Bill Mauldin
William Henry “Bill” Mauldin won initial fame in the Second World War as a cartoonist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, with his sardonic Willie and Joe cartoons, depicting the travails of a pair of disheveled combat soldiers.
Born in 1921 in New Mexico, Bill Mauldin studied cartooning at the Chicago Academy of Fine arts, before enlisting in the US Army in 1940. He started drawing for the 45th Division’s newspaper. His work brought him to the attention of Stars and Stripes, which began publishing his cartoons in 1943, before formally adding him to its staff in 1944. Mauldin covered the fighting in Sicily and Italy, was wounded during the fighting around Salerno, and after D-Day, he was sent to France and accompanied the advancing GIs into Germany.
While working for Stars and Stripes, Mauldin created Willie and Joe, a pair of front-line GIs who frequently found themselves caught between the horrors of war and the oft-times ridiculous expectations and directives of the Army’s chain of command. The irrepressible duo thus struggled from one cartoon to the next in order to triumph over both the Wehrmacht and their own rear-echelon officers.
General George S. Paton did not like Mauldin or his cartoon creations. Willie and Joe’s slovenly appearance was the antithesis of the ramrod straight and soldierly spit and polish image fetishized by Paton. Between that, and the cartoons’ pointed jabs at the unrealistic fatuousness of the military hierarchy, such as a cartoon ridiculing a directive from Paton that troops be clean-shaven at all times, the general considered Willie and Joe detrimental to discipline and morale. Mauldin was ordered to report to Paton’s headquarters, where he was berated by the general, accused of trying to incite a mutiny, described as an “unpatriotic anarchist”, and threatened with jail.
The GIs however loved Willie and Joe. Paton’s boss, Dwight D. Eisenhower, correctly judging that the cartoons gave soldiers an outlet for frustrations that might otherwise bubble over and get expressed in more troublesome ways, ordered Paton to back off and leave Mauldin alone.
The War Office also supported the cartoons and helped Mauldin get them syndicated in the US, deeming them an asset to the war effort precisely because they depicted the dark side of war, and showed the civilians back home that victory would not come easy but would require considerable effort and sacrifice.
The cartoons became a wild success, not only with the military rank and file, but also with the civilians back home after they were syndicated, earning Mauldin a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. As Band of Brothers author Stephen Ambrose described Willie and Joe: “More than anyone else, save only Ernie Pyle, [Mauldin] caught the trials and travails of the GI. For anyone who wants to know what it was like to be an infantryman in World War II, this is the place to start – and finish.”
After the war, Mauldin returned to civilian life, published collections of his wartime cartoons, and freelanced, before joining the St. Louis Post Dispatch as an editorial cartoonist. In 1959, he won another Pulitzer Prize, this one for a cartoon depicting the lack of civil liberties in the Soviet Union. In 1962, by which point his cartoons were widely syndicated, he switched to the Chicago Sun-Times. His work also appeared in numerous magazines, such as Sports Illustrated and Life.
Bill Mauldin died in 2003, aged 81. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 64, Lot 6874.