"Star-Spangled Banter"

From Piper Cub liaison planes into the shell-pocked snows of the Apennines fell bundles of food and ammunition--and news. The Army's oldest divisional newspaper was still on the job, and the most remote patrols of the Italian front got their copies. The 45th Division News had cranked out a special four-color holiday edition.

By last week air delivery had become just one more unconventional routine for the News and its editor, 28-year-old Sergeant Don Robinson (ex-Knoxville News Senfinel, Albuquerque Tribune, Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman). Born in September 1940, as the "first [Army] paper of the national emergency," the News has gone along with its outfit through half a dozen U.S. camps and into Mediterranean battles. It has also done a notable job of covering the 45th in combat.

Unpolished General. Editor Robinson looks upon his paper as a home-town weekly, no competitor to the big-city daily Stars & Stripes. His analysis of his readers: "The average G.I. Joe wants to see his name in print and likes to laugh at himself and his pals." Accordingly, Robinson handles front-line news in facetious but never flippant style. Battlefront pictures are taboo, since the doughboy knows what the front looks like. No button-polishing publicity sheet, 48th News carries officers' stories only when they are really interesting. (The division's general was interviewed when he took over, has been mentioned only twice since.)

Robinson and his four staffers are as casual about battle dangers as a weekly's reporter covering the Sunday-school cake sale. Sample reportage: "Staff Sergeant Oscar Duebec pulled the pin from a grenade he was about to hurl with his right hand when he was wounded in the left hand. Perplexed, he decided to walk to the aid station, keeping the grenade immobilized by continuing to grasp the lever in his right palm. Anxious medics hurriedly stitched the wound, whereupon Duebec walked back . . . relieved everyone by chucking the grenade into enemy positions."

Comic Sourpuss. Star of the 48th News is its cartoonist, babyfaced, 22-year-old Bill Mauldin (onetime truck driver, Chicago dishwasher and sign painter), from Phoenix, Ariz. Mauldin's chief character is an unshaven, weary-shouldered, sad-eyed "Joe," the typical U.S. soldier learning war the hard way. Soldiers think he is so true to life that potent Stars & Stripes also runs him now & then. "Joe" seldom smiles as he goes through the trials of the soldier's life. Explains Mauldin: "Life up there isn't very funny. I was 18 when I joined up, and I knew a lot of these kids then. Now, after they've been through a couple of campaigns they're old men. They're tired and they show it in their dopey expressions."

Leg Man on a Bike. Robinson's men can do a swift and objective job of reporting. When the 45th first went into action in Sicily, its News .staff went along. Mauldin cycled to beachhead ships to fetch news from their radios and personal experiences of the men. Result: first Allied invasion edition in Sicily, a hand-pressed single sheet. Moving up, the News soon had another extra, delivered by ration box. The headline: "Benito Finite."

At Palermo the News was set in a plant still aflame from incendiaries. In that issue Robinson ran Mauldin's first Sicily drawing. In keeping with his and Robinson's realistic, catch-as-catch-can "Star-Spangled Banter" (Mauldin's stock caption), the cartoon was etched on zinc salvaged from a coffin.

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