At a time when civilian periodicals faced strict censorship, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall won the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create an expansive troop-newspaper program. Both Marshall and FDR recognized that there was a second struggle taking place outside the battlefields of World War II―the war of words. While Hitler inundated the globe with propaganda, morale across the US Army dwindled. As the Axis blurred the lines between truth and fiction, the best defense was for American troops to bring the truth into focus by writing it down and disseminating it themselves.
By war’s end, over 4,600 unique GI publications had been printed around the world. In newsprint, troops made sense of their hardships, losses, and reasons for fighting. These newspapers―by and for the troops―became the heart and soul of a unit.
Molly Guptill Manning's book is "The War of Words: How America's GI Journalists Battled Censorship and Propaganda to Help Win World War II." She grew up in Latham, New York. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta from the University at Albany and went on to earn a master's degree in American History. In 2002, she moved to Manhattan to attend the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Presently, she is an attorney at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.