Soldiers’ own press

Besides making headlines for their conquests in the battlefield, fighters early felt the need to create their own press, the captured in a faithful way the war’s reality.

On November 7th of 861, in broad American Civil War, the Union battalion camped in the practically deserted city of Bloomfield, in Missouri.

The Stars and Stripes longevity wasn’t followed by the majority of war journals.

 “Have you ever sat in a trench in the middle of a battle and corrected proofs? Try it.”

The adivce is Captain F.J. Roberts’, editor of The Wipers Times, the most popular English trench newspaper during the First World War.

According to the legend, the official and the Lieutenant Jack Pearson discovered a printing machined in the ruins of Ypres, in Flanders.

Beyond the technical difficulties, the production was also marked by the continuous treat of attacks.

According to Captain Roberts, the newspaper was “produced when the air was generally full of shells... Often one had to stop writing an article in order to 'stand to”.

Far from being a flag stand of the British propaganda machine, the publication gathered a unique combination of dark and subversive humor, private jokes and satire of the live in the trenches.

Stories about food, rum rations and rats, to critic to journalists of the war front and even to the censorship itself, The Wipers Times presented the war seen from the perspective of those who fought it.

A common characteristic of the publications that multiplied for all Europe, during the First World War.

The newspapers produced by soldiers came, in part, as a reaction to the press published in the troops’ homelands.

The official journalism seemed to them, most of the times, inappropriate, since the controlled and auto-censored press tended to produce patriotic, optimistic and confident reports that, many times, made a wrong representation of the war for reader in the domestic front.

This type of press also made famous the individual deeds of the unity and promoted healthy rivalries in sports events, debates, music and other less conventional competitions.

From simple pages written in pencil and copied with carbon copies, to publications of several pages reproduced in printing machines, it is known that there were published more than a hundred British newspapers and more than four hundred French publications.

The Portuguese also succeed in the trench press.

On January 1^st of 1926, Liga dos Combatentes started the publishing of the magazine A Guerra.

The publication auto proclaimed «in the Portuguese press as the only speaker of the rights of all those who fought together, making the country great and honoring the race».

The First World War reached its end in 1918, but the entrepreneur spirit of the soldier-journalists didn’t end with it.

The press produced and dedicated to fighters was reignited during the Second World War.

Egbert White, who worked in the Stars and Stripes, proposed the creation of a new publication: the Yank, the Army Weekly magazine.

IT was published in 1942 and became an immediate success.

From humoristic cartoons to war stories, to images of American pin ups, the magazine went worldwide.

The numbers were edited in the city of New York and sent to several bases, from the Mediterranean to the Western Pacific, where editors would add articles about the local reality.

With a world circulation of more than 2.6 million copies, the magazines became the most read in the military history of the United States.

Peace called its end; the publication ceased in December of 1945.

15 years after, the United States involved in one of the most problematic – and controversial – conflicts of its History: the Vietnam War.

The war opposition spirit travelled among the combat units through the press.

The GI movement, an anti-war initiative, used newspapers as a way to illegally disseminate through the bases the ideas of opposition to the conflict, estimating that more than 300 titles had been published during the war.

The involvement of active soldiers in the production and distribution of this kind of press meant a disciplinary sanction.

Along with other war veterans and conscience objectors, he created the magazine, with the goal of giving voice to the opposition that spread among the north-American forces.

In the first month of publishing, the Vietnam GI hit a circulation of 30 thousand copies.

With the death of Sharlet, in 1969, the newspaper ended up closing doors.

In Portugal, the Colonial War oppened new horizons in this type of press, which became part of the everday life of thousands of soldiers.

In January of 1960, the first Jornal do Exército came out, with a 20 thousand copies circulation.

In the first years of war, the newspaper published a series of «Advices to Soldiers Overseas», that mixed humor with critic to motivate the soldiers and prepare them for the challenges to come.

The publication counted with the talento of thousands on the ground, like Vicente da Silva and José Rui, among others that, later, had success as cartoon drawers.

The humoristic pages, which caricaturized the troops’ missions and the situations lived in the several phase of the commission, helped the soldiers to integrated in the war’s reality.

From the 19^th century until now, the history of journalism crosses with war history in several occasions.

Publications destined to soldiers became professional and reached other formats: nowadays, many are produced by newsrooms composed by journalists and published in platforms like the internet.

A military press distant from the first battle newspapers, created by the soldiers themselves.