(Above) Dorth clipped this “Peanuts” strip out of the paper for me on Veteran’s Day. I’m a big Bill Mauldin fan, and wondered how many people reading “Peanuts” today would even know who Mauldin was. I realized it was my duty to present this tribute to Bill in today’s drex files.
When I was just a kid, I came across a book in my father’s collection called “Upfront”, one of the most famous books to emerge from the Second World War, a classic in every sense of the word. In Bill Mauldin’s drawings of the infantry dogfaces Willie and Joe, done while he himself fought in campaigns in Sicily and Italy, Mauldin created the immortal archetypes of the American fighting man. He knew, as one who had been there himself on the front line and in the slit trenches, drenched with mud and rain, that Willie and Joe – with their unshaven faces, their gallows humor, their fortitude, and their dislike of privilege and cant – exemplify something enduring and noble about Americans at war during WWII. He knew their gripes, their fears, their jokes, and their opinions, and he recorded their talk with the most pungent accuracy.
(Above)) Cartoonist Bill Mauldin in Italy during WWII.
Bill Mauldin served his country in WWII with the 45th Infantry Division and other outfits. He received the Purple Heart for wound received in Italy. After the war he became one of the most distinguished editorial cartoonists in America, first for the St Louis Post-Dispatch and later the Chicago Sun-Times. he received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1944 and 1959, as well as numerous other awards.
The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle described Bill this way:
” Sergeant Bill Mauldin seemed to us over there to be the finest cartoonist the war had produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are so terribly grim and real. Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training camp life, which is most familiar to people at home. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast Army who are actually doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.”
I’m more than honored to run a cross section of some of my favorite Bill Mauldin Willie and Joe cartoons today in the drex files. If you are interested in learning more about this American original, find “Up Front” here – http://www.amazon.com/Up-Front-Bill-Mauldin/dp/0393050319/ref=pd_sim_b_1
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