Are you old enough to remember Willie & Joe?
They were the sloppy, unshaven, mud-caked, and downtrodden G.I.s who appeared in the World War II cartoons drawn by the imaginative Bill Mauldin.
Willie and Joe were the embodiment of World War II front-line soldiers. They were depicted in foxholes and chow lines griping about Army life and the war. The humor was biting.
Mauldin was an Army rifleman himself. When he had time to do his drawings nobody knows. The cartoons appeared in the military publication “Stars and Stripes.” But the descriptions of soldiers on the European front found wide distribution throughout the war. Mauldin’s dry humor won him a Pulitzer Prize.
I recall one cartoon showing Joe standing next to a battered Army jeep with a broken wheel. His head was turned away, one hand over his eyes, the other with his pistol aimed at the collapsed jeep. The captionless drawing was considered by Mauldin as one of his best and was one of his favorites.
In another cartoon, Willie and Joe were standing in a foxhole in a heavy rain. It was pouring down on their metal helmets. Joe says to Willie: “you’re right, Willie, it does sound like the patter of rain on a tin roof.”
In another, Willie says to Joe, “Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an’ I swore I’d pay ya back. Here’s my last pair o’ dry socks.”
Mauldin, at age 13, saw an ad for a correspondence course in cartooning. This gave him his start. He later attended the Academy of Fine Art in Chicago.
When he was 18, in 1940, Mauldin joined the Arizona National Guard. He went on duty as a rifleman in the 45th Infantry Division. In 1943, as a sergeant he was transferred to Sicily. He was soon assigned to cover the war in cartoons for “Stars and Stripes.” Willie and Joe’s frank depiction of Army life and the war entertained soldiers and their families everywhere. The pair slogged from Italy to Germany.
The cartoon that won Mauldin the Pulitzer in 1945 was captioned “Fresh-spirited American troops, flushed with victory…” The cartoon depicted wretched, drenched, mud-caked, unshaven infantrymen slogging through a downpour.
Mauldin’s cartoons were a release from the pent-up rancor of the average G.I. Most of the Army brass liked the cartoons and saw them as an outlet for soldiers’ frustrations.
But not so for General George Patton. He threatened to have “Stars and Stripes” banned from the Third Army as long as the cartoons of bedraggled, unkempt soldiers were pictured. He felt the cartoons disgraced the military.
Patton and Mauldin were ordered by General Dwight Eisenhower to meet and discuss the matter. Mauldin said after the conference: “I came out with all my hide on.” But it may have been a bit raw.
After the war, in his book Up Front, he described his wartime cartoons as “heavy humor that doesn’t seem funny at all when you think about it.” His marriage ended and his cartoon style became angry and more political — unlike the treatment of his wartime characters, which avoided any political jabs.
Mauldin died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2003. It was while working at the Chicago Sun-Times that he drew one of his most famous cartoons when President Kennedy was assassinated. The drawing showed the Lincoln Memorial with Lincoln, his hands covering his face in grief.
For the veterans of World War II, Mauldin will long be remembered for giving them a chuckle in the darkest days of battle.
Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.