SEE PHOTO----- COMPLETE ORIGINAL American WW II era Armed Forces newspaper, the Stars and Stripes dated Mar 17, 1945. This is the Stars and Stripes edition that was printed in Nancy, France.
Front page heading and long report announcing the final CAPTURE of IWO JIMA by the US MARINES.
The Battle of Iwo Jima (February 19–March 26, 1945), or Operation Detachment, was a battle in which the United States fought for and captured Iwo Jima (lit. Iwo Island) from Japan. The battle produced some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific Campaign of World War II.
The Japanese positions on the island were heavily fortified, with vast bunkers, hidden artillery, and 18 kilometres (11 mi) of underground tunnels. The battle was the first American attack on the Japanese Home Islands, and the Imperial soldiers defended their positions tenaciously. Of the more than 18,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner. The rest were killed or were missing and assumed dead. The U.S. invasion was charged with the mission of capturing the airfields on Iwo Jima.
The battle was immortalized by Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of the 166 meter (546 ft) Mount Suribachi by five Marines and one Navy Corpsman. The photograph records the second flag-raising on the mountain, which took place on the fifth day of the 35-day battle. The picture became the iconic image of the battle and has been heavily reproduced.
Stars and Stripes is the newspaper published for the United States Armed Forces overseas. It is available in three formats: the European Edition, the Mideast Edition, and the Pacific Edition.
On 9 November 1861, during the Civil War, soldiers of the Illinois 11th, 18th, and 29th Regiments, after forcing the Confederates south, set up camp in Bloomfield, Missouri. Upon finding the newspaper office empty, they decided to print a newspaper for their expedition, relating the troop's activities. They called it the Stars and Stripes. Today, the Stars and Stripes Museum / Library Association is in Bloomfield.
In World War I, the staff and roving reporters and illustrators of the newspaper were veterans of the newspaper world or, more frequently, talented young soldiers who would later become famous members of the United States media in the postwar era. Harold Ross, the editor of the Stars and Stripes, returned home to found The New Yorker magazine. Cyrus Baldridge, art director and principal illustrator, later became a major illustrator of books and magazines, as well as a writer, print maker and stage designer. Drama critic Alexander Woollcott's essays for Stars and Stripes were collected in his book, The Command Is Forward (1919).
Stars and Stripes was then an eight-page weekly, which reached a peak of 526,000 readers, relying considerably on the improvisational efforts of its staff to get it printed in France and to distribute it to U.S. troops.
In World War II, the newspaper was printed in several editions in several operating theaters. Again, both newspapermen in uniform and young soldiers, some of whom would later become important journalists, filled the staffs and showed zeal and talent in publishing and delivering the paper on time. Some of the editions were assembled and printed very close to the front in order to get the latest information to the most troops. Also, during the war, the newspaper published the 53-book series G.I. Stories.
The newspaper is the main printed source of news at the installations in Europe and Mideast and East Asia. Stars and Stripes has expanded to an average of 40–48 pages each day and is still published in tabloid format, reminiscent of many British dailies. The newspaper employs civilian reporters, and U.S. military senior noncommissioned officers as reporters, at a number of locations around the world.
After Bill Mauldin did his popular "Willie and Joe" cartoons for the WWII Stars and Stripes, he returned home for a successful career as an editorial cartoonist and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Former Stars and Stripes staffers also include 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney and Steve Kroft, songwriter and author Shel Silverstein, comic book illustrator Tom Sutton, author and television news correspondent Tony Zappone, cartoonist Vernon Grant (A Monster Is Loose in Tokyo), Hollywood photographer Phil Stern and the late stock market reporter and host of public television's Wall Street Week, Louis Rukeyser.
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Steve Goldman HISTORICAL NEWSPAPERS
