For the great WWII cartoonist Bill Mauldin, the grammar didn’t matter. What he was concerned with most was communicating the raw, real, unfiltered, and uncensored life of the foot soldier. He was there for the ones who sweated, prayed, bled, and expired on the battlefields. Mauldin portrayed them as regular guys thrown into hell by geopolitical upheavals, bureaucratic snafus, and generally terrible leadership from our nation’s and the world’s swamp rats.

Mauldin in 1945. Public domain.

Bureaucrats (including desk-bound military officers) have always glamorized and pushed war to aggrandize themselves, either through promotions or political power, or to make a few bucks on the bullets and bombs. This trend has accelerated since WWII, courtesy of the cozy relationship that General and future President Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex.” Mauldin was interested in portraying how these decisions played out for the most directly affected person, the GI.

And what mattered in Mauldin’s portrayals was that he respected those GIs. Thus, he once wrote, “I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man’s conception of the army was one of mean ole sergeants and jeeps which jump over mountains.”

Mauldin knew the military from the inside out. He was born in 1921 in New Mexico to a family steeped in military service. His father served in World War I, his grandfather, Bill, scouted in the Apache War, and his brother served in World War II. Thus, his cartoons were an extension of his family’s military history.

When his parents divorced, Mauldin found himself in Arizona. It was there that he discovered his vocation for cartooning by working on his high school’s newspaper. He further studied political cartooning at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, after which he returned to the Southwest. At the same time, he enlisted in the Arizona National Guard in 1940.

When the war began, he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and on to Italy, where he was assigned to draw cartoons for Stars and Stripes. It was in the European Theatre that Mauldin’s career took off. Drawing the cartoons put him nearer to the front, as he moved from Sicily to France and Germany. He was so near the front that he was in the thick of battle, and ended up getting a Purple Heart:

Just before Christmas in 1944, Mauldin was visiting the 179th Regiment of the 45th Division. A mortar shell landed near him and he got a shrapnel wound in his shoulder. On his way to the rear, a corpsman handed him a Purple Heart. He accepted it but with considerable guilt, knowing that of all the men on the front, only he could retreat to the rear with such a slight wound. (Stephen E. Ambrose, Introduction to the 2000 edition of Mauldin’s autobiography, Up Front.).

His cartoons, featuring Willie and Joe, two weary and stoic military archetypes, illustrated the soldiers' environs and concerns. It was not all the “glory and gory” of the Hollywood movies; rather, the cartoons showed the mundane, prosaic world of the soldier.

But between the dreary intervals, “Hell of Earth” could happen at any time. Mauldin made it known that the battlefield was not a nine-to-five job with coffee breaks, dress-down Fridays, and weekends off. His sardonic take on the military was not some sophomoric attempt at cheap laughs. Instead, it reflected a man who greatly respected the military mission but was upset with the bureaucracy.

(Although Mauldin’s images are not in the public domain, you can see many of them in Up Front, or at web pages across the internet, including PBS, Inkslingers, and a Reddit thread.)

What held the cartoons together, of course, were Willie and Joe:

Willie and Joe struck a universal chord with real-life soldiers because there was no fakery to them, and no false bravado. Offered a medal by the company medic, slightly wounded Willie shrugs: “Just give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart.

Willie and Joe, average guys, average looks, and average age, served with fealty and courage, unashamed of their duty, but always wary of the decisions coming from the government and military brass. They portrayed the average life of a GI, including their routines, worries, responsibilities, and trepidations. They were rumpled, unshaven, soiled, simple yet introspective with deep soulful eyes that symbolized their looking for meaning and purpose in what seemed to be an endless war filled with needless violence, destruction, and death.

Brave and loyal and willing to lay down their lives to provide “the blanket of freedom” all Americans enjoyed, they yearned like all GIs to just go home from the bloodbath with peace won and return in one piece to their version of the American Dream.

But while Mauldin may have been loved, appreciated, and applauded by the enlisted men, he did have his enemies, among them General George Patton:

Enlisted men loved Willie and Joe, but one high-ranking general emphatically did not. General George S. Patton, Jr., commander of the Third Army, groused about “Mauldin’s scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline.” In a face-to-face meeting with the unrepentant cartoonist in Paris, Patton complained that Mauldin was making his soldiers “look like goddamn bums.” Mauldin, supported by the less stuffy generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark, held his ground, arguing that the cartoons allowed the men in the ranks to let off steam.

Maybe some of the army brass didn’t approve of his take on the war, but at 23, Mauldin was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize.

By war’s end, Mauldin wanted to kill off Willie and Joe as a final comment on the waste of war, but his editors nixed the idea, believing the two characters boosted GI morale. They were far too important to be KIA. Instead, they returned to their quiet, inconsequential, and plebian lives before the war, although forever changed.

Like Willie and Joe, Mauldin returned home, and his career flourished with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His work “commented on civil rights and constitutional liberties,” which earned him another Pulitzer.

Mauldin would move on to the Chicago Sun-Times and do freelance work for major magazines, continuing to cement his career as a premier editorial cartoonist, who received the prestigious Ruben’s Award from fellow cartoonists. When he died in 2003 (and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery), Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, wrote, “Editorial cartoonists commemorated his death with a drawing of a GI helmet with a pen stuck into the ground next to it, evoking the image of a battlefield grave marker.”