The Stars and Stripes
From February 8, 1918 to June 13, 1919, by order of General John J. Pershing, the United States Army published a newspaper for its forces in France, The Stars and Stripes. When the Stars and Stripes began publication, American forces were dispersed throughout the Western Front, often mixed at the unit level with British, French and Italian forces. The newspaper’s mission was to provide these scattered troops with a sense of unity and an understanding of their part in the overall war effort. The eight-page weekly featured news from home, sports news, poetry and cartoons, with a staff that included journalists Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross and Grantland Rice. Printing the paper on presses borrowed from Paris newspaper plants, the staff used a network of trains, automobiles and a motorcycle to deliver the news to the doughboys (as American Soldiers were called). At the peak of its production, “The Stars and Stripes” had a circulation of 526,000 readers.