![]() ![]() From time to time there had arisen the question of whether The Stripes had an editorial policy - a question posed alike by GI readers and by representatives of Allied governments who sometimes seemed to have difficulty understanding that a newspaper could have the sanction and support of a government without becoming a mouthpiece for the official viewpoint. But the mission of The Stars and Stripes remained unchanged. With the end of the global war and the settling down of the Army to the business of the occupation, the emphasis of the news shifted and the pace of the news slowed down. Trucks had to barrel over hundreds of miles of routes broken up un the fighting, through supply convoys and troop movements, in an attempt to maintain contact with troops who were usually not in the same place two days in succession.Įven when the ETO settled down to the comparative stability of the postwar period routemen were driving daily hauls as long as 380 miles. ![]() In the last few weeks of the war, the circulation problem was a big one. Somebody asked him what's going on up there, Larry, and Larry said they're having a big party, everyone's drinking vodka. The night Larry Riordan stumbled back into Pfungstadt his boots - and his camera - were still clotted with Elbe River mud. Sometimes the correspondents in the field were moving faster than the news. Things happened so fast sometimes you couldn't tell whether you were writing today's story or yesterday's - or tomorrow's. Teletype lines, the vital bloodstream of any newspaper, were a hoped-for luxury of the future. Jim McGowan sent one of the guys upstairs into the attic and he came down with a case of ancient-looking wooden circusposter type, and while the German linotypers punched out the sad words they couldn't understand, he started to fit into the page-forms the ugly black letters: "Roosevelt Dead."ĭuring the edition's early period, the day's news was a composite of rewrite from the news agency dispatches picked up by radio and phone calls traversing uncertain routes over a shaky system of telephones extending from Pfungstadt back as far as London and Paris and forward to the flexible and unpredictable war fronts. That night the type had to be big because it was an important story and one that everyone would read and feel. You can't put out a newspaper without type and the night the first big story broke the paper was still being nursed on a couple of odd-sized fonts of queer-looking German F's and W's with tails. The job of setting up a plant in a newly-conquered territory presented problems which could seldom be solved according to the book. The paper developed through this line of succession under circumstances which would be irregular in the operation of any newspaper. Since then the top desk has been occupied successively by John Radosta, New York Times Paul Elliott, Detroit News Stoddard White, Detroit News and Ken Zumwalt, Sacramento Union, the current managing editor under whom the paper returned to Pfungstadt last December. The original staff was headed by Bob Moora, of the New York Herald Tribune, as managing editor. ![]() The Pfungstadt plant was maintained for exactly a year, then abandoned in favor of the Altdorf plant of the Southern Germany Edition, and finally repossessed as The Stripes' permanent home, on December 5, 1946. Within a month the Germany Edition of The Stars and Stripes had a daily circulation of more than a half a million. They found it, in Pfungstadt, Hesse, on April 1 and four days later 10,000 copies of the first four-page paper were printed. The Germany Edition started with two jeeploads of men from the Paris and Nancy editions looking for a printing plant east of the river. The five current editions of The Stars and Stripes are published on the site of the original Germany Edition, which was established in the Spring of 1945, as the push beyond the Rhine became a race across Germany. Pfungstadt Plant Taken by Staff After Rhine Jump ![]()
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