The Story Of The Stars And Stripes - Paperback

THE STORY OF THE STARS AND STRIPES THE STORY OF TRIPES By BUD BUTTON and ANDY ROONEY FARRAR RINEHAHT. INCORPORATED NEW YORK TORONTO 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 hes as scared as the rest, or maybe a little more, but hes 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 ings 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 theyd be soldiers first and news papermen second. The staffers didnt say anything, because you cant 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 aprivate 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...