact with a destroyer
and was giving the co-ordinates when a German shell struck the
pillbox. The captain was heard to say, "The co-ordinates are right,
they check." Then he toppled over.

Two men came back together. They had been out trying to get
a German sniper, but he got them first. One had a bullet hole
through his elbow, the other a bullet through his knee. Both refused
to be taken back to the CP. They knew they were needed on the
line. They knew they could still fire their rifles. So they stayed on the
line, that thin line of riflemen, until the Rangers retired from the
position.

With the Rangers and of this I am positive there is nothing
"over and beyond the call of duty."

COMBAT 45

Hodenfield fought with the Rangers and to him fell the lot
of being the first Stars and Stripes man to kill a German in ground
warfare.

For what they did on Pointe de Hoe, Hod's Rangers received
the gratitude of the infantrymen who stormed the beaches; they
also received the gold-edged blue ribbon of a presidential citation.

Phil Bucknell, however, had beaten Hod to the first S6*S
decoration of the invasion of the Continent.

Earl Mazo, Rooney and Hutton had won Air Force decora-
tions up to D day, but Bucknell, an American who had spent
twelve years on British papers, enlisted in the U. S. Army and
was assigned to SfcS, collected the first award an SfrS man won on
the Continent. It was the Purple Heart, for injuries in action.

"Bob, we ought to have someone with the paratroops when
invasion starts/' Buck said to Moora one day in the early spring
of '44.

"Bud and Andy will be with the bombers, and Llewellyn
says he's picking a force to go over and start a paper wherever
we land on the Continent, but there's no one for the paratroops,
so I'll have a crack at it."

Moora looked at Buck's solid two hundred pounds, thought
about the thirty-four years Buck's frame had been aging, and
wondered aloud whether the reporter could make it, and
although he didn't mention it there was the additional fact that
Buck was married to a very lovely girl in London.

"Too heavy, Buck, and too old."

"I don't think so, and anyway, Bob, I've already completed
arrangements to go to a jump school and get qualified with the
paratroops who are here in England now."

Which seemed to settle it. Bob and the staff admired Buck's
guts but they wondered if the paper would get a story back.

Buck went off to jump school, which Bob Reuben, of Reuter
News Agency, and Bill Walton, of Time and Life, also attended.
On his first practice jump, Buck splintered a bone in his right
leg, and Colonel Fred Sink, the grizzled paratrooper running the
school, said he was washed up for the invasion.

Buck limped back to London, splinted up, and saw a civilian
doctor, who agreed with the army medics' decision. Bucknell sadly
told the desk, but it already was too late to get another man
trained

46 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

It seemed likely that The Stars and Stripes would not be cov-
ered on the paratroop action whenever invasion started. Buck went
about morosely for two weeks, limping a little less each day and
spending a lot of time at the bar's edge of the Lamb and Lark,
"getting his strength," as Alf Storey, the publican, put it.

About the 2oth of May, Bucknell disappeared from the office,
even as Hodenfield a few days later. No one could find him, not
even Lois, his wife.

Just after one o'clock on the morning of June 6, Phil
Bucknell spilled out of a -47 transport along with other men
of the 82nd Airborne Division toward the blackened countryside
of the Cherbourg peninsula.

He went down through the flak and the small-arms fire.
Men were hit in the air. Planes burned and plunged earthward
to explode with great white sheets of light. Bucknell dropped in
the darkness through tracer fire from machine guns.

The ground rushed up at him and Buck landed. His 34-year-
old right leg, its shin bone already splintered, snapped.

All through the fierce night, menaced by German patrols
seeking the paratroopers and in danger even from fire from his
own men, Bucknell lay in a Normandy field, trying to gather
notes. At daylight, the Americans found him and took him to the
command post, where he gathered the story of his division's attack.

When the land forces hit the beach, and a corridor to the sea
was opened, Buck went out with the other wounded, and was
taken back to England through the gantlet of Nazi bombs to a
general hospital.

They started him toward the operating room,

"Not me!" roared Bucknell. "I've got a story to do for my
paper, for The Stars and Stripes"

The doctors and nurses tried to argue with him, but Private
First Class Bucknell lay there and hollered until the colonel com-
manding the hospital was called. To him, Buck told his story, and
the colonel understood.

Before he was operated on to have the fracture reduced,
Buck dictated a story of the paratroopers. A lieutenant was or-
dered to mount a motorcycle and get that story without delay to
the news desk of The Stars and Stripes in London.

(The story got there, a couple of days late, but it was a full,
colorful account which, most important of all, gave credit to the

COMBAT 47

airborne for their part and gave it from a Stars and Stripes re-
porter who was there.)

Then Bucknell lay back on a stretcher and was wheeled to
the operating room while a clerk filled out the papers which made
him the owner of a Purple Heart medal for injuries received in
battle before the dawn of D day.

The Stars and Stripes was pretty well covered on that D day
morning for which the world had waited since Dunkerque. Hod
went with the Rangers, Buck with the paratroopers, and Hutton
took off before daylight with the Marauder medium bombers to
blast open a way for the land forces on Utah Beach, along the
eastern shore of the Cherbourg peninsula. The bombers that
morning left their fields in pitch blackness, in a driving rain
which blotted out the running lights of the other ships in the
formations. Ice formed on the wings, and bombers plummeted to
the English countryside.

As day broke, the bombers were flying above the thousands
of assault craft which churned across the English Channel to
France. Wave after wave of bombers and fighters roared against
the coastal fortifications of Fortress Europe, blasted holes for the
doughboys nearing the shore.

Hutton and Bede Irwin, Associated Press photographer who
was killed in action at Saint-L6, a month and a half later, were
with Wilson R. Wood's Marauder group which was fouled up in
bad weather and was late for its bomb run. The other groups had
struck and left when their group came down the Cherbourg coast
at 3,500 feet, with Jerry throwing up everything he had, including
small-arms fire.

Because they were late on their run, Wood's group hit the
coastal guns back of the shore just as the first American infantry
actually swept ashore, giving Bede Irwin a picture scoop as he
worked his camera from an open bomb bay, and Bud the first
story of the actual landing.

The bombers flew back to base, and Major General Sam
Anderson, the medium bomber chief, provided a liaison plane for
Irwin, Frank Scherschel of Life magazine, and Hutton. The three
of them shuttled to London, with pictures and stories.

Bud had no orders to go to France, but it was noon by the
time he reached the Times offices and since there was no word
yet from the beachheads, he decided to go to France. He called

48 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

i

Llewellyn at the business office, said he needed two hundred dol-
lars in fifteen minutes.

"Can't tell you what for, colonel/' Bud shouted. "Got to have
it in fifteen minutes."

In fifteen minutes the money was ready in American Express
travelers' checks, Hutton grabbed it and raced for a London air-
port. There the Ninth Air Force was paying off for the missions
Bud had flown in their planes and the stories he had written;
waiting for him and another liaison ship, which ferried them to
the south coast.

Three hours later they were on an assault craft heading for
the Continent. It worked out well. Pinned down to the beach
for 58 hours and battling for his life even into the third day of
the invasion, Hodenfield had no chance to get out copy. Bucknell
had been injured.

Mutton's first story, scribbled in pencil as he touched the
beach and handed to the skipper of the assault craft, who headed
back to England for another load, was the first story back from
the Continent itself. The next day the Air Force had a single
emergency landing strip on narrow Omaha Beach, and with his
connections with people who flew Hutton had virtually a direct
courier service as long as he wanted it. Hod and the Rangers on
D plus 2 fought their way out of Pointe de Hoe and he was able
to start sending stories back to the fevered city room in Printing
House Square.

PIANO IN BATTERED VILLA
DIMS WAR-A MOMENT

SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE, June 17 (delayed) The communiques can tell
only of battles, of men and material in mass, of places taken and lost.
War is more than that it is little things you remember, which will
have no bearing on the red and blue lines shifting across the maps.
War is quick glimpses, like scenes on an old stereopticon, that some-
times wake you in the night and bring their own music, like an old
violin, or the wind in the Normandy trees. . . .

There was a villa, behind the lines near Isigny. The windows were
broken, almost all of them, by the shells and the bombs of the first
five days, and the fighting which had left dead gray bodies, and some
khaki ones, on the web of trenches near the house. The slates of the
roof had been torn away, and dust had settled through the broken

COMBAT 49

floors onto the old furniture of the salon, onto the walnut stain of
an old piano.

A man came out of the lines and took a detail back in a car
to get rations for the rest of the Rangers dug in near a wood. He
was twenty-four; he came from Maine; he had busted out of OCS to
join the Rangers. His name was Dick Barrows, and he should have
been a boy, but because things had been the way they were he was a
man, with tiredness in his blue eyes and even in the heft of his burly
frame. They stopped at the battered villa and the Ranger wandered
into the room where the piano was covered with dust.

"Jesus," he said, "it's been a long time." He sat down at the
piano, placing his rifle against the last of the keys in the bass, and
his rough, cut fingers began to play.

There was "Madelon," the song of the poilus in another war. He
played that, and then "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Bye-Bye Blues,"
"Lady, Be Good" and "Blues in the Night." He played a hymn, three
choruses of it, and the lilting French nursery rhyme which goes,
"Sur le pont d' Avignon . . ."

The tiredness went out of his eyes, and his body sort of slumped
in the stained clothing. Sometimes he looked away from the keys,
out the broken window, and sang softly against spaced chords. The
piano was all the tinny pianos that ever were in honky-tonks or
bistros, and maybe it was better than it was, because there all the
sweat and hate and blood and fear were gone and the man was a kid
for a little bit.

Some soldiers stopped when he played "Begin the Beguine."
They listened awhile and went away quietly. Frank Scherschel, the
Life photographer, heard the music and came with his camera. He
took a picture and couldn't see to focus for another, so he went away.
Bede Irwin, the AP photographer, and another fellow listened as
long as they could, watching the kid at the piano, and then they
looked at each other and went out.

Barrows played some more; once in a while you could hear the
tunes come through the other noise. Finally he came out of the villa,
through the broken glass around the doorway. He shoved his hat
back on his head and laughed a little and went down the road to find
his detail and get the rations for the Rangers.

When invasion became a not too distant certainty, Lieutenant
Colonel Llewellyn announced he was planning to send a force into
the continent "with the third or fourth wave." He picked Charlie
Kiley, Earl Mazo, Rooney, Morrow Davis, and a few more to go

50 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

along. About the first of June, they were ordered to a British
southwestern port to wait.

They waited, and waited. D day came and the colonel came
to the port to join them in waiting. He called a meeting and said
they were going "on a great ambiguous landing." He called on
them to do their best. But the first wave of combat troops went,
and the second and the third and a good many more.

"Somebody," declared Llewellyn finally, "has slipped up."

Finally, about D plus 12, they sailed, landed on Omaha
Beach and went into Carentan, which the loist Airborne Division
had captured.

Llewellyn found the local sign painter and had a big banner
painted for the front of a flat-bed printing shop he took over.
It read:

STARS AND STRIPES CONTINENTAL EDITION

On the second day of occupancy, with the German lines still
only a mile or so south of the little town, the presses weren't work-
ing yet. Llewellyn said any day now, any day now.

As Llewellyn finished speaking, there came the unmistakable
scream of an 88-millimeter shell inbound. The staff flattened on
the floor just as it came through the skylight and exploded
in the two-story print shop. The roof caved in, a wall buckled.

Covered with debris and rafters, one staffer felt someone
tramp across his back, and a voice shouted, shrill and high:

"We move to Saint-Mere-Eglise in the morning!"

There were other invasions covered by The Stars and Stripes,
from Africa to Germany, but no one ever did a neater job of get-
ting an exclusive story than Jack Foisie, sergeant reporter on the
Italian edition of the paper.

In the Mediterranean Theater, Stars and Stripes men had a
tougher job than those in the ETO. There the officials insisted
they always must be treated as enlisted men, and they thus found
it difficult to attend briefings and get other information with
civilian correspondents, who were treated as officers.

Came one of the amphibious operations up the western shore
of Italy, before the Fifth and Eighth armies there had settled
down to their first winter, and Foisie was selected to go along
for The Stars and Stripes.

COMBAT 51

He and the civilian correspondents went to a staging area
on the beach where the attacking force was, to await time and
tide and moonless night to embark. The question of the status
of an enlisted man correspondent came up, as it always did, and
Foisie, not caring very much except that it made his job harder,
found himself separated without ceremony from the correspond-
ents, who were staying in officers' quarters, and dumped with the
enlisted men on the sands.

Jack shrugged his wiry shoulders; he'd be happier living with
the EMs anyway, but it might make him lose a valuable briefing
on what the operation was to be like. Oh, well ...

With a couple of sergeants and a private, Jack slept on the
sand.

The civilian correspondents and the public relations officers
were quartered off to one side.

During the night, the weather turned and was right for the
amphibious attack. Quietly sentries slipped among the sleeping
combat men on the beach and awakened them to board the assault
craft. "Come on, this is it," Jack heard a voice whisper as a hand
shook his shoulder.

With the combat men, Jack went down to the shore, waded
out to the assault craft and at daylight made the attack, while
the correspondents, awakened in the morning by the public rela-
tions officer, found the attack had gone off and left them to come
along with the rear echelon units.

Jack took the trouble to thank the PROs later.

Sometimes Stars and Stripes men went off to battle with task
forces or special assault units and had such a fine time doing it
that they forgot (or simply didn't bother) to file a story. Morrow
Davis got his name of "Two-Gun" from such an episode.

When the American armies burst out of Normandy and
cut off the Brest peninsula before dashing on across France in the
route of the Nazi forces in August and September, 1944, Davis, a
39-year-old veteran newspaperman who'd spent most of his life
on the sports copy desk of the New York Herald Tribune, shoved
a .45 in his belt and headed for Brest.

The Yanks were besieging the great Breton port, with ele-
ments of the Second, Eighth, Ninth and agth divisions gradually

52 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

battering the Nazis there into surrender. It was a terrific story,
full of color and action.

Davis went in with the assault troops. He fought isolated Ger-
man detachments, grabbed a bag of prisoners, and generally had
a hell of a time. But back at Cherbourg there was not a line of
copy from Davis. Finally, there weren't even reports about his
activities. No one heard from him.

After two .weeks, three rumors came out of the Brest fighting
about Morrow Davis:

(1) He had been badly wounded and was homeward bound
in a hospital ship.

(2) He had been killed in action.

(3) He was fighting with the doughs, captured German pis-
tols completely encircling his waist, captured German watches
covering each forearm to the elbow, captured German combat
knives thrust in each boot.

Two days later, Morrow staggered into the Paris office a
bottle of wine under each arm, his waist encircled by some seven
German pistols and belts, four watches on each wrist and a Ger-
man knife in each boottop.

"Wasn't much of a story there," Morrow hiccuped as he
toppled onto a cot, still clutching the wine, "so I didn't bother to
write anything."

The newly renamed Two-Gun Davis he always held it
obviously was a gross understatement had a lot of fun at Brest.
Thereafter, he was chary of accepting rear echelon assignments.

A new division came to the Continent, and when it failed to
get much of any publicity after a few weeks, its commanding gen-
eral, a two-star hunk of genial brass, came to the second floor of
the Paris Herald-Tribune building at 21 Rue de Berri, Paris,
where The Stars and Stripes was setting up its principal offices for
the Continent.

The general wanted to know if he could get a Stars and
Stripes reporter assigned to his outfit. The division was moving,
and was going "to see some action, it appears."

Bob Moora, who was on the desk, looked around the shop.
Two-Gun Davis was the only unoccupied reporter.

"Two-Gun, how about going up to the general's division and
seeing what they got there?" asked Moora.

COMBAT 53

Morrow slid his frame off a desk and ambled with his lazy
stride over to the major general.

"We'll see you're taken good care of," the general said.
"Keep you along with me, as a matter of fact, if you like, and get
you back here when you've got your story."

Morrow's face was unchanged.

"General, I don't care what kind of quarters you've got or
anything like that. All I want to know is this: Are you a fighting
division? Are you really on the ball? Because I'm not going to
waste no time fooling around unless you're gonna go like hell!"

The general's countenance changed half a dozen times during
the address, but he finally allowed they might do some fighting,
so Two-Gun went off with him and brought back half a dozen
top-flight stories.

From the day in January, 1943, when Andy Rooney took off
with the 8-175 for Wilhelmshaven, there always were staff men
ready to go into combat for stories. The office never gave them any
undue treatment.

The night before Rooney left the office in London to go
to a bomber base, Ben Price, Moora and Charlie White borrowed
from one to three pounds each from him, and it was only after
they had the money that one of them pointed out to Rooney that
he'd better get back alive to collect. Rooney couldn't see that it
was very funny at the time, but he laughed until the tears rolled
down his face when Tom Kelly, a gunner who had finished a tour
of combat, measured Hutton for clothes sizes just before Bud
went on his first mission with the Forts; Kelly was figuring on
what he could wear if Hutton didn't get back from Bremen.

Sometimes staffer reasons for going to combat were pretty
thin.

There was the time that Rooney, Kiley and Hutton, who
liked to be together, decided they ought to have a week's vacation.
They couldn't figure out any way to manage it together until
Rooney suggested casually:

"Why not all three of us make a bomber mission from the
same group? We could go out to some base and lie around for
a week, fly the mission, do a story, and then go back to work."

Kiley and Hutton looked at him quizzically, and Irish Kiley
remarked dryly, "You wouldn't want us to go to extremes or
anything for this vacation, would you?"

54 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

There was a catch: how to figure out a story which the Desk
which Hutton had left for the fun of covering the air war would
approve as worth sending three men into combat.

The three reporters finally worked out a deal, and enlisted
the aid of Earl Mazo, then a public relations lieutenant for the
385111 Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, who later transferred
to The Stars and Stripes on the recommendations of Hutton, Kiley
and Rooney.

"Why don't you get some new crew with a new Fortress to
name their plane 'The Stars and Stripes'!" demanded the re-
porters. "We'd give it a good story, with pictures, and it probably
would get a good play in the papers at home as well."

Mazo liked the idea, sold it to his colonel and a new crew
headed by Lieutenant John McElwain. Dick Wingert, who was
just in the process of developing his character, Hubert, went out
to the 385^ and painted a screaming eagle holding the Stars
and Stripes on the fuselage of McElwain's plane. Kiley won the
others said he lost, because it was a green crew a toss and was to
fly in The Stars and Stripes. Rooney was to go in a plane on one
wing, Hutton on the other. Thus, they assured the office, even
if one of them got shot down, the chances were good the others
would be back with the story of the baptismal flight of The Stars
and Stripes, which certainly should be well covered.

Reluctantly the Desk agreed, having been outmaneuvered by
The Stars and Stripes promotion scheme, and the three reporters
had a week of loafing around the bomber base, eating four meals
a day and relishing the Indian summer sunshine.

Unfortunately, when the day of the christening came, Hut-
ton's plane had engine trouble and turned back. Rooney and
Kiley flew on to report the baptism under fire of The Stars and
Stripes, and then stayed on the base almost another week until
the next mission, when Hutton flew to Bremen with what was
until then the greatest force of bombers ever sent out in daylight
to Germany.

Hutton and Rooney continued flying with the bombers, and
eventually Andy totaled some ten missions and Bud twenty-odd,
which was more than the average gunner lived to amass. Charlie
flew the thirteenth the air crews call it the 126 mission with
The Stars and Stripes, and when the ship and crew were ready
for their twenty-fifth mission he went back to make it with them.

COMBAT 65

The weather was bad. Day after day there was no flying, and
this at a time when the office was shorthanded and Charlie was
needed thefe. Finally, he decided to slip back to London over
the weekend, help in putting out Sunday night's big paper and
come back to the base early Monday morning.

On Sunday morning, while Charlie was in London, the
weather cleared and McElwain and The Stars and Stripes flew off
to Germany for what was to be their last mission. They lost an
engine to flak over the target, deep in northeastern Germany, and
on the way out, over the Baltic Sea, Luftwaffe fighters caught the
crippled plane.

Two of the crew baled out to drown or freeze in the sea, the
others apparently were caught in the plane as it hurtled off into
the mist out of sight of the rest of the formation.

Charlie heard about it Sunday night, at the office.

It was more difficult to do a first hand coverage of the fighter
planes; they were built for one man, and the Stars and Stripes
staff didn't believe in going to war as passengers or spectators;
it wasn't fair to the others, who had to play the game for keeps.
Staffers went as gunners with the bombers, but there was no
room for them to do a useful job in a fighter.

Eventually Earl Mazo, who had transferred to the paper by
then, and big, lumbering lovable Pat Mitchell flew fighter sorties
in P-38 Lightnings which had been converted to carry an observer
for reconnaissance. The staff felt that, since the planes had been
altered anyway to hold an observer, there was some point in going
along and no added risk to the pilot who was doing it as a job.

In time, the Stars and Stripes reporters became aware of a
distinct difference between the attitude of the airmen about
having reporters along and the views of the ground forces, par-
ticularly the infantry.

Both groups were glad to have someone from their paper
with them. The airmen were glad to have you along but thought
you were crazy for sticking your neck out when, as they viewed it,
you didn't have to do it.

The infantrymen were glad to have you along and wanted
you to stay around and get shot at and endure the misery of their
lives. It was a natural feeling on the doughboys' part, because
only those who have been with them not only under fire but

56 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

through the miserable and filthy days and nights of a ground
soldier's existence can understand well enough the bleak future-
lessness of their lives to write about them.

Everyone who is fighting in a war has a tough job. But the
staff figured the paratroops and the glider men had the toughest.
They not only went into battle in a hazardous manner, but if they
lived through that, they then had to take up as ordinary infantry-
men and endure what the doughs had to endure. Possibly that
was one of the chief reasons Stars and Stripes men jumped when
the paratroops jumped in Normandy, Holland and across the
Rhine.

When the 82nd and loist Airborne jumped at Nijmegen,
Holland, while the British were striking up the road at Arnhem,
Herb Palmer jumped with the lois. Palmer was an extracurricu-
lar member of the editorial staff, but for absolute pinwheelness
he qualified with the most veteran.

"Tired of doing this office work," Palmer complained one
day. He was in his late forties, was a second lieutenant. "Oldest
second lieutenant in the world," he claimed, a little proudly.

Palmer's record of World War I certainly entitled him to
the softest job available he was a major in the British Army
at twenty, had won the Military Cross, the French Croix de
Guerre and a handful of other decorations but he didn't want
the soft job.

"Going to be a parachute jump," he breathed eagerly down
Bob Moora's neck one day in Paris. "Better have somebody on it,
and I'm the guy."

No one else was available, so Bob said sure, and the London
office said sure, so Palmer, who knew nothing of writing or pic-
tures, was briefed on what to ask for a story, was shown how to
run a camera, and bidden a Godspeed which was a little fearful
as the staff contemplated the age of his joints and remembered
what happened to Bucknell.

Palmer made the jump, had a hell of a time, and some two
weeks later turned up casually in the London office, long after
half a dozen reports of his death had been received.

"Where are your pictures?" wrathfully demanded Bill Spear,
the ex-Associated Press man who was on the London desk.

"Forgot 'em; left 'em back. at the airport," Palmer replied,
grinning.

COMBAT 57

Before Bill could ask, let alone scream, Palmer added:

"Didn't get any story. But I'll go back to the airport and get
the photos and can I go on the next one?"

The staff eventually quieted Spear, and coaxed Palmer into
writing a story of sorts, which was only two weeks late.

Palmer went back to his business office job, but he was
unhappy, and finally coaxed Hutton into arranging for him to go
to Air Force gunnery school. He passed his tests and the next
thing the office knew, he came limping in from a mission to
Germany on which two engines of his ship had been shot out,
one crewman killed, half a dozen, including Palmer, wounded.

"Had a crash landing too," Palmer said. "But I got the name
of every man in the crew and what happened on the mission.
Where do I write it?"

The thing reduced Pete Lisagore, who had succeeded Spear
on' the London desk, to weeping, because it was a rule of censor-
ship that no wounded man's name might be used until two weeks
had elapsed, giving his family an opportunity to be notified
officially of the casualty.

"You," he glared at Palmer, "have picked a hell of a time
to start remembering to get a story."

From time to time thereafter, Palmer would come into the
editorial rooms of the paper in Paris, or Liege, or Strasbourg and
try to wangle an editorial assignment, "like going with the dive
bombers bangl crash 1 beat the hell out of the Krauts! Do you
think I could, huh?"

He eventually got into trouble for taking off from Paris
without orders and going up to the line just to visit with his
airborne friends in the loist.

Ed Clark, who spent most of the war covering the activities
of the Seventh Army, in the south of the Western Front, and
Hutton were the other two Stars and Stripes men to make an air-
borne invasion. Clark flew in a glider and Bud jumped with the
5igth Parachute Infantry Regiment in the biggest airborne attack
of all time, the jump across the Rhine which opened the way to
the rout of Nazi Germany's last defenders.

Bob Capa, the Life photographer, and Corporal Bob Krell,
of Yank magazine, also went in with the paratroops. Krell became
the second Yank man killed in action on the Continent Peter

58 THE STORY OF THE STARS AXD STRIPES

Paris was the first, on D day when an attempt to ambush a
Mark IV tank failed and the enemy gunners cut him down.

Clark and Hutton found themselves fighting instead of writ-
ing for the first twenty-four hours after their landing as the air-
borne bled to smash one big hole in the inner west wall of Festung
Europa. Ed went into action as soon as his glider touched down
amid the wrecks of blazing carrier planes, colored parachutes and
smashed gliders. With Don Pay, public relations captain of the
i7th Airborne Division, and the divisional chief of staff, he fought
through German-held woods toward the little clump of trees
which had been picked beforehand to be the command post. Ed,
Pay and the chief of staff routed half a dozen Nazis from the
trees, dug themselves in and waited for the division to reach them.

Finally the chief of staff went off on a reconnaissance to try
and find the division commander, Major General William Miley.
Don Pay went off in the other direction, and was replaced by
Lieutenant Desser, a censor who had landed in a glider to handle
the correspondents' copy.

Suddenly, Ed saw a figure coming fast across the open field
in front of him. He raised his tommy gun and hollered, "Haiti"
The figure stopped. It looked like an American, but there had
been scores of instances in which Germans put on American
uniforms to infiltrate the lines, and Ed wasn't taking any chances.

"Who are you, a GI?" he called.

"I'm General Miley, and stop this damn foolishness!"

Neither Ed nor the censor ever had seen Miley.

"You'll have to do more than say so," Ed roared, and
menaced swiftly with the tommy gun when the "general" started
to walk toward him.

"Who the hell are you, stopping me this way?"

"I'm Ed Clark of The Stars and Stripes"

"Well, by God! let me in there so I can show you the two
stars on my collar and then get and keep to hell out of my way!"

There was no doubt about the authenticity of the verbiage,
peculiar to American airborne generals. Ed let him come closer,
saw the two stars denoting major general's rank, and grudgingly
said, "Well, all right," completely unperturbed by the five-minute
dressing down he got from the general.

The formation of carrier planes in which Hutton was flying
missed their target a short distance, and the 51 3th Paratroops

COMBAT 59|

came down across a cluster of buildings which housed a Nazi
regimental command post. All the way down in their chutes,
men were hit by the storm of small-arms and light antiaircraft
fire the Germans put up.

Bud had gone out of the plane unarmed, the better to do his
job of getting pictures and stories, but as he hit the field and
men he knew started dropping all around him, he grabbed a
dead man's tommy gun and for a while was a combatant para-
trooper, remembering only occasionally to take pictures.

For twenty-four hours, the battle was a thing of horror,
touch-and-go as to whether the move would succeed, but then
tank destroyer units broke through from the land forces which
had crossed the Rhine simultaneously with the airborne strike,
tanks followed with heavy artillery, and the jump was successful.

Bud came out of the lines after five days, having sent back
pictures and stories daily, and The Stars and Stripes had been cov-
ered again where the fighting was.

From The Stars and Stripes.

WITH i7TH AIRBORNE Div., GERMANY Benny March and Charlie Krupp,
Keith Leech and all the hard-dying who stayed in the red snow on
Flamicrge Hill that January day in the Ardennes this is for you.
You who charged tanks with bayonet and grenade, and died earth-
bound on a wintered Belgian hillside and never had a chance to go
to battle as a paratrooper should this is the way it was when the
time came. This is the way it was when the airborne jumped across
the Rhine.

' All through the spring evening, until the darkness came, the
paratroopers sat by the fence and watched the French plowman
move patiently up and down his field. It was a little cold, after the
sun was gone, but as long as the farmer would plod his furrow kids
with the high boots and the side-pocket pants stayed there and
watched him. They didn't say much; they just sat there, inside the
barbed wire that would cage them until it was morning and time to go
to Germany, and watched the green field turn brown under the plow,
and it was a good thing to watch because it was not like anything
would be the next day.

In the dark, Colonel Jim Coutts, the West Pointer from Phila-
delphia, sat in a small tent and by the white light of a gasoline

60 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

lantern read the last of the battle order, read it into his memory
before he went outside to walk through the camp a last time.

The 51 gth Parachute Infantry Regiment was still in its blankets
as Jim Coutts walked along the company streets. Ward Ryan, the West
Point lieutenant colonel from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, came and
walked with the Old Man. Sometimes they would pause when there
was the low talking of men in a tent, and it was long dark when they
went to get a little sleep.

"They're ready," Jim Coutts said.

In the morning the sun was red through the mist, and we felt
colder than it was. We drank coffee and marched over to the airfield
where the round-bellied Curtiss Commando transports waited. We
went to Germany.

All that part you will understand the waiting and the getting
in the planes, the way the chute harness cuts into your shoulders
because it's always a little tighter than you figured. You will under-
stand about how our hands were too wet and our throats had no
moisture at all, and how everyone smiled when they looked at some-
one else as we sat there going to Germany because more than any time
in life things had to be good.

You will understand how that was, you who stayed on Flamierge
Hill when the regiment was slogging with the doughs, because you
knew how those men were; you know why dark-haired Jim Hedges,
the corporal from Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, would turn and
say, "Nice day for a ride, isn't it?" and why everyone who heard him
laughed harder than the thing was funny.

Over the French countryside we flew, and above Belgium, north
of the Ardennes where you stopped Rundstedt's tanks with your
bodies. Planes from other fields came to join, the transports towing
the gliders. Just ahead of us in the long stream pouring toward
Hitler's Reich were the men of the 5071!!, with veteran Edson Raff
in their first plane. Behind us were the glider guys, the iQ4th. Sid
Johnson, the lieutenant from Hillsboro, North Dakota, turned in
his gear and looked out a window.

"Where's the Rhine," he said.

After that it was different than anything had been before. Be-
cause you could not be there, you will want to know.

The flak came up from German soil 500 feet below us. The air
began to smell of cordite as Ward Ryan stood to the right-hand door,
snapped 'the lock of his static line to the overhead cable. His voice
roared out, and it's hard to tell how it sounded like a trumpet calling
above the noise of the flak and the thunder of the engines.

"Stand up and hook up!" Ward Ryan's voice called, and we got

COMBAT 61

out of the seats where we had waited in sweat and fastened the locks
of the static lines.

A new man, a man who'd never jumped before, but who'd seen
a bit of flak when he was flying with the bombers long before, said,
1 'They're laying that stuff in here," and Les Taylor, who used to
coach boxing out at Fort Sill, said in steady tone, "Not for us."

There were two sticks of us, because the new Curtiss transports
have doors on each side, and we shuffled tight together and no one
even cursed as flak came through the plane.

"Ready, men," Ward Ryan roared again, and it was good to be
there with him because everyone was scared but no one was afraid,
you understand.

The bell rang (we never looked for the green light, too) Ward
Ryan shouted again and the slipstream tore his voice away as he
went out. There never was time to make that last check you always
thought you'd make because it was to the door and shove with the
teft foot and let the slipstream turn you and it was done.

Now here belongs a part that was not us, yet it belongs here
because it is about the first of the brave men that Saturday morning.
There were a great many of them, and some lived and some died,
but you will want to know about Bob Reeder. He was the pilot of
the ship. He came from Fairmount, Indiana. When we started our
drop run, maybe two minutes from the time we left the ship, the
first flak hit us, and more after that. The right engine caught fire.
The fire spread to the wing, burning hot inside the metal. Bob
Reeder saw the fire, and he knew what could happen. But our job was
to drop where we could fight, so he held the ship on the course and
checked his navigation as the fire burned toward the gas tanks. He
never said a word, he never told us about it. He took the thing to
himself, and when we were where he thought we should be, we went
out the side and Bob Reeder stayed with the burning ship, because
when he had held it there long enough for us to jump there was
nothing else for him to do.

Out of the burning plane we went and there were others that
burned into 500 feet of broad daylight nightmare.

Even before the mottled green chutes flipped out of the back
packs and cracked the harnesses, the nightmare began. Freak flak
hit a transport's cable, and the men jamming out the door never knew
there was nothing there to yank their static lines and open .the para-
chutes. Only a couple of reserve chutes opened. The rest plunged
straight in.

From the squared clumps of woods we had studied in the sand-
tables came the flak. Twenty-millimeter stuff, a lot of it, that started

62 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

up like a long chain of lazy orange balls, just loafing along until
they got close, when they went past whooshwhoosh like that.

The next man in the air was carrying grenades. Flak hit him
and he exploded. There was another man, penduluming a little
farther beyond, and each time he swung thick white smoke trailed
behind; he was carrying white phosphorus grenades, and flak had
hit them. They burned off his leg in the air.

From farm buildings and hedgerows there came the old familiar
sound of the Schmeissers, the burp guns with their ugly sharp clatter.
Almost straight down, a German soldier stood in a wagon and lashed
a horse to a wild gallop. Sergeant Curtiss Gadd, from Cleveland,
fired his tommy gun as he dropped and the German sprawled across
the traces while the horse galloped away.

The troopers pulled the pins on their harness as they neared
the ground, and cleared the shroud lines when they hit. German mor-
tars began to fire on the men in the open fields.

Some of us landed on top of a German artillery regiment's
command post, a cluster of farm buildings. Some died where their
chutes collapsed, and some got to fight a little bit.

The German fire came out of their command post buildings.
Fred Stauffinger, the supply chief who'd worked through the last
night loading supplies to be dropped to us, died where he hit. A
new kid, a replacement who'd only heard of Flamierge Hill from
the others, went across the farmyard firing from the hip. He killed
some Germans, but there will always be a little red in that barnyard
sand that came from the hole in his head when he fell.

The noise grew louder. There were more mortars and machine-
gun fire. Here and there the Nazis had placed 88s, and the 88s fired
on open bore sighting as the gliders began to come in behind us.
There was a screaming of all the winds in hell and a big transport,
the whole left wing bright with red flame, dived into the field and
exploded.

Captain Jim Cake, the artillery observer who jumped with us,
stalked through the farmyard firing his pistol, and even as he fought
he called to the others with never a hurried note in the soft Virginia
drawl.

Lynn Vaughn, the Pfc, from Georgetown, Kentucky, took the
first two prisoners. He left them in a clump of trees with a trooper
who had been hit and went back to get some more.

The troopers got in close, and the Hun didn't like that, and
he began to quit. Some of the mortars were silenced, and some of
the men who'd landed with Colonel Jim Coutts charged the 88-mm.
gun emplacements with gun butts and the knives they carried strapped
to their legs. The 88 fire stopped.

COMBAT 63

Long before he'd collected a battalion, let alone the strength of
the 5i3th, Colonel Coutts molded what he had into a striking force
and headed south toward our objective. He lost men on the way,
but he destroyed German forces, companies at a time, and when night-
time came the 51 3th had counted 1,100 prisoners and maybe half
again as many killed and wounded of the enemy.

But before that could happen, the troopers one by one and in
clumps of two and three fought their way into solid units, oriented
themselves on landscape they had studied so long, and went to the
job of clearing their bloody island in the middle of the German Army.

Ward Ryan was the regimental executive, you'll remember, and
it wasn't the way you'd think a regimental exec would be. He led us
in taking the command post we'd dropped on, and then he grabbed
what men he could and headed south for a linkup with the main body.

"Task Force Ryan," we called it, and we never had more than
forty men but we took more than a hundred prisoners. Up and down
the length of the little battleline we put through the pine woods
and across the railroad tracks Ward Ryan stormed; when the mortars
came he walked upright and everyone felt good he was there. When
they pinned us down for a little bit, he did what was right, and Jim
Cake got his radio set up and four hours after we hit we were receiv-
ing support from our own parachuting artillery which Lieutenant
Colonel Kenneth Booth and his gang had set up after they'd fought
to win positions for their guns.

The glider pilots got out of their craft and took the tommy guns
they'd been given. They joined us. Flying Officer Billy Hill, from
Brewton, Alabama, fought like a paratrooper.

"They went an' got my lovely ol' glider with their damn' mor-
tars," he said as he knelt behind a tree and reloaded the tommy. He
stood up and ran firing toward a farmhouse, and the Germans in
there fled.

Sometimes it was a little funny. A jeep from a glider drove up
in the middle of machine-gun fire, and a young captain, John T.
Stewart, of Memphis, leaned out of it. You could tell from his voice
how surprised he was.

"Maybe it's hard to believe," he said, "but we're the Quarter-
master Corps!"

We fought to the end of the woods, and then our supplies
arrived.

Just above the treetops in thundering V formations came the
Liberators, lower maybe than they'd ever flown. They held their
course through the flak that was left and over the open fields their
bellies dumped bundles which swung to earth on green and red and
blue parachutes.

64 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

"Now we can lick anything they got," said Pappy Edwards. He
was thinking of the antitank stuff in those bundles for which some
of the Liberator men paid in flaming wreckage littered across the
German land.

That was the way it was, then, through the first day, and through
the night when the glider men beat off a counterattack just like
veteran infantrymen; and through the next day until British tanks
broke through from the Rhine to the island in Germany the para-
troopers held.

It was like that through the next morning, when Herb Sieben's
Item Company every man in it had shaved his head to an Iroquois
scalp lock pushed across the Issel Canal and the rest of the regiment
went with them and knew the German defense in the West was
cracked wide open.

Toward noon the tanks arrived, big British Churchills, and we
knew then there was a corridor open westward to the Rhine, and
that our supplies would move in overland and knew it was an in-
fantryman's war once more.

That's the way it was, then, except for one thing: the brave men.

There were some who were brave and died, and the rest who
were brave and fo.ught and lived. The men who charged 88s with
knives and gun butts or who landed and fought in the heart of a
Nazi command post will tell you, though, that the bravest of all was
no man who died nor who fought and lived.

The bravest was old Doc Meir.

He came down in his chute and began his. task. He went to the
wounded and helped them. He made it easier for the dying to do
what they had to do. He walked out there through the fire, never
bending, never hurrying; deliberate and sure of his strength. Where
men were hurt, Bill Meir went, and he never tired.

Sometimes, when it was real bad, he'd pause, and he'd take off
that tin hat with the red crosses on the white circles. He'd mop the
sweat from his head, and look a little like a Dominican monk with
his fringe o hair around the bald spot, which was a kind of funny
thing to think about then.

You remember Doc, all right. You know how he was. He knew
about machine-gun fire. He got a Distinguished Service Cross learning
about it in Africa, when the first American paratroops jumped into
battle.

These were the same kind of machine guns. Of course, they give
Doc Meir and all the medics these red crosses on the white patches,
and it says there in the Geneva Convention that medics won't be
fired upon; "protected personnel," it calls them.

Doc Meir knows how many bullets those things will stop.

COMBAT 65

But there were people hurting out there. There were men with
pieces of German mortar in them, and with holes exactly 7.65 milli-
meters wide in their bodies where the machine-gun slugs had passed.
There were the wounded and the dying, and because there were,
Doc Meir walked among them and through the fire; never paused
and never hurried, except to help the hurt and make the ones he
couldn't help go away easier. ...

But you will understand about that without being told, you
who stayed at Flamierge Hill. About the burning planes, and the
things that happened on the way down, you would want to know.
About the men and how they were you will understand, because you
knew them in the red snow then, and they are no different now.

Maybe the strangest combat correspondent The Stars and
Stripes ever had was Larry Riordan; "strangest," because Larry not
only didn't have to go where he could get shot at, but he was not a
member of the Stars and Stripes staff, and finally, he wasn't even
in the army. He was a civilian.

Riordan, 3o-year-old ex-photographer for a paper in Newark,
New Jersey, was a top-notch cameraman for the Office of War
Information branch in Paris. The OWI, however, couldn't get
clearance to get Larry up to the front for the kind of pictures
they needed and he wanted to take. The SbS Desk and the OWI
chiefs eventually worked out a strictly sub rosa deal whereby
Riordan was lent to The Stars and Stripes, which would provide
him with transportation, get him to the front and back, and also
get first crack at his pictures. OWI was to get all the negatives
next, and so would have the photos they needed. OWI was to con-
tinue paying Larry's salary, which was more than any two men or
maybe three on The Stars and Stripes made, and was to provide
film and cameras.

Larry went off to the war, crossed the Roer with the assault
troops, wandered across the front under fire or wherever he felt
his job might take him. He looked more like the average Joe in
a line outfit than any other Stars and Stripes man, and when some-
one asked him whom he represented, the answer never was "the
OWI;" it always was t( The Stars and Stripes.' 9

Frequently Life magazine or some other pictorial outfit would
marvel at the excellence and the split-second battle quality of
Larry's photos and would offer him four or five hundred dollars

66 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

for a particular assignment if he would do it. Larry never took
the jobs.

"Too busy for The Stars and Stripes" was his answer.

Some of the officers in charge of The Stars and Stripes had
their taste of combat, too.

Arthur Goodfriend, after he got to be head man of the paper,
spent some time with infantrymen. You might not agree with the
conclusions his orientation-bent mind reached but you admired
the earnest little propagandist for his willingness to go through
the grim routine of an infantry replacement system to see how
it worked.

Just before the Roer River crossing, in March, 1945, Good-
friend adopted a pseudonym and the rank of private and went
from a replacement depot to a line outfit, joined a squad as a
rifleman. He spent nearly four days with the squad and came back
with a Combat Infantryman's Badge and half a dozen or more
editorials using a squad's esprit as an example of how and why
soldiers should deport themselves toward ultimate victory in both
war and peace.

Ensley Llewellyn, the other officer in charge in The Stars and
Stripes history, had had most of his combat experience before the
paper was formed.

"I put in two hitches with the Chinese, fighting the Japs,
long before America got into the war," Llewellyn revealed to
some forty business and editorial office men who had been unable
to produce any valid reason for avoiding an inspection one
morning.

Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn had led an active life before
the war, and in the course of his fighting in China, he told the
staff, he'd picked up so much of the Japanese language that he
was one of the few experts on it in the American Army.

"Trouble was," the colonel explained, "I was so well known
to the Japs from fighting them in China that there was too much
of a price on my head to send me to the Pacific when America
got into the war. So they sent me over here, but someday I'll
get out there and make the little yellow monkeys pay for that
gas in China."

The colonel, however, apparently managed to get in a little
combat with the Air Forces in the ETO. He never would tell us
where, or just how, but twice after he had taken a week off for

COMBAT 6T

a rest, he came back to the office looking satisfied and exhilarated.
"Been off on a couple of missions with the Air Force," the
colonel explained to staff questions, but he would say no more,
although one night he hinted he knew enough about the inside
of an RAF Mosquito "to take over as navigator any time it was
necessary."

The paper basically was, for a major portion of its existence,
a paper for the combat men first, and after that a paper for every-
one else in the overseas forces. The staff felt from the beginning
that men in combat had first choice as to what should constitute
their newspaper.

With that view in which, unfortunately, some of the brass
did not always concur the paper always essayed to publish as
close to the fighting as was feasible.

When the first paper was printed in Cherbourg, there was no
transport, or virtually none, and for nearly two weeks, as the
Yanks fought to break out of the Normandy beachhead and into
the whole of France, the paper went up to the troops in captured
Nazi vehicles, Cub liaison planes, and any other vehicle.

Wally Newfield probably hit the all-time high or low. As
circulation man for a corps area, Wally distributed the paper
from the back of a little donkey he "liberated" from a Wehr-
macht service corps.

The shaggy little donkey grew to be a common sight just
behind the lines, Wally spraddle-legged on its back, a bundle
of papers slung over his shoulder. A civilian war correspondent
took a picture of Wally and it went out with a caption explaining
how The Stars and Stripes was utilizing all methods of locomotion
to get the paper to the troops. One copy of the photo came to the
Stars and Stripes office, and although we didn't normally pub-
licize the doings of our own, Bob Wood thought of a caption
for the picture too good to pass up. It read:

CIRCULATION MAN GETS His Ass Up TO THE FRONT

It was one of the most popular pictures, other than the cheese-
cake, ever run in the paper.

The night the picture of Wally and his quadruped transport
system went into the paper, Llewellyn sat in the dingy editorial
rooms at Cherbourg and fell to musing on horses.

08 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

"Any of you fellows ever ride a bronc?" he asked. The staff
hadn't.

"Greatest sport in the world," EML declared, swinging a
chair around so he could straddle it backside front. "Greatest
.sport in the world. Cossacks out in Russia probably are the great-
est horsemen. We probably could use some of their tactics in
this hedgerow country today."

He referred to the thick hedgerows which divided and
screened all Normandy fields, and made tank warfare almost
impossible on any scale.

"Used to do a lot of bronc busting myself, strictly amateur.
Rode the whole rodeo circuit out west for years and the papers
out there claimed I was the best bronco buster in the country.

"Some of the more sensational papers said 'the best in the
world/ but that wasn't really true. When I went to Russia to
study cavalry tactics with the Red Army, I saw Cossacks there
handling horses and doing stunts I never figured I could do.

"I hear Hutton's been covering the front on a horse. Great
idea! Might get horses for the whole staff. In fact, think I will.
MacNamara, make a note of that. Get horses for the reporters
tomorrow."

"But, colonel," objected the administrative officer, "the jeeps
just got in today, and there's a jeep for every two reporters."

"Well, in that case," decided the colonel as the staff meeting
broke up and the staffers headed hastily for the nearest caf6,
"just mark it down that if we ever run out of jeeps again, we'll
get horses and I'll teach the staff to ride."

It was a strange thing that the editorial denartment, which
never had been practical about much of anything except the
editorial end of a newspaper, was alert thence onward lest some
catastrophe befall them and they lose their jeeps.

Getting the morning's paper to its soldier readers was a
circulation man's nightmare. A pair of staff sergeants, Jake Miller
and Jack Melcher, whose pay for handling something more than
a million in circulation was in the neighborhood of $125 a month
each, saw to it that the Joes got their papers.

Some of the stratagems to which Melcher and Miller had to
resort to obtain transportation will not be told until the two of
them are beyond the army's grasp. It's safe to say, however, that
when a Stars and Stripes car or truck was stolen and in France

COMBAT 69*

and Germany soldiers and civilians alike seemed to feel any army
vehicle momentarily unattended was a perfectly legitimate object
of requisition a jeep or another truck took its place within
twenty-four hours, whether or not the Quartermaster Corps would
authorize such an issue.

One Stars and Stripes transportation man (whose identity
was completely forgotten when the authors of this story were
simultaneously afflicted with amnesia) came up with a classic
solution to the lost circulation truck problem in his area.

Finding that French thieves and temporarily transportation-
less soldiers were grabbing Stars and Stripes trucks or jeeps un-
attended for even a few minutes, this completely unidentified
staffer went to the French underworld in the city in which he
was stationed. It took him some time to convince the French
gang boss that he was there on legitimate illegitimate business,
but he finally did.

"I want to hire, on a per job basis, the four best car thieves
in the city," the staffer told the underworld chief.

The gangster ultimately and with great French logic saw
what the staffer was driving at and assigned four car thieves to
the Stars and Stripes man.

The other staffers who knew about it always felt it was a
coincidence of considerable magnitude that thereafter that par-
ticular circulation office always had exactly the right number of
jeeps and trucks on hand, and as a matter of fact could provide,
on demand, a spare vehicle or two for any other area that hap-
pened to be short.

The editorial department could put out an extra on the
Schweinfurt raid, or the landings in Southern France, or anything
else that was news to the Joes, but that was no good unless the
paper could get to the men in the lines. The circulation depart-
ment got the paper up there.

At times delivery of the paper involved all-night drives across
two or three hundred miles of the snow-covered Western Front,,
in blackout, with no lights, and strafed now and then by maraud-
ing German planes. The paper used soldier drivers for as many
of those jobs as possible, but the demand for news at the front
was so great that we had to employ civilian drivers as well.

French drivers picked up truckloads of papers at two o'clock

70 THE STORY OP THE STABS AND STRIPES

in the morning, as soon as the paper started coming off the
press, and raced them over French roads, which had been thor-
oughly ruined by months of rough treatment under the treads
of American tanks and heavy supply trucks, to main distribution
points all over the country.

The French are, without qualification, the world's worst
drivers. French armored divisions, equipped with American tanks
and trucks, drove their vehicles until they stopped for lack of gas.
They refueled and went on. That was the only maintenance they
knew. They had more vehicles wrecked because of reckless driving
and lack of mechanical care than an American division had due to
enemy action. The French civilian drivers for The Stars and
Stripes were no exception. A week seldom passed when Jack
Melcher, our transportation expert, didn't have to report a dead
French driver to the French Labor Ministry.

The French seemed to take it as a matter of course that in
the hazardous occupation of car driving some people simply would
be killed. That was all there was to it and nothing could be done
about it.

In May, 1945, a French driver overturned the weapons carrier
he was driving and killed the French assistant in the seat next
to him. The accident occurred near Pfungstadt, Germany, and not
knowing what else to do the driver righted the vehicle, piled the
body of his dead friend in the back of the truck and headed
back for Paris. It was a two-day drive and he made his routine
stops on the way back.

The driver finally pulled into the Stars and Stripes garage
in Paris late on the night of the third day. He parked his truck,
put out the lights and went home. He was not due to work again
until six o'clock the following night.

Melcher was there .when he came in.

"What shall I do with Monsieur Renaud?" the driver asked
Melcher.

"What do you mean what should you do with him?" Melcher
bellowed, always impatient. "Take him with you. Assistant driver,
isn't he?"

"Yes, but "

"God damn it, I have more trouble with you Frenchmen than
you're worth. What's the trouble with Renaud?"

COMBAT 71

"Monsieur Renaud is dead," the driver said. "I had a little
accident in Germany and I thought "

"Dead?" Melcher said. "Where is he?"

"He is in the back of the truck, sir."

Melcher was hard to surprise but that did it.

The driver took Melcher to the truck and pointed to the
body crumpled in the back. His head was smashed and by now he
had been lying there four days.

Since tfce day Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn hired sixty
Frenchmen, Melcher had had all sorts of problems on his hands
but never a body in the back of a truck neatly parked in line
in the dark corner of the garage.

He immediately called a French funeral parlor and explained
his problem. Please, would they come and take the body away.

They would come and get the body, they told Jack, immedi-
ately upon receipt of either 10,000 or 12,000 francs, depending
on whether we wanted to give the man their class A or class B
funeral. In no event, however, would they or could they consider
undertaking the job until payment was made.

Jack did not have 10,000 francs and by" nightfall the body
was still haunting the dismal corner of the garage, which was
being avoided by one and all by this time.

Melcher went to the home of the man's family for the un-
pleasant job of telling them of the man's death. They were quite
poor and a very religious family. Jack said that when he saw so
many crucifixes hanging throughout their little house he knew
then and there that for a very religious funeral he would have to
pay the funeral director for the special i2,ooo-franc ceremony.

In the morning he called the French Labor Ministry, hoping
that they would pay the funeral parlor so that they would come
and get the body. The Ministry told Melcher that they only
allowed "up to 1,000 francs" for burials although they would
pay for transportation of the body from place of death to Paris*

Seeing that he could only get 1,000 of the 12,000 funeral
costs from the Labor Ministry, Jack quickly figured the angles.

"Who do you pay the transportation charges to?"

"We pay the person who transported the body. Who brought
the body from Germany?"

"I did," Melcher said quickly, "and my charge is 11,000
francs."

72 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

They would not pay it, however, and by noon that day the
body was still haunting Melcher's garage.

In desperation Melcher called the funeral parlor android
them if they would come over he would have the money and the
body for them. Then he typed out a touching little note about the
man's poverty-stricken family, about his wife and three children
(which he did not have), and sent three of his drivers through
all Stars and Stripes offices to collect what he called "a flower
fund."

By the time the undertakers got to the garage he had enough
money rounded up to satisfy them temporarily and they took the
body to a Paris cemetery and put it in a mausoleum, pending
funeral ceremonies the following day.

Finally, after the funeral director once more refused to bury
the body on the following day until the final payment was made,
Melcher scraped together enough to pay him and the French
driver was buried with full i2,ooo-franc honors.

That was the last trouble Melcher had with French drivers
until one turned over a jeep loaded with thousands of papers
near Nice, along the Riviera road, and smothered to death under
the load three days later.

To help Jake Miller's circulation men do a better job, the
various editions moved frequently. A couple of times they had
to retreat when American retreat in the face of enemy counter-
attacks became necessary.There was one time, however, when the
army retreated, but The Stars and Stripes stood firm and with a
few stray GIs held a city. That was Strasbourg,

Two affable characters, who had done their share of pin-
wheeling for the most part in the African and Mediterranean
campaigns, were running the Stars and Stripes edition at Stras-
bourg: soft-spoken Ed Clark, who had volunteered with the British
Navy before the United States entered the war, and brilliant,
affable Vic Dallaire, the managing editor.

They, with John Kearney, the lieutenant from New York
who was fired for printing the story of how rotten the Maginot
Line concrete had been found by the Yanks when they arrived,
were putting out a paper in Dijon, southeastern France, when
the armies pushed to Strasbourg and the Rhine.

Vic promptly took off on a reconnaissance of Strasbourg's
printing facilities, found the plant of the largest local newspaper

COMBAT 7&

untouched. Without further ado, Clark and Dallaire moved their
edition to Strasbourg, and asked permission from the Seventh
Army authorities after they were moved and had the new plant
safely occupied.

Their living quarters were pretty fair, too. When the fighting
was moving through the town, Ed Clark was caught in machine-
gun fire in a street. He threw himself against a doorway. Surpris-
ingly, someone inside opened it, and Ed grabbed for his gun,
suspecting Nazis were hiding there. It was a good-looking young;
woman who opened the door, and the place turned out to be a.
modern small hotel. Ed and Celline got along well, and when the
paper moved to Strasbourg, the staff moved into Celline's hoteL

"It's a swell plant/' Vic used to tell people from other edi-
tions if they dropped in. He would take them through the modern
composing room, into the gleaming pressroom, and inevitably the
visitor would ask, "What are those sort of explosion noises I hear
outside?",

"Well, that's one of the drawbacks to the place/' Vic would
admit with a rueful grin. "Those are German shells busting into*
the town. You see, the Germans are just across the Rhine bridge,,
down at the foot of the street."

Nonetheless, The Stars and Stripes stayed in Strasbourg, put-
ting out a good paper that was in the hands of the doughs early in
the morning.

However, in mid-December von Rundstedt started his last
great push, striking in the Ardennes, far north of Strasbourg.

American forces were rushed to the breakthrough zone from
wherever it was felt they could be spared. Some of them pulled
out of the Strasbourg area and during the subsequent weakening
of the line the Germans began a push across the river, threatening
Strasbourg. The High Command felt it would be easier to hold
on a line farther west while the main effort was put in the north
eradicating the Ardennes bulge, so all the French and Americaa
forces in the Strasbourg area were ordered to pull back.

Someone, however, neglected to notify the Stars and Stripes
office when the move was made. Dallaire and Clark awakened one
morning early, very early for them.

"You hear a lot of traffic in the street, Vic?" Ed demanded.

"Sounds like it, but guess it's all right/' was Dallaire's sleepy
answer. They went back to sleep.

74 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Toward nine o'clock, they awakened again.

"It was kind of a foreboding, I guess, that awakened us,"
Ed Clark said. "Something was too damned quiet for a town with
troops in it."

They looked out the window and saw citizens taking down the
American and French flags which had been put up on their
houses when the Boches left.

"Something stinks!" yelled Dallaire, grabbing for his clothes.
As he went out the door, Madame Celline, the hotel owner who
had befriended the Stars-and-Stripers, greeted him with, "The
Boches are coming. All the Americans and the French soldiers
have gone!"

"That was a hell of a note," Vic recalled later. "There we
were with two typewriters, two Colt .455 and a jeep to defend
the town of Strasbourg. We were damned if we were going to leave
if we could help it, because that plant was a sweetheart, and we
knew there was nothing as good back at Nancy or Besan^on, the
only printing towns to which we could retreat.

"Ed and I talked it over and decided to stick as long as we
could."

They went out on reconnaissance, and gambled that while
German forces had crossed the river north of the city, it seemed
unlikely they would be able to cross a canal on the city's edge in
the face of the French rear guard defending it.

The two enlisted men spent the day urging French citizens
of the town to stand fast, assuring them everything was going to
be all right, "although be damned if we believed it ourselves."
With a few straggling American soldiers, the newsmen walked
around the town, appeared everywhere they could to give the
civilians a sight of United States uniforms and try and make
them feel they had not been abandoned, although the Yanks knew
full well they had been.

In the evening, they coaxed a couple of French linotype
operators and a handful of pressroom workers to the plant. All of
them spoke some French, and they wrote their stories in American
and French and sent them to the composing room.

The next morning's two-page edition of The Stars and Stripes
certainly was the first trilingual newspaper the American Army
ever published.

The extreme left-hand column of page one was in French.

COMBAT n

It told the story of the situation on the Western Front and more
or less left readers with the impression although it wasn't actu-
ally specified that Strasbourg was a very safe place indeed. That
column was for the French-speaking citizens of the city.

The next column was in German, because a large number of
the border cities 1 civilian population were of Germanic descent.
That column, too, told the news of the Western Front and subtly
left any doubting Fritzes with the impression that no matter what
it looked like this wasn't the time to come out with any repressed
"Heils!" they might have been hoarding in their systems.

The rest of the paper was in English, not because there were
any soldiers left in Strasbourg to read it but simply because the
first two columns had exhausted the Clark-Dallaire French and
German vocabularies.

It probably falls within the realm of complete candor to
report that there was at least a minor further motive in publish-
ing the trilingual paper. Even as Stars and Stripes staffers all over
the world, from the paper's inception, Clark and Dallaire were be-
hind in their pay. Their military records were still in Rome, or
some place, and it had been a good many months since the soldier-
newspapermen had seen a paymaster who was interested in seeing
them.

They felt that, since they hadn't been paid, it would be
proper to sell the paper on the streets, thus bolstering the Allied
cause and also very incidentally providing Clark and Dallaire
with sufficient funds to carry on their assigned military job of
putting out a paper in Strasbourg.

Armed with this philosophical justification, Ed and Vic went
out onto the streets in the morning and sold their papers for
five francs each to the civilians, therebly acquiring enough capital
to maintain the "American Army" in Strasbourg.

When they found they had papers to spare, Clark and Dal-
laire coaxed an army truck into town to get a load of papers at
the plant for distribution to "the front-line troops," all of whom
were considerably behind the printing plant.

Eventually the situation was stabilized, and civilian news-
paper correspondents discovered that a couple of GI newspaper-
men had held Strasbourg against the Nazi Army and told the story
over the wires to America. The boys felt it was a little ironical
that only publication of the story in the civilian press and the

76 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

attendant favorable comment for their action saved them from
the disciplinary action which was threatened for having stayed
in Strasbourg when the army withdrew.

Not only in Strasbourg was S&S published under fire. It
happened in a good many towns, including the long nights of
air raids and the thundering days of the V-weapon attacks against
London* It was so in Liege, Belgium.

On the morning of December 16, 1944, a handful of staff
men set out from Paris to reconnoiter Lidge, just behind the First
and Ninth Army fronts, as the site for a forward paper. The paper
was too far from the war; the troops weren't getting their paper
on time.

Charlie Kiley, Al Ritz, Joe McBride, Charlie White, Bill
Spear and Hutton were the advance party in two jeeps. Max
Gilstrap and Fred Mertinke were due the following day. We
knew Lige was being pounded unmercifully by V-i robot bombs
Peter Hansen and the circulation men who used the town as a
distribution point phoned back that news but if we could find a
plant undamaged by the bombing we would risk printing there;
the paper was getting out much too late from Paris.

As the jeeps rolled through the early winter twilight, the
boys could see sudden red glares filling the sky to the east, and
later would hear even above the clatter of the jeep the rolling
boom an exploding V bomb had made. But it was when they
began to pass frequent westbound convoys, jamming through the
darkness without lights, that Charlie Kiley said, "What the hell!
These guys look like the mob I saw on the road back in Normandy
once when we had to retreat 1"

At Huy, a little Belgian town about twenty miles west of
Lige, the jeeps stopped and the staffers located an army ordnance
headquarters to find out why the westbound roads, away from the
front, were jammed with traffic,

"Germans have broken through just south and east of here/'
an ordnance captain said, looking up from the papers he was
getting ready to burn in a stove. "Nazi paratroops dropped all
over the whole area. Army's withdrawing and they hope to stop
them somewhere before they get here and cut the big supply
lines."

COMBAT 77

Bill Spear, who was coming as close to the war as a series
of desk jobs ever had permitted, sighed patiently,

"Only a Stars and Stripes crowd could pick a time like this,
without even trying, to open a new paper. Maybe we can publish
it in German and call it Der Stars und Stripes."

The staffers looked at each other.

"Well," said Kiley at last, a grin on his Irish face, "we started
out to set up a paper in Liege. Let's get going/'

The jeeps drove on to Liege, and as they went into the city
twisted and turned through blazing masses of wreckage where a
series of robot bombs, aimed at crippling the Lige railway yards,
had just smashed and set afire a convoy of army trucks. They
pulled into town just as jet-propelled bombers of the Luftwaffe
streaked across the city spreading more flames and death before the
antiaircraft guns could open up or the sirens sound.

"We are sure opening this joint with a bang!" Joe McBride
remarked enthusiastically.

For nine days, the editorial men scoured the burned city for
printing facilities. They discovered that the plant of Le Meuse,
a Belgian newspaper, was one of the most modern in Europe, and
arranged to take it over and print there. They dug up a garage,
arranged living facilities, but on December 24, while Hutton was
off with the 2nd Infantry Division, on the north shoulder of the
bulge a few miles down the road from Liege, they got orders
from the head office at Paris to abandon the city.

They grumbled, but packed their personal gear, locked up
the offices, which were ready for business, promised Le Meuse
management they would be back, and headed for Paris on roads
now almost deserted for thirty miles westward.

The following day, two Stars and Stripes couriers, bringing
copy back from Hodenfield and Russ Jones at First Army press
camp, which had just been bombed out, traveled the same road
out of Lige and wound up in a fight with a German armored car.

The couriers were Morris Blackov and Tom Dolan, both
veteran infantrymen who had fought in Africa, Sicily and Nor-
mandy with the old ist Division and had been "retired to pasture*'
in supposedly noncombatant jobs with The Stars and Stripes.

"We were coming down the road, and it was deserted as a
skunk's picnic," Blackie told later, "when Tom saw an armored
car pull into a crossroads up ahead. We'd both seen that kind of

78 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

armored car before. For a second we didn't know whether to
turn and get the hell out before that 37-millimeter cannon on the
car opened up, but they hadn't seen us yet.

"We drove the car off the road, grabbed the tommy guns
we've been hauling ever since we left the line, and started stalking
the sonofabitch. And was he dumbl

4 'The guy in the turret apparently figured he was all right,
or maybe he had seen us and was trying to locate us, but anyway
he unlatched the turret and stuck his head and shoulders out just
as we got within gun range.

"Tommy cut loose on the guy and just about chopped him in
two while I made a dash to get in close, under the gun. It worked,
and even better, the other Kraut in the car got so panicky he
opened the escape hatch in the bottom of the car and started to
crawl out. I was waiting for him and that was that."

Blackie and Dolan got back to Paris with new watches, two
Lugers, and each had a fancy German winter-issue fleece jacket
when they delivered their copy.

A month later, when the Nazis' winter push had been stopped
and then driven back, the Brass gave the order and The Stars and
Stripes went back into Lige and began publishing, even though
robot bombs smashed the garage and half ruined the circulation
office with a near miss. Within three months, however, the Allied
armies had smashed across the Roer River, raced to the west bank
of the Rhine, jumped across the Rhine, and were plowing so far
into the inner Reich that the Lidge edition was a rear echelon
paper and was discontinued in favor of a plant on the edge of
Frankfurt, in the heart of Germany, which less than a year before
had been one of the toughest aerial bombardment targets in the
world.

CHARACTERS

WENT OUT of the old London courtyard that
was labeled Printing House Square and set up Stars and Stripes
editions in Africa and Rome. They went across the dank old
cobblestones and down the worn stone steps to the Embank-
ment and sailed to Normandy, and made The Stars and Stripes
there and across Europe to Germany.

Those men began to come to The Stars and Stripes as it
started, and as it expanded there had to be more and more o
them. They came in fantastic fashion, from infantry outfits, from
the Air Force, from replacement depots, from armies in which they
had served as expatriates. Two of them were native-born Ameri-
cans who had lived all their lives in England.

Of them, there were better newspapermen, there were better
soldiers, younger men and a few older, but none more the
double-distilled essence of The Stars and Stripes than Charles
Worthington White, of whom you can recount only as he was and
swear it is true.

Hubert, the little beer barrel of a man who hefted his bat-
tered, khaki-clad carcass from one bitterly absurd soldier pose to
another on the sketching board of Sergeant Dick Wingert and
thence in the editorial pages of The Stars and Stripes, was a less
genuine Charlie White. Wingert patterned Hubert after Charlie
White, and since the artist was a Hoosier too, he gave Hubert
some of Charles's dry Indiana philosophy. But no inanimate
character, no matter how well done, could be as was the pride
of Bean Blossom, Brown County, Indiana.

Charlie, as were a handful of other Stars and Stripes men,

79

80 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

was a transferee from the Canadian Army, and it was always a
tossup in the minds of those with whom Charlie lived as to
which had the harder time of it, the Canadian or the American
army.

A winter day at the beginning of 1941, Charles sat in the
pffice of the Bean Blossom Bugle, a weekly publication which
carried a hunting and fishing column, by Charles W. White on
page one; a "Brown County Notes" column by CWW on page
three, "Court Proceedings, by Our Court Reporter/ 1 on another
page, and small advertisements scattered here and there through-
out the paper listing variously "Learn Shorthand in Ten Simple
Lessons. Charles W. White, accredited court reporter" or "Be a
Newspaper Reporter! Learn the Most Fascinating Business in
the World! Journalism Class Starting January 15. C. W. White."

Charles had the simplest and, he maintained, the best system
in the business for getting material for a hunting and fishing
column.

"Trouble with most of these fellows running a hunting and
fishing column," Charles would explain in his fiat, dry-hay tones,
"they go buy a whole mess of fishpoles or guns and tents and
stoves and stuff, then when the season gets around they go a-hellin'
off into the woods, get all bit up by flies and snakes and such
things, chop their toes, catch cold, and come back and write very
authoritative pieces about how the trout are rising to Royal
Coachmen this year, or the deer are running to low ground. But
by the time they get back and get it written, hell, everybody's
already found out for themselves or they're getting ready for the
next season anyway, and all it does is start arguments.

"Now on the Bean Blossom Bugle, I had it figured out
differently.

"Take off about eleven o'clock the first day of trout season,
after a fellow had a decent night'j sleep and breakfast, and just
go straight out the road to the last tavern out of town. Sit down
there, there was a fellow named Sykes run this one tavern and he
just had the walls filled with deers' heads and big stuffed trout
and hell! he'd never lifted a fishin' pole and was scared to death
of guns, well, anyway, stop there at the tavern and just sit.

"Fellow'd get a chance to pass a decent few hours that way,
just sitting around, you know, talking and so on, and pretty soon

CHARACTERS 81

you'd look out the window and you'd see the first of the fishermen
coming down the road.

"Well, they'd be all soaking wet, and cold, and they'd come
in and half of f em wouldn't have two minnows between 'em but
they'd all sit around there getting warm, you know, and lie about
everything, and all a fellow had to do was sit and listen to them
and then walk back to town just as nice and go write his column.

"Lot of stuff and nonsense, most of it."

When The Stars and Stripes had gone to press for the night,
Charles the soldier, would sit around the office and talk for hours
about country people. He liked 'em. No cities near 'em. He liked
Canadians too. From the day he left the Canadian Army, and in
directly growing proportion to his service in the American Army,
he liked Canadians better. Charles would sit at a desk, his big
GI shoes up in front of him. His little blue eyes would twinkle
with a light that had been kindled by watching people and so
grew in delight and inward joy every day of Charles's life.

He wore glasses, thick-lensed ones, which framed the graying
fringe of his thin, sandy hair. Mostly, Charlie needed a shave,
not very much, but the sort of light, two-day whiskers your
grandfather always used to have. There were cigarette ashes on
the lapel of his jacket. His shoelaces always had been broken and
tied time and again.

"Bud, we gotta get back and get to farming," Charles would
say. He would stretch and you could almost see his mind wander-
ing across some Indiana field, looking at the wheat and wondering
if there would be many pheasants that fall, after the wheat was
harvested and the corn cut and the work done. "Get a place with
a house on a hill, where you can see everybody coming and go
hide in the cellar with the cider if you don't want to be home.
Gotta get back to that, Bud, so let's you go hurry up and win the
war. These young fellas ain't doing it right."

Both Charles and Bud had been Canadians, and they would
sit for hours in the Lamb and Lark, or at Chez Charley's in Paris
(which always amused Charles's Indiana instincts) , and swap
great lies about their respective army careers.

It was no lie, however, that Charles told about how he trans-
ferred from the Essex Scottish Infantry Regiment of the Royal
Canadian Army to the Calgary Tanks. Bud knew Canadians from

82 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

those outfits, and they swore Charlie's story understated the case,
if anything. *

At a little town near the Canadian Army camp of Borden, in
Ontario Province, Charles went to an auction. He came back to
the Essex Scottish huts at Camp Borden that evening carrying a
magnificent chamber pot, a porcelain affair with pink and violet
roses painted around its sides.

"Beautiful, eh?" Charles demanded of his hutmates. "Bought
it at an auction. Ten cents, I bid, and I'd 'a' had the cover too,
but some damn-fool woman started bidding for the cover guess
she wanted it to put over a potato dish or something and when
she put the cost of that cover up to fifty cents I said to hell with it,
I'd have a chamber pot for under my bunk without a cover."

Ted Spay and the other old Essex Scottish men, before they
went to Dieppe and didn't get back, liked to tell about Charles
shaving in bed of a morning when they were in huts at Borden.

"Charlie'd lie there after reveille blew," Ted recalled, "gradu-
ally opening his eyes. Some of us would be late to parade some-
times just sitting there watching him.

"He slept with a turtleneck sweater on, and a knitted wool
balaklava helmet, and when he woke up he was something to see.
Finally he'd step out of bed with this long sweater hanging half
to his knees.

"Charlie'd go rinse out his big fancy pot at a water tap
outside the hut door, fill it up and bring it back to bed. He'd
put his pack at the head of the bed, and climb back in, leaning
on the pack. He'd roll down the collar of his turtleneck, roll up
his balaklava. Then he'd reach around for his shaving gear, prop
a mirror up on his knees there in bed, reach down to the floor and
wet his shaving brush in the pot of cold water.

"Lying there like a kind of an ugly Buddha with glasses,
Charlie lathered his whiskers, shaved and finally washed, all the
while in bed. He was a great guy to be in the army with."

Charlie about that time began a mysterious series of acts
which involved having his hair trimmed almost every other day,
and in view of the original sparsity of hair on his then 34-year-old
pate, the Essex Scottish were a little puzzled. It seemed an extrava-
gant length to go to please some female, the obvious first suspi-
cion, but a check on Charlie's whereabouts in the evenings found

CHARACTERS 88

him at the regimental canteen pouring away Black Horse ale
and singing, in due time, "Fisherman, Fisherman." No female.

Finally, they discovered the reason for the hair trimming.

Across the dirt street in Camp Borden from the Essex Scot-
tish were stationed the Calgary Tanks. Almost opposite Charles's
hut was the Calgary Tanks' barber. In front of a fly-specked
mirror in which the customers could vaguely see him work, the
tanks' barber kept three white bottles labeled, left to right:

Eau de Cologne . . . Water . . . Tonic

The middle bottle really had water, but the end bottles were
filled each morning with medical alcohol from the dispensary
and water, in equal portions.

Charles had stopped at the Calgary Tanks' barbershop for a
haircut, his rural Indiana conversation had impressed the Alberta
tanker who was doing the barbering and Charles had been ad-
mitted to the secret of the two end bottles. Thereafter, Charles
had his hair trimmed almost daily.

The rest of the boys found out the reason for the tonsorial
meticulousness just as Charles announced he was transferring to
the Calgaries: Haircuts at the Calgary Tanks' barbershop, it
seemed, were twenty-five cents to men from other units in the
camp, ten cents to soldiers of the Calgary Tanks, and at the rate
he and the barber were going on the two end bottles Charles was
continually broke paying for haircuts he didn't need. He trans-
ferred, but the Essex were laughing so hard at his reasoning that
they forgave him and welcomed him to their pubs when they
met again in England.

Charles, as a matter of fact, had occasional trouble arising
in pubs after he reached The Stars and Stripes, but he had it, too,
when the Tanks got overseas. The story the tankers liked best
was how Charles received twenty-eight days in the digger.

Near the tankers' camp, on England's south coast (the Eng-
lish name doesn't come back easily now, but it was the next town
west of two communities called Little Dean and Rotting Dean,
and the tankers called their town Dizzy Dean, to the bewilder-
ment of the English) , anyway, in the town of Dizzy Dean there
was a pub, the White Queen, and Charles did a lot of drinking
there. One night he rolled out of the White Queen drunk beyond

84 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

speech. He started for camp via a short cut which crossed the
Brighton electric railway lines.

Reeling over the high-tension third rail, Charles fell, struck
his head on a cross tie, gashed his scalp and collapsed unconscious
across the tracks, his legs a scant foot from the power rail.

In the late summer twilight, the motorman of the Brighton
Limited just barely saw Charles's prostrate form and stopped the
train. A hospital was called, the military police and the local
constable. Charles reeked of mild-and-bitter fumes when they
picked him up, but fortunately just as the military police arrived
the sympathetic publican came out with a glass of old brandy
and Charles nearly took his arm off downing the brandy. It was
found he wasn't hurt, but that he couldn't walk very straight,
so they took him to camp and a summary court-martial was called
for the next morning.

When the trial judge, however, began to question the mili-
tary police he found they had seen Charles given a glass of brandy
to revive him, so that took care of the alcohol fumes and Charles
could claim innocence of drunkenness.

They thought of charging him with obstructing traffic on the
rail lines, but obviously he had fallen and been knocked un-
conscious.

He had come reeling into camp with the MP escort, but the
officer knew his Trooper White and could foresee the defense
against drunkenness: he was dizzy from the blow and/or the
brandy.

Charles began to relax as the trial judge checked off the
charges, but even today Charles will tell you he admires the
man for his resourcefulness in the decision.

"On charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct, Trooper
White, you are found innocent. And so on a charge of having
obstructed the rail line and His Majesty's Posts.

"But questioning of the military police who apprehended
you reveals you were improperly dressed, so you are sentenced to
twenty-eight days confinement at Aldershot military prison for
appearing in public without a respirator gas mask."

Charles admired that judge's resourcefulness all the way
through the twenty-eight days in the digger,

Charles went through the usual vicissitudes in transferring,

CHARACTERS 85

and eventually wound up as a secretary in the office of the
Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, Dwight
Eisenhower, and spent most of his time handling correspondence
for Captain Harry Butcher, the general's right-hand man.

When The Stars and Stripes was ready to turn daily, how-
ever, Charles had a burning desire to get back into the newspaper
business. Coincidentally, this desire was born simultaneously with
a bit of military police trouble in a London pub, and the transfer
was made without trouble.

Charles became successively a rewrite man, a feature man,
Northern Irpland bureau reporter, editorial office expatriate for
more pub trouble, and finally member of the public relations
staff of the Services of Supply. To a man who had started the
war in the fighting Essex Scottish, the last was unbearable, so
unbearable that Charles eventually took the pledge and returned
to the fold when the fold reached Paris.

In the couple of years it took for Charlie to get on the
Stripes, off it and back on, Dwight Eisenhower was busy after a
fashion. There was Africa to invade, Sicily, Italy, the Continent;
the Luftwaffe to defeat, the Wehrmacht to defeat, and the direc-
tion of the Allied forces. While Charles White wasn't the sort
of individual easily forgotten, it would have been understandable
if the name didn't stick with General Eisenhower. Not so, however.

After the paper reached Paris, and before it expanded to
Strasbourg, Lige and Frankfurt, Hutton was recalled to the city
desk he had left a year before to cover the air war. In the process
of straightening out the setup for covering the war, Bud was called
out to see General Eisenhower, one of the two or three times the
Supreme Commander ever felt he had reason to be concerned with
SbS policy.

Bud walked into the general's office and was just a little taken
aback when the general, after greetings, said, "Well, how's White
these days?"

"White? You mean Colonel Egbert White? That colonel we
had with us and yank for some . . ."

"No. Private Charlie White. How is he?"

Apprised later that the Supreme Commander had inquired
about him, Charles, with only a small light in his eyes, observed,
"That was sure nice of him. How's he doing these days?"

86 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

It wasn't very curious, when you knew them and considered
what they were, that The Stars and Stripes of the two world wars
were as wholly unlike as their staffs.

The Stars and Stripes of World War I, a full-size weekly,
was a stylized publication, full of literary pieces about the army
and the doings of its components. It was leisurely, and had a whole
week to be leisurely before each issue.

The Stars and Stripes of World War II was a tabloid daily
newspaper. Its only style was a straightforward account bf the
world at war, the home front, and anything else that was news
in civilian papers.

Whereas the paper of World War I was intended to supple-
ment the daily English-language newspapers available to the sol-
diers the Paris Herald and the Paris edition of the Chicago
Tribune The Stars and Stripes of World War II was all the
troops had other than the weekly magazine, Yank.

There was little in common between the papers of the two
wars except the name; there was less between the staffs.

The soldiers who put out the weekly of the first war were
full of literary talent, and from the soldier paper came Alexander
Woollcott, Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Grantland Rice, Steve
Early, and a dozen more to fame in the postwar literary world.

The staff of the daily newspaper of World War II was apt
to get pretty peeved if someone suggested there might be any-
thing literary about what they wrote. There wasn't a line of
prose in the paper, the staffers swore.

Since the soldiers who were putting out The Stars and Stripes
of World War II had dedicated themselves to a straight job of
reporting with no first person singular about it, it is entirely
reasonable that they should have become as zany a collection of
eccentrics as ever gathered in what at best is a pretty zany pro-
fession: their personal eccentricities, which became legendary in
the army, were a counterbalance to their self-imposed limitations
of straightforward recounting of the news.

Little Joe Fleming typified the zanies, and when the staffers
charged him with it, he cackled in that thin, harsh laughter, waved
his left hand above his head in an empty gesture and, looking
at eye level but in a direction about three feet to one side of
his vis-i-vis, demanded "Do you mind? DO YOU MIND?" and
cackled some more.

CHARACTERS 87

Fleming was a little guy. He was thin to the point of being
scrawny, not much more than five feet six, and his big brown
eyes peered out suspiciously at the world through thick glasses.
He had stringy black hair, spoke with a New York accent marred
by a couple of years as a newspaperman in England, and Charlie
Kiley swore his facial features were those of a dachshund, par-
ticularly when he was being verbally chastised and adopted an air
of injured dignity.

But Joe Fleming could write. He was a good reporter, could
handle a feature story, and had a flair for satire that seemed
especially born to take the hide off pompous personalities, espe-
cially those tinged with khaki and brass. Joe was under no illu-
sions about his role in the war.

"Goddam collaborator, that's what I ami" he swore. "Waited
for the draft, think armies are fascist and I'm against fascism, and
if I had the courage of my convictions about liberty and freedom
I'd make them lock me up for refusing to be part of an army.
But I don't, so I'm no more than a goddam collaborator with the
American Army, and come the revolution I'll deserve to be shot,
especially by the Communists I'll deserve to be shot because I hate
them too much even to collaborate by voting for the Democratic
party."

It was typical Fleming illogic. He worked as hard as any man
on the staff to turn out a good paper as his share of the war effort,
flew several missions with the Air Force so that he'd know what
he was writing about as air war editor.

There were a great many stories about Fleming, but none of
them ever topped his arrival in France.

It was some two months after D day, and The Stars and
Stripes already was set up in Cherbourg and getting out a daily
paper for the troops when Fleming was ordered to leave London
and report to the Continental office. In full field gear, he was
magnificent.

His uniforms always were too large for him, and the smallest
jacket he could get draped around his sparse frame like a Russian
winter overcoat. His canvas-web belt wrapped nearly twice around
his waist, and Fleming was the last man in the world to be
accoutered with martial gadgets such as canteens, first-aid kits,
compass, trench knife, and ammunition for the carbine which was
fantastic on his shoulder. His helmet settled over his head, down

88 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

over his forehead and eyes so that he was continually twisting his
head to the side so he could peer out at the world through eyes
more hurting from life than even

Thus Joe departed for the war.

The Cherbourg staff was sitting around the office, laying out
the night's paper, when there was the noise of someone coming
upstairs with a staccato gait. Kiley lifted an eyebrow: that pace
sounded familiar. In the office at the time were two French clean-
ing women who had seen the Yanks arrive two months earlier,
and it must have been a shock to them when the door burst open
and in careened Joe Fleming in field gear.

Slanting across the room in a Groucho Marx-like walk, Flem-
ing waved one arm to the staff, blew a kiss to the wide-eyed
charwomen, and repeated rapidly:

"Je suis american! Je suis american!"

Even the French charwomen went out and got drunk.

Joe was a wow in France. He teetered through Continental
life with a wild gleam in his eyes and time and again confounded
the French with a typical Fleming gag.

Almost anything can and does happen on the Champs-Elyses,
and it's a tossup as to whether the Parisians who walk there in the
heart of their city are more correct in their appraisal of "zose
crazee Amricains encore" or the Yanks who swear "those screwy
French." Joey had them all stopped.

Walking down the Champs, on a Sunday afternoon, Joe and
Kiley watched the passing crowd. At the corner of the Rue de
Berri, before they turned off for the office, Joe saw two French-
men in earnest conversation. Both of them were quietly and well
dressed and one wore a most dignified beard. Without a word,
Kiley reported later, Joe stepped over to the Frenchmen who
seemed deep in some argument. He tipped his head sideward,
cupped one hand behind his ear and listened until they stopped
in astonishment and looked at the little Yank. Joe straightend up,
beamed and said:

"Vous parlez tres bien fran^ais."

He wheeled with a leering smile, twisted his hand in his
usual gesture and walked away while the two Frenchmen stared
in amazement after the American soldier who had paused to tell
them they spoke French very well.

CHARACTERS 89

Joe's method of landing a job on The Stars and Stripes was
typical Fleming and typical Stars and Stripes, for that matter.

A draftee, Joe was sent to England after basic training and
dumped, as were thousands of other basics, into a replacement
center there. It is from such centers that all branches of the ground
forces draw new personnel, but while they are there the soldiers
go through the same old day-after-day routine close-order foot
drill and the rudiments of handling small arms.

After a week of trying to teach Joe the rudiments of infantry
drill, the sergeant grew understandably weary and Fleming was
transferred to the clerical section of the permanent staff at the
depot, where he seemed stuck for the rest of the war.

"Concentration camp," Joe mutters today when he thinks
about it.

One morning there passed through his clerical hands a buck
slip from The Stars and Stripes, requesting the replacement depot
to hold for an interview the following Monday all men it had on
hand with newspaper experience.

"It was my job to find the guys and set 'em up," Joe confessed
later, "so I did a pretty good job of digging out their specification
cards but I made sure there weren't any there with better records
of experience than mine, and when Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn
came loping into the joint Monday, looking for newspapermen
for S&S, I was a lead-pipe cinch."

Joe arrived at the Times office when Hutton, for whom he
was to work, was away for the day, taking pictures on kind of a
busman's holiday. Moora was too busy to learn much about him,
and all Joe found out about his new place of army residence was
an overheard conversation in which a couple of staff members
speculated on what degree of sonofabitch Hutton was. When
Bud got back the next day and walked into the office, he was
in a bad humor after an encounter with some photo-reconnais-
sance colonel who thought he knew better than Bud what security
was and had refused to allow pictures already approved by the
Air Force.

Hutton came into the room and found Fleming unfortunately
sitting in his chair at the city desk; Joe was just waiting around
for something to do. Hutton glared.

"What the hell do YOU do?" he demanded at length. Joe
blinked and started to answer, but couldn't.

90 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

"Look like a goddam school of journalism type to me," Hut-
ton snarled. "Get to hell out of my chair and go sit down and read
back issues of the paper for a week. Gonna have one bastard
around here who knows S&S style before he starts writing."

Joe did as he was told, and before the week was up had been
moved into a spot on rewrite, just at Hutton's right elbow where
he caught, literally, not only the copy to be rewritten but the full
bitter measure of Hutton's comments about every man on the staff
as copy was turned in and read.

To this day, Joe will flinch a little if someone sitting beside
him suddenly turns and starts talking. Sort of combat reaction,
Joe says.

Fleming's cackle, his friendly manner, and a curiously unbe-
lieving attitude about life made him a staff favorite. He was
wacky enough to be a staffer almost upon arrival, and when he
went to share an apartment with tall, good-looking Ben Price,
he embibed some of Price's fresh young wackiness and gave Ben,
in exchange, a degree of balance. Sometimes they would go out
after work and get drunk together in Alf Storey's Lamb and Lark,
and sing, although neither of them could carry a tune, "Fisher-
man, Fisherman," with Charlie White who was sure to be in the.
L&L before them.

One such night they stayed long after closing time, and when
Alf threw them out went back to the Times offices.

"Benny, I think we ought to do a story on the speech today,"
Joe said as they entered the city room. Art White and Bob Moora,
who sat quietly in a corner for the next ten minutes, told the rest
of the staff what happened.

"Yerse?" hiccuped Benny. "What speech?"

"The speech of Dr. Whoshowhosho to the students of Ling
Poo," Joe replied gravely. Abruptly his voice changed to an order.

"Price, get your lead ass over on rewrite and take a story
from Fleming. He's out at Ling Poo University."

Benny stared for a moment, then sat down, a little hesitant,
at the rewrite desk where there was a telephone with a headset
receiver. He put them on, slipped paper into the typewriter and
waited.

Joe strode across the room, picked up a telephone on the far-
side of the room and waited for the staid, decorous old gal who*
was night switchboard operator on the Times board.

CHARACTERS 91

"Give me extension 138," Joe ordered.

"No, you just think that's right in this room. It isn't, though,
as any fool can tell you. I'll tell you. It's in the Stars and Stripes
editorial rooms.

"Where am I? I'm calling from Ling Poo, naturally."

Finally, the poor gal connected Joe with Benny's extension
across the room and Fleming began:

"Hello, Price. Guess I'll dictate this. The Desk wants it to
run and have a lot of names in.

"Dateline it Ling Poo University, Feb. 12. Okay?

"Dr. Whoshowhosho, speaking to two thousand undergrad-
uates of Ling Poo University, today told them that Fascism (capi-
talize that, Benny) was a threat to Democracy (that too, Benny).
After the address, in which he soundly scored high-altitude day-
light precision bombing by the Japanese, Dr. Whoshowhosho dis-
tributed diplomas to the two thousand undergraduates who gave
their names as, semicolon. No, make that colon."

At that point Benny had had enough, and he spoke back into
the phone.

"Joe, better hold it down. The Desk says we'll do a feature
story on their names sometime later. So that's all. 'Bye, Joe, and
thanks."

They hung up and walked out of the office together after
Benny had carefully folded and placed in the "in" copy basket
the photographic print on the reverse side of which he had typed
the story.

Moora and White said the best thing about it all was that,
although Joe was shouting he claimed the connection was poor
Benny never once listened to the shouting; he got the whole story
over the phone.

Not all the eccentrics were limited to reporters or editors.
One of the prides of the old staff at the Times was George Pop-
ham, Llewellyn's chauffeur, a Canadian too before the Yanks
came into the war.

Popham first came to the notice of the city staff over a matter
of pins.

The staff was hammering toward a deadline one evening late
in December, 1943, when Popham walked into the city room and
stood quiet for a time long enough to cause Russ Jones to look up.

92 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

He saw Pop contorting his face as he reached his big fingers into
his mouth.

'Top, what the hell you trying to do?" Russ demanded.

From the burly Popham's mouth came a series of grumbling
jumbled sounds.

"What?"

Popham took his hand out of his mouth and said, under-
standably but still with twisted speech, "Grot blins in m* mouth."

"Pins in your mouth? Where the hell did you do that?"

By that time the staff was looking up and the Desk was torn
between irritation and intrigue. Popham jammed his fingers back
into his mouth, fished again and triumphantly came out with two
straight pins, reached in and got two more. The whole staff sighed
with relief and Moora asked, "Pop, how did you ever do that?"

"Putting up maps for the major in his office and forgot to
take the pins out of my mouth I'd put in there so I wouldn't drop
them," Pop answered, his speech still a little thick.

The office roared with laughter and went back to work. In
about ten minutes, Jones had a feeling something was wrong and
looked up to see Popham with his hand again jammed inside his
mouth.

Russ's roar of laughter and astonishment brought everyone
back to Popham. "Well . . ." said Moora menacingly, letting his
voice drift off.

"Blore blins/'

Bob said: "Well, Pop, you go out in the hall and try to get
them out and if they're still there when I get this head for page
one written I'll take them out for you."

Ten minutes later the head was written, Bob went out to the
hallway. Popham was still there, groping in his mouth, growing
red in the face. Bob shoved him under the light, found four more
pins and extracted them.

"What," he demanded in ultimate exasperation, "is the ex-
planation for those pins after the others?"

"Lot of maps," Popham said sadly. "Lot of maps/'

Pop had his troubles with Major Llewellyn. (E.M.L. only
became a lieutenant colonel after Pop left him.) He became, for
one thing, probably the only man in any army anywhere who ever
was court-martialed for going to the toilet.

Llewellyn stormed into the city room one day looking for

CHARACTERS 98

Popham. "Where's that crazy chauffeur?" he demanded. Gene
Graff, the sports ace, said he'd seen Pop going into the toilet.

"He can't do that/ 1 Llewellyn screamed with one of his bursts
of sudden and illogical anger which the editorial staff had grown
used to brushing off and forgetting as meaningless. "He didn't ask
permission."

That was funny in an establishment such as The Stars and
Stripes, but Llewellyn didn't see it that way.

"If he isn't here in five minutes, I'll court-martial him," he
shouted and went back into his own map-lined cubbyhole. No
one thought any more about it; just the major going off the deep
end again and he'd forget it in a nainute.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, Popham walked into the city
room and someone told him the major was looking for him. Pop
went into the major's office. Half an hour later there came to the
desk a telephone call.

"Hey, Bud. This is Pop. I'm under arrest and the major is
going to court-martial me. I told him I was only in the can, and
he says that's why he's giving me summary punishment and fining
me ten bucks and I have to stay in my quarters every night for
the next month."

The editorial staff protested to the major that this was rank
injustice, and wanted to carry the appeal further when he was un-
moved, but Popham said to hell with it he was past thirty-eight
years of age and had applied to get out of the army and join the
Merchant Marine.

Within a month he had his discharge. He stopped at the
Times the same day and the staff learned for the first time that
his father had been a law partner of the great Clarence Darrow,
that Pop had gone to Notre Dame Preparatory School, finished
two years at the University of Chicago and then had decided he
had heard too much about being a lawyer and so went off to sea.
Ben Price rode uptown in a taxicab with Pop the day the ex-
chauffeur left London for the States.

As the taxi passed Grosvenor House, the swanky London
hotel which had been partly taken over by the army for an
officers' mess and in front of which pink-panted officers always
were crowding, an army car with a major in the back seat pulled
out in front of Pop's taxi. There was a traffic snarl.

Pop, Ben said later, reached swiftly into his pocket, pulled

04 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

out his formal discharge papers which had separated him from the
army, and then gripping them tightly stuck his head out of the
taxi window.

"You," he roared at the officer lounging in the back seat of
the offending olive-drab car. "You! Get that goddam car out of
the way and do it in a hurry! Yes, you!"

The startled major jerked erect. He blanched and looked at
Pop's angrily red face, saw Pop's new civilian cloth,es, but couldn't
see the discharge papers Pop clutched in his hand.

"Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Right away," answered the major. He
turned on his chauffeur and gnattered at him until the GI, whose
countenance wore a happily smug expression, moved the cai away.

Pop leaned back in the seat as Benny prepared to leave.

"Benny, tell the boys about that," Pop said dreamily. "Tell
'em about it, will you?"

The word "fabulous" is apt to get a bit overworked in telling
of the staffers and what they did. Nonetheless, it is a most proper
usage in that connection.

Stars and Stripes men always were turning up in the strangest
places in one week toward the end of the war in Germany not
only were there Stars and Stripes men filing dispatches to the Paris
office or to the Rome office from every zone of the fighting front,
but Earl Mazo and Larry Riordan were in Norway, Pete Lisagore
was in Copenhagen, Charley Kiley was with General Eisenhower,
Andy Rooney was in the air somewhere on the way to China in
the plane of a general with whom he had bummed a ride, Corporal
Phil Bucknell was talking to the morning-coated statesmen and
mowing them down with his British accent at San Francisco,
Tom Hoge was in Odessa on the Black Sea, Ernie Leiser was in
Berlin, and there were a handful more scattered around.

Ed Clark and Vic Dallaire were riding through the Alps on
a flatcar.

Ed and Vic had started out from Germany in a jeep, planning
on driving down through the passes of the Alps to join the Fifth
Army in Italy. They found one pass blocked by a landslide. The
only route southward was the railroad line through a long tunnel.
Driving up to the switching tower at the tunnel's northern en-
trance, Vic managed in his bad French and Ed's worse German
to convince the civilian towermaster that they were railroad ex-

CHARACTERS O5

perts from the United States who were going to supervise the rail-
roads through the Alps.

Immediately at their demand, the towermaster halted the
next train south, ordered a crew of workmen to shove their jeep
aboard a flatcar and the two staffers rode triumphantly through
the Alps to Italy.

As was pointed out, Stars-and-Stripesers were always turning
up in the strangest places. And virtually every time they were wir-
ing shortly thereafter for money. The soldier-reporters never
seemed able to stretch their army pay until the next time they
had a chance to collect any. One reporter, whose name somehow
cannot be recalled, once was farmed out to the public relations
section of the Supply Forces for a period of six months. Even with
the PRO, the reporter couldn't make his money last. Finally, in
the alcoholic throes of despair the reporter "borrowed" an army
typewriter and went to a hock shop.

"That typewriter belongs to your army," the pawnshop pro-
prietor admonished.

"No, it doesn't. I own it.

"You get a slip from your commanding officer saying it's
your typewriter and I'll lend you six pounds on it."

The reporter was back in the paivnshop half an hour later.
He had the slip which said the typewriter was his personal prop-
erty, the signature on the slip read: "Colonel Joseph Zilch." The
pawnshop proprietor squinted, seemed satisfied, took the type-
writer and handed over six pounds.

Two days later when the army had missed its typewriter and
the military police detectives had finally traced it to the pawn-
shop, a friend found the reporter guzzling the last of the six
pounds in a pub.

"The MPs are on your trail!'' the friend warned.

Red-eyed and unsteady, the reporter nonetheless was com-
petent to meet the threat to his personal liberty. With a hurried
"thanks," he sped out of the pub and raced away in a taxicab
just as the MPs arrived in their jeeps.

There ensued a veritable cops-and-robbers chase through
London streets, with the reporter directing his taximan along an
escape route he obviously had planned, with commendable mili-
tary foresight, well in advance. A scant two blocks ahead of the
MPs, who missed his final turn and never caught up with him

96 THE STORY OP THE STABS AND STRIFES

until twenty-four hours afterward when it was too late, the re-
porter's taxi swung into a United States Army military hospital,
where he turned himself over to the Psychopathic Ward as an
obviously mentally ill GI, and had with him the unpaid taxicab
driver to describe the flight across the city from pursuers who
apparently never had been there, since they weren't present now
to substantiate the reporter's slyly insinuated intimation of a
persecution complex.

When the police got there a day later, the reporter was ably
and successfully defended by the hospital psychiatrist. He was
obviously suffering from a temporary derangement, was not re-
sponsible for his actions, and should be given a rest from duty
under hospital care for at least two months.

On the fringe of The Stars and Stripes organization there
were always individuals who somehow became associated with
the paper either officially or unofficially. Some of them worked
for us, some of them with us, but whatever the connection most
of them sooner or later whirled off on some strange tangent be-
cause of the association.

A New York Times correspondent, Fred Graham, always a
favorite of staffers, started traveling with Earl Mazo and Jim Grad
when he was assigned by the Times to Patton's Third Army.

One night Fred ran a little short of clean shirts and borrowed
one from Grad. Grad, a sergeant, had only one shirt left, a GI
wool one on which he had had stripes sewn when he was with a
line outfit before joining The Stars and Stripes. It didn't bother
Fred, he put it on and covered the stripes with the field jacket he
always wore.

After he finished work that night, Fred wandered over to the
elaborate headquarters officers' bar the Third Army had set up.
With another correspondent he sat around for an hour or so,
drank and talked. The barroom began to get warm and finally
Fred stood up, took off his field jacket and sat down again, for-
getting about the stripes on his shirt. No one said anything until
he started out the door with his friend.

A brusque old colonel bolted across the room and grabbed
Fred by the striped arm.

"What the hell do you think you're doing in here, soldier?"
the colonel bellowed.

CHARACTERS 97

From behind him Fred heard the voice of his friend whisper
over his shoulder, "Don't tell him."

Graham, realizing he was wrong, decided to give the colonel
a rough time anyway. After two or three minutes' bellowing, the
colonel, blue in the face with rage by then, called for military
police.

Deciding he had carried the gag far enough Fred told the
colonel he was actually a war correspondent. He had the sergeants
stripes on by mistake, he told the officer. It was too late, though,
and the colonel demanded his identification papers.

"The hell with him," the voice behind Fred whispered,
"Don't show them to him."

"Nope," said Fred, "I'm afraid you'll have to take my word."

By that time a crowd had gathered and the MPs had arrived.
Fred reluctantly started reaching for his correspondent's War De-
partment pass. First he went into his breast pocket where he usu-
ally kept it, while the colonel, the MPs and the crowd stood
around waiting for him to produce evidence that he was not a
sergeant in the officers' bar.

A little faster his hands moved from his shirt pockets to his
pants, then his back pockets.

"Gee, I had it here when I came out I think."

Fred got away that night but the colonel, fully aroused, filed
charges against him. He wanted the New York Times correspond-
ent tried. Grounds? "Impersonating a noncommissioned officer."

Fred never was tried but he left the Third Army and has
since been careful about borrowing shirts from Stars and Stripes
staffers.

Graham's experience, unique in itself, was typical of the
things that seemed to happen to what we often referred to as "our
civilian staffers."

Not all of them got into trouble but certainly one of them
was the most arrested individual in Europe for the few months
after the Seventh Army drove into Strasbourg.

He was a 1 4-year-old Alsatian named Lucien Detire, black-
haired and black-eyed. Lucien on rare occasions smiled at the
world with a brightness that was sad to see because it shone
through a very bitter and very troubled young soul: Lucien lost
both his parents to the war.

Lucien most assuredly was the most efficient fighting man on

98 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

the unofficial Stars and Stripes roster of civilian staffers. For a year
before the liberation of Strasbourg Lucien was with the French
Maquis, harrying the Germans who occupied their Alsace and
Lorraine. In the fighting during which Ed Clark and Vic Dallaire
found Lucien or maybe it was the other way around the
American forces drove up through southeastern France and into
Strasbourg. When the last German fled out of France's two last
provinces, 1 4-year-old Lucien Detiere had four notches in the
butt of the rifle he carried.

Clark and Dallaire may have been the best-natured and most
inherently kind staffers The Stars and Stripes ever had. Both of
them had been combat men before coming to the paper. They
were also competent newspapermen, and when the army took
Strasbourg they moved the Stars and Stripes edition they had been
publishing at Dijon into the newly liberated city. Lucien became
the paper's copy boy, armed guard and instigator of endless
clashes between the staff and the military police until eventually
all the MPs in the Strasbourg area knew him. Most of the MPs
liked Lucien nearly as much as the S^Sers, and the few who re-
sented his somewhat proprietary air about Strasbourg, The Stars
and Stripes, and the American Army let him alone if only by
virtue of the fierce step-paternity Clark and Dallaire exhibited
about theiK orphaned protege.

But eventually Ed and Vic left Strasbourg for another edition
and Lucien of course went with them. They couldn't always take
him when they went out on trips so Dallaire wrote out an official-
looking document for the kid.

"This is Lucien Dettere," Dallaire began his letter. "He is
on official or unofficial duty for The Stars and Stripes in the central
and southern portions of the European Continent. He is an Alsa-
tian who speaks French and some English with a German accent.

"The clothing he wears," the letter continued, "has been
given to him by the paper's staff and by various other American
units he has met. He is 14 years old and will get into about as
much trouble as a good 1 4-year-old boy will."

While the letter continued to cover almost any circumstance
the boy might find himself in, he nevertheless spent most nights
away from Clark and Dallaire in some American MP brig.

During the siege of Cologne, Ed Clark took Lucien to Terry
Allen's io4th Division with him. Ed used to go up front every

CHARACTERS 0fr

day and he left Lucien at division headquarters. Finally, when he
dashed back to Lige with a story, he left Lucien there in care o
iO4th headquarters men,

Lucien was not the boy to stay where he was put. Three
days later, after he had upset the whole io4th Division MP corps,
he hitchhiked to Liege himself. Lucien loved American soldiers,
so, attired in a complete American uniform, the little fourteen-
year-old went to the places in Liege where he would find his
friends. While he might conceivably have got by in any other
place, Lucien, in a bar, looked like just what he was, a four foot
eight inch, 1 4-year-old kid. During his stay at the iO4th Division
he had collected insignia as he always did when he stayed with a
unit. He had sewed the Timberwolf patch on his arm but the
extra-special item he had acquired was a blue and white MP
brassard.

Because he liked it and because he thought he might get into
less trouble with the police if he posed as one of them, Lucien
put the MP armband on in Liege. The kid with the .45 automatic
slung at his hip, the American equipment and the MP brassard
couldn't have been more conspicuous if he had been riding an
elephant. In two days the MPs from the various military police
units in Lige picked him up seven times. Each time Lucien
pulled out his now dog-eared letter signed by "Staff Sergeant
Victor Dallaire, Editor, Strasbourg Edition, The Stars and
Stripes." And eventually, each time, the police would call the
office and get someone over to vouch for him.

Lucien Detiere, like thousands of French, Belgian and Ger-
man kids in towns American columns passed through, worshiped
American soldiers but, unlike most, he did something about it
he insisted on being with them. Kids, even German kids, don't
like losers. They backed the winners and American equipment
rolling by their doorstep was better evidence than Hitler had ever
presented.

While Fred Graham and Lucien Detire's association with
The Stars and Stripes were typical of a hundred civilian staffers
unofficially attached to the paper at one time or another, neither
of them or any of the others were so permanent on the exofficio
roster of Stars-and-Stripers as Alf and Gert Storey, great friends
and, incidentally, proprietors of the Lamb and Lark, the Printing
House Lane pub.

100 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Printing House Square was a dank, cobblestoned little thor-
oughfare around which the motley buildings of the Times clus-
tered to keep out the sun. In the quiet, friendly half-gloom, you
could hear the dignified noises of Times presses, an occasional
rattle of a typewriter, and, in the proper hours, the comfortable
clink of ale mugs from the Lamb and Lark.

The Lamb and Lark traditionally was the pub in which men
from the Times gathered for their favorite mild-and-bitter. Its
dingy, brown, two-doored front was the first thing on your right
as you came up Printing House Lane to Printing House Square.
You stepped over the worn threshold, walked past the public bar,
where generations of Times teamsters had been replaced by lorry
drivers, and came to the inner bar, which eventually was as much
a part of The Stars and Stripes as the paper's very masthead. In the
white light of a gas lamp and a gas lamp was exactly the sort of
illumination the Lamb and Lark should have had you saw a
table with four chairs, an eight-man bar on your left, and Alf and
Gertie.

Two items should explain the relationship between Alf and
Gertie and the noisy American soldiers who came to shatter the
quiet of Printing House Square. First, in the rack of pigeonholes
which served as the staff's mailbox in the editorial department,
there was reserved for all time one compartment labeled "Storey,
Alf and Gert." Of course, they never got any mail, but that was
the way the staff felt about them. And, secondly, before the army
paper had been at the Times two months, Alf was answering the
Lamb and Lark telephone not with "Storey here,'* as he always
had done, but "City Desk," as the Stars and Stripes deskmen al-
ways answered their own phone across the square. That's the way
things were between us and Alf and Gertie.

The Lamb and Lark was the staff's YMCA, pool hall, bar
and recreation lounge. It was sort of a Stars and Stripes USO.
Stocky, blue-eyed, cockney-accented Alf was the director. Gertie,
the publican's wife, dealt with Alf and the staff in a slightly sar-
donic tone belied by the little smile at a corner of her tight-
lipped mouth and a twinkle in her gray eyes. They were com-
pletely at home in the lunatic fringe atmosphere of The Stars and
Stripes.

Eventually the Storeys got to be a little American, and the
staffers, naturally, got to be a little of whatever kind of English

CHARACTERS 101

the Storeys were. By the time we'd been in Printing House Square
six months, Alf was accompanying his good-bye wave to custom-
ers, not with the historical "Cheerio, Jack," but with "Don't take
any wooden nickels, Mac." And the staffers were hoisting their
drinks despite wartime rationing, there was always a drop o
something for them at the Lamb and Lark with "Cheerio" or
"Chin chin."

The intimacy of The Stars and Stripes staff and the Lamb and
Lark's publican served a practical purpose: It circumvented the
law which decreed that City of London pubs should be open to
the public only from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M., and from 5:30 P.M. to
10:30 P.M. Inasmuch as Alf and Gertie fed fundless staffers who
missed meals elsewhere, or put to bed long-drinking staffers who
missed the last train home, and quite as much because staffers
occasionally had to put Alf to bed, or if he had stayed too long
on the wrong side of the bar took him home with them to avoid
Gertie's displeasure, all concerned held that it was a purely family
relationship, and Stars and Stripes men thus were able legally to
be in the Lamb and Lark whatever the hour. Usually the hour
was very late.

It was fitting that in the well-worn, slightly cobwebby atmos-
phere of the Lamb and Lark there should be a rough and burly
Airedale named Prince. Prince on rare occasions managed to catch
one of the foot-sized rats which made their way up from the
Thames docks to run around the walls of the Lamb and Lark on
quiet nights. Every time Prince caught a rat, one resourceful
staffer or another somehow managed to wangle a piece of steak
for the dog despite rationing.

When Prince died, the staff quietly assessed its members for
60, which was the price of a very pedigreed Airedale from Brit-
ain's very best kennel. No one on The Stars and Stripes would
have been caught dead being sentimental, so that night the staff
simply took the new and very pedigreed pooch with them on a
leash when they went to the LfcL after presstime.

When Gertie finally threw everyone out about i A.M., Ben
Price handed Alf the other end of the pup's leash and said:

"Here's a dog we brought you, Alf. Maybe his name ought
to be Deacon."

He hurried out for the subway with the rest.

At Christmas, 1943, the staff bought Deacon a collar with a

102 THE STORY OF THE! STARS AND STRIPES

silver name plate, and sometime that winter also opened a mail-
box compartment for him in the editorial room, just ahead of
the one reserved for Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn. Everyone con-
cerned felt that a dog of Deacon's standing shouldn't go around
wearing the same collar every day, so for Christmas, 1944, we
bought him another one. That same Christmas, most of the orig-
inal Stars and Stripes staffers were across the Channel in France
anpl Belgium and Germany, but as the Yule evening settled on
Printing House Square, the telephone rang in the Lamb and Lark.
In answer to A1F s "City Desk," there came over a network of
army and civilian telephone wires a Stars and Stripes voice from
the Continent, wishing Alf and Gertie, their daughter Joyce, and
Deacon a merry Christmas.

Alf maybe was the man in all England with the best sense of
humor. He participated in more SfrS escapades than any other
civilian staffers. He was never left out.

When Bill Dunbar, one of our messengers, married an Eng-
lish girl, everyone went to the wedding in Shepherd's Bush, one of
London's outlying districts. Of course Alf was invited, but because
he had to work until two o'clock, Alf missed the actual wedding.
The bridal party left the church in the only kind of automobile
you could hire in London besides a taxi a huge, black, nine-
passenger limousine, the kind with a liveried chauffeur who can
communicate to his passengers only through one of those silver-
belled speaking tubes. The sergeants and privates and corporals,
and the handful of civilian-garbed in-laws, rode from the church
to the in-laws' house, with the staffers hoping all the time that Alf
could get there before they drank up the precious bottles of
Scotch Alf had managed to dig up for the occasion.

When the reception really got going and became a boiling
little party, the staff tried manfully to maintain a pleasant teatime
conversation with Bill's new in-laws and at the same time throw
down glass after glass of good Scotch. In the middle of the party
Ben Price decided it was time to get Alf. The only available trans-
portation was the hearselike chariot. The Lamb and Lark was
seven miles from Shepherd's Bush and to get there it was neces-
sary to pass through the heart of London's West End, through
the parts of the city where the Americans were thickest and down
into the drab businesslike area of Fleet Street.

Benny volunteered to go for Alf, and for Gert, if she would

CHARACTERS 10&

come. He stepped out the door and had the stripe-panted chauf-
feur open the door of the Rolls-Royce limousine for him. The
chauffeur's mouth dropped open when Benny gave him the ad-
dress he wanted.

"Printing House Square!"

The great black hearse took off with Ben sitting there like a
little king.

When the limousine pulled into Printing House Lane, there
was barely room on the narrow street for it to get in. Ben went
into the LfcL. got Alf and a few more bottles and came back to
the car with him.

So the English publican and the American sergeant started
back toward Shepherd's Bush in the back seat of a car not unlike
the big limousine the King and Queen of England used in their
tours.

As Alf passed friends starting up from Printing House Lane
he nodded condescendingly and passed a slow studied wave to~
them. Farther along, Alf continued the performance as he passed
American soldiers and, with Ben in his American uniform sitting
next to him, a lot of United States soldiers must have walked off
with the impression that they had just seen either the King or
his second-in-charge of the realm with a Joe in his car.

Except that Bill eventually wished he had never asked any
of the staff to his wedding, the rest of that party was relatively
uneventful. The staff had never been one to be invited to sacred
events.

Once before one of the photographers on the staff had been
married and his wife had a child. When it was time to baptize
the kid, the staffer thought it would be a nice gesture to ask a
few friends to the church for the function. Realizing, just as the
ceremony was about to take place, that a godfather was a cus-
tomary thing for a well-baptized child to have, he walked down
the aisle of the church to one of the rear pews where Sergeants
Ralph Noel, Bill Gibson and Herb Schneider were sitting.

"I would sure like to have one of you fellows as the boy's
godfather," he said hopefully, looking at them. "How about it?"

At that point he was called back down in front by his wife,
who beckoned to him.

While the minister started saying prayers over babies and
touching their foreheads with water from a baptismal font, the

104 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

three men in the rear pew huddled together trying to decide what
the functions of a good godfather were and which one of them
would be it. None of them wanted the job but, not wanting to
offend, they decided to toss for it.

Because they realized it was a responsibility not to be lightly
considered, they made it three out of five, eliminating the odd
man each time. They were careful not to drop the coin during the
prayers.

When the happy father came back they had picked him a god-
father from among their group.

Despite Alf's occasional sortie into the world, neither he nor
any of the Stars and Stripes people in London went far from the
Lamb for their recreation as a general rule. There was a shove
ha'penny board and an American pinball machine in there. A pin-
ball machine was totally out of character in the Lamb and Lark
and to present an accurate picture of the place it should be left
out, but nevertheless it was there.

The shove ha'penny game was played on a board about eight-
een inches long and twelve wide. It had nine grilled grooves an
inch apart up and down its length. The object of the game was
to knock five ha'pennies, with the heel of the hand, so that they
stopped in the center of the grilled lines, without touching the
lines. When each grill had had three ha'pennies land in it they
were marked with chalk at the edge of the board each time th6
game was won.

Alf was the master of the game. He could spin ha'pennies,
twist them, seemingly, around curves to hit others into place,
and generally do what he wanted with the heel of his hand. Ben
used to play him several times each night for the first six months
and became expert at the game himself, although he was never
able to beat Alf.

Occasionally Alf and Benny would wander along Fleet Street
on Saturday, a staffer's day off before the paper published seven
days a week. Ben would eventually wander over to the shove
ha'penny board in whatever pub they happened to be in and
after watching the Englishmen play the game for a few minutes,
he would express casual interest. That was in the days when
Americans were still somewhat of a novelty in London and more
often than not some Englishman would offer to show Price how
to play. Playing the role of the contemptuous American, Ben

CHARACTERS 105

would sneer at the game, saying it didn't look very tough; as a
matter of fact, he could probably pick it up in one game.

Before long there would be a beer bet on a game in which the
Englishman usually offered to give points to Benny. He always
refused them contemptuously and then, starting like a 'beginner,
"learned" in three or four shots and invariably beat all comers,
to the utter amazement of all regulars of the local. It was a filthy
trick which he and Alf thoroughly enjoyed.

Alf always took the worst end of any dealings he had with
staffers. He was their Bank of England. At one time the staff was
into Alf for 300, which, to a man managing a small pub, is more
than pocket change. Still Alf never refused anyone. On Fridays
he was always asked to cash two or three checks. The staffers fig-
ured, knowing Alf, that they wouldn't be cashed that day anyway
and wouldn't clear the bank, where their funds were insufficient to
cover the amount of the check, until Monday. Monday morning
they hoped to rush to the bank and make a deposit before the
check cleared.

More often when Monday morning came they would head
worriedly for Alf's and ask him whether or not he had sent the
check to the bank. He almost never had. If he had, he lent them
the money to cover it.

If one of the boys came into Alf s with a stranger and wanted
to buy a drink, Alf always seemed to be able to tell when the fel-
low was broke. He would set the drinks on the bar and then hand
the fellow change for a pound note which he hadn't received.

One mad night after the rest had left, Alf got into a crap game
with one of the boys. By three o'clock Alf was in debt 200 and
he would have paid the debt if it broke him. They continued
playing though and by dawn the staffer was owing Alf 75.

Into Alf s at one time or another there wandered the strang-
est collection of characters who ever walked the streets of Lon-
don. A quorum which very often held out until two and three
in the morning consisted of Bob Moora, a "Mr. Alf Barrum," Alf,
Gert, Benny, and Jim King, an AP man with the London bureau.

Rolypoly Jim King shared an apartment with the only com-
pletely conservative S<irSer, Len Giblin. The two once had worked
together on the Associated Press in Boston; Gib came into the
army and wound up in London, and Jim stayed with the AP and
wound up in the same place. (Through all his long association

106 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

with The Stars and Stripes, Jim King was periodically tormented
by the thought that he could probably have even more fun with
the soldier-reporters if he were in the army; but he was 4-F and
stayed a civilian.) In addition to being one of the customary
quorum at A1F s, Jim had a date with the staff to play baseball in
Hyde Park every Friday morning.

Fridays were inspection days for the staffers and after in-
spection there was a baseball game at seven o'clock. In old gray
pants, red sweater and a skullcap, Jim arrived at Hyde Park
corner each Friday just before Llewellyn ordered, "Fall in for
baseball." At that Jim came to attention, swung into the tail end
of the formation in step with Joe Fleming. It would, in passing,
be nice to say Jim could march better than the soldiers, but he
couldn't. He was just about as good, or as bad, as the rest; but he
didn't wear a brown suit. The S&S staff always figured that it
worked out pretty justly that Jim King couldn't march any bet-
ter than we could.

Anyway, Jim marched over to Hyde Park and when they
reached the baseball diamond the Yanks had laid out on the
age-old green grass, Llewellyn dropped his Friday morning pre-
tense of soldiering and The Stars and Stripes and its civilian
staffers played baseball.

When the ball game was done, the majority of the staffers
went off and deliberately got drunk in protest against inspections
and baseball and Jim went with them. (As this is written, it is
two years since we stopped the baseball games, and to be perfectly
candid our exact reasoning for getting drunk in protest against in-
spections and playing baseball is forgotten. It must have been a
valid reason.) At any rate, on one such Friday Jim, Ben Price, Bob
Moora, Joe Fleming, and Hutton took off for a pub crawl
through Chelsea, London's Greenwich Village.

In the center of Sloane Square, Chelsea, there was a large
steel emergency water tank for use against air-raid fires. It was
Jim's misfortune that he passed the tank after the group had had
five or six at the Queen's Head. As a sign of their affection, the
staffers threw Jim into the water tank. After a great deal of con-
torting he emerged soaking wet, and they went on to the next pub.
In the midst of his second drink at the pub, which was a sedate
sort of place frequented by the nicer people of the neighborhood,
Jim suddenly stepped away from the bar, twisted his torso and

CHARACTERS 107

kicked lustily with his right foot. He kicked again. Out from his
pant leg came one half of a pair of green- and orange-striped
shorts. The shorts sailed over the bar, to which Jim turned and
finished his drink. He spun about and kicked with his left leg. The
other half of the shorts, less like the Associated Press than almost
anything anyone could wear, arced gracefully across the room and
settled in a corner.

Somehow the group of Americans simultaneously had the
same idea. With one gesture they emptied their glasses and, brazen
faced, bowed deeply to the astounded patrons of the pub and
strode out.

It was some time later that Jim, for obvious reasons, won even
more of the staff's undying admiration for a bit of haberdashery
legerdemain.

Late one evening Ben Price, Len Giblin and King left a May-
fair cocktail bar and, the worse for wear, headed toward Clifford's
Inn and their apartments in a taxicab. In the blackout they rode
drowsily across the city. When they arrived at Clifford's Inn, paid
off the taxicab, and went into the apartment house, the staffers
got their first look at King since leaving the cocktail bar.

Jim had on his gray fedora, his pants, shoes and the coat of
his suit. Neatly tied around his bare neck was his necktie, and he
wore no shirt.

The staffers caught the taxicab before it got away, but there
was no shirt in it. Jim giggled and said he didn't know how it
happened; he guessed maybe it was the same thing that had sep-
arated the legs of his shorts that time in the Chelsea pub.

Ernie Pyle was probably the paper's best-known civilian staf-
fer, since we printed his daily column, and to The Stars and
Stripes there came regularly letters for Ernie from soldiers all over
the world. So, too, in a considerable measure were other civilian
war correspondents whose writings we occasionally felt covered a
particular subject better than our own staffers. Among them we
had a handful of friends almost as.close as Jim King. One such was
Homer Bigart, one of the New York Herald-Tribune's ace re-
porters who covered the air war with Stars-and-Stripesers, went to
the Continent with them, and whose office sent him to the Pacific
about the same time as the vanguard's skeleton staff of the army
paper. Homer was a close enough friend so that he and the staffers
could laugh together about his occasional difficulties in telephon-

108 THE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

ing his stories to the Herald-Tribune bureau in London. Homer
stuttered.

Covering the story of the raid over Wilhelmshaven by Eighth
Air Force heavy bombers, Homer and a Stars and Stripes man
talked to the returning crews at their base and together walked
over to the Administration Building to telephone their respective
stories to London. The Stars and Stripes man was talking on one
phone as Bigart finished writing his piece, and heard the bespec-
tacled Herald-Tribune man speak to the public relations man in
the office.

"W-w-w-will you p-p-please t-t-t * . . t-t-telephone my s-s-
story f-f-for me?" Homer asked the PRO.

The public relations man replied offhandedly, "Sure, if you
want me to. But there's another telephone. You're welcome to use
that, yourself/'

With a straight face, Homer replied:

"I c-c-can't h-h-hear very well over the t-t-t-telephone."

There were all sorts of individuals, whose sole common de-
nominator with the staff was a lack of a common denominator
with normal people, who came to The Stars and Stripes, the Lamb
and Lark, or any of the far-flung offices across the world and their
auxiliary barrooms.

Inasmuch as Charlie White, George Popham, Ralph Noel,
and a few others had come to the American Army as transferees
from the Canadian Army, there usually were two or three old
friends from the Canadian Army wherever The Stars and Stripes
was. After one visit by Canadians to the Lamb and Lark, Alf
Storey put up a sign which read:

Out of bounds to Canadian and ex-Canadian bagpipe players.

Some of the boys from the Canadian Essex Scottish and Cal-
gary Tank regiments had dropped in to see their old comrades
on SirS. Charlie White and Hutton adjourned their nostalgia to
the Lamb and Lark.

The legal afternoon closing hour came and the patrons of
the Lamb and Lark left. Charlie and Hutton, as members of the
family, stayed on to tell Alf for the several hundredth time about
what fine people the Canadians were and, oh boy, couldn't a
fellow march to bagpipes. Alf should have known better. He con-
fessed to a liking for the skirl of the pipes.

CHARACTERS

Immediately, the nearly tone-deaf White and his equally so
companion began to drone the pipe band marches to which they
had trod many a Canadian mile. It was "remember this?" and
"remember that?" and the Scotch flowed on as Alf joined in the
droning.

Outside, Printing House Square and the lane were quiet,
but on busy Queen Victoria Street, onto which the lane opened,
the late afternoon rush was just beginning.

Suddenly, as the trio finished a particularly moving (to them)
vocal version of "The Road to the Isles," Hutton could stand it
no longer. He seized the bar towel, tucked it in the fashion of a
Scottish sporran beneath the belt American soldiery wore at the
time over their blouses, and with a swift motion removed his
khaki pants. Firm in the belief that he now resembled a Scot in
kilts, which Charlie a second later verified by emulation, the
sergeant seized one of the tall wooden bar stools, upended it
and somehow managed to drape it over his shoulders and around
his torso. One leg of the stool was at the level of his lips, and
pumping lustily with his left arm as he stopped imaginary holes
in an imaginary pipe with his fingers, the half-clad Yank stalked
stiffly out of the Lamb and Lark, droning with all his might:

"The Essex Scottish sailed away
And left their girls in a family way . . ."

At this point Charlie White grasped the worn old club with
which Alf used to pack ice in the cooler, raced after the departing
pseudo piper and fell into step going down the street with the
club carried Canadian rifle-fashion over his left shoulder.

"And they won't be back until Judgment day,
To put them back in the same old way."

Across Printing House Square, shattering the afternoon
calm down Printing House Lane, and out onto Queen Victoria
Street went the two ex-Canadians. They droned, "What'll We Do
With the Drunken Sailor" and as that ended, Charles roared:

"The company will retire in a column of twos! A-boooout
TURN!"

They had finished half a dozen skirling Scottish tunes, Charles
had taken his company through a series of Canadian foot-drill

110 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

maneuvers impeccably, if with a slight stagger, ordered and carried
out, when the imploring Alf finally caught up with them, and be-
fore a laughing throng of Englishmen who, as a matter of fact,
had cheered lustily at each well-done maneuver and strangely
done pipe tune, Alf begged:

"Please come back to the pub. It's after closing time, and
you'll have the bobbies down on us all! Come back and you can
inarch all you please inside the Lamb and Lark."

Magnificently Charles turned his head as they marched up
the street.

"Storey! Fall in!"

With a despairing groan, Alf fell into step just to the rear of
the piper, and Charles carried out his part of the unspoken bar-
.gain with a final order:

"The company will retire , . . to the Lamb and Lark . . .
a-booooout TURN!"

The crowd cheered.

THE BRASS

AS The Stars and Stripes was, it somehow
never outpaced its first officer in charge. There were half a dozen
of them on the road to Tokyo via Berlin, but no one on the staff
ever felt that the commanding officer ever should really be anyone
except Ensley Maxwell Llewellyn, of Tacoma, Washington.

Llewellyn, who started The Stars and Stripes as a major and
became a lieutenant colonel before he left the paper in Paris and
went out to the Pacific, treated every problem that arose to block
publication just as he treated McDonnell's half-voiced plea about
the English weather. With a wave of his bony hand, a shrill
"Okay! Let's do something!*' and a bland obliviousness to the fact
that rto sane man woiild do whatever it was he was going to do,
EML, as he signed himself, set the paper going. He picked up a
nickname early.

Walking past the circulation office, Llewellyn overheard Bob
Collins, the private who was production boss for the paper, ask
someone "What is The Brain going to do about no newsprint?"

Llewellyn, back in his office, asked Harry Harchar, the major
who had come into the army from a job as assistant executive of
the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, council of the Boy Scouts of Amer-
ica and who had been assigned to be executive editor of The Stars
and Stripes, "Harry, who do they call 'The Brain' in the outfit?"

Harchar already knew. "That's you," he said, not knowing
whether to smile.

Llewellyn beamed. "Figure the Old Man's pretty smart, eh,"
he mused. "Not bad, not bad at all, Harry."

The following day he sent Collins a memo about newsprint,
and signed it "The Brain."

in

112 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Staff relations with Llewellyn were not as with other army
brass, but more on a basis of hired hands and the boss's son who
was holding down a director's job. You could argue with him, and
we always did. We broke about even.

The Desk, as the heart of the paper, was a professional func-
tion. Professional newsmen, turned soldier, ran the Desk, and as
such spearheaded the staff's arguments with all outsiders; and the
term "outsiders" included Ensley Llewellyn as far as the news-
paper business was concerned. Sometimes the EML-Desk conflicts
ended with EML retreating down the halls of whatever plant we
were in to lick his wounds, and sometimes it ended with the per-
sonnel of the Desk being banished to Northern Ireland, or Bel-
gium, or whatever place was most remote from where the chief
paper of the chain happened to be at the time. Usually, Llewellyn
managed it so that he never banished both city editor and cable
editor at one time.

The first such conflict between Llewellyn, then a major, and
the sergeant and the corporal who at the time made up the Desk
ended in a sort of Mexican stand-off.

For the first month of the daily's existence in London, the
major tried valiantly, day after day and by every ruse he knew,
to keep the editorial content of the paper directly under his will.
But it no longer was a country weekly, it was a daily, big-time and
getting bigger every morning, and there was no time any more to
fool around with arguments which mattered not at all. After a
month of slugging every night to get out a good paper with a seven-
man staff, including copy boys, and slugging every day to keep
E.M.L.'s amateur touch out of a professional paper, the corporal
and the sergeant collapsed in weary sadness one evening against
the bar of the Lamb and Lark. Tom Bernard, the Los Angeles
yeoman who, with Seaman Jack Foster, of Chicago, covered the
navy's doings for the paper, joined them.

A few Scotch-and-sodas and the commiserating sympathy of
Alf Storey only sharpened the woes of News Editor Bob Moora and
his companions. A street minstrel came in and played "Danny
Boy" on a violin and the three newsmen really began to pack away
the Scotch. Sometime about midnight they lurched forth, and by
mutual understanding headed for the office. As they surveyed the
scene of their sweatings (which was the best fun they'd had in
years although they wouldn't admit it) the three grew sympathetic

THE BRASS US

for themselves and bemoaned the callous army that was trying to
stifle them.

Somewhere during the next half hour of self-pity, the urge to
do something about it swept the trio.

When morning came, the editorial offices were a battlefield.
The telephones had been ripped from their connections, the ever-
delicate complex of hanging lights rested in a tangled mass of
desks, wire, typewriters, chairs, smashed pastepots, torn paper and
charred ashes of what had been stories piled atop the city desk.

The simple, unsuspecting cleaning staff that found the mess
in the morning could think of only one thing: Nazi spies had
broken into the offices of the paper. They called their chief and
he called the general manager. Major Llewellyn was called from
his breakfast. A little checking showed it could have been only the
two men on the desk. (Somehow, Tom Bernard never was con-
nected with it, which was poetic justice; he spent the night in the
apartment the two deskmen shared in one of London's most ex-
clusive apartment houses, and en route home Moora and the other
half of the desk, after fighting with each other, turned united on
Bernard when he tried to stop them and blacked his eyes, cut his
lips, and put a two-inch gash in his head with a bottle before tuck-
ing him with great care to sleep in one of their beds.)

Llewellyn was faced with a problem. What had happened to
the office (for days we sent salvaged stories to the composing room
whose members greeted the charred edges of the copy with wide
eyes) called for punishment. On the other hand, the job was to
get out a daily paper, and a professional one. There simply
weren't any other deskmen available.

"I ought to court-martial you two," EML told the deskmen
when at his phone call they had dragged themselves red-eyed down
to the office that morning. "But, frankly, I'm not going to. Part of
it probably is my fault for any number of reasons. If it happens
again, though, or anything like it, you'll both stay here as copy
boys if we never publish a paper 1"

A couple of weeks later, for Christmas, he gave the Desk four
bottles of Scotch.

The battle as to editorial authority finally resolved itself, with
the Desk running the news end of the paper without question, and
EML writing the editorials. He wrote about the value of the Jap-
anese yen in conquered Borneo, about Russian cavalry, about Jap

114 iTHE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

naval tactics, about the Luftwaffe, and for all his editorials he
could describe a background to justify his opinions. It was just
as the daily began to get under way that the major decided he'd
known some of the boys long enough to tell them a little of that
background.

The Luftwaffe was giving London a light going over, and
the antiaircraft batteries in the scarred old city were putting up a
fantastic flak barrage when Llewellyn walked into the blacked-out
office one night and swung his loose-jointed frame onto the end of
the desk. Price, Moora, Senigo and a handful of the others were
laboring over the page proofs and looked up to see the major's
deep-set eyes bright with excitement, and across his narrow, bony
face that not infrequent expression of some eternally hidden and
never wholly understandable joy. He ran fingers through the thin
fringe of hair which sat Dominican-friar fashion on his high
domed skull.

"Lot of flak out there," he observed. "Lot of flak. But their
predictors for the antiaircraft guns aren't the equal of what we
have back in the good old U.S.A."

Benny, who would turn his mind to any argument and espe-
cially with the major, put down his copy pencil and observed that
the British antiaircraft predictors ought to be pretty good in view
of all the combat they'd had for developing them.

"Not like ours though," the major insisted. "I was National
Guard Coast Artillery before the war, and I know. We've got a
predictor that . . . why * . .

"Listen, a month before Pearl Harbor our G-2 figured there
might by spy planes over the West Coast. You know how'it is on
the West Coast. Some of us who were in the confidence of the Big
Brains in G-2 were put on special gun sites with those new Amer-
ican predictors. Well, not many nights before Pearl Harbor we
were on duty, right on the coast it was, when our predictors
showed there was a plane coming in from the sea, high and fast,
and a check showed it wasn't American.

"Well, sir, we turned our guns to the course and height the
predictors said, fired, and there was a blinding flash way up there
in the sky a few seconds later. Just one round apiece, that was. The
flash had hardly died away in the sky when kerr-thump! right out-
side our gun site there were two terrible sounds, right close to-

THE BRASS 115

gether, and we went outside to find the smashed bodies of two Jap
aviators. They were dead."

When he finished the story, Llewellyn got up and strode from
the office, triumphantly, as a man who has proved his point. The
following morning there was a note on Price's desk, although such
matters were none of Price's concern,

"Price: Any technical stories dealing with antiaircraft fire
will be edited by me. EML."

Llewellyn finally admitted he was no authority on editorial
problems. (He never claimed he was; he simply wouldn't admit
he wasn't, at first.) But he found newspapermen who were, and
when the army said it wanted a daily newspaper to replace the
country weekly, Llewellyn took a quick whirl and said he could
deliver in three weeks. He set out to find the men for the job.

Bob Moora, one-time night city deskman on the New York
Herald-Tribune, was the first man Llewellyn needed to round out
the Desk. Moora, a sergeant, was in England for Yank, the army
news magazine. Yank had a hot tip that the Allies would invade
Europe within a few weeks, a month at the outside. That was in
July, 1942. They sent Moora to England, and he waited through
the summer. Nothing happened, until it seemed there was to be
an invasion of North Africa, anyway. But Llewellyn asked his staff
what they needed and the staff said another deskman to go with
what it already had, so Llewellyn sold Moora on the idea of setting
up a daily. Moora got a transfer by cable from Yank, which felt
kind of silly about the whole invasion business after such a long
wait. From replacement depots, Llewellyn filled out his staff, and
on November 2, 1942, two days less than the promised three
weeks, he delivered the daily paper to the army. Llewellyn could
pay off.

There was the time, for example, long afterward, when we
had come to France, that SfcS needed transportation; specifically,
jeeps. Over a telephone, EML found that all new jeeps coming to
the Continent arrived at the port of Cherbourg. Another call got
him the authority to obtain all the transportation he could find.
A third call, to Cherbourg, used the results of the second call to
obtain a promise that, if he could drive them away, he could have
sixty jeeps any time the following day, but that they would all be
gone the day after.

In the next twenty-four hours, EML went out onto the

116 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Parisian streets and grabbed every Frenchman he saw who looked
as if he could drive a car. With a wild gleam in his eyes, Llewellyn
stalked from newly liberated French garage to newly liberated
French garage, an interpreter tagging along and trying to trans-
late and explain to pre-eminently logical Frenchmen why this
wild-eyed American wanted to hire their services for two or three
days as chauffeurs, although admittedly he had no money with
which to pay them a retainer, and non, ce n'etait pas absolutement
certain combien, mais . . . and the interpreter would gesture and
point to the lieutenant colonel (he'd been promoted by then) who
stood impatiently waiting for the Frenchman to say yes, and with
his gesture and shrug, the interpreter said all he had to say.

Pinwheel or no, the colonel collected forty Frenchmen to be
chauffeurs, recruited twenty more staffers, copy boys, editors, pho-
tographers and accountants, and headed for Cherbourg in two big
circulation trucks which also carried three meager K ration packs
for each man as the sole sustenance. He and his caravan got there
in time, took over thejeeps from an astounded but promise-bound
colonel, and headed for Paris, a couple of hundred miles away.

They made it without an accident, without the loss of a single
jeep or Frenchman, with everyone fed, somehow, from occasional
messes along the route, and the papers went out from the Paris
circulation office as soon as the presses rolled out the first copies.
No one was sure how, but it had been done, and Llewellyn was
the man who did it, even if it did take two weeks of maneuvering
afterward to get the money for the French chauffeurs.

That was the kind of guy who promised there would be a
daily paper within three weeks of October 15, 1942. Having his
staff and little else, The Brain whirled dizzily in his office, some-
times holding (by Warren McDonnell's sworn count) three tele-
phones and a sandwich at one time, and called for bids from Lon-
don papers, got a clearance on payments by reverse Lend-Lease,
got shipments of newsprint started from the United States.

So the daily came out, and set the precedent. Some of the
other papers in what grew to be the Stars and Stripes chain oc-
casionally outdid the Times and "its little American army paper/'
but they did it on the format set up at the Times.

When the arm/ landed in North Africa, a force of about ten
business and editorial men was shipped there to start publishing

THE BRASS 117

a paper. The editorial office eventually got to look like the London
office, but the mechanical problems never did resemble the Lon-
don mechanical problems.

Russ Jones, G. K. Hodenfield, Dean Hocking, Bob Neville,
Harry Harchar (a captain) Ralph Martin, and a handful more
who didn't speak much more than the have-you-seen-the-pen-of-
my-uncle type of high school French started working in Casa-
blanca to publish the first S&S in Africa.

The typesetters and compositors spoke French only. The type
was French. There were no letters W and S. The presses were bad.
But, all things considered, it was not a bad paper and it got better.

As a matter of fact, from that early beginning the southern
edition of the paper grew to print in several towns and within a
few months it no longer was a London edition subsidiary. It
picked its own staff from the army units in North Africa and
eventually, under Lieutenant Colonel Egbert White, a New York
advertising man, became one of the best and probably the most
honest of all the Stars and Stripes editions.

Generally, on its way across Africa, through Sicily and Italy,
it got into more serious trouble than the northern editions, and
that, in an army newspaper, often was the criterion of honesty.

Coming into Southern France from Italy with a mobile p r int-
ing press, the southern paper was better organized for an invasion
than the one that came to be known as Llewellyn's Ambiguous
Force.

Llewellyn's ambiguous force took the original Stars 'and
Stripes out of England and Ireland, where for two years it had
been virtually the Air Force's own, and to the Continent with the
Allied invasion, where it became the doughfoot's paper, or as
much so as the staff could make it.

"Won't tell you what you are going to do," announced EML
to the staff when it was growing obvious that invasion was near.
"I've got my plans and they're locked in a safe and there they stay
until the first waves go ashore on the Continent, and then we
go too."

Three weeks before D day, Llewellyn suddenly jerked half of
the editorial staff and a good hunk of the business staff out of
town. They disappeared into secrecy for two weeks, when a couple
of them got back to London. "We're billeted down in the port of

118 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

Bristol," they revealed, "and what we've done so far to get ready
to publish the S&S on the Continent is to learn how to run motion-
picture projectors."

They told of EML's disclosure to them of their task. On the
train down to Bristol, he talked to them three or four at a time,
in a furtive whisper.

"We're going in with the second or third wave," he said, look-
ing sternly at his listeners who began to figure, well, The Brain
really has the deal taped, this time anyway. "We're going to put
out a newspaper on the beaches, and the rest of the time we'll
run motion pictures for the troops behind the lines. We're all set,
equipment all ready. We're a regular ambiguous force."

The boys protested that the idea of running motion-picture
projectors was fantastic. What was that all about? It was a long
time afterward that a slip by the colonel revealed that at the last
minute he had been unable to obtain passage to the Continent
for S&S personnel, and only by agreeirig to run motion pictures
for the Special Services people had he been able to get room for the
staffers in the Special Services section of a trans-Channel boat in
something about the forty-fifth wave, along about D plus 10.

Llewellyn's ambiguous force swarmed ashore on beaches lit-
tered with rear echelon supplies, and while the colonel led the
others in a search for a printing plant, reliable old Charlie Kiley,
the one-time Jersey City sports writer, dug up a mimeograph ma-
chine and a portable typewriter and began putting out a beach*
head edition of The Stars and Stripes. It was mimeographed, it
was sketchy, and it was only two sides of ordinary copy paper, but
the troops to whom he could get it ate the paper up and hollered
for more. They got more: Every day, as the big C-47 transport
planes winged across the Channel with supplies vital to sustain the
beachhead, they brought copies of the London Stars and Stripes,
and circulation men picked them up at the hastily constructed
airfields and rushed them out to the men in the line.

After picking a plant in Carentan, a little town at the base of
the Cherbourg peninsula, which the Boche promptly smashed
with an 88-mm. shell through the roof (the front lines were less
than a mile away), Llewellyn moved his ambiguous force to Cher-
bourg when the big French port fell, and there published the first
Continental edition of the paper since World War I.

THE BRASS 110

It was published in the bomb-damaged plant of the Cher-
bourg Eclair.

' The presses were relatively undamaged, but the linotype ma-
chines needed repairs and parts, which weren't available. Maybe
the most pressing need was a roof; the compositors and staff
labored over the forms with raincoats each day it rained until they
found enough tarpaulins to make temporary repairs.

From England, four soldier-linotype operators were selected
and flown to France, where they went to work on the battered
lines with rubber bands, hairpins and the traditional American
bailing wire. Somehow they got them operating, but when the
mechanical troubles were solved, there were personnel problems.

The French typesetters, always up in the air and shouting at
each other about something, usually politics, refused to work for
anyone but their original shop foreman. Military Government
officials, however, had him under arrest as one of the most active
collaborationists in all Cherbourg, although that per se was no
great crime, since at one time or another almost every Frenchman
in Cherbourg accused almost every other Frenchman there of hav-
ing been a collaborationist.

The paper lurched out daily, though, and the plant began to
look like other SfrS plants. The staff lived in a house formerly oc-
cupied by the Germans, and Llewellyn found a couple of maids
and a cook to run the place. When the loyal French of Cherbourg
got around to cutting the hair of all women known to have been
friendly with the German occupiers, one of the first bald heads
belonged to Paulette, the boss cook the colonel had hired.

About the time the paper got settled settled except for the
mines which blew up every other day or so in the harbor and
spilled type all over the composing room the colonel started to
worry about inspections and the staff cheered when Rennes fell
and the paper moved to keep up with the troops.

At Rennes, which was only a stopping point on the way to
Paris, SfrS took over, naturally enough, the plant just vacated by
the staff of the German Army magazine Signal, a color production
not unlike the U. S. Army magazine Yank. The day Paris fell,
August 25, 1944, a task force of Stars and Stripes men who, well
armed, could almost have taken the city by themselves, moved
into the French capital and headed for the plant of the Paris
Herald, the New York Herald Tribune's Continental edition.

120 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

The paper, of course, hadn't been published since the German
declaration of war on the United States, but a fiery, red-haired
Frenchwoman, Madame Brazier, who managed the business end of
the paper for the Herald Tribune, had loyally stayed with the
plant and had managed to keep the Germans from destroying any
part of it and even from occupying the premises, a fine modern
building. The Germans in Paris, as the Yanks found out when
they got there, had been, officially, very polite in many instances.
They seldom had taken over any building which was used or
wanted by the French official governmental agencies. Madame
Brazier pulled a deal with the French Ministry of Agriculture,
the terms of which called for them to occupy the building. When
the Wehrmacht came to see Madame Brazier about taking over
the American-owned building at 21 Rue de Berri, she showed
them the papers she had signed with the French Agricultural Min-
istry. There was some argument, but the Germans never pushed
the point, and a couple of days of oiling and dusting after August
25, 1944, and the presses were ready to roll.

The French linotype operators and compositors, who
streamed back to work from the Resistance movement, from hid-
ing and from their normal lives, immediately bound themselves
for all time to the staffers with the declaration of one veteran
printer.

He had been a linotype operator on The Stars and Stripes of
World War I, which was printed in Paris. The staff waited for the
the inevitable comment that came from oldsters well, this was
a good paper, and probably it was modern, and yet it printed
every day and all that, but by golly there never would be a paper
like the OLD Stars and Stripes. After about two weeks, the vet-
eran printer declared himself, to the satisfaction of a staff which
had heard too much about Alexander Woollcott, Grantland Rice,
Steve Early, Harold Ross et al.

"They were all right, but they didn't know much about the
newspaper business," he declared.

Regardless of whether the statement was true, everyone was
happy to hear one clear derogatory voice lifted against the memory
of that goddamned first war Stars and Stripes.

For a while, the staff of the Paris paper lived in a luxurious
hotel. The army moved them out when a circulation man arrived

THE BRASS 121

home from an all-night party just as a general, who also lived
there, was going to work. The general might have passed it off
if the circulation man hadn't leered at him, hiccuped and re-
marked, "High time you were up."

Before the staff was kicked out and wound up in barracks
in which the staffers refused to sleep as long as they could find cots
enough to bed down in the editorial offices two of its officers
staged an epic feud.

Bob Moora, the news editor and a first lieutenant, had taken
issue with the proffered opinions of Rader Winget, a former Asso-
ciated Press man who as a captain was in charge of the paper's com-
munications four telephones, a teletype, and two radios. Finally,
their argument reached such a stage that they sat down one night
in the lobby of the hotel and started describing what should be
done to the others.

"Moora, if I had a knife, I'd cut out your heart!" declared
Winget with feeling.

"Well, get a knife," replied Moora.

Apparently both of them got to thinking over their threats
before they went to work the next day, and Moora came into the
office toting a 45-caliber automatic in a holster, which he slapped
down on the desk with a flourish.

Someone went looking for Winget, to tell him that Moora
was going to plug him if he entered the editorial offices, and found
the communications officer upstairs beside the teletype, grimly
grinding an edge to a vicious-looking fighting knife.

Neither of them got hurt, chiefly because Moora never went
near the communications room and Winget didn't come to the
city room, and after a while they both got tired of carrying around
their weapons and quit.

Moora's resentment of criticism of the editorial office by an
outsider was only a logical outcome of the first line of defense set
up against the army by the staffers when the paper was young.
From the first day, the Desk and with it the city room staff had
fought against the dictation of news policies by people who were
not professional newsmen.

Eventually, the attitude of the Desk and the staff became
reflexive: An order from the army which in any way, according
to our thinking, jeopardized our ability to exercise our best news

122 THE STOKY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

judgment brought an automatic "No," and after that we'd see
what we could do to defend the "no." The whole thing certainly
was at odds with all military precedent, but so was the very paper.
The army ordered publication of a good, honest, daily newspaper
within the army's framework. That was the job handed us, just
as other soldiers were given the tasks of shooting rifles or flying
planes (although some of us did those things too).

It happened that in addition to being the task assigned us by
the army, the publication of a good, honest, daily newspaper also
was the thing we could do best and that a good many of us had
been doing for most of our working lives.

Eventually, not only the brass connected with the paper but
a good share of the ETO command realized that here was a col-
lection of professional people doing a highly professional job far
better than it ever could be ordered done, and they were helpful
about it. Aside from Dwight Eisenhower, two men in high com-
mands were among the best friends the paper had. They were the
late Morrow Krum, a professional newsman who became a colonel
and chief public relations officer for the European Theater, and
the late Lieutenant General Frank Andrews, who succeeded Gen-
eral Eisenhower in command of the theater when "Ike" went to
Africa in the fall of 1942.

Half a dozen times when some colonel or general along the
line started throwing the weight of his brass around the Stars and
Stripes pages, the corporal who then was city editor went to
Morrow Krum for help. They'd talk it over, and if it looked
to Krum as if he could help, he'd take the corporal in to tell
General Andrews about it; and the brass-throwing would
cease.

One night the paper was waiting for an official announcement
on some policy or other affecting the troops in the ETO, and it
was unaccountably held up. The Desk phoned Colonel Krum,
and asked if we could get the story before our 1 1 P.M. deadline.
Colonel Krum said he'd try. Eleven o'clock came and passed, and
no story, but during the early morning hours it was released, and
the British papers in the morning had the story and we didn't.
At 10 A.M., the phone rang in the apartment shared by the two
men on the Desk.

"Morning. It's Old Man Krum. Guess we're on the top of

THE BRASS 123

your unpopularity list for the way that story was released, but
there'll be another one up tonight that we'll make sure you get."

Which from a colonel to a corporal was all right.

When, several months later, the plane carrying Morrow
Krum and Frank Andrews crashed in Iceland and hurled them
both to their death, SfrS lost a pair of good friends. There was
never another theater PRO who'd call up as Old Man So-and-so
and be sorry for something he couldn't help anyway.

The public relations officers and their generals of the
Eighth and Ninth air forces were our friends, and we liked to feel
it was not just because the paper could do things for them. The
two air forces were doing all the fighting that was to be done in
the ETO before June 6, 1944. The land war hadn't crossed the
English Channel, and it was the bomber crews and the fighter
pilots who made war news. Sometimes their problems of morale,
especially in the early days when American losses frequently were
fantastically high, maybe as much as 30 per cent a mission now
and then, must have made the air force public relations officers
want to ask The Stars and Stripes to slant the day's air story this
way or that, to play up tliis battered bomber group or this scat-
tered fighter group. But they held the belief that the army news-
paper was trying to do an honest job, and they never asked. Hal
Leyshon, a veteran newsman who was a major and public relations
executive for the Eighth Air Force, summed it up this way: "If
what we're fighting for, the so-called system of freedom, is right
and should win out, then the honest telling of the news, which is
an integral part of that system, isn't going to hurt us in the long
run."

Despite the lack of official pressure for certain stories or
particular treatment, the job the paper did on the air was such

as to bring from Major General Frederick Anderson, commander
of the Eighth Bomber Command, which was sending the heavies
out to Europe every flying day, a letter expressing thanks for the
accurate, authoritative stories of the air war and declaring that
"between the Stars and Stripes story of one day's combat against
the Luftwaffe and the results of the bombing on the next mission
there is a very real and positive connection."

That was enough for The Stars and Stripes; if the kids who
were flying out to German skies were benefited by our self-imposed
task of battling short sighted persons in order to maintain an

124 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

honest newspaper (for every "must" story of somebody's special
service band playing somewhere there was that much less room
for the story of a kid in a warplane), then we would battle and
damn the regulations.

Ensley Llewellyn fitted right in with the conditions which
made SfrS for so long the Air Forces' newspaper. He was an old
airman, himself, the staff learned. We first heard about his aerial
background the night of February 27, 1943, when Andy Rooney
came back from the second Air Force mission against a target in
Germany.

The office had decided that if we were to cover the war in
the air, we couldn't do it from a desk. To be accurate and know-
ing, some of the staff had to fly with the big bombers. That was
a fair assignment in the days when a combat crewman's useful
life was figured at a maximum of fifteen missions, but Andy
wanted the first crack at the job and went.

Andy came back from his first mission, on which Bob Post
of the New York Times also flew and was lost in action, and
entered the office in usual Rooney fashion: he came into the noisy
city room panting and red in the face.

"Made it," he gasped, sinking into a chair breathless.

"What?" asked the man on the desk.

"Held my breath all the way from Charing Cross subway
station to Blackfriars," Rooney panted. "Been trying for a month."

Ensley Llewellyn walked into the office just as Rooney fin-
ished speaking. He shouted when he saw Andy: "Hey! Good
work, Rooney. Glad to see you back. Heh heh. Come along for
a cup of tea and tell me about it. Want to hear."

Over a cup of tea in the old Times cafeteria, where you fre-
quently looked up to see a rat snatching a crust off the floor and
racing for a hole in the ancient woodwork, the major asked, "Well,
how was it?"

"Oh, all right," Andy began. "We flew "

"Bomb at about four miles, don't you?" broke in Llewellyn.
Rooney said yes they had and . . .

"Wish I could have gone with you," EML said, banging the
table and shaking his head. "You fellows don't know it, but I
helped to set the world altitude record for Flying Fortresses, and
I'd like to have been there today. Of course, in the early days,

THE BRASS

when I was flying, the Fortress was a new thing, very secret. But
we set out one morning from a field near Tacoma. War Depart-
ment sent me along to take pictures and broadcast, so they'd have
a record right up to the last minute if anything went wrong.

"Well, we took off and I focused my camera on a bush in a
fence row. Got higher and I focused on a tree, but right off I was
switching to a whole clump of trees. We were climbingl First
thing I knew I was focusing on a lake. Needed something bigger
as we climbed. Finally, we got so high set the world's altitude
record of 46,600 feet that I had to focus my camera on a moun-
tain and I was half afraid the next thing would be the edge of
the sea!"

The major took a gulp of tea, and one of the circle of staffers
drawn around to hear Andy's story of the raid started to ask a
question.

"Great airplane, though," the major continued enthusiasti-
cally. "Used one to fly an expedition I was with into the Arctic
Circle. We dropped by parachute from the bomber and set up a
camp. Lived there for nearly six months. Land of the Midnight
Sun, you know; studied weather conditions. Had pretty nearly
nothing but blubber to eat toward the end, and by the time I got
back to the States my system was so used to blubber that it seemed
I couldn't get enough of it. Had a terrible time getting used to
civilized food again."

The major drank the last of his tea and shoved his chair back
from the circle of staffers. No one else moved. The major made a
lunge for the sixpenny check.

"No, sir," heh-hehed the major, "this one is on me. Well,
you certainly had a time, Rooney. Good work, my boy. Sounds
exciting."

He strode off whistling, "Off we go into the wild blue
yonder . . ."

The cafeteria at the Times was about the only place in the
whole building, except the composing room and possibly his own
narrow little office down the hall from the editorial rooms, where
an officer in charge of The Stars and Stripes ever dared whistle.
Whistling being verboten in the editorial rooms, to staffers, vis-
itors and officers alike.

The no-whistling rule was particularly hard on Max Gilstrap.

126 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

In civilian life, Max had been a Forest Ranger, then a lecturer on
wild life and finally a reporter-columnist on the Christian Science
Monitor. As a sort of newspaperman, however, Max continued
his lectures about the flora and fauna of the United States, illumi-
nating his lectures with remarkably good bird call imitations. He
brought his whistling into the army, where he became a censor
and a captain, then was transferred to The Stars and Stripes as an
executive editor, the official title of the administrative officers in
charge of the various editions.

But before he joined the paper, back in his censor days, Max
was assigned once a week to come to The Stars and Stripes in Lon-
don to check the night's paper for matters of military security.
Through his first five or six visits to the paper, the good-natured,
kindly Gilstrap found the staff a little reserved in their acceptance
of him; suspicious of brass per se, the staffers were inclined to feel
that his air of camaraderie, which was genuine, was maybe a little
faked. In addition, he was called down by the Desk for whistling
in the city room, and that made Max cautious, but finally the
boys began to talk to him and he made up his mind he had been
accepted.

That night as Moora, Ben Price and Hutton finished making
up the paper in page form and turned away from the composing
room, they took up their usual practice of whistling "The Road
to the Isles" as they strode through the long corridors, because
with the paper gone to bed everyone naturally felt better and
whistling would disturb no one.

At the first note, Max Gilstrap checked off the last story on a
page proof and raced across the composing room after the whis-
tling trio. He pushed himself between Price and Moora, threw
his arms around their shoulders and with a beaming smile said:

"Say, fellows, that's great whistling. But do you know the

'Washington Post March?"

The three newsmen looked surprised.

"Because if you do we could have a great time. I know the
oboe part and we could have a quartet."

And all the way down the winding halls, Max whistled hap-
pily the oboe part to the "Washington Post March."

Max Gilstrap's whistle got him into a lot of grief with the
staff, eventually. Not serious grief, from the staff's viewpoint,
but Max seemed unhappy about it.

THE BRASS 127

During the Battle of the Bulge, in the winter of 1944-45, the
paper opened a new edition in Lige, Belgium, better to service
troops in the First and Ninth armies on the northern flank of the
Bulge. Max was appointed administrative officer there (the charts
always said executive editor, but everyone concerned understood).
The appointment came just after Ensley Llewellyn had been
booted upstairs because he squabbled with the Special and Infor-
mation Services of the SOS, which tried to inject orientation into
the news columns of the paper. Arthur A. Goodfriend, a major
who had some newspaper and considerable advertising experience
in civilian life and who was chief of the orientation and propa-
ganda section of the army, was named to be officer in charge and
editor in chief of all The Stars and Stripes. The staff, while ac-
knowledging his honesty of purpose, challenged Goodfriend's right
to try and tell the fighting men how to think through the medium
of a paper the Joes had come to trust, and, consequently, every-
thing Goodfriend did for a long time was wrong in the minds of
the old staffers. Goodfriend appointed Gilstrap, which automati-
cally made Max non grata with the city room.

Max went to Lige, lived through the buzz bombs with the
boys and tried manfully to erase the curse of the Goodfriend
appointment by being a regular guy. Eventually, the boys read-
mitted him to their circle as such, but not before he was tagged
with the most damning phrase any brass ever got from SfrS.

Every time someone from the outside, usually a newspaper-
man from one of the civilian papers, would ask a staffer what
Gilstrap's background was, the answer was the same:

"He used to be bird call editor of the Christian Science
Monitor."

It was a beautifully wicked damnation. There was just
enough truth in it Max wrote the nature lore and wild life
column and had lectured and sounded off with his bird call imi-
tations to make it pretty tough denying. After two or three weeks
of that, it got so that people would be introduced to Gilstrap and
then say, "Oh, yes, you're the chap who used to be bird call editor
of the Christian Science Monitor."

It was murder.

Max would say, no, he wasn't the bird call editor, honest he
wasn't. But he was too honest to deny he could and did imitate
-wild birds, that he had written a nature lore column, and the

128 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

more he denied the more people nodded their heads and said
mmm-mmm.

Finally, Max asked the boys to lay off, and because he'd been
very much of a help in organizing the Lige edition, never com-
plaining and never attempting to find refuge in the brass on his
shoulders, the boys did lay off; but Max spoiled the whole thing
by blurting out the very next afternoon, as they sat around the
office listening to the buzz bombs crash around the city, that the
whistling business was "a lot of fun."

"I worked out one whistle while I was living out in the
woods," Max told the boys, "that you couldn't hear if you stood
next to me, but you could hear it perfectly plainly a half mile
away.

"Called it the 'silent half-mile whistle/ "

Max never understood the mad laughter that elicited.

SAID A PVT. TO A PRINCESS-NOT MUCH
Brass Wall Comes Between the S&S And Royalty

By Gene Graff
Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

AN EIGHTH BOMBER STATION, July 7 Princess Elizabeth and I in-
spected some U.S. bomber stations yesterday and some other people
were there too, including her mother and father and a general or so
and innumerable aides and custodians.

That last part is important, because somehow they seemed to
put a crimp in conversation between a princess and a private, al-
though there were no barriers to conversation with King George VI
and Queen Elizabeth themselves.

Shortly after the royal party arrived, Princess Elizabeth was
standing in front of a fireplace, looking at pictures on the wall and
occasionally glancing around to study faces in the room.

SHE ENJOYS VISIT

"Is this your first visit to an American camp?" I began.
"Yes, it is," she replied, "and I'm enjoying it very much."
"Do you ever have American guests at your hou . . . er, palace?"
"Not unless they attend state parties or are being decorated by
Daddy," the pretty but shyly aloof young lady replied. "If you mean
at my parties and dances, Americans never have attended probably
only because I haven't met any."

THE BRASS 120

Further conversation was interrupted when a British general
edged purposefully between us.

Three hours and two Fortress stations later, Princess Elizabeth
was eating ice cream with three American Red Cross girls while the
rest of the party was off discussing aeronautic engineering or some-
thing. It looked like a perfect opportunity to renew the brief ac-
quaintance.

"Does a trip like this tire you?" was the open shot. One eye
noticed that Elizabeth was a pretty girl with effervescent expression.
The other, of course, was peeled for interrupting officials.

"I've been enjoying myself too much to think of being tired,"
the Princess said with a pleasant smile. "You know, I don't get to
meet so many people very often.

"Those hats [canvas caps with jockeylike brims worn by ground
crews] certainly are funny. And I never realized a pilot has to wear
so much equipment."

She seemed to grow more cordial at this point and was about
to volunteer further information about the mental ponderings of a
princess when an RAF uniform, housing a wing commander, loomed.

Someday here I'd like to complete the interview, because there
won't be any princesses in Chicago. But when the RAF officer politely
asked, "How long have you been in England?" I launched a strategic
withdrawal in nothing flat.

That was the way a general opened his dissertation the day I
breezed by without saluting. And what I heard then convinced me
I didn't want to hear it again.

SOLDIERS FIRST

iWlosT NEWSPAPERS have a dictator somewhere in
their organization, and most newspapers get hundreds of com-
plaints; but maybe no newspaper ever before was in the absurd
position of having half its complaining readers in a position to
dictate. The Stars and Stripes was.

The Stars and Stripes was an army organization and had for
its reading public virtually no one but army personnel, and most
of its readers were, by virtue of their army rank, in a position they
had always hoped for in relation with their morning paper back
home: here, by God! was a newspaper they could tell.

In Paris, in the early days just after the liberation of August
25, 1944, a colonel who was vaguely associated with the paper well
up toward the top of the Special Service pyramid, walked into the
editorial rooms in the Paris Herald building. In his hand he
carried a slip of paper carefully lettered in pencil:

IKE'S ARMY STRIKES!

"I want you to use this as your headline tomorrow," the
colonel said as he handed the paper to Bob Moora, who was
running the paper at the time. "I have an appointment with
Eisenhower tomorrow, and I'd like to have that on his desk
when I come in."

It was not run, of course. Patiently Bob Moora explained to
the colonel that (i) Ike's armies had not struck that particular
day, (2) headlines were tailored to fit a story according to size type
used, and (3) even if Ike's armies had struck and even if the
headline had fitted the story he wanted to use, that would not
be the head which would appear in the paper.

130

SOLDIERS FIRST 181

Just after the German breakthrough in the Ardennes had
been stopped, the colonel (by then a brigadier general) came into-
the office bubbling over with enthusiasm for a new idea he had
just conceived.

The general, it appeared, had been mightily impressed with
the Hearst slogans back home which advised readers to "Buy
American" and with the catch phrases such as "Buy Bonds*' which
some civilian papers were using. He felt he had a humdinger of
an idea for helping to end the war with a slogan. Again he had
printed his message clearly on a slip of paper, and he slid it across
the desk to the man making up the paper:

HAVE YOU KILLED YOUR GERMAN TODAY?

That phrase, he thought, should be inserted at every break
between stories in the Stars and Stripes columns.

"I think we ought to use that as little fillers in the paper/*
the general said. "That would make it easy to fill up those little
holes in the columns, A good catchy saying, something to help win
the war and show the fighting men we're behind them.

"Have you killed your German today?"

The general stood waiting, smiling happily at his contribu-
tion to the paper. No one in the editorial room had a word to say,

There were men there who had flown more bomber mis-
sions than most bomber crewmen ever got to live through, wha
had spent more time in foxholes than a good many generals had
spent in the ETO; the staff looked around at them to see what
they thought, and it was all right there in their silence.

The thing was so absurd it was funny, but a little too bitter
to be as funny as the usual dictates of the brass-shouldered readers,
It might have been interesting to watch the reaction to its use
by the couple million service troops, up to five hundred miles
behind the front, who read the paper daily; not to mention the
reactions of the combat troops who were killing Germans just so
they themselves could stay alive.

Finally, the general left the room, trying pretty hard to smile.

The only idea of his which he pressed to a point that officers
in charge and the enlisted editors could no longer refuse was
one he professed to have one day after reading the New York,
Times.

182 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

The Times, he noted, ran on its front page a brief digest of
the day's important events, listed as a sort of table of contents.
The Times, he reasoned, was a great newspaper, and because he
felt a paternal interest in The Stars and Stripes, he wanted that,
too, to be a great newspaper. He sent down an order that we
should run about six inches of type daily containing a digest of the
news. That was about what the Times used.

The Stars and Stripes then was only a four-pager, and was at
its most voluminous a brief digest of selected news sent us by the
S&S bureau in New York and a specially culled glossary of news
from the press agency wires. We tried to explain to the man that
such a feature would be a digest of a digest, but he insisted and it
ran, for a while.

The staff always marveled that we weren't ordered to run the
Macy advertisements the Times used, too, and that was always
good for a laugh until we finally did run a full-page advertise-
ment disguised as a plug for a war bond contest*

As the war in Europe drew to a close, and it appeared that
some of the staff would stay with the paper for occupational troops
and some others would head for the Pacific to put the old S&S
out there, the powers-that-be ordered a War Bond Contest spon-
sored by The Stars and Stripes to aid the Seventh War Bond Drive.
It was a good idea, would help interest the troops in salting away
a little of their spare cash. The idea was to write an essay on one's
postwar future and plans and send it to SfrS, where it would be
judged on merit alone for one of ten Chevrolet automobiles,
postwar models, or one of ten Frigidaires, postwar models.

How General Motors Corporation came into the picture with
two of its products that way no one ever explained. In the Paris
edition, most nearly under the eye of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur
Goodfriend and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick L. Eldridge, who
were officers in charge at the time, the first announcement of the
contest used the term "Chevrolet" or "Frigidaire" half a dozen
times, advertising priceless to General Motors. Some of the other
papers used the trade names, too. The Nice-Marseille edition
refused point-blank, figuring it was immoral and anyway citing
an old order from the brass which chewed at one editor for having
referred to Coca-Colas in the news columns. There was no come-
back from Paris, but the following week, The Stars and Stripes in
all editions except Nice-Marseille carried a full page purporting

SOLDIERS FIRST 1SS

to be contest rules and terms that featured huge engravings of
Chevrolet sedans and Frigidaire iceboxes, and labeled them as
such.

Finally, the editor of the Nice-Marseilles edition was sum-
moned to Paris to explain his failure to comply with a direct
order to print the contest stories verbatim, including trade names
and engravings of the prizes. He was threatened with court-martial
if he continued his refusal. With enough combat credit to be
discharged from the army within a few months, the editor figured
what the hell and said he'd print them.

It was cowardly, but by that time The Stars and Stripes had
become in fact just what the thousands of special service officers,
public relations officers and various other noncombatants always
had wanted it to be: an organ of the army completely under their
control. The fighting in Europe had stopped, and the combat
men no longer were combat men, so the paper's staff had no moral
grounds on which to fall back.

Despite hundreds of little incidents similar to, if not quite so
absurd at all times, as these, the paper's staff in London and on
the Continent only once seriously considered refusing to put out
the night's paper.

The Stars and Stripes, along with the rest of the world's news-
papers, had printed a sensational story from the Mediterranean
Theater of Operations. The story was negative, an official denial
by the army of a statement printed in Drew Pearson's Washington
column that Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. had struck
an American private recuperating from combat fatigue in an army
base hospital. Every correspondent in the Mediterranean had
known about the incident, but all of them withheld publication
at the request of the high command there, who feared the news,
would hurt army morale. It probably would have. However,
Pearson broke the story in the States, and there was nothing for
the army to do except make some kind of statement. The army
denied it, and The Stars and Stripes put down what the army said.
There was no complaint about that.

The following day, Associated Press copy came into the office
with an army confession that the denial was a phony. Patton had
slapped the convalescent soldier because he thought he was gold-
bricking. Patton, the army said, was sorry. Then the details of
the story came out, whether or no the army wished. It was learned

184 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

that all the correspondents in Africa knew of the story but were
prevented from filing it. The whole thing made reading for
every soldier in the army. A high-ranking officer was in plenty
of trouble. That was readable news for soldiers at any time.

The Desk of the London Stars and Stripes the only paper
in the ETO, then let the story run, shoved it to the composing
room and had it in type slated for a prominent spot on page one.

About six o'clock that evening, the officer in charge of the
paper dropped in, as he occasionally did. He took one look at
the Patton story and said it would not be run.

"That's an order!"

The phrase became famous around the office.

The staff, however, was faced with a problem. If the people
ivho put out the paper quit right then and there, no Stars and
Stripes would be on the streets or at the mess lines in the morn-
ing; but a mutiny such as that would bring serious charges and
courts-martial against all concerned in the strike. Some of the staff
felt that if we refused to put the paper out minus the Patton
story the incident would get so much publicity at home that it
would be associated with the Patton case and the thing would be
too hot for the army to grab and handle in army fashion.

The more sober soldiers of the staff voted against a strike in
protest of brass censorship, and reluctantly the paper was put to
bed, without the full story of the Patton incident.

The following day, the staff regretted that it had turned
yellow. No Stars and Stripes man could walk through Grosvenor
Square, where most of the army headquarters were housed, with-
out getting a knowing smile from everyone who recognized him
as a staffer.

"Missed a little story this morning, didn't you?"

Everyone bought the London dailies in addition to The Stars
and Stripes, so the Patton story was no secret. Even on the most
remote airfields there were half a dozen copies of the British
papers, with the Patton story splashed around page one in glee.
The fact that we had run the original denial and then no more
made the paper look that much more like a dictated army house
organ.

The third day after the story broke, there was another story
stating that Eisenhower had officially reprimanded Patton. The

SOLDIERS FIRST 135

London papers threw it across their pages. We did not run it,
again by order.

All those little incidents served to underline the army's orig-
inal and oft-repeated pronunciamento: soldiers first and news-
papermen second. Sometimes we'd escape that a little bit, but
sooner or later a khaki sleeve whose upper end terminated in brass
reached out and grabbed.

Sometimes, though, it worked out in just as ridiculous a
fashion as it should have.

Back in New York, Yank was putting its staff through daily
foot drill under the watchful eye of several hundred service com-
mand colonels and an occasional Life photographer. It was an
absurd waste of time, but the army felt that the uniform alone
was not enough, and eventually in the spit and polish London
Base Command sector The Stars and Stripes was caught in a net
of the same weaving.

The brass sent down an order, and it was pasted up on the
iron pipe in the city room which was the bulletin board. What
the order had said in effect was that once a week, at 7 A.M. on
Fridays, the Stars and Stripes staff would be soldiers first, and after
that they could go publish a newspaper.

That made Friday night's paper maybe the best in the week.
Compounded of resentment at what was palpable nonsense and
discouragement that the army could thrust itself upon us when
it wished, the paper on Friday night was tossed together with an
air that usually made it the brightest, most sparkling of the week,
even though we didn't realize it at the time. But how that mob
of individualists, nonconformists, quasi-sedentary newspapermen
suffered before they could leave the inspection and drill behind
and sneak off to the sanctuary of the smelly old offices in the
Times!

In London, the staff had been for some time on a very spe-
cial and desirable status known as "per diem." That meant simply
that the staffers received from the army one pound ($4, more or
less) each day for food and quarters, and the individuals could
live and eat where they pleased but got no further help from the
army. Jt was a sensible arrangement, and it didn't take a day more
than nine months of arguing with the army to bring it about. The
staff worked until one o'clock most mornings, and it was obviously

136 THE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

impractical to put men who didn't get up for breakfast in a
barracks.

On per diem, then, the staff was scattered all over London,
and some even found themselves suburban homes an hour's train
ride from the city. They may have been the army's only enlisted
commuters. It's just about certain that the staff was composed of
the only men who went to the army in taxicabs.

In order to reach a given point for an inspection at seven
it was necessary for the men, who had gone to bed only a few
hours earlier after putting out the paper, to get up any time
from 5:30 on to 6:45, depending on how far they lived from the
little alley back of the business office off Grosvenor Square.

Ordinarily, on normal workdays, they were not a bad-looking
lot of soldiers, or newspapermen. They were neatly dressed, for
the most part; some shoes were shined and pants and blouses
almost always well pressed. A couple of them, particularly two
who lived just off Belgrave Square in the heart of London's most
fashionably dignified district, had valets and were very well
pressed.

But on inspection days they were a crummy-looking lot.

Low shoes, oxfords, could not be worn. We had to wear high
army shoes, and none of us had worn the army shoes enough to
get the grease out of them so they would take a polish.

Neat and clean khaki shirts had to be replaced by regulation
army issue heavy wool shirts, which, being worn once a week,
always had collars which pointed in all directions except down.

Stripes, which privates first class and corporals found they
did much better without when trying to be newspapermen, had
to be worn, which meant a quick sewing job by probably the
least proficient group of seamsters in the world.

In short, it took a different wardrobe to stand an inspection.

Thus once a week, from musty barracks bags stored in pol-
ished London apartment house closets, staffers pulled out the
necessary pieces of soldier suit. In the early hours of the morning
they rubbed a little metal polish on tarnished buttons and
scrubbed quickly for a few minutes, leaving speckled evidence of
their work in the form of metal polish all over the fronts of their
clothes and scraping just enough tarnish from the brass to make
the high spots gleam and the dull spots duller. They clambered
into the strange garb and raced for their apartment house doors

SOLDIERS FIRST 18T

where early-rising porters waited with already summoned taxicabs-
The taxi drivers, under rush orders, careened through the bleak
streets for the soldier's appointment with the army.

En route the staffers tugged and twisted at their army suits
to try to look like soldiers. Since their ideas were liable to differ
from the army's, the results, what with the unfamiliar garb and
all, were not startlingly spectacular, and it was a motley crew
that drew up in front of the alley, paid off the taximen in the
fashion of newspapermen and then turned around to be soldiers.

(There were two or three taxicab drivers who used to wait
especially at staffers' homes on Friday mornings so they could take
them to the army and then hang around and watch the fun.)

The inspections in London never were discontinued,,
although most other staffs of the far-flung chain managed to defeat
them. Maybe the Algiers staff did the best job. Bob Neville,
then a captain, was officer in charge when he got an order to "get
the men in top physical shape; make them soldiers." Bob ordered
calisthenics. He said he would lead the exercises himself.

The first morning, the staff piled into a courtyard in the
early African sun, and waited for tall, balding, quiet Neville,
whose carriage and demeanor are the antithesis of athletics.
Finally, he came out, with big Bill Estoff, who, nearing forty,
was a long way from being a physical training director. Bill did
better in the Kasbah.

"All right, men," began Neville, "we'll start this program
today and keep at it as long as the army demands. First exercise,,
the deep knee bend, with hands outstretched. To the count, ready,

"One ... two .. ."

Bob never got past two, which was the count at which the
group squatted on haunches, arms outstretched. He couldn't
reach three, because try as he would Bob couldn't get himself
back upright.

"Fstoff, fergawdsake take over. I can't get up."

The Algiers staff rolled on the courtyard in laughter, but
it wasn't funny to Bill.

"Take over, hell! I couldn't get that far down, myself!"

The Algiers edition found that morning exercises were better
marked down on the schedule as performed, and nothing further
said.

188 THE STORY OF THE STARS A N I> STRIPES

Not so in London, under Ensley Llewellyn's soldierly eye.
The editorial staff might look like something from an Abbott
and Costello movie and the business office staff as bad, but E. M.
Llewellyn was in his glory. As he told us, he'd been a National
Guardsman for years, he'd soldiered in China and a lot of other
places, and Friday morning was the time when he could appear
in resplendent pink riding breeches, gleaming boots and O happy
day white gloves. White gloves in Hyde Park on Friday morning,
'where are you now?

"Attention! Forward march!" My stumbling friends, strag-
glers from a lesser Coxie's army, where do you march?

"Hup two three four" and yesterday two of you were sweaty
in the subzero altitude as the Focke-Wulfs made their run on the
Flying Fortresses, but today you will make noises like soldiers in
the rear echelons.

"Names will be taken." That was the way the weekly notice
of inspection always ended. If we were not this or that, and if we
looked the way we had looked the last week, "names will be
taken." We were always threatened, ominously, that "anyone who
does not meet inspection standards will have his name taken."
The staff took it just as it was said, and that is all the procedure
ever amounted to, except it was a hell of a lot of fun to stand there
and tell Acting First Sergeant Corporal Ham Whitman (on The
Stars and Stripes it seemed the most natural thing in the world
that the first sergeant really was a corporal; naturally) your name
and rank when you knew all the time that he knew it, and Llewel-
lyn, who was listening, knew it, and anyway all three of you knew
that nothing would ever come of the affair anyway.

Sometimes the sun was bright on those inspection mornings,
and the buttons didn't look too bad. On cloudy days, though,
there wasn't any shine to them and John Cornish Wilkinson, the
South Carolina captain who was the paper's writer of jokes, shone
less than any, so he led the punishment detachment.

That was a euphemism of the sort in which S&*S abounded;
egregiously First Sergeant Corporal Whitman. Colonel Llewellyn
would look at buttons, decide they didn't shine, and with a gesture
of his white gloves snarl "Hammersmith. 1 ' When the inspection
was done and Whitman had saluted very properly and said that all
were "present or accounted for," the punishment detachment
set out.

SOLDIERS FIRST . . 130

Wilkinson tried not to laugh and to sound very stern at the
same time and failed miserably on both counts as he ordered the
"following men to fall out, fall in and march to Hammersmith/'
some five miles across London.

For five or maybe six steps, as the unshining group started
out from the alley, they were as close to being in step as a Stars
and Stripes unit ever was. After that, it was the usual straggling,
meandering, abstract group of staffers. Before they had gone a
mile, all remembered they had eaten no breakfast. The course to
Hammersmith led them past the Hans Crescent American Red
Cross Club in Knightsbridge, well, anyway, pretty close to it, a
matter of five or six blocks out of the way, and a detour and coffee
and doughnuts made a break in the punishment. Second, by
cutting then over to Kensington, the detachment could pass the
Milestone Red Cross Club, and have more coffee and doughnuts.
The fact that these side marches totaled an extra couple of miles
made no difference; the staffers got breakfast and, without men-
tioning it specifically, there was a feeling that thus the army was
finally and almost completely foiled in its effort to control them.

By the time they left the Milestone Club, it was almost ten
o'clock in the morning, and that was the hour at which the pubs
opened. The punishment march, led by the captain with the dull
buttons and the coffee stains on his necktie, at 10 A.M. was turned
into a rout.

There was one thing about it, though. Driven by some strange
sense of honor which could make itself unaccountably compati-
ble with the detours and the pub stops every man every time
managed to stagger the complete distance to Hammersmith before
boarding a bus for home and a return to his ordinary, noninspec-
tion-day clothes in which he again was a fairly presentable citizen
soldier. None of the marchers, however, ever were able to come to
work that day. Even if they never felt better in their lives, part
of the staff which marched to Hammersmith couldn't come to
work; the whole office decided that if people who marched to
Hammersmith didn't work it would show Llewellyn the whole
thing was a farce.

In the course of three years of such inspections, all that
gesture ever managed to accomplish was to make more work for
those who didn't do the Hammersmith march. Pressed about the
advisability of that type of punishment for men who had a day's

140 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

work to do, Llewellyn told a harrowing tale of his experiences on
the march, with which the staff hardly could argue.

"I remember when I was a private in the National Guard in
Washington," the colonel related.

"We had a mean first sergeant, and sometimes ror no reason
at all he'd wake us at three or four in the morning, line us up in
our underwear and start us on the run over a ten-mile road of
sharp stones in our bare feet. Our bare feet, mind you. '

"If I could stand that, I guess you fellows ought to be able
to take a little walk to Hammersmith with shoes on."

There were what Llewellyn came to describe as "incidents"
every time there was an inspection, and especially when inspec-
tion was followed by military drill or instruction.

There were bound to be incidents when the colonel tried to
teach the copy-desk men and the reporters about grenade throwing
and used for his grenades six wooden practice grenades which
the previous week had been painted yellow, green, pink and blue
by the Yank staff artists for an Easter cover illustration.

But when it was decided to introduce sports into the curricu-
lum because it was so hard to keep the staffers from going over
the hill to a pub or their flats when they were out "drilling" in
spacious Hyde Park the army was completely routed. It was
decided to let the staff play baseball. We were all going to get
healthy, including the ones who jumped with the paratroops, the
gunners and the reporters who were combat infantrymen. They
were to be made tough and healthy by a sports program, playing
baseball.

The colonel played in the first game, sprinted for second base
in the second inning and was tossed some five feet in the air when
Private Charley Kiley blocked the base line. In the next game, the
colonel said he would umpire. There came one of those argu-
ments that no army, no order, no martial discipline is ever going
to prevent when American kids play baseball. The colonel called
a man safe who was out by ten feet, and the side in the field
descended on him screaming "robber," "blind man," and no "sir"

about it, either. The colonel tried to argue. He was shouted down.
He drew in his breath and roared.

"The man is safe. That's AN ORDER!"

Even Jim King, the civilian reporter for the Associated Press

SOLDIERS FIRST 141

who showed up at inspections some mornings because he liked to
play baseball so well, decided that was enough, and baseball as a
body builder for the staff of S&S became a thing with grenade
throwing.

For all of the fact that he was the direct cause of our unhappi-
ness on inspection days, the colonel brightened them too. From
his stories, we knew he had soldiered all over the world, had led
a life of one adventurous incident after the other; and if the
allegedly military training (for the rewrite men and copy editors
and other such martial characters) that followed the inspection
became dull, the colonel always was good for a story of a campaign
or an exploit somewhere to brighten the day and sort of illustrate
the point involved. There were the lectures on chemical warfare,
for example.

(Bob Moora used to do a pretty good job of brightening
military lectures, too. Assigned "Chemical Warfare" as a topic on
which to lecture to the staff, Moora began his talk to a leering staff
with "Chemical warfare is making war with chemicals/')

Llewellyn, however, chose to tell some forty members of the
business and editorial staffs about his campaigns in the Chinese
hinterlands, when he was "fighting the Japs long before our war.
They used gas on us, and a lot of people were killed, died in ter-
rible agony, but just because I'd attended lectures such as this
and knew what to do, I got out of it with hospitalization. Twice,
that happened.

"So, you fellows, pay attention, especially you people from
down at the editorial offices who always are so sure you know more
than anyone else. Maybe you'll get gassed."

He brushed his white-gloved hands together briskly, said
"dismissed" with an arch smile so that we never knew whether
we were being ribbed or not, and strode away.

One man, however, really stopped the good colonel cold at
an inspection. That was Herb Palmer, the wild-eyed 4g-year-old
second lieutenant, who was supposed to be an administrative
officer in some vague way connected with the business office but
who always turned up aboard some bomber that limped back
to base on two engines, wandered off with a bunch of Joes and
stayed with them when they turned out to be paratroops on their
way to jump in Holland, or something equally odd.

142 THE STORT OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Colonel Llewellyn started a "Wear-Your-ETO-Ribbon" cam-
paign. The ribbon was a multicolored affair denoting service in
the European Theater of Operations. It seemed kind of hard to
understand why anyone should wear, while stationed in the Euro-
pean Theater of Operations, a ribbon which denoted that one
was stationed in the European Theater of Operations. The staff
figured you could almost certainly tell a fellow was stationed in
the ETO by looking at him if you both happened to be standing
in the ETO at the time, and that maybe the ribbon was just a
little superfluous.

Llewellyn's first trouble came when one staffer, a corporal,
showed up wearing an ETO ribbon on each shoulder as officer's
shoulder bars. Palmer came to inspection with no ribbon at all.
"You," shouted Llewellyn, "are a fine officer. Next week, you
wear every ribbon you're entitled to." He glanced down quickly
at his own pre-Pearl Harbor and ETO ribbons.

Next week, Palmer stood in line, shining, polished and
pressed beyond anyone's belief. Llewellyn strode down the ranks
and came to the grayhaired second lieutenant, looked at his shoes,
his buttons, his chest, his hat, and then jerked his gaze swiftly
back to the chest in a magnificent double-take. On Palmer's left
chest there were almost three full rows of ribbons, every one of
them strange to the colonel's eye except the ETO affair.

"What," demanded the colonel, suspecting broad satire, "is
the meaning of this? What are those . . . those ribbons?"

In his softest tones, Palmer answered:

"This is the ETO ribbon, sir. After that, all from the last
war, except the last ribbon, are the British Military Cross, the
French Legion d'Honneur, the French Croix de Guerre, with
palm, the 1915-16 campaign ribbon of the British Expeditionary
Forces and the Mons Star, the 1918 victory ribbon and the Medal
of Honor of the Spanish Loyalists."

Llewellyn was taken aback but hung on grimly to his original
assumption that it was a hoax. "And how did you get them?"
he asked.

'Tve been fighting Germans for some time, sir," Palmer an-
swered, still in the soft tones, and the colonel moved on.

The colonel, or any other brass connected with the paper and
its staff, should have known better than to try to make the pri-

SOLDIERS FIRST 148

vates and corporals and sergeants of The Stars and Stripes look
like privates and corporals and sergeants of the army.

To begin with, Private Joe Blow, for instance, of the Um-
teenth Messkit Repair Company, has his life all laid out for him
by the army. Private Blow's job is repairing messkits and the army,
maybe starting somewhere along with Baron von Steuben's time,
has concerned itself with the best way to repair messkits. The
army has written a little book which says how messkits will be
repaired and since that is Private Blow's only job the army does
not have much trouble ordering Private Blow to repair a messkit,
as per Field Manual 61005. When he is through work Private
Blow has to dig ditches to maintain the camp in which he lives,
or the station; he has to make beds or wash dishes or pick up
cigarette butts or do whatever it is the army says he should be
doing according to some other field manual.

But neither Baron von Steuben nor the army ever had the
temerity to try to write a field manual about publishing a news-
paper within the army. In World War I there had been the first
Stars and Stripes. Then it was published hand to mouth just as
the newspapermen connected with it figured out it should be.
So with the paper of World War II. And still unlike Private Joe
Blow, of the messkit repair battalion, The Stars and Stripes lacked,
in addition to an army manual on how to publish a newspaper,
any other directive from the army on what to do with its spare
time, because Stars and Stripes staffers didn't live in camps or
stations and anyway most of them at one time or another had a
maid or a valet to pick up cigarette butts or make the beds.

Somehow, maybe just because that happened to be the for-
mat for everything the paper touched, even the personal military
records of Stars and Stripes personnel were in arrears, mixed up,
wrong or lost. A careful check of the hundreds of personal service
records which moved their mysterious ways through the Stars
and Stripes administrative files, once failed to reveal a single set
of records complete and correct. Bill Esthoff, the sergeant from
Syracuse, went to Africa from a job as circulation director in
Scotland, and for seven months went without pay until his service
records finally arrived at Casablanca. Bill got paid regularly
through 1943, but then he went to Italy and in turn to Southern
France and Paris, and it was April, 1945, before Bill collected his
soldier's pay for June of 1944.

144 THE: STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

There was one master sergeant on the editorial staff who
transferred to the American Army from the Canadian forces. In
three years on The Stars and Stripes, the sergeant never received
a single hour of the basic military training through which, in
theory and in practice everywhere else in the army all soldiers
must pass. As a matter of fact, that same sergeant spent three
years as an American soldier without receiving a single medical
inoculation, and if there are twelve million Americans in the
forces, then there are twelve million Americans that will swear
it's impossible. He never signed a payroll but collected his pay
every month through some alchemy the process of which he never
dared question; never had a set of dog tags, never heard an official
reading of the Articles of War, and never had a physical inspec-
tion, all army procedures normally as automatic as putting on a
khaki suit in the morning.

The staffers who went out to the war from the editorial offices
in search of news carried with them their own particular little
aura of disorder. One staffer, who flew twice as many missions with
the bombers as the average gunner lived through and in the
course of doing it became more or less of an authority on aerial
gunnery, did so although he never had gone to the gunnery
school through which all aerial gunners must pass, never had
taken the rigid physical examination without which the army
insists no one may fly. There were three Stars and Stripes men
who jumped into action with the paratroopers, but of the three
only one went to any sort of a jump school in preparation for the
task; the other two simply arrived more or less unannounced at
airborne units, climbed into the carrier planes with the paratroops
and made their first jumps in combat. Neither of those two,
incidentally, could have passed a physical examination for a third-
grade rear echelon typist's job.

No fighting unit, nor its officers, ever seemed to be disturbed
about the impromptu, unheralded fashion in which Stars and
Stripes men arrived, gathered their news of the fighting and de-
parted. The only objections came from the rear echelon organ-
ization.

Four hundred miles behind the war, surrounded by files in
a Paris office the Wehrmacht administrative section once had
used, sat an officer and his staff whose duty it was to see that
travel orders sending one Stars and Stripes man or another out

SOLDIERS FIRST 145

to do this job or another were properly filed. Because they loathed
argument with the paper-work people, the staffers tried once in a
while to go to the places their orders specified but frequently
it was impossible.

For one thing, a corporal or a sergeant might know of an
impending military move of such consequence and importance
that few outside the General Staff knew about it. The staffer then
informed the city editor who was maybe a corporal or a sergeant,
too and received an assignment to cover the offensive or retreat
or whatever it was.

At that point any attempt to carry out the prescribed routine
of having the Army issue travel orders became absurd. Obviously
the corporal or sergeant could not reveal to some captain or major
what only the General Staff and the reporter knew about. So the
staffer took off on his own without orders, got his story, brought
it back and received the inevitable reprimand from the adminis-
trative people. Sometimes the reprimand was hard to take.

In the blow that opened the way for the Allied armies into
the heart of Germany, two army newspapermen jumped with
the paratroops. One of them was a Stars and Stripes man. The
other was Corporal Bob Krell of Brooklyn, New York, young,
laughing, curlyheaded combat correspondent for Yank. The air-
borne attack was prepared in highest secrecy and neither Krell
nor the Stars and Stripes man for a moment considered informing
the travel order people so that they could carry out the assignment
in "proper" military fashion.

The troopers jumped and started fighting when they hit the
ground in the midst of Germany's last-ditch line of resistance.
The two army reporters fought with them. In the heart of a black
German forest, Bob Krell and three troopers fought a German
tank holding up the attack. German infantry surrounded the
four Americans, killed them just before help arrived.

The Stars and Stripes reporter, who had had his share of
the fighting not far away, heard about Krell's death a day later
when he went to divisional headquarters to radio out the story
of the airborne assault. Some two weeks afterward, wearied from
the swift attack that had cut deep into the Reich, the Stars and
Stripes man got back to Paris. After he turned in some other
stories and pictures, he was ordered to report to the officer who
sat in the midst of the filing cabinets of the administrative section.

146 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

"What's all this paratroop business?" demanded the officer.
"I see in the paper you've been away, but you didn't have any
travel order."

"Look," replied the reporter, who was too tired to worry
about discourtesy, "I'm sure you can understand how secret that
thing was I couldn't come around here and tell you about it."

"You could be court-martialed for going off without orders
like that," growled the officer. He sighed and slumped in his
chair. He had been working very hard seeing that the papers
were filed in all the service records for which it was his army
task to care. "That Corporal Krell from Yank got killed, I see/*
the officer continued in an even wearier tone. "Now we've got
all his papers to try and straighten up because he wasn't on travel
orders when he got killed. You can't understand the amount of
trouble that causes us."

The Stars and Stripes reporter looked at the officer a long
time. The reporter had a notoriously bad temper, but at length
he shook his head slowly, turned and walked out of the office and
an hour later was in a transport plane going back up to the front.
He didn't have any orders, either.

The Stars and Stripes records, travel orders, inoculations and
pay were confused and mixed up but their state of military dis-
order never approached the nightmare quality of Stars and Stripes
uniforms.

In the course of searching for news in infantry regiments,
bomber squadrons, engineer battalions, the occasional navy war-
ship to say nothing of the same sources of news in other Allied
forces the staffers collected and wore a pretty motley assortment
of clothing, footgear and headwear. Had a quartermaster supply
officer stood in the doorway of the Stars and Stripes office at Liege
or Frankfurt, Paris or Rome for three days, and tried to identify
those who entered as to rank or branch of service, he probably
would have become crazy enough to get a job on The Stars and
Stripes. As a matter of fact he probably would not have been able
to tell which of the United Nations they represented.

Russ Jones, the quiet combat correspondent from St. Paul,
used to cover fighting in the First Army sector in garb that began
at the bottom with high leather Ranger boots over British Army
gray woolen sox, and proceeded upward through a pair of Ameri-

SOLDIERS FIRST 147

can officer's field pants, a civilian shirt, a German captain's wide
leather belt, a vest of Russian rabbitskins, which had been cap-
tured by the German Army and then captured by Jones at the
fall of Aachen, a Canadian infantryman's olive-green battle jacket,
and an American Air Corps, flying cap. (On his monthly two-day
sojourn in Paris during which he wore clothes of the same type
Jones stayed at the apartment of a White Russian refugee who
before the invasion had been the group leader of a Maquis unit
composed entirely of Spanish Loyalists.)

Sometimes, if there happened to be enough resemblance to
an American Army uniform to arouse suspicion, Stars and Stripes
men were stopped in rear echelon areas by well and correctly
dressed rear echelon officers, and required to explain, unless they
they could evade the issue, why they were improperly dressed.
There was at least one red-faced old Colonel Blimp of a colonel
who probably never again asked a strange enlisted man about his
uniform after the fine Parisian spring day on which he stopped
a Stars and Stripes reporter and demanded an explanation for
military undress.

The reporter was a sergeant, although there were no visible
signs of the rank. He wore a pair of paratroop boots. Tucked
into them were ordinary khaki trousers. His shirt was a dark-
green officer's shirt. Over it was an Air Corps leather flying jacket.
The shirt was open at the neck and the flying jacket was open
all the way down. The pants were grease and mud spattered and
unpressed, the shoes hadn't been shined at all during the month
of combat from which he had returned not ten minutes earlier.
Most heinous crime of all, however, was the sergeant's lack of a
hat. For no reason that any quartermaster can explain, the army
insists that its soldiers wear hats of one prescribed sort or another.
The sergeant wore none. Finally, as he strode up the Champs-
Elyses, there was the sergeant's walk, a loping, hands-in-pockets
bounce which any parade ground would have opened and
swallowed.

Hurrying along the Champs at the same time was the multi-
tude of vari-clad Allied personnel, soldiers, sailors, marines, air-
men, civilians, and here and there, it will be noted because it
became important to the colonel and the sergeant, the odd Ameri-
can civilian technician. Throughout the war large American
manufacturers of munitions and weapons sent civilian representa-

148 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

tives abroad to advise in the use of their products such as
airplanes, guns, tanks, trucks. The technicians were apart from
army discipline although they wore, when they wished, a uniform
which was khaki and which at least vaguely resembled a soldier's
uniform. It was among that crowd, then, that the sergeant jounced
along.

The red-faced colonel was coming the other way. He was two
steps past the sergeant before a magnificent double-take relayed
to his colonel's brain that, by God, that must have been a soldier!

He whirled and roared, "Soldier!"

Naturally the sergeant didn't think that was meant for him.
He walked on. Purple gilled, the colonel leaped after him, grabbed
him by the arm.

"Give me your name, rank and organization!" roared the
officer.

The sergeant didn't need a double-take to recognize the
situation or the cause of it, nor to classify the colonel.

The corner of his eye saw the vari-uiii formed crowd passing
by the soldiers, the sailors, the civilians, the American tech-
nicians. Before the colonel's question had scarcely thundered
away, the Stars and Stripes man turned on a beaming Rotary-
Club-welcome variety of smile, thrust out his right hand. In an
elaborately overcordial gesture, he banged the colonel on the
shoulder with his left hand and said in a tone as jovial as the
colonel's had been thunderous:

"Why, I'm Thomas Bert Thomas of Republic Aviation!
Who're you?"

The colonel sagged through every inch of his jowls, flustered
out a rank and some sort of name, limply and hurriedly pumped
the sergeant-reporter's proffered hand, turned and fled into the
vari-uniformed anonymity of the Paris crowd.

The "soldiers first" dictum was injected into The Stars and
Stripes regularly. And the staff failed miserably, as a matter of
candid reporting, to offer any reasonable grounds as to why it
should not be comprised first of soldiers and secondly of news-
papermen, until almost the end of the war against Germany. The
staff fought the dictum, and fairly successfully; but never, even to
itself, on any other grounds other than that it was too much bother
to dress up like a soldier.

SOLDIERS FIRST 149

Just before the first elements of The Stars and Stripes began
to drift out toward the Pacific, however, one staff member was
cornered by a brigadier general. The general went through the
usual routine about the staff man's state of improper dress and
concluded with the timeworn clich which the army had been
addressing to The Stars and Stripes from the day the paper was
founded about "You know, just because you men are putting out a
newspaper you don't want to forget you're still in the army. You're
soldiers first and newspapermen second."

The staff man's reply was inspired, but it should have been
made three years earlier (although all concerned would have
missed a lot of fun if the army had taken up his suggestion) .

"General, in all seriousness,'* the staffer asked, "since we
put out a newspaper and that's the only thing we do in the
army, why shouldn't the Stars and Stripes staff be newspapermen
first and soldiers second?"

To a brigadier general the query was fantastic, and he said
as much. He said it for quite a while and finally concluded "and
anyway, you're in the army and you are soldiers, so naturally you
have to be soldiers first."

There wasn't any argument about that; there couldn't be.
When the army pulled that line on the staffer he was licked. But
let the army get one inch over onto civilian ground . . .

There was a time a staff writer, a corporal then, was going
from London by train to a West England port. Rail transporta-
tion in England, as in America, is divided into classes correspond-
ing roughly to Pullmans and day coaches. The British army
officers ride first class; all other ranks ride third, or day-coach,
class. (There is no second class for some reason no one ever seems
to have inquired about.) The American Army in England sent
its officers and all enlisted men above the rank of buck sergeant
by first-class coach; buck sergeants and below traveled third class.

The Stars and Stripes corporal, as did all other Stars and
Stripes men, bought a first-class ticket out of his own pocket,
boarded the train and entered a first-class compartment. Already
in the six-person compartment were four civilians and a British
major. The major, who was reading the Times, looked up as
the American soldier entered the compartment. He saw no
insignia of rank on the soldier's sleeves, and in his best old-school-
tie manner demanded:

150 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

"See heah, soldiah, aren't you out of bounds? This is a
first-class carriage."

The Stars and Stripes man looked at the major stonily, sat
down and began to read the morning's issue of The Stars and
Stripes. The major rustled his Times fiercely, leaned forward and
barked:

"I say, have you a first-class ticket?"

The reporter eyed the major again. "I think that is a matter
between me and my conductor."

British Army enlisted men do not talk to British majors in
that fashion even if the major has asked a stupid, impertinent
and irrelevant question. The major leaped to his feet, threw open
the door of the compartment, disappeared down the corridor.
Almost immediately he returned grasping the train conductor
firmly by the arm.

At the compartment doorway the major pointed a stern
finger at the Stars and Stripes man. "This man's a common
soldiah he has no right in heah."

The expression on the conductor's face obviously said, "Yank,
I don't like it but regulations, you know, ".but the trainman's
voice asked, "Do you have a first-class ticket?"

The American stood up and on the British major's counte-
nance there grew one of those righteous expressions of vindicated
virtue as the Yank, apparently flustered, began to search with
mounting haste through his pockets, fumbling in his billfold with
apparently nervous fingers, even searching the seat on which he
had sat. The major's cup was almost running over when the Yank
snapped his fingers, reached in his watch pocket and produced a
first-class ticket. The conductor accepted it, was more polite than
necessary in thanking the American soldier as he punched and re-
turned the ticket, and left. The Stars and Stripes soldier sat down
and resumed reading. The major, his day spoiled, returned to
his Times with the air of a man who has found the worm in the
apple. The major's face was red, and after staring stonily at his
paper for long minutes during which it might have been a
snicker that came from behind the papers the civilians in the
compartment held, the major drew from his pocket a package
of Players cigarettes, selected one, tapped it impatiently on his
wrist watch, lighted it.

Quietly the reporter across from him stood up, and slipped

SOLDIERS FIRST 151

out into the corridor. In the second car ahead he found the
conductor. In a few moments they were back. The reporter's
countenance was serene as he entered the compartment door,
silently pointed a reproving finger at the smoking major, then
lifted his gaze and finger toward the sign on the window, which
said: "No Smoking Five Pounds Penalty."

There was joy in the conductor's eyes as he said to the major,
"I shall have to have your name and rank and service number,
sir. You will be notified when to appear in court by the proper
authorities/'

The reporter sat with downcast and modestly flickering eye-
lids as the major left the compartment, tried vainly to argue his
way clear in the corridor, and finally surrendered his name, rank
and service number.

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBED S

M HE staff always seemed to find themselves a
pretty good place to live. Even the combat reporters, who slept
with the men at the front in what the folks at home seem to think
are always foxholes, usually managed to do pretty well. Just like
any other combat man in the line, the staffers slept in abandoned
houses in the battle zone when they could, in barns which weren't
too obviously the targets of enemy fire, and sometimes best of
all in one of the elaborate dugouts which Jerry somehow always
found the time to construct and live in until we chased him out.

Most Stars and Stripes reporters carried their shelter halves
(one half of a pup tent, which the army provides each soldier as
his home in the field) all the way from their first London apart-
ments to the requisitioned German castle just outside Frankfurt,
which was their eventual halting place on the Continent, and
after that some of them toted the same shelter halves across the
Pacific to the war against the Japs.

But there is no known record of a Stars and Stripes man un-
folding one of those pup tents and hammering the little wooden
pins into the ground. And more frequently than abandoned
German dugouts, barns, houses or foxholes, the average Stars and
Stripes place of temporary abode was apt to be pretty luxurious,
as luxuries go in the war. Russ Jones, one of our First Army
correspondents, summed it up:

/'There's no use in wearing a hairshirt if you can find a
linen one, and if I'm getting shot at all day, by God! I'm gonna
sleep as well as I can, eat as well as I can, come night."

Most of the boys did.

152

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 153

THE 4TH-IN A FOXHOLE, BUT A MEMORY

WITH THE u.s. FORCES IN NORMANDY, July 3 When he got back to base
there was a message. The office wanted a piece on how the guys were
spending the Fourth of July in France. He went down to the side of
the road and sat on a broken German antitank-gun frame, and he
said, "What the hell."

Five or maybe ten years ago most of these guys would have gone
to bed this third of July night knowing they could get up tomorrow
and wake up the neighborhood with maybe a couple of cannon
crackers, and put torpedoes on the trolley car rails, and tomorrow
night there'd be Roman candles all over the sky, and you could
watch skyrockets arc over the town.

Tonight they crawl into foxholes, if there is time, and tomorrow
they'll do the same things they've been doing today, and some guy,
dirty with Norman mud and red-eyed with waiting for this Fourth of
July, will make a sour crack about firecrackers before he picks up his
M-i for the day.

The fellow by the roadside said he didn't know of anybody who
would have the gall to write a story contrasting that.

A long time ago, it was a day for picnics, and the kids turned the
ice-cream freezer in the morning and spilled rock salt all over the
back porch. Grandma made a batch of cake, with frosting, and there
were pickles from last fall's cucumbers, and fresh raspberries on the
ice cream. You met a lot of aunts and uncles you only saw once a year,
and one of your cousins was a wise guy who took apart some 1 2-gauge
shotgun shells to get the powder and fire it from an iron pipe.

Tomorrow these guys'll have good old Ks again, or maybe in
some places they'll get some Cs. Not an awful lot of ice cream in a
can of Cs, nor cake in the brown wapc paper marked K.

The fellow by the side of the road figured anything anyone had
to say about that was better unsaid.

Sometimes there would be a concert in the octagonal wooden
bandstand in the square on the afternoon of the Fourth, and then
one at night too, with the council spending 20 bucks or so on giant
sparklers that were pale in the early dusk and only bright when it
was almost time for you to go home.

The fellow by the side of the road scratched a beard grown three
days long and listened to 155 hows, banging away toward the lines
beyond Carentan, and thought of the noise of screaming meemies,
which the infantry had heard up ahead for two days without end. If
the infantry people thought about bandstands in a town back there
somewhere, all right; but how could anyone else try to tell the

154 THE STORY OP THE STABS AND STRIPES

contrast between those other days and what the infantry was having
this day before the National Holiday?

In the little towns behind the lines in Normandy people were
planning with the officers of the civil affairs sections to observe the
Fourth of July, and they asked would the Americans in turn help
them ten days later to celebrate Bastille Day. In Grandcamp-les-Bains

and Isigny, in Cherbourg and at the bomb-scarred communities all
along the beaches there would be little speeches by M. le Maire, who
knows a few words of English, or maybe the civil-affairs guy would
translate. There would be fresh wreaths placed in the cemeteries
where civilians and American soldiers were buried side by side.

There would be maybe it wasn't certain a simple parade or
two, and all across the Norman countryside which had been freed
the Tricolor would fly with the Stars and Stripes. To the east, it would
fly with the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf.

The fellow got up from the roadside, caught a ride in a jeep
and went back to the beach. He talked to an MP, Ed La Due, wha
came from Utica, in upstate New York, where they have Fourth o
July picnics, and there are bandstands in the town squares.

Ed said "Yeah, a hell of a way to spend the Fourth of July." He
watched a truckload of sober-faced men going toward the place where
the sound of guns had been in the air all day. "I bet a lot of guys
will make a lot of speeches over on the other side."

The fellow said, "Yeah," and walked away, down to a stretch
of sandy shore where there was no work. At a place where the Channel

had left a scum of oil on the sand there was a piece of khaki webbing,,
part of a soldier's gear. There was salt rime on it and the water had

run the purple of an indelibly penciled ASN into a blur.

The fellow looked at it awhile and remembered he had to do a.
piece on the Fourth of July, which used to be a holiday a long time
ago.

In Paris, the editorial men lived in a comfortable little hotel
on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor^ (where the landlady
wanted only one thing from the American soldiers: a pair of
rubber overshoes) . In Rennes, the French city at the base of the
Breton peninsula, the small staff lived in a lovely little brick
house hurriedly abandoned by the Gestapo chief for the entire
area when the Yanks came down the road. Possibly it was in Nice,
the Riviera rest area for American troops, that the Stars and
Stripes staff achieved its ultimate collective luxury. There, as soon
as the fighting swept through the town and settled down to a war
of position some five miles to the east, toward the Italian frontier,.

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBED8 155

the staffers ensconced themselves in the Francia Hotel, a room to
each man, a bathroom to every three, a maid to every three, a
civilian chef who once had run the kitchen of the Sands Point
Bath Club on Long Island, one waitress to every six soldiers, and
the whole fabulously expensive Blue Coast of the Mediterranean
in which to swim and sunbathe. All the soldiers not on leave but

working in the Riviera district were billeted in regular army
fashion. The Stars and Stripes staff got its own hotel when the
area commander asked one thing of them: a good newspaper
published on time every morning and delivered daily at six A.M.
beneath the door of every combat man spending a seven-day leave
in Nice. Most of the staff on the Nice edition had had a plethora
of combat and came to work there because The Stars and Stripes
felt that its own combat men deserved a rest as well as anyone else
although they might as well publish a paper as long as they
were there.

It was of living quarters in London, however, that most of
the staff thought with fondest memories. Perhaps that was because
most of the original staffers lived there for more than two years.

The fondest and most fantastic memory by far was the
home and it was literally that which Charlie Kiley, Ben Price
and Charlie White rented in Beckingham, Kent, some thirty miles
outside London. It was a fine old house with four bedrooms up-

stairs, good kitchen, baths, and a backyard complete with flower
garden and grape arbors. At a time when a good many officers
in London below the grade of general were living two to a hotel
room, Sergeant Kiley, Sergeant Price and Private White decided
they wanted "a country home." They had lived a year in metro-
politan London one enlisted man to an apartmen " and figured
there was no reason why two sergeants and a private shouldn't
commute to work.

The three hired a maid and a gardener and at one time
started with elaborate plans to grow their own vegetables on
their day off. (On the other six days of the week, the gardener
grew the vegetables, and eventually on the seventh as well.) Their
Beckingham house quickly became a Stars and Stripes rest home
all by itself.

The life of the country gentleman had one drawback: train
fare to and from London was one shilling thruppence each way,
about twenty-five cents. Kiley, who settled easily into the tern-

156 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

porary luxury of country life despite an occasional interruption
to go off and spend a month training with the Commandos or a
couple of days flying with the bombers, somehow always had his
train fare. Ben Price nearly always had it.

With Charles Charles Worthington Worthington White,
however, it was different. (When you start remembering stories

about Charlie White, you invariably find yourself thinking of
the stubby, myopic, gg-year-old ex-Canadian tank trooper in the
manner by which he always referred to himself: Charles Charles
Worthington Worthington White, which wasn't exactly the way
his name went, but it should have.) Charles Charles occasionally
had enough money to get out to the country, and if he didn't he
usually could borrow enough. There were times, however, when
he couldn't make it back to work.

After one long night in the Lamb and Lark, old Trooper
White climbed aboard a train at the Blackfriars Station with just
enough money to buy a one-way ticket. He got home all right,
but neither Price nor Kiley came home that night and the follow-
ing morning White called the office and in a lonesome voice told
the Desk he was stranded,

"I got no money to come to work on," he said plaintively.

It was a busy day for the Desk and Charlie got little help
and no satisfaction, so he hung up and looked around for another
source of funds. There was Vicky, the maid the three had hired
when they rented the house. Charles waited until she arrived for
work at one o'clock and approached her. It was a delicate job
because Vicky received some three pounds about twelve dollars
a week. Also, she hadn't been paid for seven weeks.

Charles, however, made the touch successfully and walked
out of the house with two pounds tucked in his pocket. The
railroad station was a mile from the house and while Charles
Charles may have started out with good intentions of catching the
2:12 to town, he never got past the Running Horse Tavern.

Anyway, by pub-closing time, Charles Charles had drunk his
way through all of Vicky's two pounds, and he returned dolefully
to Cheesecake Manor, so called because Ben Price, who made the
arrangements for renting it, was the paper's art editor.

At home, Charles went to bed and when he awoke the next
morning, almost noon, Price and Kiley had been home and gone
and the trooper was right back where he had started the day be-

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 157

fore no money to get to the office. Vicky arrived for work, and
calling to her from his bed Charlie asked her to go down to the
Running Horse and bring back a few pints of ale. To pay for
the brew he gave her an odd four pennies from his pocket and
told her to trade in some empty ale bottles under the kitchen
sink. He gave her his musette bag to carry the bottles, because

Vicky wasn't very strong. When the maid returned with the ale,
Charles Charles drank it, felt better and began to wonder, once
more, about getting to work. Once again he was penniless and
thirty miles from his place of business.

Finally, as a last resort Charles was afraid to call the Desk
he telephoned the local taxi driver with whom he had done a
small amount of business and a considerable amount of drinking,
and asked him to pick him up in front of the house in ten
minutes. The cabby, happy to have business at an unexpected
hour of the day, drove around promptly. Charles Charles stepped
out of the house and briskly walked up to the cab.

Charles turned the handle to open the door, paused, seemed
to consider something that had just struck him and swung his
head toward the cabby, who was waiting for the destination.

"Say/ 1 Charlie said confidentially, "uh ... I wonder if you've
got a couple of quid you could let me have?"

The driver apologetically explained that, because he had just
come out of the hospital where he had been ill for two weeks,
as Charlie knew, he only had ten shillings to his name. With a
wife and kids at home that wasn't much money for a man.

Charlie said yes he reckoned as how it wasn't very much at
that, but somehow he would make out with it all right. The
cabby reluctantly and with a sort of mesmerized expression turned
over the last ten shillings he had. Charlie shoved the note into
his pocket, stepped into the cab and said, "Well, let's stop first
at the Running Horse."

The cab drew up at the tavern and, since Charles was a kind
and generous American, he did not merely hop out and say
"Charge it" to the cabby, nor was he going to spoil a beautiful
friendship by tipping the man with money he had borrowed
from him; he invited the driver inside to have a drink.

The two drank several mild-and-bitters. In the course of the
second glass, there was some discussion during which Charles
Charles allowed he thought it was immoral for one man to treat

168 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

another with money he had borrowed, so he had the publican
of the Running Horse put it on the cuff.

At half past six, the cabby took Charles back to Cheesecake
Manor, put him to bed, and went off presumably a sadder but
wiser man. The next morning, Ben and Kiley, on orders from the
Desk, got Charlie out of bed, made him eat breakfast, and

marched him off to the train and a return to work. It is poetically
just that Kiley made Charles Charles buy all three tickets with
the borrowed ten shillings.

Most of the staff on the original paper in London couldn't
see their way clear to commute daily between the office and Eng-
land's flowered coastal counties. For one thing, some of them
were going from one training area to another across the United
Kingdom, getting ready for D day and writing about the combat
men who were getting ready for D day, and they weren't in
London enough to make it worth while. So the rest of the staffers
satisfied themselves with apartments of varying degrees of luxury
in metropolitan London. Especially those men who were flying, or
were getting ready for the eventual invasion of Europe, had some
conscience about living so well while the rest of the army was in
the field or at best billeted in requisitioned and thoroughly
"army" houses in cities. But since they were doing their job, and

since those who flew possibly might not come back to the paper

or London or anything else in any given week, most of them
figured that Russ Jones was right about the hairshirt business and
settled themselves to utilizing what luxury their sergeant or cor-
poral or private's pay, the per diem allowance for subsistence of
i a day which the army paid, and their newspaperman's wits
could provide.

Maybe Dick Wilbur, former Yale News editor (who continu-
ally had navy lieutenant commanders dropping in on him) had
the best apartment of the lot. Dick, who came to the paper from
a hospital unit as a sergeant, rented the spacious flat belonging to
a lieutenant general in the British Army. Dick shared the flat with
Ray Lee and George Maskin, and from time to time with half a
dozen other staffers. In the eight months they occupied the British
general's flat, they could never get the gas and electricity bill
straightened out with his Majesty's gas and electric organization,
and had it not been for the rank of the apartment's rightful

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBED8 159

occupant, the trio would have finished their tour there by candle-
light. Eventually the lieutenant general returned from the wars,
North Africa probably, and took over his flat again. Wilbur,
Maskin and Lee had to find new quarters. They complained bit-
terly for some time that they came down in the social scale when
they eventually could find vacant only the flat of a British Army

lieutenant colonel, who also was away to the wars.

One Stars and Stripes staffer lived in one of the most exclu-
sive buildings in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of
London just off staid, dignified, old Belgrave Square. The ser-
geant took great delight in the doorbell name plates at his apart-
ment house. The chaste engraving above the polished bells read:
"Lady Simonds, Apt. 4," "Colonel the Hon. H. Ramsey Tweed-
ing, Apt. 6," "Mme. the Princess Raspigliosi, Apt. 2," etc. Under
Apt. 12, just below a brigadier general, was a finely engraved
card bearing the sergeant's name and the carefully spelled-out
preface, "Sergeant."

The sergeant, in addition to living in a pretty exclusive
kind of foxhole, belonged to the near-by expensive and exclusive
Cadogan Gardens Tennis Club, whose membership was by invita-
tion and limited to four hundred. Saturday mornings the sergeant
used to put on an old pair of army pants and play a few sets of
tennis, usually with a major who worked in the Censor's Office,

and once in a while with one of the British Foreign Office's bright

young men whose great-something-or-other had been one of the
founders of the club. One afternoon, the sergeant went back to
his apartment after a strenuous tennis game and was luxuriating
in his bath when the very valet-looking sort of valet, whom the
sergeant shared with a lieutenant from The Stars and Stripes who
had moved to the same house, knocked on his door and handed
him a card from a Czechoslovakian diplomat who lived downstairs.

The Czech, the valet explained, wished to discuss world
affairs with an American newspaperman and had, seeing the
sergeant's valet in the hallway, sent his card with an informal
but quite correct verbal invitation to a drink. Without giving
much thought to it, the Stars and Stripes man took a pencil and
scribbled a brief note on the reverse side of the Czech's card
saying he would drop down someday when he had more time,
maybe Saturday.

The valet returned the card to the foreign diplomat in his

160 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

flat below and the sergeant heard nothing more of the incident
for several weeks, when the lieutenant from the same building,
Earl Mazo, who became one of the paper's top combat correspond-
ents despite the handicap of being an officer, eventually revealed
what happened when the Czech received back his card.

The Czech diplomat, after the fashion of his country's eti-
quette and oblivious to the fact that Americans normally do not
put too much store in the varied forms of Old World courtesy,
considered the return of his card and the writing and faint trace
of bath water and soap on it the equivalent of a slap in the face
with a pair of gloves. In the valet's presence (which the Yank
later decided was a breach of etiquette itself on the Czech's part) ,
the Czech speculated aloud to a friend who was visiting him on
whether he should challenge "the rude American" to a duel.

Frake, the valet (who, incidentally, never got over an in-
voluntary frown when his American employers called him Bill
and suggested he have a drink or maybe breakfast with them) ,
got off a discreet cough in the direction of the Czech and said:

"I trust you will forgive me, sir, for intruding in a gentle-
man's affair, but unless I am mistaken, were you to demand
satisfaction from the sergeant, his would be the choice of weapons,
and the last time a gentleman demanded satisfaction from the
sergeant it has gone this far several times the sergeant's choice
was 50-caliber machine guns at a hundred yards, and the sergeant
in addition to being a newspaperman is possibly the foremost
gunner in the American Air Forces."

The Czech's desire for satisfaction, according to the story
which Mazo gleaned from the valet, forthwith was dispelled.

Considering the number of bombs which struck London
at one time or another while the staff was spread through the
city, it was surprising that no one was ever bombed out. Russ
Jones, G. K. Hodenfield and Herbie Schneider used to live with
Robin Duff, the BBC news broadcaster, in his comfortable St.
James flat, and Robin's home was hit shortly after D day by a
buzz bomb, but the three staffers had moved out by that time.
Other than that, the Clifford's Inn home which Joe Fleming, Ben
Price and Charlie Kiley inhabited before and after Cheesecake
Manor had the closest call. Clifford's Inn was a fine apartment
house on Fetter Lane, just a few steps from Fleet Street and
close to the Times office.

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 161

During February, 1944, the Germans made their last effort
to bomb London on anything like a major scale with conventional
airplanes. Fleming and Price were sitting around in the apart-
ment about two o'clock in the morning talking when the sirens
sounded. Planes droned overhead and within thirty seconds there
was a crash in the open courtyard behind Clifford's Inn and
through the blackout curtain came a brilliant burning light.

They put out the lights in the apartment and threw back
the curtains. Outside white-hot lumps of phosphorus were burn-
ing where a basket of German incendiary bombs had scattered
over the area and nestling neatly in the open-topped, towerlike
spire of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields Church was an incendiary fire
which shone magnificently through the unbroken stained-glass
windows.

Price ran downstairs, grabbed an ax from a stupefied fireman
and ran out into Fleet Street prepared to chop almost anything
down rather than see it burn. After a few minutes of putting out
lumps of the inflammable metal which had fallen on Fleet Street's
block-wood surface, he ran bkck upstairs and helped the fireman
on top of Clifford's Inn itself, where several of the small basket
incendiaries had fallen.

Back downstairs again, he found that by now the church
behind the apartment house was flaming. The pews inside had
been set on fire by burning timbers that had fallen from the
ignited roof. Across the street Benny (who, it must be remem-
bered, was the paper's picture editor) saw that the Acme photo-
graphic agency offices were burning.

At that point a little man in clerical robe came running up
to him.

"Don't you see? St. Martin's-in-the-Field is burning! St.
Martin's-in-the-Field is burningl"

There was no doubt about that, but every man to his own
in times of stress. Benny turned from the beseeching pastor of the
church and made for the picture agency building, ax in hand.

While both the picture agency building and St. Martin's-in-
the-Field were almost completely gutted, the Clifford's Inn home
of the staffers was almost untouched.

By the time Benny finished his night's work with the ax
he had endeared himself to every last one of the proud members
of London's Fire Department present by comparing them un-

1621 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

favorably, constantly, and in loud oaths, while he worked, with
the fire department in Des Moines, Iowa.

After the invasion, when both Price and Kiley eventually
returned to work in the New York office of The Stars and Stripes
for a few months, Joe Fleming took over the flat by himself.

Kiley had always attended to the little working details of
the apartment, while Ben took care of lease problems with the
agency that handled the place.

When they left, Joe was helpless. He found he did not know
where to send laundry or to whom he should pay the monthly
bill. When the three of them lived there together they often ate
a late meal in the flat at night and for that purpose they had one
loaf of bread delivered to the door every other day. The maid
used to bring the bread in and put it on the shelf in the flat's
little kitchen.

Joe never ate there himself and after a week alone he noticed
that there was an extraordinary lot of bread on the kitchen table
but gave it little thought until later that same week.

There, was no longer room for the bread on the shelf and
the maid was putting the accumulating loaves on the stove.

Joe realized that something should be done. Charlie Kiley
had made the bread arrangement and Joe had no idea where to

go to have the order stopped. He left a note in the apartment
but no one seemed to read it and Joe, of course, was always at
work by the time the bread man came in the afternoon.

Finally, when the loaves had overflowed the tiny kitchen and
were beginning to pile up in the luxuriously furnished living
room of the flat, the maid, who hated to see the food wasted,
decided to have the order stopped until Joe ate the bread he
already had.

Openhanded hospitality and a sort of communal share-the-
bed policy were integral parts of The Stars and Stripes' feather-
bed-and-foxhole existence. Especially if you didn't have a bed and
could get into the bed of someone who did have one before
they did, it was a share-the-bed policy.

The two Stars and Stripes men who lived in the exclusive
apartment house with all the colonels and ladies and so on ran
open house for the Air Force crews with whom they occasionally

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 163

flew. When the members of the crews came into London on a
48-hour pass they knew that above the doors of flats 8 and 12 at
17 Chesham Place there always would be the keys, that inside
the flats there might or might not be someone before them, that
in any case they always would be welcome. The gunners and
pilots came, drank whatever there was in the liquor closet, ate

whatever there was in the icebox, gave Frake the valet their
clothes to be pressed, and at the end of their leaves went back to
base. (It was no particular philanthropy that prompted the open
house; bomber crews especially, but all other kinds of combat
soldiers as well, welcomed Stars and Stripes reporters and invari-
ably went out of their way to see that the staffers were as well fed
as possible, had the choice beds or corner in a hayloft or captured
German dugout, as the case might be.)

In addition, there came to the sergeant's flat in Chesham
Place periodic visitations of burly, tough Canadian infantrymen
with whom the sergeant had served before America got into the
war, and even long after the sergeant had gone to the Continent
with the invasion, succeeding occupants of flat 12 were apt to be
awakened at two or three o'clock in the morning by a thunderous
pounding on the door and a strident Canadian voice demanding:

"Slim, you old son of a bitch, since when did you lock
your door?"

The Stars and Stripes staffers all had patchwork uniforms
but certainly the military wardrobe of those correspondents who
made their apartments available to the soldiers with whom they
flew or fought were the strangest, Canadians, airmen, and infan-
trymen alike would find themselves wearing soiled shirts after
their first day on pass in London, would select from the bureau
clean shirts, socks, underwear, and meticulously put their soiled
linen in the dirty-clothes basket. The next time the size-is-neck
staff writer got home and went to put on a clean shirt he was
equally liable to find himself putting on a size 16 garment that
had an Air Force patch on the shoulder, or a collarless Canadian
shirt of the variety his Majesty's troops were required to wear
beneath their buttoned-up battle blouses. It was just barely better
than no shirt at all.

But it was at the Hotel Haussmann, a couple of blocks away
from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, that the Stars and Stripes
mob reached its ultimate in a communal existence. The S&Sers

164 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

at the Haussmann eventually got to be communal with a French-
man, who kept two motorcycles in his bathroom, a beautiful
brunette Latvian accordion teacher, a professional French prosti-
tute, who claimed that during the Occupation she had done her
bit of sabotage by deliberately contracting gonorrhea and spread-
ing it in fulsome fashion among unsuspecting officers of the
German Army.

When The Stars and Stripes established its main office in
Paris, the staff was handed the comfortable little Saint-Honore
Hotel, which had been requisitioned by the army as its billet, and
did very well until some rear echelon feather merchants decided
that the hotel was much too luxurious for a bunch of "ordinary
enlisted men" and The Stars and Stripes was assigned a barren
army billet in an old series of lofts in the Champs-Elysees. It was a
frigid, dirty building, and its furnishings consisted entirely of
wooden bunks more or less covered with straw mattresses; which
would have been all right if it were necessary, but it wasn't. The
staff called the place "Pneumonia Manor" and as soon as the
individual reporters, editors, and other hired hands could find a
little capital or a little blonde, they moved out. Armed with
their cigarette ration, whatever money the army offered, and what-
ever else they could find, most of the boys moved into cheap hotels
near the office. Five packages of cigarettes was the standard week's
rent.

The Hotel Haussmann became the most notorious unofficial
Stars and Stripes billet. Although only six or seven of the staffers
ever rented rooms at the Haussmann at the same time, almost
everyone slept there sometime or other, occupying either the floor,
extra army cots they brought along with them, or comfortable
chairs. Bob Moora proudly hit the high point in sleeping arrange-
ments when, bedless one night, he went through the darkened
hotel jerking pillows from under the heads of already sleeping
staffers, and then dumping the pillows into Ben Price's bathtub
where he spent what he claimed was an exceedingly comfortable
night until Ben, indignant in the morning because his had been
the first pillow taken, awakened and turned on the water in the
tub where Moora slept.

Most of the rooms in the Haussmann were double and one of
the occupants, without warning the other, was likely to bring
home two or three or four guests to spend the night.

FOXHOLES AND FEATHERBEDS 16&

Ben Price went to the hotel one night planning to sleep in
a room shared by Joe Fleming and Gene Graff, the sports editor.
Joe told Ben he could use his bed. Price walked into the room
and saw a black-haired form already in the bed Fleming had
promised him. Thinking it was some other staffer who beat him
to the mattress, Benny tore the covers off the bed and loudly
threatening mayhem, started to roll the occupant out onto the
floor.

The sleeper woke, yanked himself free of Benny and stood
up in bed, glaring. It was Billy Conn.

Graff had brought Conn home and given him Joe's bed.
Benny smiled weakly, indicating he was really only kidding about
the beating he had just threatened to hand out, and walked out
of the room leaving the man who almost beat Joe Louis to
sleep in peace.

Among the occupants of the Hotel Haussmann that is, the
normal citizens who slept in their own beds and paid the rent
with money was Gay Orloff, blonde, lovely Russo-American,
one-time mistress of "Lucky" Luciano, the New York gangster.

Gay considered herself, eventually, one of the Stars and
Stripes mob and, although she never had any amorous dealings
with any of the staffers, she was as apt as any copyreader to sit
on the edge of a bed until dawn arguing with staff men about
the stories in the morning s paper they had brought home with
them.

Jimmy Cannon, a latecomer to The Stars and Stripes, whose
claim to fame on the paper lay in a masterful capacity for telling"
dialect stories, gave Gay a bad time one evening when he tele-
phoned her at the hotel and whispered confidentially that he had
just come from the States and had seen Luciano the gangster.

"Gay, he has a picture of you, a picture of you over the
bed in his . . . his . . . that place up the river he's at now. He
said did you need any money. I'll stop around tomorrow at three
o'clock and see you. Right now I'm hot . . . these French dicks
are on me."

The blonde Orloff never did find out the phone call was a
hoax, and while Luciano may have continued to hold a place
in her affections he had to share it with the Stars and Stripes
man who jumped with the paratroopers for stories. Bob Capa,
the Life photographer who also jumped with the paratroopers,

166 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

sent to the Stars and Stripes office a negative of the soldier-corre-
spondent in the paratroop uniform. Gay got hold of the negative,
had it enlarged to maybe a quarter life-size, and hung it on her
bedroom wall She called the staffer her "pin-up boy" and cer-
tainly felt more kindly toward him than the professional prosti-
tute in room 17, who also used to join the informal midnight
discussions of the staffers.

The prostitute's name was Madeleine and she plied her
hoarse-voiced trade between the Champs-Elyses and a dirty little
side street hotel each afternoon. Her evenings she kept free for
one of the Stars and Stripes editors with whom she was completely
and, in her own lights, truly in love. (Let's call that particular
editor Luigi, since that wasn't his name.)

Luigi didn't reciprocate Madeleine's love but he had a
warped sort of affection for the little whore. Madeleine, who had
thriftily saved tens of thousands of francs while spendthrift Ger-
mans were in Paris, eventually became a sort of unofficial banker
to the perennially impoverished soldier-newspapermen, but the
fine entente was shattered when Madeleine was unable to collect
a loan she had made to a reporter who went back to the United
States. Madeleine apparently felt she had avenged herself by
coming to the Stars and Stripes office about seven o'clock one
night, demanding to see "my luffer, zat Luigi, who have made

me wiz baby, also zat journaliste who have made my sister wiz
baby, zose peegsl"

The unabashed staffers simply threw Madeleine out and they
should not have been surprised when they got back to the hotel
that night and found every room rifled of cigarettes, which were
the next week's rent, candy and every other thing barterable on
the black market.

SECRETS

EVERY TIME some major general from somewhere
withheld a story from a Stars and Stripes man on the grounds that
is was secret information, the staffer might be annoyed, but he
could not help reflecting on the absurdity involved.

Because the paper was the army's paper, and because its staff
members were in the army, and because from the very beginning
the really big brass of the army opened all its files to the paper,
and because Stars and Stripes men continually were moving across
the theaters of war, because some of them went into action with
the combat troops wherever the fighting was and knew at first
hand far better than the major general what we were doing and
how, there were few secrets which sooner or later were not un-
folded to the soldier-reporters.

We never knew whether the German High Command's In-
telligence Section tried, but if they didn't do everything within
their power to plant a spy on the staff of The Stars and Stripes
they weren't as smart as we knew they were. (Of course, it is
possible they tried and succeeded and that one of the men who
made The Stars and Stripes what it was originally was a German
spy, who got on The Stars and Stripes and after a couple of weeks
of looking around and seeing what the paper was and who the
staffers were, decided there wasn't any use in trying to get his
information back to the German High Command because the
high command of no army as sensible and sane as the Wehrmacht
ever would have believed the things that made up The Stars and
Stripes and its people.)

Most of the secret stories that The Stars and Stripes knew and

167

168 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

didn't print remained a secret because the military censors, whose
word was ultimate with the army newspaper, just as it was with

civilian newspapers, forbade their publication.

NAZIS DID ATTEMPT TO BOMB NEW YORK-BUT FAILED

(The following story was written by a Stars and Stripes
correspondent who was on TD with the paper's New
York bureau in November. It was withheld by The Stars
and Stripes until after Germany's defeat.)
by Andrew A. Rooney

A German attempt to bomb New York City was made last Elec-
tion Day, Nov. 7, according to sources considered reliable.

The bomb, presumably a jet or rocket propelled projectile, was
reported to have been launched from the deck of a German sub-
marine lying off the Atlantic Coast. The attempt failed when the
V bomb either fell short of New York or was shot down by fighter
pilots alerted to watch for such projectiles.

Soldier operators at Mitchell Field said they detected the projec-
tile on its course toward the city and determined that it dropped
into the sea.

No confirmation or denial of the story was given by tight-lipped
Mitchell Field G-2 officers to a Stars and Stripes reporter at the time.
In Washington, on the following day, Nov. 8, high-ranking officials

in the War Department refused to comment.

Later that day a joint statement was issued by the army and navy,

warning the people along the Atlantic Coast that a German V-bomb
attack on the United States "is entirely possible."

The official statement said that the robots might be launched
from long-range bombers guided across the Atlantic by radio control
from submarines.

Soon afterward strong fighter reinforcements were moved into
the Atlantic Coastal Area.

Rear Admiral Jonas Ingram, soon after his appointment as com-
mander in chief of the Atlantic fleet, told a press conference on
Jan. 8 that "it is possible and probable the Germans will attempt to
launch bombs against New York or Washington within the next 30
to Go days."

He said the opinion was based on his own experience with the
enemy and not on intelligence reports. He added, "There is no reason
for anyone to become alarmed. Effective steps have been taken to
meet this threat."

The same day the Navy Department said, "There is no more

SECRETS 16

reason now to believe Germany will attack with robot bombs than
there was Nov. 7, 1944."

Public relations officials told the Stars and Stripes reporter that
within a few hours after Ingram's statement there had been a rush
for reservations by air and rail to get out of New York and Washing-
ton, and it was deemed advisable to issue a comforting statement.

Actually, the bombing incident has never been officially con-
firmed or denied.

Sometimes we didn't tell a story because its merits as news
were not enough, in the opinion of the people of the Desk, to
outweigh some harm it might have done to the soldiers' morale.
We undoubtedly made mistakes on some of our self-imposed
censorship, but they didn't happen because we weren't trying.

Maynard H. (Snuffy) Smith, a staff sergeant gunner in the
Flying Fortress bomb group at Thurleigh, in East Anglia, was
the Eighth Air Force's first Congressional Medal of Honor winner*
Snuffy almost singlehandedly put out a raging fire in the fuselage
of his bomber on the way back from*attacking German submarine
pens on the Bay of Biscay coast of France. He saved the life of
another gunner in his plane, and pretty much by himself was
responsible for the bomber's return to England through swarms
of attacking Luftwaffe fighters.

An alert public relations officer sensed that this was the

time, if there was going to be one, for Eighth Air Force men to
start winning Congressional Medals of Honor. Snuffy *s heroism
was duly recommended and approved, and a couple of months
later when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson visited the United
Kingdom on an inspection tour, he brought Snuffy 's Congres-
sional Medal of Honor with him for personal presentation.

But Character Snuffy Smith was enough of an eccentric to
have been a Stars and Stripes man, and when the secretary arrived
to present the medal at a full-dress parade ceremony, Snuffy
Smith was on KP because he and his first sergeant couldn't agree
on how many hours away from the post Snuffy Smith could stay
with a pass that was good for twenty-four hours for anyone else.

Those things Andy Rooney's story in the army paper duly
chronicled. Snuffy objected, when he read the story in the paper,
but the Desk had felt that the news value outweighed the conse-
quences of any possible effect on morale that Snuffy's un-Con-
gressional Medal of Honor job on KP might have had.

17O THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

Snuffy had been a hero on his first raid.

What The Stars and Stripes didn't print about the gunner
they took off KP to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor was
that after he managed to get in four more missions, thus qualify-
ing for the Air Medal, an award infinitely inferior to the CMH,
he was taken off flying status and went no more to the war as a
gunner because all concerned felt that his experiences that day
over France had taken too much out of Smith to make him
an efficient member of an air crew.

The self-censoring staff of the army paper felt that other air
gunners, who might read that Snuffy Smith, the Congressional
Medal of Honor winner, was through flying after only five mis-
sions, might find their morale lowered in that knowledge, and
that such a reaction was worth far less than the story's value in
a purely newsworthy sense.

Even aside from the Snuffy Smith story, the greatest single
bunch of yarns The Stars and Stripes knew but couldn't tell
stemmed from the Air Forces. There were those wonderful tales
of Air Force men shot down over the Continent who, through the
French, German, Belgian and Dutch underground movement,
made their way back to the British Isles.

Figures are difficult to get but it is estimated that 50 per cent
of all the men who parachuted safely to the ground in German-
occupied countries eventually made their way safely back to
England. Every one of them has tales to curl the hair of his
children.

If the flier could escape being caught within the first few
hours after he reached the ground he was almost certain of
contacting some underground leader who would start him out
on the road back. The road back was through the houses of
hundreds of French and Belgian patriots who were willing to risk
their lives to house an American for the night, in hiding from the
Germans. That part of the story is an old one but the experiences
American boys had boys who a year previous were comfortably
settled at home attending high school were fantastic.

One Fortress ball-turret gunner finally showed up back at
his station with a mouthful of stories, none of which he was
supposed to tell because of an oath he had taken. There was one,
however, which was too good to keep to himself.

SECRETS 171

"I'd been wandering around for about four hours after I
landed," the gunner told the fellows crowded around him.

"Jesus, was I thirsty. Funny, but that's what was bothering
me most, thirst. Couldn't find any damn water anywhere.

"I walked down this dirt road into a small town. Nobody
said anything to me because I'd picked up some old civilian
clothes.

"I walked a little ways into town, worrying mostly about
finding some place to get a drink of water where I wouldn't have
to talk the language.

"Finally I see this little place where they are selling beer,
so I walked in. There were a couple of Frenchmen sitting around
but I wanted to be careful so I just pointed to the beer tap when
the fellow asked me what I wanted.

"He drew me a glass and I drank it down. Really thirsty.
Just as I finished the glass, this German officer comes walking into
the place and I figured I'd had .it. I just stood there sort of
stiff without turning, but he comes up, stands there next to me
and orders a beer.

"I really wanted to get out of there quick. I reached in my
pocket for money to pay the guy with and, Jesus, I pretty near
turned green. I had nothing but those big new notes they give
you in the escape kits. I didn't know how much the beer was,
how much any of the money I had was worth, but I knew if I
pulled this wad of brand-new money out of my pocket and start
fumbling through it, this Jerry next to me is gonna get wise.

"While I was standing there trying to figure what the hell
to do I must have put my hands in all my pockets.

"I see this Jerry officer eying me and figured there wasn't
much sense trying to kid him any longer.

"All of a sudden this guy smiles. He reaches in his pocket,
pulls out some change, figuring I am broke, and throws it across
to the bartender to pay for my beer.

"I give the guy a weak smile like I meant 'thank you/ and
walked out."

Americans will never know how many of the French, Dutch,
Belgian and even a few German heroes harbored American
fliers but certainly when the boys begin to tell their stories
Americans will at least hear, at first hand, of the great under-

172 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

ground movement, which couldn't be mentioned while it was in
operation. The Germans knew of it, of course, but feeling that
every line which appeared in print was unnecessary advertising,
Allied authorities closely guarded any reference at all to the
underground.

Many American families must have experienced the strange
sensation of having their sons reported missing in action one
month, only to have them show up in the States the next. Fliers
were honor bound not to discuss their experiences, and many of
them did not explain their mysterious disappearance even to
their families.

A Stars and Stripes reporter ran , across an amazing story
of an American woman who married a French count. She lived
in a large chateau in Normandy and while she secretly kept
eighteen to twenty American and British fliers between the false
floorings of her home, she billeted five high-ranking German
officers with a highhanded hospitality that fooled them for
months.

The fliers who lived in the garret-like space between the two
floors had to live in their stocking feet for fear their footsteps
would be heard below by the German officers. At night the fliers
crept downstairs after the German officers had retired and ate like
kings from the fat of the rich Normany countryside. The countess
had to buy a cow or several lambs each week on the black market
to feed her hidden guests and with the meat she gave them
Wehrmacht wine to wash down the fare fit more for kings than
hideaways.

The other side of the story and it may or may not have
been the same countess in the same chateau was discovered when
the 2nd and 6gth Infantry divisions cleared the German city of
Leipzig almost two years later.

An American-born countess was freed from her Nazi captors
there and she told the story of how she had been taken as a
political prisoner after the Gestapo had been tipped off that she
was harboring Allied fliers who had been shot down.

The woman said that twenty Gestapo agents had entered her
house one night unexpectedly. She had twelve American and
British fliers hidden at the time, she said, and while the Gestapo
agents searched the house thoroughly for an hour, they failed to
discover the double-floor hideaway. Later, however, they returned

SECRETS 17&

and arrested her anyway on someone's word that she was helping
Allied fliers.

Even after the invasion of the French coast what were known
in the business as "escape" stories were not released by censors.
The American First Army, and later the Third, Ninth and
Fifteenth, ran across thousands of Americans who had been living
with French and Belgian families. United States tanks would
trundle unexpectedly into some small French town and while the
French civilians went noisily mad with joy, invariably four or
five healthy-looking specimens in ill-fitting clothing would saunter
over to an American tank.

Tank crews, expecting the usual "Cigarette pour moi?" were
always startled when the first of the approaching boys spoke:

"Fer chrissake it's about time you guys got here."

It is a great mystery how the Germans missed spotting the
Americans who lived almost openly in French towns. When the
3rd Armored Division rolled into a small village just outside of
Liege in Belgium there were three "Frenchmen" leaning up
against a corner store watching the tanks roll by.

Two of the boys were tall, good-looking fellows of about
twenty-three, and the third was shorter and probably not more
than twenty. The two tall fellows wore unpressed blue jeans
which came to a point on their legs just below the calf muscle.
They wore old brown corduroy coats which fitted so tight across
the shoulders that the arms were pulled up almost to their elbows.
Perched on top of this sartorial camouflage were two of the most
un-Frcnch-looking berets that ever went on anyone's head.

The short one in the trio wore brown tweed trousers which
he had rolled up at least four inches at the bottoms, a tattered
blue pinstripe coat and a silly Tyrolean hat which he had cocked
over one eye.

The three of them were standing there against the building
and all that was missing was the Coca-Cola sign. One was leaning
with his elbow against the wall bracing his head with his hand.
The second was standing, or half standing, slouched against the
front of the building with his hands jammed down into his
pockets, and the little fellow had planted one foot against the
wall behind him while he stood on the other.

They were three American Joes who had been living in the
town for five months waiting for the army to get to them. How

:174 THE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIPES

they, and thousands others like them, escaped the watchful Ger-
man eye is hard to explain.

Those three had a great story to tell The Stars and Stripes
but even then it could not be printed.

Many Americans like them had chosen to wait with their
French or Belgian hosts rather than risk their own lives and the
lives of those willing to help them, by moving through the under-
ground channels back to where they could be shipped to England.
There were thousands of Americans who chose to lose themselves
in the Paris crowds for months, and some even years.

Two years before the invasion the bomb group at Chelveston,
the 305th, had a favorite story they liked to tell about one of
their pilots who, they were sure, was living in the lap of luxury
.in Paris.

It fell in the category of those stories we knew and couldn't
print and even now his name better be Joe Doyle.

The 305th used to have the same great heartache that every-
one of the original Fortress bomb groups used to have. The notori-
ous Luftwaffe Abbeville Kids were in their prime in those days
along with the famed Goering Yellow Nosed Circus. They were
the crack fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe and they sent more than
, one and more than a hundred for that matter four-engined
American bombers down in flames over France. And Joe Doyle
was taking no chances.

Every time the 305th was scheduled for a mission you could
see Joe over in his Nissen hut packing up a little overnight bag
he had bought for the purpose. He put in pajamas, some under-
wear, shaving kit and tooth paste, and other odds and ends of
articles he wanted to have with him.

When the briefing was over Joe Doyle would trudge out to
the hardstand where his Fort stood, dragging his parachute and
all his flying paraphernalia with him. And his overnight bag.

Everyone laughed at Joe for it. It was one of the station gags,
Joe Doyle and his little bag.

Finally Joe got it one day over Lille. Joe made sure the rest
<of the crew cleared the ship and then he jumped from the burning
bomber before it fell to pieces. The rest of the group got home
.and they sadly told the story of how Joe finally got it. Some of
them got out of the ship, they knew, but the pilot, Joe, probably
^didn't have time.

SECRETS 175*

It was three weeks later that the real story came home to-
Chelveston. Three of Joe's crew had been taken in by the under-
ground and had been shipped through in a hurry. When they
were asked about Joe Doyle they could only laugh and tell the
tale.

They had made contact with an underground man just a
few hours after they hit the French soil.

He took them to his home and made contact with another
friend farther along who was going to escort the boys along the
road in the right direction.

As the three fliers and their guide walked down a dusty
French road they came to a small intersection. A quarter mile
down the side road there was a figure gaily swinging along and
at his side he carried a little bag an overnight bag.

The three crewmen couldn't have been happier to see any-
one than they were to see Joe Doyle.

They looked around carefully to see that there was no one to
see them then they dashed up to Joe and told him what a good,
thing they had run into.

"This guy's gonna take us back, Joe!"

Joe was glad to see his boys, glad they were safe, but when
they wanted him to go along with them he smiled and tapped
his bag.

"I didn't pack this for twenty-two trips for nothing. I got
three addresses in Paris and that's where I'm going. Been wanting
to go there all my life. I'll be standing on the curb waving when
the army comes marching in there."

And that was the last the boys saw of Joe Doyle as he picked
up his bag and started down the road toward Paris with his-
peculiar swinging gait, whistling as he went.

And when the First Army finally reached Paris a year and a
half later, Joe Doyle probably was standing on the curbstone,.
Waving like mad with the rest of the Frenchmen.

Jack Foisie, ace combat reporter for the Mediterranean edition
of The Stars and Stripes, revealed during a furlough back to
the States in 1944 one of the best-kept secrets and one of the
most terrible errors the army ever had. It was the destruction of
a score or more American transport planes and their burden of
battle-bound American paratroopers by American and Allied and-

176 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

aircraft guns during the first morning hours of the invasion of
Sicily.

Jack came home from the war for a brief vacation and a
tour of duty in the Stars and Stripes bureau in New York. On a
tour of the States, Jack submitted for a local army public relation
officer's approval the typed manuscript of a talk that included
disclosure of the Sicilian fiasco. For God knows what reason, the
PRO passed it. Jack talked, and the news service wires hummed
with the revelation that made page one of virtually every paper
in the world. Everyone in the Mediterranean Theater of Opera-
tions had known about the slaughter when the low-flying 047
transports came in over the Sicilian beaches as the invasian was
starting by land, sea and air, but there had been a tight censor-
ship "stop" on it, and the home front hadn't heard a word about
the kind of military mistake everyone should know about so that
there won't be so many of them.

Jack was censured for what he had to say, but one way or
another the paper had managed to tell one of the secrets it felt
shouldn't be secret.

Now it can be told that the airborne assault which eventually
cracked the Rhine barrier and opened the way to the guts of the
Nazi Reich originally was scheduled for November or December
of 1944. As Stars and Stripes understood it, the airborne were to
leap into action at the Rhine bridges as soon as the course of
battle some forty or fifty miles to the west along the Roer River
had forced the Germans to commit their Sixth Panzer Army,
which the Germans oblivious to the American connotation ^
called their "Salvation Army," because it was their last unde-
feated, unimpaired reserve of any magnitude. The idea was for
the paratroopers and the glider men to hold the Rhine bridges
against retreat by the Nazi panzers while the Allied forces de-
stroyed the enemy west of the Rhine.

A Stars and Stripes staffer who eventually jumped with the
17th Airborne Division across the Rhine at the end of March,
1945, was scheduled to jump in the ambitious plan to destroy the
Nazis at the close of 1944. Even today that staffer gets acute
attacks of the shakes and probably the Allied High Command
does too when he realizes that von Rundstedt's unleashing of
hoarded and secret German power in the Battle of the Bulge on
December 16, 1944, delayed by three months the plan to cross the

SECRETS 177

Rhine. Neither the staffer nor anyone connected with the opera-
tion likes to think of how affairs might have gone for the airborne
troops had the Rhine bridge jump come off when scheduled with
the Germans holding all the power they had built up for the
Bulge offensive.

It was a relief when the German strength was worn out in.
the Ardennes campaign, but the bonds of security, and of pa-
tince, were stretched long and thin in The Stars and Stripes
during the wait for the attack, which eventually occurred on
March 23.

Just before the jump across the Rhine, a Stars and Stripes
staff man stumbled onto another story which ranked with the
most intriguing of the war but couldn't be told for reasons of
military security. That was the yarn of the so-called Nazi Suicide
Corps "human torpedoes" of Remagen bridge.

The German human torpedoes who tried and failed to
destroy the one steel and three pontoon bridges across the Rhine
where the gth Armored Division had seized a bridgehead on the
east bank early in March, 1945, were seven members of a highly
elite group of Nazi volunteers organized to carry out missions
of usually suicidal nature against the Allies.

For a long time the Allied High Command, some intelligence
operators, and two or three Stars and Stripes men were aware of
the existence of the Suicide Qorps. There was nothing to be
gained by boasting of the knowledge of its existence, even had
the censors permitted. An even better story whose publication
would have militated against the possibility of his capture was that
about the leader of this German corps, fabulous, scar-faced, Hun-
garian Stefan Skorzeny.

When the Americans seized the bridge at Remagen and the
little wedge of ground on the Rhine's east bank, the Wehrmacht's
high command shot the bridge's defenders for failure to do their
duty and called on Skorzeny for a detachment of human tor-
pedoes to destroy the Remagen bridge and the auxiliary pontoon
structures which the American engineers had erected to supply
the forces across the river. Skorzeny sent seven men.

"Destroy the bridges," he ordered them before they boarded
the plane at their training school in the Austrian Alps and flew
to the German lines upriver from Remagen. "After you have

178 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

destroyed all the bridges there, swim on down the river, recon-
noiter the American positions on the west bank, and then swim
across to the east bank opposite Bonn where our patrols will be
waiting for you."

That was one of the things that made Skorzeny one of the
great soldiers of the war, friend or enemy. Of the Suicide Corps
he demanded and frequently got the impossible. Most comman-
ders would have been content to say to their men, "Try to destroy
the bridges."

The human torpedoes came down the Rhine with the current,
but there was no negligence at Remagen as there had been seven
or eight months before when a similar detachment played an
important role in thwarting the abortive Allied effort to seize
and hold the storied bridge at Arnhem, in Holland. Vigilant
guards at Remagen spotted the Nazis in the water. The Yanks
opened fire, killed three Nazis by exploding the demolition
charges with which they swam, and captured the other four.

As it had happened before so often that the Desk almost
came to count on at least a measure of "Stars and Stripes luck"
in any emergency so this time a staffer happened to be on hand
as the human torpedoes were taken and led in for questioning.

The four Germans, whether one liked to admit it or not
inasmuch as they were of the enemy, were as brave men as there
are in the world. They weren't fanatics; they simply were the
type of thinking, adult fighting men that recognizes what happens
to people in wars but isn't afraid of it.

Interrogation of the human torpedoes and a close inspection
of their equipment provided a top-notch story. Over heavy under-
clothes they wore a thin garment coated with a chemical which,
activated by the extreme cold of the Rhine River waters in late
winter, generated heat to keep the swimmers from exhaustion or
death due to the near-freezing temperature of the water. Their
outer garment, which conjured up thoughts of warriors from
Mars, was a completely enveloping rubber suit with webbed
hands and feet. With simple oxygen masks the swimmers were
able to traverse long distances underwater, coming to the surface
only infrequently to get their bearings, and hauling with them
semibouyant containers of explosives which traveled just beneath
the surface of the water. Even the explosives were a story: They

SECRETS 179

were of a fantastically light, pliable plastic, to which almost any-
thing could be done safely except giving a sharp jolt.

Interrogation of the prisoners revealed they were part of
Skorzeny's corps and that it was from him they had their in-
structions.

Eventually parts of the story could be told and the paper
carried all the details the censor felt would provide no knowledge
to the enemy. But by that time the Allies were closing on Berlin
and the story had lost much of its significance.

That was the way with many such stories, among them an-
other one in which the fabulous Skorzeny figured.

The Stars and Stripes and a good many people on the Allied
side knew but didn't tell for obvious reasons the gravity of the
situation in the first three days of Germany's desperate, last-throw
offensive in the Ardennes, which began December 16, 1944. To
maintain that secret until long after the Battle of the Bulge was
won was an obvious case of self-imposed and military censorship.
The story we would have liked to tell, but couldn't at the time
for censorial reasons, was the never-substantiated whisper in high
military and intelligence circles that Stefan Skorzeny and a suicide
squad had parachuted to earth behind the Allied lines and were
playing a deadly hide-and-seek with Allied counterespionage while
they sought an opportunity to assassinate Supreme Commander
Dwight Eisenhower, British Field Marshal Montgomery, and other
ranking Allied leaders.

It had been Skorzeny and a picked band of Nazis who para-
chuted into Italy and kidnaped Benito Mussolini. Every soldier
knew that had been a magnificently conceived and carried-out
exploit. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the
Suicide Corps could get away with a similar feat against the
Allied command.

Maybe Intelligence knew whether the whispered conjectures
had a basis in fact and maybe it didn't, but Stars and Stripes
staffers felt fairly certain through information gleaned from vari-
ous sources that the story was a skillfully planted bit of dis-
quietude from German espionage agents. We would have liked to
tell the story, listing all possibilities and probabilities as to its
authenticity, but the censors held, and quite possibly rightly, that
such an article would only serve to fray even further the nerves
of troops long in combat.

180 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Sometimes, though, censorial "stops" on yarns the Stars-and-
Stripers had turned up were the results of flat orders by some
undoubtedly thin-skinned individual much higher up than the
echelons of command who had maybe made a mistake, been
caught in it by the enemy, and wasn't going to have anyone
rattling the skeletons in his officer's foot locker if he could help it.
Such, we always felt, was the case with the failure of an American
secret weapon, the 6-40 super-gunned version of the Flying
Fortress.

The first few American heavy bomber raids on Nazi targets
in Europe revealed, in addition to the fact that enough of such
raids with enough planes could do a lot toward winning the war,
at least one chilling conclusion: Somehow the bombers had to
have even more protection from German fighters than the ad-
mittedly great gun power provided by the thirteen heavy machine
guns in each Flying Fortress. The army had to provide single-
engine pursuit planes with a range long enough to escort the
bombers to their target and back. The army set about doing that,
and eventually succeded.

In the interim, however, it was decided to set aside a number
of conventional Flying Fortress bombers, eliminate their bomb
racks and install 5o-caliber machine guns and so-mm. aerial can-
non everywhere on the plane that room could be found. The
resultant gun-bristling aircraft was designated the 6-40, the
"Y" symbolizing the experiment, the "B" that it was a bomber
and the "40" that it was the fortieth basic bomber design the Air
Force ever had attempted.

"We'll blow the Luftwaffe out of the skies!" declared one
public relations officer to his Stars and Stripes staff man who had
stumbled onto the existence of the 6-40.

Eventually the American Air Forces did just that, but they
didn't do it with a 6-40, which flopped with almost as loud a
noise as the explosion of one of the bombs it should have been
carrying.

The YB-40S did fine on the way to the targets, scattered
through the formation of conventional Fortresses. The heavy
armament of the experimental craft took a big toll of Nazi at-
tackers. But most of the success of the American bombers' defense
lay in their tight formation, whence all ships could bring to bear

SECRETS 181

on attackers a concentrated fire power far greater in total volume
than the scattered 6-405.

When the target was reached and the conventional Fortresses
dropped their 6,000 pounds of bombs, they turned for home three
tons lighter and thus considerably faster in cruising speed. The
only weight the YB-40S had got rid of and they were at least as
heavy as a bomb-loaded plane since their armament tacked on
roughly some three additional tons was the couple of hundred
pounds of ammunition they had used up. The 6-408 fell behind
the formations, and the Luftwaffe, although not without a fight,
played hell with the stragglers.

In a short time the Air Force abandoned the YB-40s, but
right up to the end of the war somebody way up the chain of
command refused to permit lifting of the original censorship em-
bargo on the story.

Sometimes the reason for reticence about confidential matters
by people below the very top echelons was the time- and army-
honored stand that any officer could be trusted with a confidence
but not the most intelligent enlisted man. With two or three ex-
ceptions, Stars and Stripes reporters were enlisted men. And after
all, as they invariably put it, the assistant public relations lieu-
tenant in a port somewhere on the French coast couldn't be ex-
pected to hand over to an enlisted man the tonnage of supplies
handled through that port in, let's say, the last fifteen days.

Not that the enlisted man was a spy or anything, but it said
"secret" at the top of the page in the assistant PRO's drawer and
these fellows from The Stars and Stripes, after all, were enlisted
men and enlisted men weren't supposed to see secret documents
unless they had the written permission of the general commanding
or something. No one on The Stars and Stripes ever bothered to
find out just what kind of permission one had to have because
when you ran up against something like that you did one of two
things: you either went to the general commanding the area and
asked him, and he told you, or you said unh-unh to the assistant
public relations officer and walked next door to the enlisted man
chief clerk and he gave you the figures or whatever it was you
wanted because the reason he was chief clerk was that he was a
level-headed individual who knew his job and had sense enough

1S2 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

to know that the army's newspaper probably 'wasn't going around
collecting port tonnages <for the Wehrmacht.

One of the reasons you got the information from the general
or the chief clerk was the Stars and Stripes patch on your shoul-
der and another was the khaki uniform. The staffers were Joes in
a citizen army of Joes, and most of the time you can tell a Joe
even if he wears a gray suit and a fedora. The Joes talked to the
staffers.

In October, 1942, the American forces in the British Isles
were getting ready for the invasion of North Africa, and because
it was their first invasion, the getting ready was a fairly obvious
thing, The Stars and Stripes was about to become a daily, and the
newly forming staff was anxious that its first big story be covered
successfully.

Charlie White, who had joined the staff only a week before,
took a couple of men and started out to do what he called "a plain
ordinary police reporter's job on this invasion."

One of them walked into the public relations office and spent
the bigger share of the day just sitting around, inconspicuous in
khaki, and listening. The others perambulated through the maze
of headquarters offices, talking to clerks in this office or that, stop-
ping to chew the fat now and then with the odd colonel who hap-
pened to be a personal friend.

By simply listening and comparing notes afterward, Charlie
and the others were able to come to the city desk, a week before
the paper became a daily, and tell the story of what the invasion
would be, when it would be, give or take forty-eight hours, and
who was going.

"People like to talk," Charles said in explanation. He said it
a little sadly, because Charles always was finding out that most of
the things he suspected about people really were true. "We didn't
steal no secret papers or anything like that. We just stood around
and listened and once in a while asked questions with a dumb
look. Great system. Especially in armies."

There were guards with fixed bayonets, and multi-steeled
safe doors, and very complicated secret ciphers, all guarding the
details of the North Africa invasion, but The Stars and Stripes cov-
ered it.

There was some dispute as to who was going with the in-
vaders. Everyone wanted to go, but they also had a sneaking

SECRETS 183

desire to stay in England and help make the weekly a daily, a
newspaperman's dream job. Charlie White and his "police re-
porter" collaborators had first choice, and they made it in a taxi-
cab on the way to the office one day.

"We'll flip coins," Charlie said, "odd man going to Africa.
The other two make him go."

In a cold light, however, it seemed as if putting out a daily
paper would be more fun than going to Africa, especially since
the big show would be the invasion of the European continent;
in October, 1942, everyone was sure that the invasion of Europe
was only a matter of months away. So the Desk cast around for a
good reporter to handle the job.

Bob Neville, nervous, capable one-time foreign editor of
Time magazine, no tyro he, had been sent to the European Thea-
ter by Yank, the army magazine for which he worked as a sergeant
correspondent, to do a series of stories about the Canadians in
the war. He had run into the SirS crowd even as Moora had earlier
in the summer, and with his consent and help he was stolen from
Yank in a quick double-shuffle about extraordinary orders, top
secret, and emergencies. The Desk assigned him to the Africa
invasion, and he sailed right behind the first wave.

A week or so later, on the morning that the German radio
just beat the Allies to an announcement that American troops had
landed in Nazi-held North Africa, the daily Stars and Stripes was
ready.

In the musty old library of the Times, which was still draw-
ing in its breath at the arrival of the Yanks in its quiet hallways,
no one ever would have noticed the plain pieces of white paper
which inconspicuously marked pages in a dozen travel books.
There was nothing on the paper markers, and if you opened the
books to the pages so marked you found only some paragraphs
about Abyssinia, or maybe prune plantations in California. How-
ever, if you looked at the number of the page, and multiplied it
by two and turned to the page number by the product of that
multiplication, you found maybe an engraving of the harbor at
Oran, or a picture taken in 1929 of the fortifications at Casablanca,
or a page of documentary material on the French colonial army, or
even, in one pamphlet, a post- 1941 summary of what the Nazis
had taken over of the French colonial empire.

It was all kind of Boy Spy in the White Houseish, but it paid

184 THE 8TORT OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

off when the flash came. The Stars and Stripes simply turned to
the library references which had been so carefully prepared on the
basis bf the findings of what he called the Charles White Com-
mission and each night was exactly abreast of the news with a
well-documented background story of what was happening.

We made one mistake, although the staffers always held with
some smugness that the mistake was not The Stars and Stripes at
all, but rather that of the army, which was forty-eight hours be-
hind on some of its plans.

In the original schedule, the French West Africa city of
Rabat, with its high-power propaganda radio station, was to be
taken on a particular day, possibly four days after the first land-
ings. The Stars and Stripes adhered meticulously to the schedule
it had managed to learn, but as the paper went to press that eve-
ning there still was no official announcement that Rabat had been
taken, which was news of some import in those days.

"The announcement probably will come after we've gone to
press, and we'll look bad," the staff decided finally, "so we better
just go ahead and assume it's been taken."

Thus, the next morning, the interpretive article with the
news story went into a fairly detailed description of the propa-
ganda radio station at Rabat which was now in the hands of the
Americans and which could be of immense help in getting the
North African French around to our side.

All the next day, Rabat radio was exhorting the people of
North Africa to resist the invasion, and it wasn't until the follow-
ing evening that the American forces moved in and made The
Stars and Stripes truthful.

The Stars and Stripes made plenty of mistakes in the war but
we tried very hard not to make them where the fighting men were
involved. For that reason long after Stars and Stripes reporters
had known about and flown on the secret series of raids against the
German rocket-bomb sites in coastal France, and long after the
second medium bombardment attack from bases in Britain re-
sulted in a 100 per cent loss, long after three groups of Liberator
bombers made a mistake in navigation and wiped out a harmless
Dutch town, long after a staffer had flown with and watched in
operation the secret device by which American bombers accu-
rately aimed their explosives through clouds long after those

SECRETS 185

things and many more, just as long as there were men fighting
who might be harmed by premature stories, the paper did its best
to keep the faith.

D DAY LANDING IN BRITTANY IS REVEALED

Isolated French Paratroops Battled on for Two Months
Waiting the Big Break

VANNES, Aug. 17 A French para troop battalion dropped near this
city on D day and its remnants fought savagely for two months to
disrupt German communications and to organize the French re-
sistance army in Brittany.

Its story can be told now that U.S. Forces have broken through
the German resistance to free the isolated paratroopers roving, hitting
and hiding, fighting all over Brittany.

From June 6 until the day the Sherman tanks showed up in
Vanncs on Aug. 3 the French paratroopers armed loyal Frenchmen
with Sten guns; they took up miles of railroad tracks, tore up cable
lines, and generally played havoc with German communications and
transport.

The battalion was divided into squads, each led by one officer.
The men had light machine guns of all descriptions, Sten guns, Bren
guns, tommy guns, pistols and carbines. They had mortars and
bazooka guns when they landed and it wasn't long before they had
captured more mortars.

Whenever possible the paratroopers avoided pitched battles with
the Germans. Their assignment was not to fight, or they would have
had no time for their important jobs.

Their biggest battle came June 18, more than six weeks before
they hoped for help from the beachhead landing force. The para-
troopers had been living on a large French farm. The Germans began
to notice that Allied planes circled over that particular farm regularly
and frequently and they soon discovered that supplies were being
dropped in the fields near the farm.

The German commander assumed that the farmhouse garrison
was a routine gathering of parts of the French resistance army. Under-
estimating the size and strength of the force, the German commander
proceeded as usual. He rounded up a large force of Georgian soldiers
and ordered them to march on the farmhouse and wipe out the
group there. It was 4 A.M. when they first attacked. They came for-
ward singing and marching in open file, unaware that behind farm-
house walls waited one of the world's toughest fighting units.

The paratroopers waited. Finally, with the upright, marching

186 THE STORY OP THE STARS AND STRIFES

German soldiers only 20 yards from the muzzles of their machine
guns, they opened fire. The withering burst cut the German ranks
in two and the remainder retreated in disorder.

There were 120 paratroopers and about 400 French patriots in
the farmhouse garrison, and when the German commander realized
its strength he reinforced his attacking party until there were 3,000
German soldiers with him. The battle continued with wave after
wave of German infantrymen attacking. Each time they fell back,
badly beaten. At ten o'clock the following morning the paratroopers
took advantage of the confusion in the German lines to launch a
counterattack. For the loss of only two paratroopers the counterattack
further depleted the German force by almost a hundred men.

That midnight, after the paratroopers had killed 500 Germans
and wounded 600 more, they withdrew with the patriots and vanished
into friendly Brittany, where the Germans couldn't find them.

The cruel Georgian troops were offered a standard price of one
million francs for every French paratroop officer they captured and
fifty thousand francs for every enlisted man.

One of the Frenchmen wounded in the battle was hit in the
throat, in the stomach and in the thigh but he managed somehow to
crawl to a near-by woods. A Frenchwoman helped him with his
wounds and while he lay helpless on the ground a party of German
soldiers discovered him and filled his dying body with slugs from
their machine pistols.

The philosophy of the Georgian troops, according to the para-
troopers, was that if they were captured by the Allies the Russians
would make sure they were shot as traitors; if they were abandoned
by the Germans, the French people would kill them; if they did not
fight, the Germans would kill them.

Of the French fighters who are left, most plan to settle down in
a free France after the war. But one Frenchman who spent fifteen
years working in a restaurant in Los Angeles plans to return to the
United States.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

MF EVERY CIVILIAN in America held a rank or rat-
ing, as every soldier in the army does, and if the publicity man-
ager for a Fifth Avenue fur shop was a colonel while the managing
editor of the New York Daily News was a corporal, there
probably would be a lot of fur flying around the pages of the News.
Although very few fur merchants wanted to insert advertis-
ing in the columns of The Stars and Stripes, we were roughly in
that sort of position. Every special service public relations officer
(PRO) outranked every Stars and Stripes deskman, and every
time the PRO's little unit put on a show for a few hundred men
he wanted the rest of the army to know about it. Releases which
started like this came in by the thousands to The Stars and
Stripes:

AT THE FRONT WITH THE UMPTY DIVISION Five hundred delighted
GIs tonight listened to the syncopating rhythms of Fred Shmertz and
his all GI band of the loith Special Service Command, commanded
by Capt. Arthur Emlyn of 1010 Hollywood Boulevard, Gloversville,
N. J., who formerly played with Glenn Miller's band, etc.

The facts of the show usually were that it was put on in front
of a hundred soldiers of a trucking company fifteen to twenty
miles behind where anyone was mad at anyone else by a bunch of
special service soldiers who did a pretty good job under the leader-
ship of someone who had heard Glenn Miller's band and may
have lived at 1010 Hollywood, etc.

Not only special service PROs approached the Desk with that
sort of thing, but PROs from every outfit in the army.

187

188 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

The Stars and Stripes regarded every PRO as a frustrated
newspaperman, which was not actually true. There were a lot of
PROs who were better newspapermen than some of the staffers
themselves, but they were in one of the war's most unenviable
jobs.

Most of them considered that half their job was getting their
unit, whether it be a bomb group, an infantry division or a spe-
cial service unit, into the Stars and Stripes pages. At best, the
paper was an eight-page sheet while the war was being fought, and
if in any given week The Stars and Stripes had decided to print
the name of every unit in the ETO, it could have filled the eight
pages for seven days without mentioning every unit there. That,
of course, would have left no room for L'il Abner or the Russia
story. Here, then, were hundreds of public relations officers, all
with great heroes and honest to goodness top-flight newspaper
stories on their hands, and their commanding general on their
necks, trying to get something in the four- or eight-page army
daily in which there simply was not room.

Time and again PROs would approach reporters in the field,
point to a story in the paper and then point to one they had
sent in. 9

"Mine is a better story. I think you'll admit it. Why wasn't
it run?"

Usually the reporter had to admit it. What the PRO seldom
could understand was all the little things which, haphazard as
they seemed, put the other story in ahead of his. Maybe it didn't
get held up so long by the PRO headquarters through which all
such stories funneled to us; maybe his story had trouble in the
censor's office, but more probably it was still buried in a mound
of stories, every one possibly as good, in the Stars and Stripes
office.

Sometimes the corporals and the sergeants didn't even have
time to read the material which the lieutenants and the majors
who were the PROs sent in to them. In a way it was criminal
negligence. The stories represented hard work for the PRO and
his staff and more often than not they involved men's lives. It
was not right for the army newspaper to toss them off without
notice but it was the only way in an eight-page paper.

Some of the fur merchants tried the forceful approach. Often

PUBLIC RELATIONS 189

a major from some artillery outfit would storm into the office and
demand to see the officer in charge.

'The sergeant just sent him out on an errand," someone in-
variably remarked, maybe truthfully.

"I want to see the man who edits this paper/' the irate PRO
would continue.

"I put out the paper," another stripeless soldier sitting at a
desk would say. "Can I help you, sir?" The "sir" was double-
edged.

Realizing that the man was an enlisted soldier, the major
would start laying down his demands. Depending on who was on
the desk, he was handled with varying degrees of firmness but
always the deskman talked as a man with the authority of The
Stars and Stripes, not his authority as sergeant or corporal. Staffers
always figured the paper held the rank of something equivalent to
a grade between a major general and a lieutenant general.

Along with all the other good but sad things in the world,
it always seemed that the best PROs represented the best outfits;
the saddest, the saddest outfits.

The 4th Armored Division, the Flyaway 4th, had, for a long
time, a good PRO named Ken Koyen. Koyen, a first lieutenant
while he was with the 4th, probably submitted more copy to The
Stars and Stripes during one three-month period than any other
man ever did. It was at a time when the paper was first being
printed in Paris for distribution to the First and Third armies to
the east, and to the Ninth Army back in the Brest peninsula. The
paper was only four pages at the time because of serious newsprint
problems and every day literally tens of thousands more words
than could be used came to the Desk.

The man handling all the PRO copy noticed that for every
four releases he handled from all the divisions put together, one
was Koyen's. The staffer saved all Koyen's unused releases for one
week and then added together all the words the PRO had sent
in to The Stars and Stripes. In more than 500 stories sent in by
that one division alone there were about 70,000 words.

At that time, the type size and column width allowed about
500 words in the average printed column. In four pages, five
columns to a page, that left room for about 10,000 words jammed
together without headlines or pictures.

The rewriteman made a note to that effect to the Desk and

100 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

the following day The Stars and Stripes printed a boxed story in
the form of a memo to Lieutenant Ken Koyen of the 4th Armored
Division. The story stated, for his information, and for the in-
formation of other PROs who did not understand why few of
their stories were printed, that if we used all Koyen's releases we
could have just filled the paper with nothing but them for seven
days each week.

The crack infantry divisions in France and Germany had
crack PROs. Captain Lindsey Nelson, for example, agent for the
great gth Infantry Division, was first interested in seeing that
American people at home got the right story on what American
boys were doing in the war and how they were doing it. Second,
he was interested to see that his own outfit got the credit it de-
served.

When the Ludendorff Bridge crashed after First Army troops
had captured it intact and used it for their initial crossings of the
Rhine at Remagen, Lindsey Nelson, a Stars and Stripes reporter,
and Howard Cowan of the AP happened to be around. The gth
Infantry Division had little to do with the bridge's capture, but
the heroism of the engineers who dropped into the Rhine, and
their companions who swam out to save them, was a great story
of American heroism. Lindsey and two of his assistants worked
for five hours getting the full story, with hundreds of names and
home towns. When they had collected and written their material
they had it mimeographed and handed it to fifty correspondents
who, through a stroke of bad luck, were not at the scene when the
bridge went down. All those men wrote stories, and the pieces ap-
peared under their by-lines at home, but it was Lindsey Nelson
who actually was responsible for every one of the thousands of
words they wrote.

Nelson is credited by correspondents with having designed
the original PRO Kit, Mi (M-i being the official quartermaster
designation for the first design of a new piece of equipment). The
PRO Kit, M-i, consisted of Scotch, bottle, one ea., gin, bottle, one
ea., copy paper and carbons for correspondents who have forgot-
ten same, and three soft lead pencils.

The ist Infantry Division, the Red One, had a good PRO. He
was Captain Maxie Zera, zany, calypso-singing Slapsie Maxie, who
probably knows more stories of American heroism than any other
in the army just because he has been with the fightingest division

PUBLIC RELATIONS 101

in the U. S. Army. Some may have fought as hard, but none
longer.

Maybe the most unfortunate PRO in the business was Major
Haynes Dugan, grd Armored press relations man. The grd
Armored, always with the First U. S. Army, and one of only two
heavy armored divisions left in the entire U. S. Army, had a great
gripe directed against The Stars and Stripes and every American
newspaper at home. What editors could not seem to get straight
enough to satisfy the grd Armored Division was that it had noth-
ing to do with Patton, It was not Patton's armor, it was not even
in Patton's army, and the fact that its official name was the 3rd
Armored Division and that Patton's Army was the Third U. S.
Army was only an unfortunate coincidence.

All across France, Belgium and Germany the grd Armored
led the way in their sector and all the time newspapers seemed to
give credit to nothing but "Patton's Third Army."

The grd Armored, together with the 2nd Armored Division
and two infantry divisions, the ist and gth, made the breakthrough
at Saint-L6. It was the turning point of the war on the Continent
and the four divisions were proud of the job they did that July
26. Four days later, General Patton's army, which had been com-
ing into France on the beaches secured by the First Army weeks
before, was committed. The breakthrough was made and Third
Army armor raced through the hole torn in enemy lines like a
halfback in the open. General Omar Bradley planned it that way
and it worked to perfection but when the grd Armored started
getting their home-town papers through the mails all they could
find was Patton's Third Army in the columns and in the head-
lines.

As months rolled by and Stars and Stripes deskmen changed,
some of them got a little hazy on the background of the great
breakthrough and several times, in reviewing the situation, The
Stars and Stripes made the grave error of crediting the Saint-L6
breakthrough to Patton instead of the First Army and the grd
Armored Division and its cofighters.

It was not from those good PROs and those good outfits that
the beefs and the pressure were always coming to The Stars and
Stripes. The paper had more trouble from the London and Paris
PROs, the brass, than from all the line outfits combined. The line
outfit's beefs were usually legitimate, the others almost never.

102 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

In London a high-ranking PRO, a fur merchant, came to the
offices one afternoon with a request that bordered on being an
order. The provost marshal wanted to put American soldiers in
London on their toes, he wanted to enforce stricter saluting dis-
cipline, he wanted the GI better dressed, and he was worried
about organized vice.

Realizing that MPs alone might not be able to accomplish
the job the way he wanted it done, he had come to the PRO, who,
in turn, came to us. We were to start a campaign against poorly
dressed soldiers and soldiers who weren't acting the way the army
thought they should.

Without being for or against poorly dressed soldiers or sol-
diers who didn't salute every one of the thousand officers they
could pass in five minutes along Piccadilly, the Stars and Stripes
staffers rebelled at the idea of preaching anything to the GI.
Maybe that was the start of the longest argument The Stars and
Stripes ever had with the army. Was the paper strictly an organ
through which news was to be presented to the soldiers or was it
to be "used 1 ? Was it an army house organ, or was it a newspaper?

The PRO didn't know or care about the morals of the thing,
all he understood was that The Stars and Stripes reached more
soldiers and had more influence than any other single thing he
had access to and he planned to use it.

The Desk, while not accepting the half-order, made a com-
promise. They told the ranking PRO that if there was a news
story in it, The Stars and Stripes would run it. That is, if the
provost marshal wanted to. announce a new enforcement campaign
aimed at arresting soldiers who were out of uniform, that was a
legitimate news story. The outcome was that Charlie Kiley got to-
gether with Sergeant Bruce Bacon, one of the Army Pictorial
Service's ace cameramen, and together they did a story with a pic-
ture layout on vice rampant in London. It was a good news feature
and in an honest, moral way, ar\ editorial. It presented the facts,
it did not preach.

From that time on, the PRO who felt he failed in what he set
out to do, seemed to lay for staffers. The PRO was in a position
where the Stars and Stripes staffers often had to call on him for
information.

On one occasion a reporter called in a routine fashion.

PUBLIC RELATIONS 193

"This is The Stars and Stripes calling, colonel, I wonder if
you could teh us "

"Who is this on The Stars and Stripes?" the colonel inter-
rupted angrily.

"O'Shaugnessy," the reporter replied, giving one of the staff's
favorite pseudonyms. (The by-line Pfc Luigi O'Shaugnessy was
used on St. Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day stories usually.)

"O'Shaugnessy, huh, what's your rank?"

"Private, sir," the sergeant reporter answered.

"All right, Private O'Shaugnessy, hang up, call this number
again and start your conversation with a superior officer in the
prescribed manner."

The Stars and Stripes man hung up. Then he dialed the
number again.

"This is Private Luigi O'Shaugnessy, of The Stars and
Stripes, sir!"

'That's betterl Now what do you want?" the colonel at the
other end of the pipe said.

There was a ten-second silence.

"Well," the colonel repeated, "go ahead, what do you want?"

"I'm sorry, sir, I have the wrong number."

The Stars and Stripes reporter hung up.

Generally the PRO's attitude toward The Stars and Stripes
enlisted men was much the same as the staff's own. And the staff
got away with some very unarmy encounters with brass simply be-
cause they would talk to generals and captains exactly as though
they were enlisted men.

One night after the paper had gone to bed the phone rang
and Charlie White, who was sitting nearest at the time, picked
it up.

"Hello, White here."

The staff, which had been sitting around the office talking,
listened because there was nothing better to do until Charlie, one
of the principles in the bull session, was through on the phone.

"Yeah, yeah," Charles said, nodding. "Yeah."

There was twenty seconds while the party at the other end
explained what he wanted.

"Just a minute until I get the headset on," Charlie said.

Charles Charles Worthington Worthington White prepared

194 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

to take a dictated story on the typewriter. Then he picked up the
phone and spoke again.

"Okay, general, whattya got? Shoot! "

The staff, which never became immune to the humor of its
own attitude toward brass, broke out in a loud laugh and picked
up the conversation without Charlie while he took the general's
story (which was probably not used).

The most consistent source of trouble emanating from the
PRO high command came as a result of cartoons The Stars and
Stripes ran. In London Sergeant Dick Wingert developed a roly-
poly soldier whom he called "Hubert" into one of the best, and
least advertised soldier cartoons of the war. Hubert was the carica-
tured prototype for all inept, out-of-uniform soldiers in the army,
and the army, which thought its left hand should know what its
right hand was doing, did not think that the Hubert-type humor
was funny. The official army thought it was not right for one
branch of its organization to laugh at a little man who did almost
everything a soldier shouldn't, while another branch issued stern
warnings that there was nothing funny about being out of uni-
form, etc.

Down south, Sergeant Bill Mauldin and the Mediterranean
edition were having similar trouble with "Willie," the cartoon
character of Mauldin. Mauldin always played his "Bill," proto-
type of the front-line infantryman, against rear-line SOS soldiers.
There was already enough friction there, the army felt, without
having an army publication make pointed jokes about it.

Bill Mauldin's cartoons were the most popular because, from
a front-line infantryman's viewpoint, he laughed at top brass,
poked fun at outdated training programs and at all the other
things the army held sacred.

After Mauldin came into Southern France with the Seventh
Army, his cartoons began to appear regularly in the Rennes, Paris,
Lidge, Besan^on, Dijon, Strasbourg, Pfungstadt (Frankfurt), Nice
and Nancy editions of the paper. The Ltege paper was servicing
the First and Ninth armies while the Nancy edition was circulated
in the Third and Seventh. Mauldin himself wandered through all
army territories in a jeep.

The Stars and Stripes with Mauldin's irreverent cartoons
began to reach the army commanders, and finally Lieutenant

PUBLIC RELATIONS 195

General George S. Patton, Jr., informed a Stars and Stripes repre-
sentative that unless Mauldin's cartoons stopped appearing in the
paper he would bar it from Third Army territory.

Typical of the Mauldin cartoons Patton did not like was the
one which made fun of the Patton posters in Third Army terri-
tory which warned men along the roads and in the towns that if
they were out of uniform or disorderly in any way they were sub-
ject to fines running up to $50. There were, for instance, signs
one hundred miles behind the lines threatening soldiers who
failed to wear their steel helmets. Soldiers who walked the same
streets with women pushing baby carriages felt a little silly with
steel helmets on. The Mauldin cartoon depicted Joe and Willie
stopping before one of the signs in a jeep.

Headed "YOU ARE NOW IN THIRD ARMY AREA,"
the sign was a list of offenses with their fines. Mauldin added a
few of his own to reduce the thing to complete absurdity.

No helmet 20 dollars

No shave 30 dollars

Buttons unshined .... 40 dollars

Windshield up 50 dollars

Pants down 60 dollars

The sign listed fifteen or twenty items and was signed:

By Order of

Old Blood and Guts

Willie was saying to Joe in the caption:

"Joe, you better radio the old man we'll be a few days late
because we gotta detour around an area."

After a few such had appeared, Mauldin got a call to appear
before Patton himself. The genial general just wanted to "talk
it over."

Patton told Mauldin that he did not appreciate his character,,
Willie, and thought he was not typical of the American soldier
in the Third Army. Mauldin presented his view on the subject
and they departed, not friends, but sergeant and general. Soon
after, Mauldin packed up his jeep and the army let him go
back to Italy, where he had a little more freedom to draw what
he saw.

Dick Wingert ran into the same kind of trouble in London

196 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

and later in Paris. From time to time, after some cartoon lam-
pooning the army or the officers in it, the editors got a direct order
from very near the top that no more Wingert cartoons were to
appear. Somehow, after a few weeks and new promises to be good,
or better at least, Wingert's great cartoons with Hubert waddling
rampant through them were reinstated.

Somehow those orders from on high always seemed to come
through the public relations office, and the initials "PRO" be-
came a little phrase in a category of disrepute all its own in the
Stars and Stripes office. There is little doubt that the words "The
Stars and Stripes" were more spit out than said in most PRO offi-
ces. The lack of affection was mutual.

The paper generally prided itself in the early days on its cov-
erage of the air war. Staffers flew in the war, they lived at the
bases, and complete files were kept of raids and bomb tonnages.
At any given time, the Stars and Stripes man writing the air story
could go to a card file and find out how many times Saint-Nazaire,
or Bremen or any other target had been bombed, by how many
bombers and the number of what size bombs dropped while gun-
ners were shooting down how many Luftwaffe planes. It was in-
formation no one but the people in the business cared about, for
the most part. At any rate, when it came to air statistics, a few of
the staffers carried a chip on their collective shoulder. They fig-
ured they knew more about Air Force statistics than anyone else
except the official statisticians and were ready to argue about it.
It was the cause of one of the nastiest little wrangles the paper had
with a public relations office.

The Eighth Air Force started flying P-47S as fighter cover
for its own 6-175 and 8-245 some time before the Ninth Air Force
came up from Africa. The Ninth, when it came, was to be the in-
vasion air force, or, as someone called it, "the infantryman's air
force." When the invasion finally came on June 6, 1944, it was
just that, but until invasion its fighters escorted Eighth heavies.

For a long time Colonel Hubert Zemke's Fighter Group, an
Eighth Air Force outfit in Thunderbolts, led all other fighter
groups in enemy planes shot down. For some reason that was not
easy to explain. Zemke's Outfit (as it was known) just seemed to
run into more of the "fun," meaning German planes, and always
shot down more than other groups. It was a red-hot fighter mob

PUBLIC RELATIONS 197

and others became envious of its knack of running into and shoot-
ing down so many German planes.

Before long, twenty of the twenty-five "aces," a tag applied
to a pilot who has shot down five or more enemy planes, belonged
to the Zemke Outfit. The other five American aces were scattered
through a dozen other fighter groups.

Meanwhile another group of pilots flying from the old RAF
field at Debden started to come along. They were all transferees
from the RAF and many of them had flown with the famous Eagle
Squadron, the ail-American outfit that fought with the Royal Air
Force during the Battle of Britain. They were just slightly differ-
ent from any other group of American fighter pilots. Before the
United States came into the war they had volunteered to fight
with the RAF or the RCAF, something the average American boy
wouldn't, or at least didn't, do. Ipso facto, they were that kind
of guys not quite average Americans.

With the RAF they had been flying the highly maneuverable
little Spitfire. They liked it. They knew it well, they knew what
it could do, and it was the plane they liked best to fly. When they
made their transfer to the United States Air Force they were given
the then new P-47 Thunderbolt. The P-47 was a high-powered
juggernaut as unlike the Spitfire as one fighter plane could be
from another. They didn't like it.

For several months they did their job of escorting the bombers
but they did not shoot down many German planes. They were
a little bitter about it. They accused the Zemke Outfit, all of
whose pilots thought the Thunderbolt was a great airplane, of
leaving the bombers uncovered while they chased German fighters.

When the P-SI Mustang began to appear in England, the old
Eagle Squadron pilots were the first to get the new plane. The
group liked the Mustang. It was more like the Spitfire they were
used to, and almost immediately their batting average began to
improve. Slowly they began to creep up on the Zemke Outfit,
which by this time was nearing a record of four hundred German
planes destroyed in the air.

As time came closer to the invasion date there was more low-
level strafing to be done by fighter planes. With the air almost
cleared of German fighters it was safer than it had been for our
fighters to race at low altitudes over French and German terrain,
shooting up locomotive engines and flak towers without so much

198 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

fear of being "bounced" from above by flights of German fighter
planes.

Because the P-47 of that period was at its best at high alti-
tudes and the P-5i Mustang was good on the deck, the Eagle
Squadron group did a good deal more work close to the ground
than the Zemke Outfit. While they went out with the bombers
and then came down close to the ground to shoot up what they
could find on the return trip, the Mustang group went in low all
the way for the specific purpose of shooting up Luftwaffe airfields.

As time went on it soon became evident that someone was
going to top the record of twenty-six enemy aircraft destroyed by
Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in the last war. Zemke's Outfit had
Walker Mahurin, Bob Johnson, Francis Gabreski, Dave Schilling
and Zemke himself with records of about twenty destroyed.

The Eagle group had two men, Duane Beeson and Don Gen-
tile, both pushing up around the same mark. The only other con-
tender seemed to be Charlie Beckham, from the 353rd Fighter
Group.

Everyone became conscious of the race among the fighter
pilots, although it was officially discouraged because Fighter Com-
mand insisted that the fighter pilots' primary job was to protect
the bombers, not to shoot down German planes.

After every raid the big question was "How did Mahurin
make out?" or "Did Gentile get another?"

PRO releases read "Twenty E/A [enemy aircraft] destroyed,
ten probably destroyed and thirty damaged."

The problem arose when fighter pilots started strafing Ger-
man airfields. The communiques were changed to read "Fifty E/A
destroyed, thirty on the ground, twenty in the air, etc."

Finally Bud Mahurin, Beeson and Beckham were forced to
"bail out over German territory, eliminating them from the race,
but Bob Johnson of the Zemke Outfit and Don Gentile, with the
Eagles, each passed his twentieth victory and headed for that goal
of twenty-seven.

Gentile went out and, while strafing a German airfield, set
fire to one or two German planes. He repeated the performance
on several days during that month and Air Force PRO credited
him with another enemy plane destroyed.

On the first night it was released this way, The Stars and
Stripes printed it with the statement that Gentile had forged

BLIC RELATIONS * 109

id of Johnson in the race for the record. Whe'n the staffer
ing the air story found out the next day on what the claim was
'd the argument, which was never satisfactorily settled, began.

Should planes which pilots destroy on the ground count
ird the record? The Stars and Stripes thought not. PRO
ned that a plane destroyed on the ground was just as definitely
of the battle as one shot down out of the sky, and some of the
ts said it was even harder to get them on the ground than in
air. If they were not going to count on the ground, what about
ones destroyed as they were taking off? Should they count?

It seems insignificant now, but it was big news in America
in England at the time and, while it was strictly a newspaper
rd, it meant a lot to the boys flying.

In the course of the argument it was discovered that one of
tenbacker's "planes destroyed," was actually an observation
Don. Some claimed that was a ringer; that the record should be
to twenty-five.

The whole argument was settled when Major Richard Bong,

over on the other side of the world, shot down another Jap
e and passed all ETO contestants to become the first American
ter pilot to hit Rickenbacker's record. Gentile at that time
twenty-three destroyed in the air and seven on the ground. All
tob Johnson's twenty-five were shot out of the air. It was a
y argument but The Stars and Stripes and Fighter Command
*r got along well afterward.

HEROES COME WHOLESALE

Here, briefly, is the story of one Fort Group, one of

many units making air war history fighting

the Germans

By Andy Rooney

Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

Thursday, April 27, 1944

If gallantry came in cans, there would never have been enough
ping space to get all the Eighth Air Force has used to England.
Heroism has been buried by heroism here. Heroes have come
lesale and there have been more than America could digest.
ies which in normal times would be headlined in every paper
merica end up as two paragraphs in someone's home-town paper.

200 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

In U.S. military history no fighting unit the size of the Eighth Air
Force ever performed with a higher percentage of workaday heroes;
not heroes in name, but men who have actually been warmed by
comradeship to do more for their fellow men than they need have;
men who have unnecessarily risked their lives to save others and
men who have performed with an intelligence and a courage to save
their own lives when it would have been easier to die.

Had the men of any one of the ten United States heavy bombard-
ment groups operating from fields in England performed with com-
mensurate heroism in battle actions which caught the imagination of
the American public as did Guadalcanal, that group would be the
most celebrated in American military history.

Here, briefly, is the story of one Fortress group which has been
operating against the Germans for a year and a half. It is a story of
American boys which could be a book: there are other groups with
the same story and people don't want to read that many books.

The group has never had a name that stuck. The boys know it
as a number or by the name of the small town near the field. Both
are restricted information.

Its first haul was last October 9 when it went into Lille, France.
From that day on the group was at war and it didn't take the men
long to find out that heavy bombardment of targets on the Continent
was no picnic. Principal objectives in the early days were German
U-boat pens. Again and again they struck at Saint-Nazaire, Lorient
and La Palice. On the second trip into Saint-Nazaire, the one of No-
vember 9, the group participated in one of the Eighth Air Force's most
successful experiments the experiment proved to everyone's satisfac-
tion that medium level was not the altitude at which to send in Flying
Fortresses. They got the hell shot out of them.

The group went in that day at about 8,000 feet and the ships
that did come back came back looking like colanders. There are
still a few veterans left in England as gunnery instructors who will
tell you about that raid. They may have been to the heart of Gar-
many since that day but when they have bad dreams it is the flak
that day over Saint-Nazaire they dream about.

The group has completed 135 missions and dropped about 6,000
tons of bombs in Germany and on German targets in occupied coun-
tries. Like too-short or too-long artillery fire, some of the 6,000 tons
fell in kraut fields and potato patches, but a lot of it has fallen in the
middle of some of Germany's best industrial plants.

The group is made up of four squadrons. The Eager Beavers,
the Clay Pigeons, Fitin' Bitin', and one which has never adopted a
name that stuck. One they picked held too much blood and thunder

PUBLIC RELATIONS 201

and was forbidden. In anger the fliers dubbed themselves "The
Buttercup Boys."

Of the four, Fitin' Bitin' and the Clay Pigeons squadrons gained
most of the early fame. A story appeared in the Saturday Evening
Post dubbing the one squadron as "The Clay Pigeons" because in
those early days they had lost so many men. Time after time they
returned, and while squadrons on each side of them would be lossless
the Clay Pigeons would have lost two or three ships.

What made the thing even harder to understand was that flying
in the same group with the bad-luck squadron was the Fitin' Bitin'
outfit. The Clay Pigeons set up an attrition record at the same time
Fitin' Bitin' was starting a lossless streak that was to extend to 43
raiids. Today the Clay Pigeons have been 20 raids without a loss.

There were heroes in the group. First of the long line was a
young lieutenant by the name of Bob Riordan. Riordan piloted the
first really famous ETO Fortress named Wahoo and on three suc-
cessive occasions he brought the ship back under circumstances which
when set down on paper set the style for the thousands of wing and
a prayer stories that have come out of the Eighth Air Force since.

Riordan went on to finish a tour of operations. Now, more than
a year later, he is several years older and a lieutenant colonel who
shows no signs of stopping at that rank. Last week Riordan went
home for a 3o-day rest.

Because of its early start on operations the group had the first
officer and the first enlisted man in the theater to finish. Mike
Roscovich was the first man in the ETO to complete a tour. He was
a tech sergeant radio gunner at the time with a penchant for cutting
off people's ties whether they were colonels or corporals.

Rosky went a long way toward being one of the happiest men
who ever lived and his was almost a completely happy story. He was
commissioned soon after he finished his ops and assigned to a near-by
station as gunnery officer. As a nonflying officer he made more trips
than anyone knows of and possibly completed more than any other
man in the Eighth Air Force. Unofficially he had 33.

The colorful Rosky came to a tragic death last February. In
Scotland on furlough he was in a plane taking off for home. For
reasons which are not altogether clear, the pilot was trying to take
his B- 1 7 off with three motors. The plane crashed and all were killed.
After 33 missions over the most dangerous enemy territory in the
world Rosky died in an ordinary accident.

The first officer in the ETO to finish a tour was First Lieutenant
Eugene J. Pollock, of New Orleans, Louisiana. Pollock was a navigator.

The group's most popular legend and hero is Arizona Tempe
Harris. Arizona Harris was a gunner's own gunner, a hero's hero.

202 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

He hated the army and at the same time he was one of the best
combat men in it. In the States the boys in the group knew him as
a spirited redhead who was afraid of nothing and who didn't want
to do much but get back to his home in Tempe. Once in England,
Arizona was one of the most conscientous gunners of the war. No

armorer touched Arizona's guns or the guns of any man in his crew.

Returning from a haul to the U-boat pens at Saint-Nazaire,
Harris's plane with Charley Cranmer at the controls was forced down
in the Bay of Biscay. German fighters kept up the attack as the plane
cased down to the water. In another ship Bill Casey, pilot of the
famous Fort, Banshee, pulled at his stick and wheeled the Banshee
out of formation to help protect Cranmer.

The ship finally hit the cold waters of the bay but in the tail
of Casey's ship P. D. Small could see Harris still firing away from
the top turret. As the plane settled and the water crept up over the
wings they could still see Arizona Harris at his guns in the turret firing
away at the FW igos which dived in to strafe any possible survivors.
The last thing they saw of the ship was Arizona's smoking guns as he
drowned at his post.

That story and Arizona himself are a legend at the base and
when the story comes up there is always an old-timer who will swear
that if any man ever deserved the Congressional Medal it was old
Arizona Harris.

In the first days Colonel Frank Armstrong was the group CO.
He was promoted to brigadier general, and Colonel Claude B. Put-
nam, a tall, slim pilot with a brain like a whip, moved in. The
present CO is Colonel George L. Robinson.

Like men from any bomber outfit, the boys are proud of theirs.
Talk to any one of them for ten minutes and he will be listing for
you the things the group has done first, most and best. They'll tell
you:

"The Eager Beavers were the first squadron in the USAAF to
drop 1,000 tons of bombs on the Germans or on anybody. They
passed that mark the last day of 1943."

"Fitin' Bitin* went 43 missions without a loss in the days before
fighter escort."

"We have the only enlisted man who ever got the Congressional
Medal of Honor here, 'Snuffy' Smith."

"This base was the first in England to be turned over to the
U. S. from the British ... we had the first aero-club."

"We had the tallest tail-gunner Hank Cordery. Used to be a first
sergeant. He was six feet five inches.

"Only ship in ETO which shot down 11 planes and had them

PUBLIC RELATIONS 203

confirmed. Lt. Bob Smith's crew got them May 21 over Wilhelms-
haven."

The three-man awards and decorations section at Colonel Robin-
son's station have done a lot of work. They have handled the paper
work for one Congressional Medal of Honor, four DSCs, 18 Silver
Stars, five Legion of Merits, 467 DFCs, 200 Purple Hearts, 4,500 Air
Medals and Clusters, and four Soldiers' Medals.

The station's heroes today are men like Gilbert Roeder. Roeder's
got 25 in now and he's come back on one, two and three engines
more times than he's come back on four. He's got a knack for flak.
The boys will swear, though, that there's not a better pilot in the
Air Force than Roeder. He and his crew could have been living in
Switzerland, Sweden, France or Germany now if they'd chosen the
easy way out, but instead they chose to fight it the hard way, take a
chance of going down in the North Sea or blowing up in mid-air,
or of crashing over England. They've taken chances and they've
paid off.

One of the group's favorite wing and a prayer stories is the
one they tell of Captain Purvis E. Youree and Le Roy C. Sugg his
copilot. Their Fort was badly damaged in the best tradition of flak-
riddled Fortresses. It was in danger of spinning out of control any
minute because the cables on one side had been completely shot
away and Youree had little control over the ship.

Sugg looked the situation over and without a thought for his
personal safety stripped his parachute off and used the harness to
tie to one end of the frayed control cable. The other end he gave
to Youree and that way the pilot guided the plane home pulling
on one end of his copilot's parachute harness.

Two of the station's favorite characters were Jewish boys. The
story of one was a happy story. Captain Arthur Isaac was a character
from Brooklyn in every sense of the word. He ditched once, crashed
once, and came home on countless occasions in a ship full of holes,
but always he came home. Now that it's over the secret of Isaac's dog
tags is out.

He carried three pairs. On one was his right name. On another
he had printed "Otto Mclsaac." That set was in case he was shot
down over Germany.

On a third pair of dog tags he had stamped "Frangois d'Isaac,"
to be used in the event he went down in France. The Brooklyn
bombadier always swore that the first thing he would ask for if he
was shot down in Germany was the nearest church where he could
hear a Catholic mass said over him.

The other Jewish boy was Eric Newhouse (nee Neuhaus), an

204 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Austrian gunner whose family owned a little chocolate shop in
Vienna when Hitler began making European Jews uncomfortable.

Eric joined a band of kids he was fifteen in 1937 and with
them slugged German police and tore up German rails. He made his
way from Germany to Yugoslavia, to Greece, to Palestine, to Syria.
Still fifteen, he convinced British authorities that he was nineteen
and joined the British Army there, where he fought with the Kent
regiment against the Arabs. At Jaffa, Palestine, he paid a German
consul a bribe of three pounds for a visa and finally got to Gibraltar
in his fight to get to America.

Newhouse was broke, but on the boat he met an American nurse.
As a souvenir the nurse gave him a dime, and when he got to Boston
that was all he had. He didn't speak a word of English but he was
so thrilled with America that he spent the dime on two trolley rides.
He went to the end of the line for one of the nickels and came back
with the other.

On December 7, 1941, Newhouse was not yet a citizen. The min-
ute he heard of the Jap action he volunteered for the army. He was
rejected and for 120 consecutive days he heckled his enlistment office
at Wausau, Wisconsin, until they finally took him. He was assigned to
the Air Force and became a gunner.

Once in London he met a French refugee girl and became en-
gaged. The day before he was to be married, Newhouse was shot down.
Dave Scherman, Life photographer who had planned to picture the
happy ending to Newhouse's story, was left with a tragic finish and no
pictures.

Men on the field will tell you that Newhouse was the only man
in the group who ever hated the Germans with the intensity that
drove him to kill and kill. Emanuel Klette, a pilot on the base, fin-
ished a tour of operations and crashed at his home field after his 28th
raid. He has been in the hospital recovering for several months and
has recently been put back on operations at his own request, but
Klette loved flying more than he hated Germans.

Captain Raymond Check, of Minot, North Dakota, was one of
the group's great heroes, and the circumstances of his death were
tragic. Check was on his last mission. Colonel James Wilson, air exec-
utive, flew with Check as copilot and Ray's regular copilot, First Lieu-
tenant William P. Cassidy, refusing to miss Check's last haul, went as
a waist gunner.

Check was killed instantly. A 2O-mm. shell struck him in the head.
A fire started in the cockpit and Colonel Wilson stayed with the
controls until the rubber of his oxygen mask melted on his face. His
hands were so burned that he could not let go of the wheel. Finally,
Cassidy came up from the waist and helped Wilson. In the ship that

PUBLIC RELATIONS 205

day they were luckily carrying a flight surgeon who wanted practical
experience, and had it not been for his work Colonel Wilson might
not have lived.

There had been a party planned that night at the officers' mess
and Check was to have been the guest of honor. A cake was baked and
his name was inscribed on the top. When Check's ship flew into the
field with Cassidy at the controls there wasn't a man on the field who
felt like eating cake or having a party

The ground personnel at the field was unsung as is the tradition
and knowing that they would live to tell their own story they had no
objection. Major Thurman E. Dawson and his crew of bomb loaders
have put into the bomb bays every last pound of the 6,000 tons the
group has dropped. In addition they have done the work that hurts.
The work that has to be undone a few hours later when the report
comes through that the mission has been scrubbed bombs must be
unloaded.

That doesn't tell all the group's story. It doesn't tell about the
officer whose greatest delight is to take a Very pistol and a pocketful

of assorted green and red flares and chase the old white horse in the
pasture next to his Nissen hut around in circles; it doesn't tell about
Harold Rogers and his dog "Mister," who went on eight missions with
his gunner master who used to be a Hollywood stunt man, and it
leaves out completely the hundreds of ordinary Joes in crews who
have stood around. their potbellied stoves at night worrying and
throwing so-caliber shells into the fire for excitement. It doesn't tell
any of that; it would take a book.

You can tell, though, from these few people, why the Germans
haven't got a chance. You can tell why the U. S. Air Force can make
a lot of mistakes and still somehow struggle to the top of the heap of
world air forces.

Generally you could generalize about public relations offi-
cers: all but a small minority of PROs in combat outfits were
pretty reasonable people doing a pretty unreasonable job, and all
but a small minority of rear echelon PROs didn't like The Stars
and Stripes. The conflict between the paper's staff men and de-
manding public relations characters went back to the very be-
ginning of The Stars and Stripes. A photographer-reporter who
was a corporal and might as well be called Slim, went to northern
Ireland in July of 1942 to cover the first inspection of American
troops overseas by the King and Queen of England.

Some fifty civilian war correspondents, and the corporal,

2O6 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

waited on the docks of a North Ireland port for the royal ship
from England. A lieutenant colonel cautioned the correspondents.

"You are not allowed to come closer to their royal Majesties
than fifty feet," the colonel told the newspaper people, capitaliz-
ing every letter. The photographers groaned. Pictures of British
royalty talking to American privates wouldn't be much pictures at
fifty feet.

The corporal-correspondent suggested that when he had been
a photographer in the Canadian forces, a year or so before the
Yanks got into the war, he had taken a good many pictures of the
King and Queen and that the specified distance always had been
fifteen feet.

"Fifty feet, corporal!" the colonel roared. He turned and
added, "and gentlemen."

Their Majesties arrived. Down the gangplank came a British
brigadier, as formidably correct as British brigadiers are. He was
the King's equerry and had handled this sort of thing scores of
times. He knew some of the newspapermen and nodded. His eye
went over the soldier-reporter, paused.

"Hello there, Slim. Changed armies?"

"Yes, sir, and we're having a little misunderstanding here."

"Oh?" with lifted eyebrow.

"A rule has been made, sir, that we can't take pictures closer
than fifty feet. Would you mind fixing it up?"

The King's equerry was not unmindful of the situation: the
corporal was straightening things out. That happens in armies
all the time. Among the reasons the brigadier was the King's
equerry were good sense and better taste, along with a not over-
inflated sense of proportion, even in time of war and royalty.
He turned to the American colonel:

"The photographers may take pictures at fifteen feet,
colonel," he said. Everyone thought he said the word "colonel"
pretty firmly.

The pictures were taken at fifteen feet.

At the end of the three-day inspection tour, the corporal
was broke. He needed steamer fare to cross the Irish Sea with his
pictures and story and told Bob Vining, the genial lieutenant
commander who got United States Navy public relations off to a
good start in Europe. Vining searched his pockets as the rest of
the party headed for the ticket window.

PUBLIC RELATIONS 2O7

"Broke myself," he said. "But I know where to borrow it.
Five pounds for you and five for me."

Vining stepped across the dockside, spoke low and brief to
the lieutenant colonel, who pulled out his pocketbook and handed
over two five-pound notes. The colonel stood graven, a little
slump beginning in his shoulders, as Vining recrossed the dock
and handed the corporal half the money.

It was a little thing and petty, and didn't help much to
win the war or lose it fifty feet or fifteen feet. But it set some
sort of gauge by which the long lines of privates and corporals
and sergeants who passed through The Stars and Stripes in the
years to come could judge their own responsibilities.

The Stars and Stripes was to be an enlisted man's newspaper,
published and written by enlisted men lest it lose the soldiers'
viewpoint; and the army wanted a good newspaper, something
that would be to the soldiers what their morning papers had been
at home; and if there was difficulty in compromising the two basic
tenets, the Stars and Stripes staff would work the thing out as
best could be done en route, but no one not even the army it-
self would balk that staff from doing their primary job in the
war, publishing and writing that good newspaper.

It was a little mixed up.

The Stars and Stripes always was a little mixed up. Even on
the occasions when everything connected with it had been momen-
tarily straightened out it was mixed up, because the condition
was so unusual that it was confusing, maybe a little frightening.
The original purpose and setup was simple enough on paper. To
make it clearly simple and direct, General George C. Marshall, the
American Army chief of staff in Washington, put it down in the
form of a letter, printed in the first issue of The Stars and Stripes
of World War II. He wrote:

Like any other veteran of the AEF in France, I am delighted to
welcome the new version of The Stars and Stripes.

"I do not believe that any one factor could have done more to
sustain the morale of the AEF than The Stars and Stripes," wrote
General Pershing of this soldier-newspaper. We have his authority
for the statement that no official control was ever exercised over the
matter which went into The Stars and Stripes. "It always was entirely
for and by the soldier/' he said.

This policy is to govern the conduct of the new publication. From

208 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

the start The Stars and Stripes existed primarily to furnish our officers
and men with news about themselves, their comrades, and the homes
they had left behind across the sea.

A soldiers' newspaper, in these grave times, is more than a morale
venture. It is a symbol of the things we are fighting to preserve and
spread in this threatened world. It represents the free thought and free
expression of a free people.

I wish the staff every success in this important venture.

Their responsibility includes much more than the publication of
a successful newspaper. The morale, in fact the military efficiency of
the American soldiers in these islands, will be directly affected by the
character of the new Stars and Stripes.

There were quite a few interpretations placed on General
Marshall's declaration over the years. Folks used to spend no end
of time interpreting what General Marshall must have meant
when he said no official control ever was exercised over the matter
which went into The Stars and Stripes in World War I and that it
would be the same way this time. A lot of people figured they
could interpret that and make it plain. They knew just what the
general meant.

Twice in the years that followed, General Dwight Eisen-
hower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, talked. to
members of the staff and recalled for the army what General
Marshall had written.

The interpreters got busy both times figuring out what Gen-
eral Eisenhower must have meant when he quoted General
Marshall.

The Stars and Stripes relations \tfith the military press censors
weren't quite like its relations with the rest of the army.

At the outset, wartime censoring of press copy for policy and
security was a comparatively new thing in the European Theater,
as it was everywhere for the American citizen army. It had been
done in World War I and not since. It was a tough job, for even
the very word "censorship" is mild anathema to the average
American who has a vague feeling that somewhere back there in
the Bill of Rights or something like that there is something that
says nobody is going to tell American newspapers what to print
and what not to print.

The military censors who came to the ETO to see that no
breaches of security or policy were committed in the tens of

PUBLIC RELATIONS 209

thousands of words written daily about the growing United States
war machine in the United Kingdom had been fitted as best the
army could for their task, but it was largely a case of learning as
they went along. The Stars and Stripes was in roughly the same
position, and the two groups learned together. Yet despite the mis-
understandings traditionally supposed to exist between newspaper-
men and censors, The Stars and Stripes felt it had friends in the
office of press censorship, and the censors felt that, strained as it
might occasionally be, there was friendship between them and the
soldiers who put out the newspaper.

The straining came in various ways. If the S^rS Desk thought
a cut in a story to be unjustified, there was no hesitation in
calling the censors and arguing it out.

Someday, maybe, Lieutenant Colonel J. D. Merrick and the
lieutenants, captains and majors who worked for him as censors;
will know how gratefully the S<zW> accepted their reasonableness.

Not that it was all one long honeymoon. The Stripes staff
prided itself on the authenticity and background knowledge
which went into its stories of the air war. The censors had to
get their air war knowledge by remote control, as it were, and not
infrequently a censorial cut would be argued, and bitterly. Some-
times the paper won; more often the censor, but unhappy his lot
if later events proved the cut unjustified.

Then there were the pastepots.

Somehow, when the paper was a couple of months old, a vast
shipment of paste arrived at the editorial offices, gross upon gross
of pint-sized bottles of paste, whereas normal consumption would
have been about a pint a month in that office. The staff didn't
believe in clipping stories from other sources.

One evening, Phil Bucknell, an American-born staffer who
had been a top-flight newspaperman in England when the war
broke out, was having trouble with American verbs. Phil had
been writing English verbs so long ("The RAF HAVE done
so and so" or "His Majesty's Government HAVE . . .") . Plural
verbs with collectively singular nouns were a red flag to the Desk.
Phil committed four of them in two paragraphs and the tough
guy-city editor could stand it no longer.

"Damn it to bloody hell, Bucknell! You limey so-and-sol"

The city editor grabbed the nearest pastepot and heaved it

210 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

in a flat trajectory across the room at Bucknell's head. Fortu-
nately it missed.

"Will you ever learn [another pastepot crashed against the
wall] to write the American language?"

Bucknell, like the rest of the staff, operated on the theory
that if they were going to set up the Desk as a sort of terrestrial
god (albeit two-headed) they'd put up with what the Desk did as
long as the Desk was right, and raise hell if the Desk was found
wrong, a fair arrangement. However, the pastepots seemed a little
beyond even terrestrially godlike prerogatives, and Buck, too,
grabbed a pastepot. The first one smashed on the wall just behind
the city editor, and with a fine show of justice splattered Bob
Moora across the desk with broken glass and the city editor
with paste.

The flurry ended when the immediately handy supply of
paste was gone, and then Mark Senigo, the sports editor, started
to laugh and pointed. Beneath his little table which had been
exactly in line with the flight of the pastepots was the censor
for the night, a Lieutenant Bennett. He had slid into his walnut
foxhole at the first salvo and stayed there until it was over, each
passing pastepot drizzling a swirl of gooey liquid across his uni-
form.

That set the measure of the Desk's displeasure. A staff man
relating in the Lamb and Lark how mad the Desk had been at
him counted the anger by the number of pastepots hurled before
he got out of the office.

Victor Meluskey, lieutenant censor from Philadelphia, how-
ever, was no man to take refuge when a pastepot war started.
Mollie was a burly customer and was willing to stand up for
himself. (He became more proficient than any men on the staff
itself at starting fires under Joe Fleming's chair without being
detected.) Mollie alone of staff or censors held a pastepot decision
over the Desk.

A warm spring evening, when the paper had gone to press
early, the staff sat around the office drinking Coca-Colas. Meluskey
was wearing a new pair of pink officer's pants, which the staff,
sweaty and tired from three straight sixteen-hour days, had eyed
disdainfully all evening. Suddenly, Hutton picked up a half-full
pastepot and hollering "Meluskeyl" tossed it at the censor.
- Mollie had been waiting for that, a long, long time.

PUBLIC RELATIONS 211

Sidestepping the missile, Mollie reached swiftly into the
drawer of his censor's table, pulled out a full bottle of paste and
heaved it at Hutton, who caught it carelessly with one hand.
Mollie came up with a second pot and heaved that. Hutton caught
it with the other hand. With a fierce howl, Meluskey triumphantly
brought out a third pastepot and pegged it straight down the
middle.

Unable to move, Hutton instinctively brought together his
two hands already holding pastepots. There was an explosion of
glass and glue as the three factory-fresh containers smashed to-
gether. Paste flew all over the city desk, over feature stories type-
written for the next day's paper. Paste streamed from Hutton's
chest and face, and in a couple of seconds blood began to follow
from a cut in his shoulder where flying glass had lodged.

The staff cheered, Meluskey bowed gracefully and stalked
out, while for the next two or three days copy sporadically
appeared in the composing room smeared with the blood Hutton
had shed that night.

Meluskey's opinions on security and policy were valued as
long as there was a paper, not only because he was a competent
censor and knew his business, but because he was pointed out
to each new man on the staff as "the censor who licked the Desk
at pastepots at five paces."

Some of Lieutenant Colonel Merrick's censors never caught
the Stars and Stripes assignment, and would have felt they were
fortunate except for the telephone calls from staff members who
wanted to thresh out a point of censorship. Long-standing rela-
tionships were built up thus over the telephone and the censors
and staff members frequently never saw each other, although from
their arguments they achieved a pretty accurate mutual insight
into character.

One censor, Lieutenant Charlie Desser, talked for months
with the staff of the Paris edition without ever seeing a single
S&S man, and it was not until he went in a glider on the airborne
invasion of Germany itself that Desser found a staffer. At a press
headquarters, which was a foxhole in a clump of German woods,
Desser looked up the second day of the invasion and was handed
copy by an individual who from his dress obviously had jumped
with the paratroops. At the top of the first page the copy read:

212 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

TO: Stars and Stripes, Paris.

Desser groaned. "I'll censor it," he said finally, with a wry
grin. "But if you want to argue about any cuts I make, you'll
have to call me on someone's telephone or I won't know how to
talk to you."

Lieutenant Colonel Merrick insisted to civilians and army
alike that The Stars and Stripes was entitled to exactly the same
treatment as any other publication, and he did his best to see that
we got it. More than once he stuck his silver leaves as well as his
neck way out beyond the dictates of duty or conscience to see
to it that the army's newspaper wasn't forced through any censor-
ship to degenerate from the honest publication it set out to be.

Such treatment from censors had a beneficial effect on the
Stripes staff, too. Inclined anyway to put accuracy above every-
thing, since its readers were the people who had made the news
and would know where mistakes were written, the paper was
doubly careful because of the obvious trust imposed by the
censors. Consequently, some of the paper's stories became sources
of precedent, particularly the air stories.

The greatest compliment that the censor's office paid The
Stars and Stripes happened one afternoon in early 1944.

An editorial phone rang. Hodenfield answered.

"This is the censor's office," a voice said. "Lieutenant So-
and-so. Look, we've got a story here from an American corre-
spondent to censor. He's writing about the new 6-17 Fortresses.
He's referring to the B-17G, and we don't know whether we
ought to pass that or not. We figured you could tell us.*'

Hod called a conference of the other air people he was the
first staffer to fly to Berlin, and did it at night with the RAF
bombers and it was decided there no longer was good reason
for keeping the designation B-iyG secret, since Jerry had knocked
some down, so the story was passed.

It was Captain, later Major, Eugene Nute, who summed up
the censors' attitude toward the duty trick at The Stars and
Stripes.

"It's all right to go there, and they're a good bunch," Nute
explained to a new censor. "But we've been thinking for a long
time of getting the army to award a censor an Air Medal or an
Oak Leaf Cluster, which is what you get for five missions to Ger-

PUBLIC RELATIONS 218

many, to every censor who makes five missions to The Stars and
Stripes."

The censors packed their blue pencils and went across to the
war wherever the fighting and The Stars and Stripes went. Lieu-
tenant Colonel Merrick never would admit it officially, but as the
relationship continued, the Stars and Stripes staff began to have a
sneaking suspicion that Merrick occasionally farmed out new
censors to a Stars and Stripes job so that they could get the worst
over with first and also maybe learn a little more about their jobs
than they would have ordinarily. Some of the favorite censors from
London turned up again in France and Germany. Happiest, per-
haps, were the staffers of the Liege edition to censor whose paper
Lieutenant Colonel Merrick sent Meluskey, the hero of the
pastepots.

All through the bitter winter war of 1944-45, while the buzz
bombs droned regularly into Liege and shattered buildings and
lives all around but never in The Stars and Stripes, Meluskey
stuck with the Lige staffers, censored combat stories as they came
back from the front, and contributed greatly to the staff's financial
condition. Maybe that was the index of how The Stars and Stripes
thought of Vic Meluskey: He was the only outsider they ever
would admit to their poker games. To be perfectly fair about it,
however, Meluskey's lack of skill as a poker player may have had
something to do with it. While he was at Liege, Vic became a
captain and drew something more than three hundred dollars
a month. It all went into the poker game, for even if Vic held a
full house someone invariably had four of a kind.

At the end of March, when the Allies leaped across the Rhine
and struck into Germany in the blow that finished the war, the
Lige paper was left far behind the combat area to which its
circulation went. The edition was closed down and the staff scat-
tered among other editions at Frankfurt and Altdorf, in Germany,
and those still publishing in France. That was a godsend for
Meluskey. The captain hadn't had a nickel of his own pay for
three months and on the day of last publication was borrowing
ten-franc notes from the sergeants and corporals so that he could
buy coffee and doughnuts at the Red Cross club to make up for
the luncheons he missed because he was busy losing his money
playing poker.

Most of the censors who came to the various Stars and Stripes

214 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

offices accepted, as did the staffers, the doctrine that within the
city room of The Stars and Stripes the man running the Desk was
boss. He wasn't ordering the censor to do this or that, but he was
the best man in the room or he wouldn't have been on the Desk.

There was one censor, who had friends and relatives in
France and who liked to spend as much time as he reasonably
could at their chateau, who possibly went a little far in accepting
the authority of the sergeant running the particular edition to
which he was attached. That edition was in a rear echelon area
and its reporters covered the activities of organizations in which
there was little or no military security involved; the censor didn't
have much to do.

One afternoon at four, then, the lieutenant-censor telephoned
to or came to the office and said to the sergeant running the Desk;

"Er ... is there any work for me to do?"

Usually there wasn't and the sergeant would look up and
say "No."

"In that case could I have the evening off, please?"

The sergeant was very fair about it and gave the lieutenant
every other evening off that he asked for.

PUBLIC SERVICE

MN THE FALL of 1942, when the American soldiers
in the British Isles were getting ready to invade Nazi-held North
Africa, a lank, earnest young private first class named Dewey
Livingston decided that the size 14 overshoes he was wearing in
lieu of ordinary footgear weren't exactly the thing in which to go
storming the beaches of Africa. Dewey was wearing the arctics
because neither his supply sergeant nor any of the Quartermaster
Corps's minions that Dewey showed his feet to could provide him
with a pair of size 13 EEE shoes.

In desperation, Dewey went over to the Red Cross club one
evening and wrote a note to The Stars and Stripes.

"Dear Editor," Dewey began, inaugurating a kind of reader-
publisher relationship that was to be indigenous to The Stars and
Stripes all the paper's days. "Can somebody please help me get a
pair of shoes to fit me? I wear size 13 EEE. As a matter of fact,
I will wear 13 anything if I can get it. I am wearing overshoes
right now which are too big for me anyway even with two pairs of
socks. I have had this same trouble with shoes ever since back in
the States and thought maybe The Stars and Stripes knew some-
body with a pair of 13 EEEs."

Dewey signed the letter and affixed the address of the infantry
outfit to which he belonged.

When the letter reached the Desk, it was handed to Charlie
White, who turned out a little piece which ran the next day
asking somebody in the army please to find Dewey Livingston a
pair of shoes.

It would be nice to chronicle that so great was The Stars and

215

216 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Stripes' reach and appeal that scores of 13 EEEs came pouring in
to shoe Dewey's naked soles, but that isn't the way it was. Either
The Stars and Stripes didn't reach the right people or the army in
the British Isles was fresh out of 13 EEEs. Charlie White tried
another story.

"Won't somebody please turn up a pair of 13 EEEs for poor
old Dewey Livingston?" asked Charlie. A couple of days later a
sergeant from the Quartermaster Corps came in with a pair of
shoes of the right size; would we forward them to Dewey Livings-
ton? Charlie White fortified himself at the Lamb and Lark for
a jeep ride and started across England with the 13 EEEs. But
Dewey Livingston and his outfit had moved. We ran a story
notifying Dewey his shoes were waiting. No response.

Meanwhile, half a dozen more supply sergeants with half a
dozen pairs of 13 EEEs found their way to the new daily 's quarters
in Printing House Square. The place began to look like a shoe
shop, and into Charlie White's daily piece asking Dewey to come
pick up his shoes or tell us where he was there crept a plaintive
note of entreaty. Charlie's stories weren't, perhaps, approved
journalese, but neither was an editorially conducted search for
13 EEE shoes.

"Please come get your shoes, Dewey/' Charlie wrote. "I'm
gettin' awful sick of this story."

The rest of the army wasn't sick of it, however. White's
stories publicly aired a grievance most men in the army feel: you
never get the right size from the Quartermaster Corps more than
half the time. To add to Charles's troubles, there began to arrive
each day at Printing House Square, sometimes waiting in the
office when the staffers came in for work, a small stream of other
soldiers who wore 13 EEE shoes, and hadn't been able to find any
either. Charles wrote one last ultimatum to Dewey Livingston:

"Dewey, you better come get your shoes or they're gonna
be all gone."

We never got an answer from Dewey Livingston, because
he and his outfit had sailed for the invasion of Africa, Dewey
presumably in his too-large overshoes. But we did hear in daily
increasing queries from scores of other big-footed GIs, and from
a few small-footed GIs. Soldiers couldn't find 14 BBs, 14 EEEs,
15 EEs. Neither could they find size 4.1^ A.

Each of their appeals was duly chronicled, and so naturally

PUBLIC SERVICE 217

and dryly were the appeals translated into gently satirical stories
by the Hoosier humor of Charlie White that they became almost
regular features on page one.

Charlie fortuitously one evening used the phrase "help
wanted/' That started a snowball.

Size-42-waist soldiers complained they couldn't get pants to
go around their middles unless they accepted legs so long they
tripped on them. Size-28-waist soldiers complained that the leg
size with their waist made good knickerbockers. A soldier turned
up with a No. 6 hat size, and another one said that the quarter-
master had issued him two shoes for the left foot and wouldn't
exchange one of them. Two other soldiers had similar trouble
with gloves. They all wanted help.

All these things Charlie White chronicled, and there was
beginning to rest almost day and night in his blue eyes a bright
gleam of delight as he and the rest of us contemplated what the
German High Command whose agents certainly were reading
every Stars and Stripes they could must be thinking of the "best
equipped army in the world" whose soldiers no doubt one day
would go into battle wearing two left shoes and khaki knicker-
bockers.

By this time, Pfc. Dewey Livingston's original request had
assumed the proportions of a good-sized help wanted department.
But the army had had enough. The Quartermaster Corps and
Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee's Services of Supply were be-
ing made to look more ridiculous and inefficient than they were.
To the Desk came a peremptory order originating, we were in-
formed by the colonel who delivered it, with General Lee: The
Stars and Stripes would print no more stories calculated to pub-
licize failures in the Services of Supply system of distribution.
That was an order.

We were in the thing too deeply, however, simply to say to
the growing thousands of readers, "We're sorry, fellows, but the
army says we can't help you any more,"

By that time we were hearing from soldiers who wanted to
swap kodaks for bicycles, binoculars for stamp collections; who
wanted to know if we could find their brother Louie who was
with some ordnance outfit, who wanted to get a transfer from one
outfit to another and who didn't like the company commander,
or maybe wanted to get in touch with the Woman's Auxiliary

218 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Air Force girl who was sitting at the second table from the door
at Lyons' Corner House last Saturday evening.

There must have been some wry-humored, eccentric kind of
special god with nothing to do except watch over The Stars and
Stripes. The paper somehow seemed to scrape by one crisis after
another through the last-minute intervention of a providence be-
yond any poor power we had and so the "Help Wanted Depart-
ment" miraculously was born at a time when shoes were begin-
ning to pile three deep around Charlie White's desk and the be-
spectacled Hoosier was leaning more on the Lamb and Lark and
Alf Storey's mild-and-bitter for a solution to the problems in his
mail.

Private Lou Rakin, who had been a police court justice in
Linden, New Jersey, before he went into the army, and looked
just like that sort of guy, showed up at the Stars and Stripes busi-
ness offices one morning as an administrative clerk. No one knew
how the orders assigning him to us were issued, but there he
was. He started to work on a pile of Help Wanted correspondence.
In a week Private Lou Rakin was running the Help Wanted
Department. He was just the kind of man for the job. He wanted
to help people.

At his battered little desk in London, the painstaking Rakin
began to assume the qualities of a combined Dorothy Dix, Mr.
Anthony, the Help Wanted Department of your morning news-
paper, Travelers Aid, and an itinerant umbrella mender. Two
years later Lou was running a department with half a dozen
research assistants, two or three stenographers, and answering as
many as a thousand soldier requests for help a week.

"Who is this guy Rakin?" demanded a colonel in a telephone
conversation with the Desk one day. "He comes in my office, says
do I mind helping him get some fellow transferred from the
ordnance to the Air Force as a gunner. You can't do that. But
Rakin just left here, and, by God, I'm doin' it!"

"Help Wanted" became possibly the most concrete public
service that The Stars and Stripes ever performed for the millions
of soldiers who looked to it as their voice in dealing with the
Army. Lou did everything for them: he got them the right size
clothes when the quartermaster didn't have any. Sometimes he
used Stars and Stripes money to buy whatever it was a soldier

PUBLIC SERVICE 219

wanted, more often he traded with another soldier or some other
branch in the army.

He found their WAAF girl friends for them, traded their
surplus goods, brought them news from home when their wives
had babies. Every time a soldier asked for something unusual,
Lou made a point of getting the item into the Help Wanted
column to let other soldiers know that here was still another
service they could get from The Stars and Stripes.

Once in a while the GIs got a chance to help their paper. In
the winter of 1944-45, the Stars and Stripes editions in Paris and
Liege were down to one day's supply of newsprint. The morning's
papers carried a modest box at the lower left-hand corner of
page one:

Stars and Stripes has enough newsprint for tomorrow morning's
paper. There are twenty-two carloads of newsprint consigned to the
S8cS somewhere on the Continent. If you know where they are will
you call us at Ely sees 4149?

Before nightfall the telephone switchboard in the Stars and
Stripes building clamored with the voices of soldiers who had seen
carloads of paper here or there within the previous two weeks.
By the following evening we had enough paper to carry us for
several days. But the paper's request for help had consequences
beyond anything we had foreseen.

For three weeks railroad cars laden with virtually every kind
of paper manufactured were funneling into the army-operated
Paris switching yards. Some of the paper was consigned to the
Office of War Information, or the Propaganda and Psychological
Warfare Division of the army, or to French civilian newspapers.
It made no difference to the Joes to whom SeW had addressed a
plea of help wanted. They weren't going to see their paper run
short of newsprint.

Only once did The Stars and Stripes' concept of public service
carry it beyond ability to deliver. In the autumn of 1944, after
the American Army had raced across France and had liberated the
French perfume business, among other things, Lieutenant Colonel
Ensley Llewellyn thought it would be a fine idea if the paper
could undertake to do the soldiers' Christmas shopping for them.

He was moved to the contemplated public service by the
daily sight of scores of American doughboys, the whiskers, grime

220 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIFES

and weariness of the front still upon them, standing in queues at
the exotic perfume and cosmetics shops for which Paris is famous.

Llewellyn sent to the Desk a "must" item offering the paper's
assistance to soldiers who needed help in buying Christmas gifts-
of perfume or anything else to send back to America. The Desk
tried to argue that the paper would do well first to set up a
department and a specific modus operandi to handle the requests
that certainly would follow. Llewellyn, however, possibly may
have come to consider, as a regular staff member, the special if
eccentric providence which theretofore had come to the paper's
aid so many times. He said it would work out and made the
"must" an order.

One announcement and only one of the proposed Stars and
Stripes "shopping service" was printed in the paper. We said we
would find the gift and send it home. All the soldier had to do
was send to The Stars and Stripes his money and the address to
which the gift was to go.

Ralph Noel, a sergeant who probably knew more about army
finances than anyone else in the army including chief paymaster,
fought manfully to deliver the goods for "shopping service/' He
had a cousin living in Paris and she helped. At one time there
were sixteen paid and volunteer girls and as many soldiers chang-
ing marks into francs, buying Schiaparelli "Shocking" and send-
ing it to Dubuque with a card that said "Merry Christmas from
Elmer." But we never caught up with the number of requests.

Buried away in some corner of the Paris Herald building
which so long housed The Stars and Stripes in Paris there un-
doubtedly today are several quietly mad staffers and stenographers
still filling soldiers' pre-paid orders for perfume to be sent home
as a gift for Christmas, 1944.

We had one other bit of trouble with soldier requests. Early
in its career as a weekly, the paper resumed the plan of sponsor-
ing a fund by which American servicemen abroad contributed
money to the support of Allied children orphaned by the war:
the Stars and Stripes of World War I had done the same thingr
for hundreds of little French girls and boys.

We started out with a plan of permitting any uqit bomber
group, infantry company, service battalion which raised the
equivalent of $400 to choose the kind of orphan it ivanted to
help. The soldiers could specify sex, age, nationality, color of

PUBLIC SERVICE 221

hair, etc., of the orphan to whom they wished to act as a great
many Europeans feel Uncle Sam should.

The Stars and Stripes War Orphan Fund helped thousands of
youngsters who had lost one or both parents to enemy action to
get a start in education, or to get past that critical first year in
\vhich slow-moving public assistance would not care adequately
for them. The $400 wasn't a great deal, and it wasn't designed to
provide all or even a majority of the orphan's care. The American
Red Cross, which administered the fund, simply figured on using
the $400 to provide a life above bleak and bare subsistence.

Bomber groups which sponsored orphans in England brought
their young charges to the airfields for parties and presents far
beyond the original subscription of $400. If in the turmoil that
fills Europe today there lingers a strain of feeling not thinned by
the bickerings of the international talkers who appear after wars,
possibly a share of it will be because here and there an unhappy
child found out just how generous and kind the average American
kid in a war could be.

Some of the motives of the soldiers seeking to sponsor war
orphans, however, to get back to the difficulties the paper's public
service occasionally engendered, gave the War Orphan Fund staff
and the Red Cross administrators a bit of difficulty.

The letter accompanying the sixth contribution to the
Orphan Fund, and about one every twenty-five thereafter, said
naively:

"For our $400 we would like to select a redheaded, good-
looking, feminine little French war orphan about twenty years
of age."

It didn't take very long for the fund's personnel to insert a
clause in the conditions of sponsorship specifying that no orphan
would be more than twelve years of age.

In the stories in which combat soldiers learned better ways
to fight a war, or in which engineers or ordnance men described
better ways of repairing and improvising equipment, The Stars
and Stripes did a genuine public service. The development of
"parachute brakes" for aircraft was one such.

Into the London office one evening came the telephoned
story of a Liberator bomber crew which had come back to base
from Germany with their plane's brakes and wing flaps destroyed

222 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

by enemy fire. Faced with a certainty that they would be unable
to halt the go-ton bomber before it reached the end of the run-
way, the Liberator crew hit upon the idea of tying a parachute
to the gun mount at each of the two waist windows,

As the plane with no brakes and no flaps glicjed in for a
landing, and the emergency crash truck and the ambulance
clanged expectantly at the far end of the runway, a new safety
device for combat aircraft was born.

Just as the bomber's brakeless wheels touched the concrete,
the waist gunners simultaneously pulled the two parachute rip-
cords. From each waist window blossomed the white silk of a
parachute. They caught in the blast of the propeller's slipstream
and with the effect of giant air anchors slowed the bomber to a

halt just short of the waiting crash truck.

The Stars and Stripes carried the story in a box on page one.
Within a month, at least four other observant bomber crews had
used this same device to make safe landings with planes so badly
damaged that a crash would have been inevitable before the dis-
covery of "parachute brakes/'

Paris, November 11, 1944
Hancock County Briefs:

IRA FISK ELECTED SHERIFF

"Will you as soon as possible publish the complete election re-
turns by states, with particular reference to the returns from Hancock
County, Ind.?" Signed First Lieutenant Melville E. Watson, APO 739.

This request came by mail to the Stars and Stripes news desk on
election night. A lot of editors might have screamed, but not on The
Stars and Stripes, which claims the best Indiana election coverage in
France. Here you are, lieutenant, straight from Ben E. Price, our New
York political sage:

"HANCOCK COUNTY, INDIANA . . . SHERIFF, IRA FISK, REPUBLICAN;
CORONER, CHARLES PASCO, REPUBLICAN; SURVEYOR, CHRIS OSTERMIER,
DEMOCRAT."

Bertha Kirkpatrick, Democrat, won something we think county
clerk.

Now that we've shown we can do it, we rest on our laurels. No
more, please.

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES

A.T ONE TIME The Stars and Stripes in Paris alone
was getting about 2,500 letters a week. Half of them were com-
plaints and beefs, many of which were directed against The Stars
and Stripes itself.

Often the beefs against the paper were legitimate. The Stars
and Stripes made the same number of errors as the average good
army organization. Its editors made the same number a good patrol
leader made, a tank commander or a corps commander. Graves
Registration Units saw the fighting men's leaders' mistakes. They
buried them. Mistakes in The Stars and Stripes, though, were
there in cold black print for everyone to read and reread and file
away or clip out. A mistake was never dead.

The greatest single number of complaints was from men in
units which had never or only infrequently been mentioned in the
paper. They wanted to know why. There was a constant argument
among staff members about the comparative importance of play
on a local story of great importance to a relative few and a
universal story of mild importance to thousands.

The question first came up on Mark Senigo's sports page in
the London edition. Were the fights held weekly in the ARC
Rainbow Corner more important than a Notre Dame-Ohio State
basketball game? Thousands would read of the game played back
home with casual interest but the few hundreds who watched the
local boxers and those who participated would probably clip out
the report of their affair and send it home.

When operations started in earnest, the question answered
itself. With several million men reading the paper, no one unit
could be given space on a story of interest to that unit alone.

223

224 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

There were, however, many real errors The Stars and Stripes
made both in general policies and on specific stories,

Maybe the worst mess we ever made of a story was the Third
Army's taking of Metz. The strength of the garrison was under-
estimated by Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr., and the
city did not fall so easily as he first told newspapermen he thought
it would.

Jim Grad and Earl Mazo were with the Third Army at the
time and they were filing regular news and feature stories on the
action leading up to the fall of the fortress city. The 5th and gsth
Infantry divisions were hammering away for weeks at the bastion.
One night, when the fall of the city seemed imminent, a story
came into the Paris office from Jim Grad. It was a color story
that told of the fighting leading into Metz. Jim did not have a
Metz dateline on for the simple reason that no American soldiers,
let alone a correspondent, had been in the city itself. The Desk
planned to use the story as it was written.

About eight o'clock a radio flash from some foreign news
agency was picked up by the Stars and Stripes listening station.
On the strength of the flash, which stated that Metz had fallen
to American troops, the Desk had Grad's story rewritten. A Metz
dateline was added to the story and a new lead was tacked in front
of the piece, which said that Metz had been captured.

When the paper got to Third Army troops still fighting a
bloody fight for Metz, the following day, more than one infantry-
man made a mental note to shoot the first S6*S reporter on sight.

Poor Jim Grad explained to Patton himself, to his staff and
to the PRO that he was as surprised as they were at the appear-
ance of the erroneous story under his by-line. The fact that there
was a duplicate of his original story in the censor's file there
helped officially but not every man in the Third Army could see
or hear about the correct version of Jim's story. After that, Grad
veered wide around Third Army territory.

The Stars and Stripes Metz mess wasn't over though. Several
days later the city actually fell to the 95th and the sth, which
had done the toughest fighting of their careers to win the town.
Both divisions had entered the city and each guarded its half
carefully against infringement by the other U. S. outfit.

The news came through that the two divisions had cleared
Metz but somewhere in transmission the phrase 5th Division was

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES 225

dropped and the following day The Stars and Stripes had the 95*
taking Metz alone. Every man in the 5th Division was ready to
pick up his rifle again. They wanted to clean up the gsth and then
march on to Paris to wipe out The Stars and Stripes. (To avoid
the civil war the Desk ran a front-page box next day, giving the
5th its credit.)

Mazo and Grad stayed out of trouble for a while after that
with the Third Army until finally Mazo, one of the two officer-
reporters on the staff, signed a petition, along with other Third
Army correspondents, asking for the removal from office of the
colonel acting as PRO. The petition was sent to Eisenhower and
when some Third Army checker saw Mazo's name (Lieutenant
Mazo) he hit the roof. Mutiny, he said. Mazo never went close
to Third Army again but he somehow escaped the court-martial
charges laid against him.

One of the greatest, if most unimportant, mistakes the paper
made happened in London months after the invasion.

Tony Cordaro, a man with more good ideas than he knew
what to do with, convinced Pete Lisagor, then editing the London
edition, that The Stars and Stripes should pick its own man-of-
the-year on January i, 1945. The army paper's own man should
be neither Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eisenhower nor anyone
else in the public eye, Tony said with conviction.

"Our man of the year as the GIs' newspaper, should be GI
Joe."

So that was it. The Stars and Stripes New Year edition carried
a three-column front-page picture of a combat-weary soldier with
helmet on, unshaven and dirty.

THE STARS AND STRIPES CHOICE FOR MAN-OF-THE-YEAR

The line over the picture read like that; underneath there
was a longer caption explaining fully that the picture of the
soldier had been picked as typical. It gave the man's full name,
rank and home town.

Newspapers in the States thought it was a good idea and
quoted the Stars and Stripes choice. The alert New York Times
city editor sent a reporter out to locate the man's family to see
what they thought about having their son chosen man-of-the-year
by The Stars and Stripes.

226 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

The reporter talked to the mother of the soldier named in
the Stars and Stripes picture caption and finally he even got a
picture of the soldier, taken several years before when he had
been a civilian.

Back in the Times offices the two pictures were compared.
The difference was remarkable. In one the soldier was a young,
carefree-looking boy and in the other, the combat picture, he was
a weary man with hard lines in his face and gray streaks showing
in his hair from under the helmet.

It was a natural "before-and-after" picture setup. Side by side
the New York Times ran the two pictures, noting in their caption
how the Stars and Stripes man-of-the-year had aged ten years in
less than a year of combat.

Other newspapers saw the Times pictures and copied them.
Time magazine used the picture and no one who saw the two
pictures side by side could help being impressed by the change the
war years had brought in the young boy's face.

The pictures got back to England and over to the Continent
from back home. And one day, buried in a stack of mail a foot
high, a note came into the Stars and Stripes office from a combat
soldier at the front. He broke the horrible news,

"That was a very fine picture of your man-of-the-year," he
said, "but it was not a picture of me as your caption stated."

The awful truth was that The Stars and Stripes had given
the wrong name to their combat soldier and when the New York
Times reporter got the picture of the man whose name appeared
in the army paper, he got the picture of an altogether different
man. Naturally, when the two were compared the editors noticed
a great difference.

Tony Cordaro, formerly with the Des Moines Register, glibly
explained to interrogating authorities that, while he admitted he
had made "a little mistake," it didn't seem important. After all,
Tony told them, the man was just a symbol to represent all fight-
ing soldiers. It didn't really matter that The Stars and Stripes used
the wrong name under the soldier's picture, he said.

Mistakes like that were made only once but somehow editors
of the various editions never really learned to avoid one thing,
which, whether it was actually in error or not, always brought in
basketfuls of complaints. We were always giving someone credit
for being first somewhere; being the biggest or having the most of

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES 227

something or the least. The Stars and Stripes staffers finally decided
that no one ever was first anywhere. If we found a man fifteen
feet tall in the army and said he was tallest there were bound to
be fifty letters in the mail the following day from fellows who
claimed to be sixteen feet tall.

We find a soldier named Aach who says the War Department
told him his name, alphabetically, leads all the rest; a guy named
Aaberg writes us and wants to know what about him.

We use the name of the soldier who climbed off the boat in
Ireland in January, 1942, as the first American soldier to set foot
in the British Isles after America declared war and a sergeant who
came over to serve at the American Embassy in London a few
weeks before that wants to know what about him.

On January 26, 1942, when the Eighth Air Force bombers
hit Germany for the first time at Wilhelmshaven, a Stars and
Stripes reporter got the name and home town of every man in
the bomber leading the formation that day so that the paper
would have the names of the first Americans in the U. S. Air
Force to fly over German territory. The 6-17 in which Brigadier
General Frank Armstrong flew as an observer led the formation,
but after The Stars and Stripes stated the following day that they
had been the first American crew over Germany, the crew of the
B-17 which flew on their right wing wrote in and said that actually
they were first because of the angle at which the formation flew
into Germany.

You couldnlt beat it. After a few years with the paper most
of its reporters wouldn't believe any "first" claim. If it had been
an American soldier who shot Hitler dead, most Stars and Stripes
reporters would have been leery about saying it was the first time
it had been done.

We made lots of mistakes in giving credit to one outfit for a
job another had done. One reporter, in the early days ofter the
invasion, reported that the Rangers had taken Carentan, a tiny
but once strategically important French town. The loist Airborne
Division, a rugged bunch of Americans who worked full time at
the job of being a tough outfit, actually lost a good many men in
clearing Carentan and for months after the mistake it was not
safe for an S&S reporter to go near the division.

Joe Fleming did a piece in London on an ack-ack outfit
which was reported to have been the first American anti-aircraft

228 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

battery in the British Isles to bring down a German plane. The
following morning a captain called the office in a plaintive voice.
He did not dare distribute the papers to his men, he said, be-
cause twenty minutes before The Stars and Stripes said that the
first German plane was destroyed by the other flak battery, his
outfit had knocked a Ju 88 out of the air.

Joe did a humorous apology piece on that one but for the
most part the paper had to let the mistakes stand. When the
Jewish chaplain wrote us that the Catholic ceremony we had
reported as the first American church ceremony in Germany was
actually preceded by three days by an informal Jewish religious
meeting on Friday, there was nothing we could do. A correction
was worse than the mistake if it was one.

Some of the mistakes were more a matter of poor judgment
than actual error. At Thanksgiving and Christmastime, the
quartermaster public relations office invariably issued some sort
of statement on the meal they were going to provide soldiers on
the holiday.

"Every GI will have at least a pound of Turkey with ice
cream for dessert with nuts and cigars and cigarettes on the side,"
the handout read one year.

Knowing that food was always big news to soldiers, The Stars
and Stripes .printed the pound of turkey per soldier story. For the
following week the office was flooded with letters and cluttered
with personal visits from cooks who first swore at us and then
pleaded, if we had an ounce of mercy in us, not to do it again.

The cooks who were forced to serve warm corned beef, fresh
from the can, were nearly lynched by soldiers who had read the
Stars and Stripes turkey story. Others who got turkey, and they
were in the majority, were almost lynched too when they cut the
soldiers short with a very small bit of turkey in an ocean of
mashed potatoes. Some, of course, got their full turkey ration
but the quartermaster had issued the statement assuming ideal
conditions and the figure was probably strictly an arithmetical
one which did not take into consideration problems of distribu-
tion, losses, etc., which inevitably appear.

Chaplains, next to cooks, were one of the paper's major
sources of trouble on those special holidays. The Desk was always
fair about news of religious interest because usually the man put-
ting out the paper could view the subject with considerable

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES 229

detachment. In London, on Thanksgiving, the Protestant story
generally got the biggest play in the paper simply because the
Protestant chaplains arranged to have their services held in West-
minster Abbey. The American flag was hoisted over the Abbey,
and because this marked the first time in history that any but the
flag of St. George had ever hung over the great English shrine, it
was news.

The Catholic chaplain could not see it that way, however.
The Catholics were having a pretty important Mass said in West-
minster Cathedral the Catholic chaplain contended, and he felt
their story should be told in the same size type and for the same
length as the Protestant story, at least. His argument, not an
unreasonable one, was that more soldiers would attend Catholic
services than Protestant services that day. The Jewish chaplain,
had nothing to say on Thanksgiving.

On December 16, 1943, the news was a little slow and the
London edition went overboard on a story Arthur White brought
in about plans for installing regular ice-cream soda fountains at
American bases all over England. The story was true when printed
and the fountains were already bought by army post exchange
authorities but they hadn't wanted that much publicity. London
newspapers picked up the story and before long all England knew
that the American Army in the British Isles was going to have
ice-cream sodas for itself. There was so much unfavorable com-
ment from within the army itself about "pampering the soldiers/'
and so much criticism from the British who were "already outeaten
about four to one by the Americans who brought their own food
with them, that the plan was abandoned and the soda fountains,
never were installed.

Probably one of the most valid criticisms which could be
leveled against the paper was its ever overoptimistic slant on the
news like the soda fountains and the pound of turkey. We were
never quite skeptical enough.

We were always taking reports from the States that a new
model 6-17, which was capable of carrying ten tons of bombs,
was being produced, when men on the staff who knew airplanes
knew very well that no 6-17 would ever cart ten tons of bombs
to Germany and fly back the same day. With great optimism we
reported new American weapons which were going to make the
invasion easier. Somehow most of those weapons seem to have

280 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

been left in Stars and Stripes files. They never showed up on the
war front.

We were criticized because the paper always had the war
coming to an end. The answer to that was, of course, that it
always was coming to an end. That was the answer to many of
the criticisms that we presented nothing but optimistic news. For
almost two years there was little but good news about the progress
of the war on all fronts. On the few occasions when the war did
not go so well, when things looked black, the paper usually pre-
sented the facts to the extent censorship allowed.

With the air force, the bombing of Germany in daylight
looked like an impossible task after the beating the Eighth Air
Force took over Schweinfurt on October 14, 1943, when it lost
sixty planes. Just after the invasion, during the four-day storm
which made beach landings almost impossible, it looked as though
the beachhead might have to be abandoned. In December, after
the Ardennes breakthrough by the Germans, it appeared as though
their armor might cut off our First Army supply link into Lige
and run riot through France behind our lines.

In all those cases The Stars and Stripes presented the black
news as it was, when censorship permitted.

Before the invasion, guessing the date was a great game. In
December, 1942, just before Christmas, a reporter went around
to see the chief chaplain in the ETO. The chaplain, a full colonel,
said that the invasion would come off very shortly, that the war
would be won soon afterward, and that all American soldiers in
England would be home by the following Christmas. The high
command had obviously not let their chaplains in on anything.

A year later at Christmastime we were still getting letters:
"You said last Christmas that by now we would be home," etc.

We always ran into that trouble, as every newspaper does.
If the letter was answered, and letters usually were answered by
a staff of letter answerers, it was explained that the chaplain had
said that he thought the war would be over* The Stars and Stripes
had nothing to say on the matter.

It happened that way no matter whom we quoted. If we used
a story saying that a War Department order had just been issued
stating that all troops in Europe would go direct to the Pacific,
ive were damned all over the army the following day.

COMPLAINTS AKD MISTAKES 281

"The Stars and Stripes says we aren't going home first when
this war is over/'

"The Stars and Stripes says . . ."

The editorial department of The Stars and Stripes, or more
properly the Desk and the other people who handled the news,
seldom made any statement on their own authority. One of the
biggest mistakes, probably the biggest, that The Stars and Stripes
ever made, however, appeared in the editorial content of the
paper. That was the publication of editorials designed to "orient"
the soldiers' thinking.

That series of editorials was, the staffers felt, the one com-
pletely unethical and immoral thing The Stars and Stripes ever
did.

The editorials were bitterly opposed by the Desk and the
staff since they were thought to provide the opening wedge by
which the army Information and Education Branch might eventu-
ally pry its way into the news columns of the soldiers' newspaper,
producing a publication thus in many respects similar to the state-
controlled press of the enemy.

The inroads the army's official propaganda department began
to make on The Stars and Stripes started back in the days just
prior to the invasion of June 6, 1944*

Armed with a War Department order, which found it con-
venient to overlook General Marshall's original dictum that The
Stars and Stripes should be the soldiers' newspaper and as free as
possible from army control, Arthur Goodfriend, who had written
for some newspapers back home and had prepared several War
Department pamphlets designed to teach the soldier what he was
fighting for, descended on The Stars and Stripes to convert its
eight-page weekly magazine section into a publication to be called
Warweek, conceived as a vehicle for carrying to the combat man
the contents of War Department directives which the soldier
wouldn't read if they came to him as directives.

The Stars and Stripes staff had fought successfully against
just that sort of thing from the day the first paper was printed,,
and in the course of fighting had made the paper so obviously
an unoriented creation that the soldiers had come to trust in it
pretty much implicitly.

"The orientation people," as the staffers referred to them,,
took advantage of that reputation and with orders from so high

282 THE STORY OF THE STABS AND STRIPES

that the sergeants and corporals couldn't buck them, began to

teach the soldiers how to think.

The combat man in a bomber or on the firing line feels that
there is no particularly good reason why he should be told how
to think by someone two or three or five hundred miles from the
-conditions under which he is doing his thinking.

Although the soldiers resented the 'Tips on How to Destroy
Your Foe," written by rear echelon orientation men, it wasn't
until October and November of 1944, when the fighting became
bitter along the western German border, that there was any really
audible protest from the front.

During that period, Goodfriend, who had become the "editor
in chief" through a series of higher echelon movings, began to
write almost daily "picture editorials," which were ordered into
the paper over the vehement protests of the editors and reporters
who alone really put out The Stars and Stripes.

These editorials comprised lectures on what the army wanted
the soldier to believe and think about, illustrated by an appro-
priate and, if possible, interesting photograph. Most notorious of
these was a neat little gem entitled, "So you want to go home?"
That one came close to demolishing completely The Stars and
Stripes 9 reputation as the GI's newspaper.

The editorial exhorted the fighting men to slug on down the
Toad to Berlin with undiminished fervor, hating all that Nazism
.stood for and stopping not for a single reason before Victory. It
censured them for any occasional moments of doubt, bitingly
.scored any soldier who had the temerity to express a wish to
go home.

The editorial referred scathingly to soldiers who might "raise
their heads at night from tear-stained pillows . . ."

A Stars and Stripes reporter couldn't safely go within two
miles of the veteran by noon the next day. Those staffers who
were up there slipped off to cover divisions where they were
unknown, and palmed themselves off as being from the Associated
Press, or maybe Yank. Anything but from the paper that had
demanded of the fighting men "So you want to go home?"

Every soldier fighting the enemy in the mud, cold and fear
and death of the Western Front wanted to go home. Naturally.
He knew the job had to be done first, and knew it would be done

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES

first, but he was goddamned if he could see anything wrong with
wanting to go home.

Quite possibly from a completely detached point of view the
sentiments of the editorial were fitting and proper. But The
Stars and Stripes, as any enlisted man staffer who lived with the
Joes could have told Goodfriend, was not published for people
with a detached point of view. It is very hard to feel detached
when you're going to get killed the next night or the next hour
or the next week.

For that editorial there were some major generals command-
ing divisions who seriously considered barring The Stars and
Stripes from their areas. At least one of them wrote his old West
Point friend, Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, decrying
that and other Stars and Stripes editorials and asking that some-
thing be done.

For that editorial, some of the ordinary staffers for months
lived almost without surcease in the midst of the fighting, trying
their best to restore by their presence where the fighting was
the paper's prestige with the guys who were winning the war,
the guys who wanted to go home.

. February 3, 1945

JUST A NEW GUY FROM BROOKLYN

by Bud Hutton

Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

WITH THE gora INF. Div. The new guy from Brooklyn looked
across the snowy fields in the moonlight, saw the German tanks coming
toward him. The German infantry was with them, black against the
snow, and he must have known what would happen if he stayed.

He came up to D Co., in the regiment's first battalion, at Christ-
mas time, and they made him an ammo bearer with the machine guns.
He was a private, and he didn't have much to say. If there was a job
to be done he'd do it and that was that.

He was 20 years old, about five feet seven, with kind of brown
hair and a sort of medium build. He was one of a batch of reinforce-
ments, and it was easier to remember the names of some of the others,
so mostly Dog Company called him the new guy from Brooklyn and
let it go at that.

The outfit moved north to cut at the south flank of the Nazi
bulge, and the new guy did a good job in the rough going east of
Bastogne, so Captain John McLean, the Los Angeles skipper of Dog

234 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Company, made him a machine-gunner. The new guy said that'd sure
be good and slipped back into the obscurity of the company.

So they came, the night of January 23, to Binafeld, which is a
little town the Yanks had to have for the jump-off to the Our River
and the crossing into Germany.

They caught the enemy facing the wrong way and chased him
out of town about one o'clock in the morning. Then Dog Company
hurried in the bright moonlight to get set for the counter-attack which
always follows.

There were three houses in a triangle on the far edge of town,
and in them T/Sgt. Paul Landolt, of Aberdeen, Idaho, first platoon
sergeant in Baker Company, placed his men. He found the new guy
from Brooklyn, from Dog Company, already in the house nearest to
the Germans.

The new guy had set up his caliber .50 in a window on the sec-
ond floor, overlooking a road and the fields from which the Nazis
probably would come. Landolt didn't know the guy's name, but he'd
seen him around. He asked the new guy was he all right, and the kid
said yes, and Landolt said did he know the bazooka ammo was gone.
The kid said yes again, and then the counterattack began.

Three hundred yards away, out of the black shadows of the woods
beyond the fields, came two German tanks, silhouetted clear and sharp
in the moonlight against the snow. They began to clank toward the
three houses, and behind them came the infantry.

As Lieutenant Colonel Bill Dupuy, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
commander of the first battalion, or anyone else will tell you, the tanks
don't like to come into a thing like that alone; the bazooka will get
them. So the infantry comes along and it consolidates the position if
the tanks clear it out.

The new guy was a reinforcement and he had been with the outfit
only a month, but he knew if they could kill the Nazis' infantry, the
tanks probably would stop, because they wouldn't know how it was
about the bazooka ammo.

The noise of the tanks was getting loud across the field, and the
new guy must have been thinking about it. He could fire a little and
have a jam in his gun, or he could run out of ammo, and then the
red and orange flash wouldn't be there for the enemy.

The other men in the houses heard the new guy's gun begin to
yammer, saw figures out beyond the tanks stumble, fall, less than 100
yards away.

The tanks came on until they were 20 yards from the nearest
house, where the machine gun was, and stopped. The new guy's gun
kept firing.

The men who are left in Dog Company will tell you what hap-

COMPLAINTS AND MISTAKES 285

pened later: how some German infantry surrounded the three houses
and First Lieutenant Bob Smith called down artillery around the
houses; how they fought the Nazis off till daylight came and the Amer-
ican tanks got up to give them support.

Mostly, though, they'll tell you about a new guy from Brooklyn

and how he kept firing at the tank turrets until they turned. They'll
tell you that by that time there wasn't enough infantry left to cover
the tank. They'll tell you they could see the reflection of the machine
gun's flare on the sides of the tanks, and they'll tell you that the new
guy must have known what would happen if he stayed there and fired.
The first shell from the tanks smashed the house wall next to the
new guy and he kept firing. The second shell passed through the red
and orange flare at the muzzle of the new guy's gun and exploded, and
because the censor won't pass the name of a soldier killed in action
until it's certain his folks are notified, the story has to call him the
new guy from Brooklyn, which is the way it was to most of Dog
Company.

Not long after "So you want to go home?" General Eisen-
hower sent a call to The Stars and Stripes for the editor to confer
with him. Max Gilstrap, a captain who acted as administrative
officer for the editorial department of the principal paper in Paris,
went along to see General Eisenhower with the sergeant who had
been recalled to run the Desk for a month or so in an effort to
restore some of the paper's standing. The sergeant, who had re-
ceived the summons from General Eisenhower's office, didn't see
any point in inviting Goodfriend to come along.

General Eisenhower said he wanted to express some concern
about some of the editorials which had appeared in the preced-
ing month or so. He pointed out that almost never had he tried
to influence in any way what went into the soldiers' newspaper.
He said flatly he didn't want anyone else doing it. But editorials
such as "So you want to go home?" and some others in that vein,
he said, had brought a most unfavorable reaction from the fight-
ing men and their commanders.

General Eisenhower said he felt that from time to time
The Stars and Stripes had a duty to remind its readers of the basic
cause for which we were fighting, but that "perhaps it would be
better to do so in a straight, factual manner."

The sergeant agreed wholeheartedly with everything the
Supreme Commander said. He said the staff felt that way about
it too. Finally, he explained as diplomatically as he could that the

286 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

editorials had appeared as a result of direct orders from various
generals and colonels under the Supreme Commander.

The sergeant went back and told the staff about the confer-
ence. He told the colonel, too, and the other colonels and a
general who filled out the ranks of command above The Stars and
Stripes.

The colonels and the generals said yes, they knew exactly
what the Supreme Commander "really meant" and they inter-
preted the message the sergeant brought. The sergeant naively
said he didn't think General Eisenhower's declaration of policy
needed any interpreting. The colonels laughed indulgently.

The orientation editorials continued to be published, by
order. There wasn't anything the staff could do.

The staffers who brought out the paper could have gone
back to General Eisenhower and asked him to put a stop once
and for all to the negation of General Marshall's original directive
that the paper was to belong to the soldiers. But they didn't. They
wanted to, but that was in midwinter of 1944-45 when Dwight
Eisenhower was beset on every side by pressure to do this or
demands to do that, to stop von Rundstedt's Ardennes offensive.
And after that the Supreme Commander had all the worries one
man should have in driving home the final blow that brought
victory in May. The Stars and Stripes staff was not willing to add
to the burdens of that one man who could have helped.

Personally the authors of this story and possibly a majority
of the Stars and Stripes staff were friends of Arthur Goodfriend.
Outside the sphere of the army newspaper, Goodfriend was a
gutty, friendly individual who never stood on army ceremony
or rank. Most of us felt that in his efforts to propagandize the
American soldier he was carrying out what he sincerely believed
to be a worthy project. He simply didn't understand what we
considered the American way of a straigh forward, unbiased chron-
icle of things the way they were.

About the motives of the polished Information and Educa-
tion brass which glittered up to the top of the noncombatant
pyramid of command from Goodfriend to Washington we held
another view.

THIRTY

Paris, May 22, 1945

A JOE CAN DREAM

This Army Life at Times is a Bit of All Right

When Viewed From a Deep and Cozy Bed

By Andy Rooncy

Between white sheets in a hotel in Nice a Joe fell asleep and he
dreamed:

He was assigned to a division made up of the best from the First,
Second, Third, Fourth, Ninth, 82nd Airborne and a few more crack
divisions. They just took the old-timers. Terry Allen was division com-
mander*

The infantry division was reinforced with tank battalions selected
from the Second, Third and Fourth Armored divisions: they all had
new tanks with three feet of armor all around and a quick-traversing
high-velocity io5-mm. gun.

Every man in the division kept his M-i and was given a German
Luger and a Schmeisser machine pistol in addition. Each man also
got a pair of i6-power Zeiss binoculars and a Leica.

One of the best things about the outfit was that there was a jeep
for every four men and the jeeps were armed with handy twin Span-
dau machine guns taken from the tail of captured J U 88s.

The division artillery was equipped with German 88s, which artil-
lery officers had been careful to see that the War Department had not
"improved and modified*' and with our own 1055, 155$ and 240$. Each
platoon was supported by a battery of 4. 2 -mm. chemical mortars and,
of course, had their own cub observation planes.

The division fought only on weekdays and the men were paid in
American dollars, not cigar coupons as formerly, every Friday night,

2*7

288 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

whereupon their CIOs would turn them loose on the nearest town on
the boys' promise that they would report back in time for the war first
thing Monday morning.

Both EM and officers in the division were given a weekly liquor
ration and the PX ration had no tropical chocolate bars in it. Each
man got a carton of cigarettes each week and if he didn't smoke them
himself he could turn them back to an officer whose job it was to take
them to the best local market and sell them. The soldier was given all
but three per cent of the return on sales. The other three per cent
went into the division fund which gave every man $100 when his turn
came to go home on a 3o-day furlough every six months.

Special arrangements were made with the postmaster in New
York to have the division's mail sorted there and it was then put on
special planes which flew directly into a field near the division CP,
giving the boys four-day mail service even from the West Coast.

Each infantryman who received four or more air-mail letters each
month got flying pay and the Air Force fellows were mad as the very
dickens about it because no matter how many letters they got they
couldn't get the infantryman's $10 combat pay. The dreamer was
heard to chuckle in his sleep by a chambermaid who was passing the
door with four sheets over her arm, whistling "Off We Go into the
Bright Blue Yonder," in French.

When the division got in a tight spot the cooks were issued class B
ration; usually, however, they got regular garrison rations, with a
chicken in every messkit every Sunday. Some C rations were issued the
fellows who wanted them to feed friendly animals they had acquired
and K rations were fed to German prisoners who wouldn't talk.

Each jeep was equipped with a blowtorch instead of the regular
GI stove and the canteen cups they heated their coffee in were of a
new design which did not burn the lip when full of hot coffee.

In the winter the men were issued German sheep-lined jackets
instead of the regular or irregular field jackets. Issue shoes were always
paratroop boots instead of cold, leaky, buckle-top boots.

Underwear, towels and handkerchiefs were white, not olive drab,
when issued, and to keep these dainties clean the quartermaster pro-
vided the division with a mobile, foolproof, 48-hour laundry service.
The laundry almost never made mistakes except when some careless
worker slipped an extra shirt or pair of shorts into a bundle.

Because of the division's experience, it often was given towns to
take which were being defended by Italian prisoners whom the Ger-
mans had ordered to fight. By a great stroke of luck the cellars in the
towns were always as full of good things to drink as was the cellar of
the Excelsior Hotel in Cologne.

The division's actions were closely and accurately followed in The

THIRTY 289

Stars and Stripes and on the average day most of the men in the divi-
sion had their names mentioned at least once. The paper always
reached them the same day it was published.

The dreamer, who had 110 points toward a discharge, awoke.
Next day he was shipped to a repple depple and moved as an essential
through the Mediterranean to the CBI, where he lived unhappily ever
after.

On the Western Front the guns are quiet. The dust settles
on the rubble of Germany. Some of the Joes turned west and went
home; some of them to the Pacific; some of them stayed to guard
the peace they won. The Stars and Stripes is already established in
the Pacific for those who are occupying Japan. Some editions of
the paper Paris, Nice, one or two in Germany, and for a time
the one in Rome will stay with the Joes in the ETO as long as
they need it.

Here and there across the newspaper empire, which a bunch
of soldiers built, a press slows and the last copy of the local SfrS
has been printed. The staffers go away to a new job, or maybe
home, and the city room returns to the kind of normalcy it knew
before the pinwheels came.

Probably it can't be, but as the noise of the presses dies
away you have a wishful sort of feeling within you that maybe the
paper won't have disappeared entirely from this place. That
maybe, when it's quiet again and the civilian staff of whatever
paper normally publishes there is back on the job, someone once
in a while will light a newspaper under a rewriteman's chair or
hurl a pastepot at an erring reporter; that maybe where the soldier-
reporters have been something will stay on which will continue
to speak out for the ordinary folk who can't speak out for them-
selves. You hope there will be someone to stop in now and then
at the Lamb and Lark . . .

On the way home one of the old gang paused in London. He
went to the Lamb and Lark. As he stepped from Printing House
Lane into the cool shadowed pub, and smelled again the dank
old-beer-and-cigarette-smoke smell of the place that was home to
SfrS for so long, the staffer heard the phone ringing. Alf started
to answer the phone before he saw the staffer.

240 THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES

Alf put the receiver to his ear and out of the corner of his
mouth he said, "City Desk/' The staffer said that Alf s voice was
a little lonely, like a man saying over again a line from a story
he'd read a long time ago.