The Stars And Stripes - European Edition
US Army, Europe
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Pfungstadt Plant Taken by Staff After Rhine Jump 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. The Germany Edition started with two jeeploads of men from the Paris and Nancy editions looking for a printing plant east of the river. They found it, in Pfungstadt, Hesse, on April 1 and four days later 10,000 copies of the first four-page paper were printed. Within a month the Germany Edition of The Stars and Stripes had a daily circulation of more than a half a million. 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. The original staff was headed by Bob Moora, of the New York Herald Tribune, as managing editor. 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 paper developed through this line of succession under circumstances which would be irregular in the operation of any newspaper. The job of setting up a plant in a newly-conquered territory presented problems which could seldom be solved according to the book.

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. That night the type had to be big because it was an important story and one that everyone would read and feel.

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."

During 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. Teletype lines, the vital bloodstream of any newspaper, were a hoped-for luxury of the future.

Things happened so fast sometimes you couldn't tell whether you were writing today's story or yesterday's -- or tomorrow's. Sometimes the correspondents in the field were moving faster than the news. The night Larry Riordan stumbled back into Pfungstadt his boots -- and his camera -- were still clotted with Elbe River mud. Somebody asked him what's going on up there, Larry, and Larry said they're having a big party, everyone's drinking vodka. And that was the linkup.

In the last few weeks of the war, the circulation problem was a big one. 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.

Even when the ETO settled down to the comparative stability of the postwar period routemen were driving daily hauls as long as 380 miles.

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. But the mission of The Stars and Stripes remained unchanged. 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. One of the managing editors, called on to answer this question, affirmed that the paper DID have a policy and he defined it: "The Germany Edition remains dedicated to its original aims: Coverage of the news with accuracy and fairness; upholding the rights and dignity of its readers, and maintenance of its freedom from outside influence by exercising that freedom widely and realizing the obligations it entails."

The rights and dignity of its readers meant everybody. When the President came to Potsdam for the Big Four conference, he was one of our readers, too. Of course he was a rather special one, but he had the same rights. So Mr. Truman was invited, like all our readers, to submit any gripes he might have to B Bag, with the assurance that, under Stripes' avowed policy, the commander-in-chief gets as good a break as any Pfc."

Mr. Truman got a kick out of that but he said he didn't have anything at the moment to gripe about, so he just sent along his good wishes. General Ike almost made up his mind once to write a letter to B Bag but he decided against. It might look as if he were trying to exert pressure on the paper.

After all, Ike had let us know how he felt about it from the very beginning: "So long as it lives, the paper must remain completely free..."

You could call it policy or no-policy but that's what the editors had in mind.

From the beginning, there was always plenty of news. The big black headlines stopped the action of history like a camera shutter: "Nazis Quit" ... "Air Fleets Hit Japan" ... "Atomic Bomb Levels Hiroshima" ... and the really big one "Peace."

Afterwards the headlines were quieter and the type wasn't so black but it was still history: "85 Points and Out" ... "Redeployment Reaches Halfway Point" ... "44's Marked for Occupation."

Redeployment hit the Pfungstadt edition.

In October Paul Elliott was ZId and Ken Zumwalt left his managing editorship in Nice to take over. An undermanned desk remained to get out an honest report on, of all things, redeployment.

Staffing the desk were White, Landau and Creed Black. Short timers were Frank Quest and Charles McHarry.

It was soon pointed out that Altdorf, near the geographical center of the U.S. Zone, had long been selected as the logical place to publish an occupation edition.

April 16 Pfungstadt published its 377th edition and closed four years after the opening of the first edition of World War II.

Altdorf Edition, Born at War's End, Outlived Sisters

By Dick Jones and Sterling Lord

Presses Once Printed Nazi 'Der Stuermer'
The last of the combat-born editions of The Stars and Stripes moved into Altdorf, Bavaria, in the wake of the victorious troops who were chasing the Wehrmacht into its last mountain redoubt. Motivated by the urgency of keeping the news abreast of the swiftly-moving armies, the paper's first wave took over, on April 20, 1945, an auxiliary plant which only a few weeks before had been used by Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer and published the first issue of the Southern Germany's edition the night the German forces surrendered.

Altdorf continued to be the farthest-east edition of the soldier paper until it was moved on Dec. 5, 1946 to Pfungstadt and established in what is now its permanent home. The edition grew in those 18 months from four pages produced daily by six editorial workers to 12 pages with a staff of 63. T/4 John Radosta was the first managing editor and was succeeded in June by Pfc Arthur R. Force, then by T/4 Frank T. Waters and at the year's end by Sgt William Weinstein.

One week after V-J Day the Altdorf edition began the publication of Midweek, a weekly magazine devoted entirely to featured material about Europe. It was in this magazine that the Stripes began to use color printing as a regular feature.

In this early period of Altdorf history the edition was being circulated from Vienna to the northernmost reaches of the U.S. Zone but the western third of Germany was being covered by the edition then printed in Pfungstadt. Circulation trucks set out daily on long hauls into Czechoslovakia, and down into the Brenner Pass. It was an operation which had to get along without trains, and the soldiers who drove the trucks were responsible in a large measure for the success of the edition.

Though Altdorf continued to be thought of as a country cousin by personnel of the suave Paris and London editions, its own members found a Shangri-La in the pastoral peace of this ancient Bavarian village. By V-J Day all other soldiers had been moved out of Altdorf and Stripes men became oddities who were watched and sometimes seven admired by the natives of the village.

Became Civilianized
As the edition grew, more German workers were hired and the paper soon was looked upon much as Bavarians in another generation had viewed their feudal baron; The Stars and Stripes had become the symbol of economic security and the German families who had one member working for the Amercian newspaper became a strange kind of aristocracy.

But the success of these villagers was only a reflection of what was happening within the organization itself.

The spring of 1946 was a significant period in the paper's history, in that it marked the transformation from GI to civilian publication. The change was coincident with a similar move, throughout the European Theater, whereby soldiers about to be redeployed and discharged were hired to continue their jobs in a civilian status.

The Southern Germany edition had a civilian staff member as early as March, Bill Weinstein, managing editor.

At the start of this civilianization period, the Southern Germany edition was one of two in the theater, but, when the Germany edition at Pfungstadt folded, the paper at Altdorf became the European edition, and the last one on the continent. Two months after the consolidation of the two editions, Ken Zumwalt, already a civilian, assumed duties as the managing editor.

Weekend appeared May 26, with 12 pages in black and red under the editorship of Jim McLean who prior to this time had been feature editor with the daily.

On August 16 a page-one article announced that, with this edition, The Stars and Stripes was growing to 12 pages for the first time in the nearly four years of the paper's history.

The Managing Editor (left) with the Editor in Chief.

Mr. Kenneth D. Zumwalt, a veteran who has served successively with the Paris, Liege, Nice, Altdorf, and Pfungstadt editions since October 1944, heads the editorial staff. About 20 Americans -- both civilians and soldiers, many of whom were professional newspapermen before the war, and most of whom served in combat zones -- assist in preparing the contents. The Stars and Stripes subscribes to three United States wire services -- Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service; and to two news-picture services -- Acme and lnternational News Pictures. A bank of teletype machines is kept running continuously to insure that no news is missed. In addition, the European edition operates eight continental news bureaus, ranging from Vienna to Berlin to Paris, and a large news bureau in New York. The New York bureau functions as a clearing house for all Stateside news, cabling some 10,000 words daily to Pfungstadt.