Dimmed Stars and Stripes

Born of war, the Stars and Stripes, Armed Services-directed daily newspaper of U.S. troops abroad, was not designed to survive peace. But in the era of the cold war, with some 700,000 U.S. servicemen and attached civilians scattered around the globe, it has survived with unprecedented peacetime proportions; in separate Atlantic and Pacific editions, it has a circulation of 211,000 in 37 countries.

From a converted Luftwaffe base at Darmstadt, West Germany, on grounds fitted with tennis courts and a swimming pool, the European edition of 150,000 goes out to armed forces people from Iceland to Morocco. The Darmstadt editorial staff of 94 is supplemented by bureaus and district offices in nine countries. The paper they produce is a 24-page tabloid largely filled with wire service news and the familiar staples of U.S. journalism: comics (in color on Sunday), crossword puzzles and features. The similar Pacific Stars and Stripes, published in Tokyo, distributes its 61,000 press run from Pakistan to the Aleutian Islands.

Unwelcome Brass. With all its size and success, the peacetime Stars and Stripes is only a dim reflection of its violent and lustrous past. First published intermittently by Union troops during the Civil War, it was revived for the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, became a little-censored, undisciplined and often brilliant weekly with enlisted and commissioned giants on its staff--among them, Private Harold Ross (who went on to found The New Yorker), Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, Lieut. Grantland Rice and Captain Franklin P. Adams.

Revived during World War II, the Stripes passed 1,000,000 in circulation, achieved greatness. Among the dogfaces, whose cause it espoused in the ceaseless conflict with brass, it ranked in favor not far below Paris leaves and letters from home. Officers were less than welcome in the city room; one sergeant habitually flung pastepots at any such invaders. It provided the first frame for Bill Mauldin's expert cartoons of Willie and Joe, the two war-weary, grizzled infantrymen who patiently endured everything that Nazi and U.S. generalship threw their way. With courage, Stripes correspondents dug in at the front among combat troops: during the Battle of the Bulge, the Strasbourg edition was printed for several days from Nazi territory; before the war ended, Stripes correspondents died in action at the battlefront.

Lost Sass. Now peace has taken its kind of toll. In lieu of thinly veiled assaults on brass pomposity, there are special homemaking articles for military wives and front-page stories about some general officer's advancement in rank. There are no crusades; political news is calipered inch for inch so that neither party can claim bias. The long arm of peacetime censorship hangs implicitly over every page. Recently, an editor of the European Stripes was denied permission to reprint some Bill Mauldin war cartoons on the ground that "they show officers in a bad light.' The famous Stripes pinup art of Work War II has disappeared, chased out by disapproving chaplains.

The Stripes still proclaims itself to be "a home-town newspaper away from home," and its success supports the claim. But many of its readers long for the tough old days. Said one hash-marked enlisted man last week: "Reading today's Stripe is like meeting some woman after 15 years She's gotten a lot fatter and lost her sass to boot."

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