Appreciation
The Human Face Of Armed Forces
Bill Mauldin Captured the GI In His Willie and Joe Cartoons
Sgt. Mauldin in Italy in WWII: His cartoons spoke for the soldiers who
fought on through the muck of war. (File Photo/ John Phillips)
By Phil McCombs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003; Page C01
Among the great American archetypes of the 20th century, two cartoon
figures still stand large. Their names are Willie and Joe, and they're
slogging through the mud with rifles and packs. They're the ragged and
exhausted "dogfaces" of World War II, the infantrymen who did the fighting
and hated it but did it anyway and whose spirit remains with us despite the
death Wednesday of Bill Mauldin, their Pulitzer Prize-winning creator.
"D'ya beleeeve that stuff he's writin' about us?" Joe might well say at
this point.
"Naw!" Willie might reply. "He's jus' makin' it up. Hey, Joe, ya got a butt?"
Their spirit, God willing, will always be with us. Because Willie and Joe
are the "citizen soldiers" who've faithfully come forward time after time
to pull this nation out of tight spots. From Valley Forge to Kandahar, from
Anzio to the Chosin Reservoir, they've been there -- hating every damn
minute of it, skeptical of spit-and-polish officers, contemptuous of
bigwigs spouting about a "great cause," irreverent, sarcastic, yearning for
home.
Mauldin got them right because he was one of them. A sergeant in K Company,
180th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division, he spent most of the war in the
Italian theater of operations. His cartoons appeared in a division
newspaper, then in Stars and Stripes, the military-wide paper beloved by
the dogfaces (and later, in Vietnam, by the "grunts") because it was
written by enlisted men who shared somewhat in the perils of battle and
tried to tell the truth.
Mauldin spent much of his time at the front with the troops. He'd get ideas
from what they said, from what they were going through. Then he'd scrounge
up some ink and paper, even drawing on the backs of pictures he tore from
the walls of bombed-out buildings.
His cartoons "caught on and live on because in them everything is
accurate," Stephen Ambrose wrote in the introduction to "Up Front," a
recent reissue of Mauldin's 1947 book. "Willie and Joe's boots and smelly
socks, their baggy, dirty uniforms, their knives, rifles, ammunition,
mortars, web belts, canteens, beards, haversacks, helmets (with crease
marks or holes), the rations -- this is how it was."
And their dark humor:
"This damn tree leaks." (Sitting out a storm.)
"Me future is settled, Willie. I'm gonna be a expert on types of European
soil." (Digging a foxhole.)
"My, sir -- what an enthusiastic welcome!" (Citizens greet U.S. troops, as
dogfaces surreptitiously pelt their officers with tomatoes.)
"Why th' hell couldn't you have been born a beautiful woman?" (Under the
stars at night.)
"Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an' I swore I'd pay ya back. Here's my last
pair of dry socks." (Sitting in the muck.)
"Straighten those shoulders! How long have you been in the Army?"
(Inexperienced young officer to dogface schlumping in from combat.)
"Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in
thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners. (News item)" (The
victors look as bedraggled as their captives.)
That last one won Mauldin his first Pulitzer Prize in 1945, when he was 23.
In a sense, the cartoonist didn't really create these guys at all. Like any
gifted journalist, he simply perceived a reality and reported it with as
much depth and nuance as he could. The elusive quality that Mauldin was
exploring -- through Willie and Joe -- was the subtle but defining
existential quirk at the heart of the American character, a duality that is
being acted out again today on the national stage:
Americans really, really hate war. But sometimes they gotta do it. So they
do it well, but they still keep on hating it.
Mauldin's genius was that he could get that down with a few brush strokes.
"The surest way to become a pacifist," he explained in "Up Front," "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."
Citizen soldiers.
Gen. George S. Patton Jr. didn't really understand them. He was a
spit-and-polish officer, an elitist -- let's face it, a nut case -- and at
one point he tried to silence young Sgt. Mauldin.
As Ambrose tells it: Patton "despised Mauldin. . . . The general wondered
aloud if Mauldin wasn't an unpatriotic anarchist. He said he wanted to
'throw his ass in jail.' He wanted to ban Stars and Stripes in his Third
Army area, or at least censor it. His boss, Supreme Commander Dwight D.
Eisenhower, wouldn't allow it. It is the soldier's paper, Eisenhower told
Patton, and we won't interfere."
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