An overhaul of the leadership of Stars and Stripes will “refocus its content away from woke distractions,” a Pentagon spokesman says.

It was 1945, and Gen. George Patton, whose Third Army was battling toward the Rhine, was fed up with the way his soldiers were depicted by cartoonist Bill Mauldin in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Mauldin’s signature characters, Willie and Joe, were grubby and unshaven, frustrated and annoyed, impatient with authority — not to Patton’s liking. So the general threatened to ban the paper unless it dropped “Mauldin’s scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline.”

But Patton’s boss and future president, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, stepped in. “Stars and Stripes is the soldiers’ paper,” he told Patton, “and we won’t interfere.” So Willie and Joe stayed put.

That was then. In March, the Pentagon ordered Stars and Stripes to drop its syndicated content, which included cartoons and news from major wire services, and a month later fired the paper’s ombudsman, a position created by Congress in 1991 to report directly to Capitol Hill and safeguard independence from military brass.

Article continues below this ad

All that was a prelude to the Pentagon’s decision last week to get rid of the paper’s leadership, firing the publisher and editorial chief along with a Middle East correspondent. A Pentagon spokesman said the publication must “refocus its content away from woke distractions” and onto “warfighting,........

© San Francisco Chronicle