Media : Airlifting the News:...

The “hometown” newspaper of American GIs in Europe, The Stars and Stripes, is preparing to go to war again.

The European edition is printing 190,000 copies a day, up from the usual 140,000, and is flying the paper to Saudi Arabia, where it is distributed to U.S. troops. But with more than 230,000 U.S. servicemen and women in that region, all starved for news, “there’s still not enough to go around,” says Managing Editor Bob Wicker.

The staff of “Stripes,” as it is familiarly known, tries to deliver the paper to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines within a day or two of publication, depending on the vagaries of the airlift system.

New readers in the Persian Gulf region find a varied journalistic diet in the tightly edited, 28-page tabloid, with national and international news, features, comics, syndicated columnists, plenty of sports and a lively letters-to-the-editor page. In pages where readers of the famed World War II edition saw drawings of Bill Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe,” today’s military reader can peruse the equally trenchant Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” and Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad.

And, of course, there’s a daily special section with reports from the Middle East called “Crisis in the Gulf.”

“We edit with the idea that we are our readers’ hometown paper, in the sense that we are trying to keep them widely informed while looking after their special interests,” said Wicker in his Spartan office in a suburb of this Rhineland city.

Other American newspapers are attempting to have their editions airlifted to the gulf from nearby U.S. military air bases, and some, including The Times, have launched special fax editions to the troops. But Stripes has a much wider distribution system, processed through the Army Post Office (APO) in Saudi Arabia to more than 200 units in the field and at sea.

“We’ve got readers from Turkey to Iceland, and now Saudi Arabia,” said circulation manager Deane B. McDermott. “It’s not an easy job getting the papers to them, but we’re used to complex distribution.”

McDermott says that more than 80% of the papers for the gulf region are flown by military aircraft from Frankfurt-Main air base to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the other 20% by commercial cargo to Riyadh, the capital.

In getting the paper to the troops at the front, the European edition of Stripes is following distinguished precedents. The first professional Stars and Stripes was published late in World War I, on Feb. 8, 1918--a weekly produced by an all-military staff for the American Expeditionary Force. On its staff were such journalistic notables as Pvt. Harold Ross, later to found the New Yorker, critic Alexander Woolcott, and sports writer Grantland Rice. Gen. John J. Pershing credited the paper with being a major factor in sustaining the morale of the American troops in France.

After the war the paper folded, but the European edition was reinstituted on April 18, 1942, in London, first as a four-page weekly selling for 2 pence--then about 5 cents. It quickly grew to an eight-page daily. A separate Mediterranean edition was soon established with its own editors and staff, and also a Pacific edition. The papers expanded rapidly, with as many as 25 printing locations in Europe, North Africa and Hawaii.

During the war, the paper was published in rear-line cities, but also from presses newly captured from enemy control. Reporters and editors were always on the move, setting up shop as close to the front as possible.

“We kept printing in plants as we moved forward: Algiers, Naples, Rome,” recalled retired Los Angeles Times correspondent Jack Foisie, who served as a combat reporter with the Mediterranean edition in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, an admirer and special friend of Stripes, issued a hands-off directive against officers who wanted to bring the publication under official Army editorial control.

“There was a lot of pressure from the military to make us a propaganda sheet, but Gen. Eisenhower insisted on our editorial independence,” said Foisie. “He said he wanted it to be as close to a soldier’s hometown newspaper as possible, not in the narrow sense, but with plenty of news about things the GI was interested in. For us, it was a great job--serving your country, up front with troops, but not getting shot at every day, and practicing your profession.”

After the war, a decision was made to continue publication in Europe and the Pacific as long as American troops remained abroad. The European postwar newspaper plant moved several times in Germany before settling in Griesheim at a former Luftwaffe training field. Over the years, the paper built up a reporting staff with a dozen bureaus, and extensive news agencies.

Defense Department policy continues to insist on the free flow of news to all military personnel without censorship or news management; the calculated withholding of unfavorable news is forbidden. However, arguments still arise as to whether the military is attempting to impose news management on civilian editors, and congressional sources recently charged that such interference had occurred at the Pacific edition of Stripes, which is based in Tokyo. The charges stimulated a professional inquiry that led to changes in the Pacific edition’s structure to strengthen civilian direction.

The paper eschews staff-written editorials but carries a wide range of signed columnists, commentators and cartoonists who span the political spectrum. It prints front-page news stories that are critical of the military or the Administration and has conducted its own hard-hitting investigations into such sensitive military subjects as the black market, women soldiers, medical care and crime by U.S. military personnel in Germany.

The publication costs 25 cents--the Defense Department pays for the gulf-bound copies--but that price does not cover the costs, estimated at 40 cents a copy. Advertising is restricted to printed inserts from organizations supporting or associated with the military, which does not bring in enough revenue to break even. And government subsidy is limited to transporting the publication’s newsprint and delivering its product, some mailing privileges and the salaries of the paper’s relatively few military personnel, 28 out of 767 employees.

Still, the operation stays in the black thanks to The Stars and Stripes’ 192 bookstores in Europe, which sell magazines and books, and its profitable job-printing shop at Darmstadt. It all adds up to a $65-million-a-year business.

Stripes officials say that it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, particularly when its balance sheet is hit hard, like American troops themselves, by the relative decline of the dollar’s value in Germany.

Despite the expense, news editor John Kominicki has assigned two reporters to Saudi Arabia: Like everyone else, they must apply for visas and sign up for press trips. “We don’t get any better official access than anyone else,” Kominicki, 35, said. “But soldiers probably feel more comfortable with a Stripes reporter than others. So we get a lot of unit requests for our guys to visit them.”

Military information officers tend to get edgy around Stripes reporters, their editors say, because they get on well with GIs, are specialists in the field, and therefore might more readily develop stories that could embarrass the services.

Until now, Stripes correspondents have been busy keeping up with feature stories on the military outfits being deployed and putting “a human face on the story,” as Kominicki calls it. In the future, though, they may be looking at harder-edged articles, he says, perhaps equipment failures, command relations problems and troop morale.

Kominicki, 35, foresees continuing military supervision over reporters in the war zone. “Vietnam was probably the last war where the military was willing to allow open access for the press,” he said. “While open access may have been a success for the American people, it is hard to find an American officer who will say that policy was a success for the military. If it comes to war, there will be controlled access for the media in the gulf.”

One of the most popular sections of Stripes is the letters page.

“We received about 6,000 letters a year before the gulf crisis and printed about 1,000,” said letters editor Kathy Chipman Wicker, wife of the managing editor. “We run to consumer service, and if they’re questions we can’t answer, we forward them to the appropriate military command for response.”

There are plenty of complaints in the letters from Operation Desert Shield in the gulf, she says, but few involving commitment to the mission.

“We have gung-ho readers who are getting tired of sitting around, now that they’ve been there for a couple of months. We’ve got a really patriotic audience out there.

“The thrust of many letters suggests the troops are interested in the political reasons for their being there; and they want to make sure their families know they are OK. They also want people back home to know the hardships implicit in life in the field, the lack of cold drinking water and warm showers and recreation. They just want Americans to understand the conditions they are living under, the heat, sand, scorpions.”