Bill
Mauldin
was
born in New Mexico in 1921. While in his early teens Mauldin decided
he wanted to become a professional cartoonist and after school attended
the Academy of Fine Art in
Chicago
.
He
joined the
United States Army
in 1940 and
began producing cartoons for the 45th Division News. In 1943 he took
part in the invasions of
Sicily
and
Italy
.
The following
year he became a full-time cartoonist for the
Stars
and Stripes
. His cartoons often featured two infantrymen
called Willie and Joe.
After
Ernie Pyle
, America's most popular journalist
in the
Second World War
, wrote an article about
the work of Mauldin, he was picked up by United Feature Syndicate
in 1944 and his cartoons began appearing in newspapers all over the
United States
. He later recalled that: "I
drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their
life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something
out of the humorous situations which come up even when you don't think
life could be any more miserable."
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"Just
give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."
Bill
Mauldin
,
Stars and Stripes
(1944)
Mauldin's
cartoons often reflected his anti-authoritarian views and this got
him in trouble with some of the senior officers. In 1945 General
George
Patton
wrote
a letter to the
Stars and Stripes
and threatened to ban the newspaper from his Third Army if it did
not stop carrying "Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine
military discipline."
General
Dwight D. Eisenhower
did not agree
and feared that any attempt at censorship would undermine army morale.
He therefore arranged a meeting between Mauldin and Patton. Mauldin
went to see Patton in March 1945 where he had to endure a long lecture
on the dangers of producing "anti-officer cartoons". Mauldin
responded by arguing that the soldiers had legitimate grievances that
needed to be addressed.
Will
Lang, a reporter with
Time
, heard
about the meeting and questioned Mauldin about what happened. Mauldin
replied, "I came out with my hide on. We parted friends, but
I don't think we changed each other's mind." When the comment
appeared in the magazine
George Patton
was furious and commented that if he came to see him again he would
throw him in jail.
In
1945, Mauldin's cartoons on the
Second World War
won the
Pulitzer Prize
. The citation read:
"for distinguished service as a cartoonist, as exemplified by
the series entitled "Up Front With Mauldin". Mauldin, the
youngest person to be awarded the prize, was now one of the best-known
cartoonists in the
United States
. His book,
Bill Mauldin's Army
,
was
published in 1951.
As
a member of the United Feature Syndicate Mauldin's cartoons attacking
racism
, the
Ku
Klux Klan
and
McCarthyism
appeared in
newspapers all over the United States. Mauldin's cartoons were unpopular
with the newspapers in small towns and he had difficulty getting them
published.
Disillusioned, Mauldin gave up cartooning. He returned in 1958 when
he replaced the retiring
Daniel Fitzpatrick
at the
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
. This newspaper
was willing to publish his strong views on racism. In 1959 he won
another
Pulitzer Prize
for his cartoon,
I won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What was your crime?
In 1962 Mauldin moved to the
Chicago
Sun-Times
where he worked
with another radical cartoonist,
Jacob Burck
.
His drawing of a crying
Abraham Lincoln
on the death of
John F. Kennedy
, became
one of the most famous cartoons in American history.
During
his career Mauldin wrote and illustrated more than twelve books. This
included
Up Front
(1945),
Back
Home
(1947),
Mud and Guts
(1978),
Hurray for B.C.
(1979),
Bill Mauldin's Army
(1983) and
Let's Declare Ourselves Winners
and Get the Hell Out
(1985).
Bill
Maudlin died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Newport Beach,
California, on 22nd January, 2003.
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Bill
Mauldin
,
United Feature Syndicate
(1947)
(4)
Bill Maudlin,
Up Front
(1945)
The surest way to become
a pacifist is to join the infantry. I don't make the infantryman look
noble, because he couldn't look noble even if he tried. Still there
is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid
men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets
coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties.
Their nobility and dignity
come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help
each other. They are normal people who have been put where they are,
and whose actions and feelings have been molded by their circumstances.
There are gentlemen and boors; intelligent ones and stupid ones; talented
ones and inefficient ones.
But when they are all together
and they are fighting, despite their bitching and griping and goldbricking
and mortal fear, they are facing cold steel and screaming lead and
hard enemies, and they are advancing and beating the hell out of the
opposition.
They wish to hell they
were someplace else, and they wish to hell they would get relief.
They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee
was hot. They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and
fight, and then they climb out and crawl through minefields and fight
some more.
(2)
Bill
Maudlin
wrote about his meeting
with General
George
Patton
in his book,
The Brass Ring
(1971)
There he sat, big as life even at that distance. His hair was silver,
his face was pink, his collar and shoulders glittered with more stars
than I could count, his fingers sparkled with rings, and an incredible
mass of ribbons started around desktop level and spread upward in
a flood over his chest to the very top of his shoulder, as if preparing
to march down his back too. His face was rugged, with an odd, strangely
shapeless outline; his eyes were pale, almost colorless, with a choleric
bulge. His small, compressed mouth was sharply downturned at the comers,
with a lower lip which suggested a pouting child as much as a no-nonsense
martinet. It was a welcome, rather human touch. Beside him, lying
in a big chair, was Willie, the bull terrier. If ever dog was suited
to master this one was. Willie had his beloved boss's expression and
lacked only the ribbons and stars. I stood in that door staring into
the four meanest eyes I'd ever seen.
Patton demanded: "What
are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?" Patton then launched
into a lengthy dissertation about armies and leaders of the past,
of rank and its importance. Patton was a master of his subject felt
truly privileged, as if I were hearing Michelangelo on painting. I
had been too long enchanted by the army myself to be anything but
impressed by this magnificent old performer's monologue. Just as when
I had first saluted him, I felt whatever martial spirit was left in
me being lifted out and fanned into flame.
If you're a leader, you
don't push wet spaghetti, you pull it. The U.S. Army still has to
learn that. The British understand it. Patton understood it. I always
admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane.
He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants
to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his
theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes.
(3)
Frederick S. Voss wrote about the meeting between Bill Maudlin and
George
Patton
in his
book,
Reporting the War
(1994)
Pulling from a drawer some clipped samples of Mauldin's work, he asked
their creator to justify their anti-officer tone. In
doing so, Mauldin thought he acquitted himself fairly well. By making
soldiers laugh at their grievances and letting them
know that someone else understood them, he said in effect, he was
helping them to let off steam in a relatively harmless way and thereby
preventing the mutiny that Patton was so sure he was causing. Patton
was clearly unconvinced. "You can't run an army like a mob,"
he declared when Mauldin was done, and after a handshake and a smart
parting salute from Mauldin, the interview was over.
(4)
Studs
Terkel
interviewed Bill
Mauldin about his experiences during the
Second
World War
for his book,
The Good War
(1985)
Willie and Joe were really
drawn on guys I knew in this infantry company. It was a rifle company
from McAlester, Oklahoma. There were Indians in it and a lot of laconic
good ol' boys. These two guys were based on these Oklahomans I knew.
People like that really make ideal infantry soldiers. Laconic, they
don't take anything too seriously. They're not happy doing what they're
doing, but they're not totally fish out of water, either. They know
how to walk in the mud and how to shoot. It's a southwestern sort
of trait, really. Don't take any crap off anybody.
I think Willie and Joe
would have voted for Roosevelt cynically, sardonically, with a lot
of reservations. He really wasn't their cup of tea. They would have
considered Roosevelt too much of a bleeding heart. They couldn't bring
themselves to be Republicans. Someone like Harry Truman would be more
their cup of tea. I'm really expressing my own feelings. I dug Truman.
I still do. It really shows you what my limitations are.
Willie and Joe are my
creatures. Or am I their creature? They are not social reformers.
They're much more reactive. They're not social scientists and I'm
not a social scientist. We're moral people who do not belong to the
moral majority. One of my principles is, Thou shall not bully. The
only answer is to muscle the bully. I'm very combative that way.
I was twenty-two when
I got home to two hundred papers printing my stuff. The
Stars &
Stripes
released my stuff for syndication. I'd done a book during
the last year of the war and the Book-of-the-Month Club picked it
up.
Up Front
was number one on the bestseller list for about
eighteen months. I came home, and here all my friends were on 52-20.
My book sold something like three million in hardcover. Elsenhower
and I made the same amount of money on our books. Congress rammed
through a special law letting him claim capital gains on it. He kept
what I paid, I paid what he kept. He paid capital gains, I paid through
the nose. My income tax was in the hundreds of thousands. I remember
signing one check for $600,000. Here I was twenty-three, twenty-four
years old, fresh out of the war. I felt like a war profiteer, and
here were all my friends on 52-20. I might have gone in as an average
citizen but I came out
as
something else.
(5)
Mike Anton,
Los Angeles Times
(23rd January, 2003)
Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning cartoonist whose characters, the downtrodden GIs Willie
and Joe, spoke to a generation of soldiers who fought in World War
II, died early yesterday. He was 81.
Mauldin died at a nursing
home in Newport Beach, Calif., where he had lived since mid-2001 while
battling Alzheimer's disease. More recently, he had contracted pneumonia.
The cause of death was respiratory failure.
A self-described "hillbilly
from New Mexico," Mauldin rose from small-town obscurity to cult
hero as a baby-faced Army sergeant working in Europe for the armed
forces newspaper Stars & Stripes.
His darkly funny and irreverent
cartoons captured the mood of a changing military made up of citizen
soldiers who questioned the leadership skills of their officers even
as they battled the enemy. Mauldin went on to become one of the best-known
and best-loved newspaper cartoonists in America.
Mauldin's Willie and Joe
were dirty and unshaven, slogging through mud and snow and sleeping
in foxholes filled with water. They dodged the enemy's bullets as
well as the poor morale brought on by incompetent officers.
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