Cartoonist with a carbine

Robert Nott |

3/27/2008 - 3/28/08

Bill Mauldin's characters understood that death was waiting for them just outside their battle trenches. The New Mexico-born cartoonist used his art to reflect life at the front lines during World War II, and most of the time he managed to do it with humor.

By that war's end, at the age of 23, Mauldin had earned a Purple Heart and been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He may have been the most famous enlisted man in World War II. In the
new biography Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), Todd DePastino presents a man who was so well defined by his role in that war that he initially found himself unsure how to live out the rest of his life.

"That's not the stuff that legend is made of; it's the stuff that everyday life is made of," the author said by phone from his home in Pittsburgh.

Yet much of Mauldin's postwar career was anything but everyday. He flirted with Hollywood, writing scripts and even acting in a movie or two (remember him playing opposite World War II hero Audie Murphy in John Huston's 1951 Civil War picture The Red Badge of Courage?). He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New York in 1956, wrote fiction and nonfiction books, covered the Korean and Vietnam wars as a cartoonist and journalist, won a second Pulitzer Prize for his cartoon work, lectured, sculpted, and learned how to fly. Not bad for a kid from Mountain Park, New Mexico, who got kicked out of high school in Arizona for sharing a cigarette with a lab skeleton.

Mauldin is perhaps best known for his cartoon characters Willie and Joe, two soldiers who were perpetually covered in mud and grime as they strove to avoid falling prey to the law of averages during the war. Willie was the serious Anglo, Joe the sardonic Native American. The duo spoke for all the enlisted men who had to deal with the fear of death, the absurdity of military discipline during combat, and the lack of latrines on the battlefield. "Wish to hell I wuzn't housebroke," Willie notes in one cartoon as he crawls out of the safety of his trench, under enemy fire, to relieve himself.

Mauldin knew the Willies and Joes of that war well. He enlisted in the Army in September 1940, more than a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor signaled America's entry into World War II. Mauldin created works for various military publications, including the 45th Division News and Stars and Stripes, but he wasn't ensconced safely behind the front lines.

Mauldin participated in the beachhead invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and he carried a sketchbook with him as he accompanied the troops into battle zones. In December 1943, he earned a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel from an enemy mortar shell. "I had been cut worse sneaking through barbed-wire fences in New Mexico," he later quipped.

Mauldin was always close enough to the action to smell the fear of battle and to witness the heroism and distress of his fellow soldiers. "This life up front stood in stark contrast to the official sanitized picture promoted by the War Department and the media back home," DePastino writes. "In newsreels, morale was always high, and soldiers, motivated by skilled leaders, hurtled forward toward victory. No mud, no shit, no fear."

What made Mauldin's work stand out was his ability to give a voice to those men at the front — especially after his cartoons were syndicated in newspapers in the United States. "They spoke to the sense of grievance that the combat soldiers had — and probably still have — against all those who were not there with them, suffering," DePastino explained by phone. "And these guys had such grievances: they hated the army, they hated the war, they hated being used the way they were. And here was this bat-eared cartoonist, 23, 24 years old, finding a way to put these grievances on paper for the world to see. That boosted their morale by letting them know that the folks back home understood what they were going through. Mauldin was able to convey trauma through his cartoons and put a touch of redemptive humor in there as well."

The brass didn't always appreciate Mauldin's humor or honesty. DePastino writes of a tense but amusing encounter between the cartoonist and the rigid, intimidating Gen. George S. Patton (whose pit bull terrier was named Willie). Patton was particularly displeased with two Mauldin cartoons: one showing infantrymen bombarding officers with fruit and another showing how officers enjoyed certain privileges — in this case, showgirls — that the enlisted men did not. Yet it was this sort of honest depiction of the military life that earned Mauldin the respect of his comrades and the appreciation of the public back home.

When the war ended, Mauldin returned to the States (but not to New Mexico) and to the first of three marriages. He no longer focused solely on art reflecting military life; there were other hot topics to cover: the communist scare of the McCarthy era (one controversial cartoon showed U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, clad in Nazi storm-trooper attire and sporting a machine gun, herding President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his army staff along a ridge), racism, and the postwar challenges servicemen faced (Willie and Joe popped up in many of these works). One of Mauldin's most renowned works from the early 1960s was his Lincoln Memorial cartoon, knocked off in about an hour after the cartoonist heard of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the piece, a grief-stricken Lincoln cradles his head in his hands.

In the book, DePastino notes that Mauldin adapted to the changing U.S. culture through the decades, so his work always seemed timely. "He was one of the world's greatest survivors," the author said. "He somehow figured out a way to thrive in any situation he was thrown in. He seems to have been everywhere, done everything. He was in Pleiku, in Vietnam in 1965, at the start of the Vietnam War. He was in Korea. He did the Hollywood thing. He eventually went to [Saudi Arabia to visit troops during] the Persian Gulf War."

Mauldin moved to Santa Fe in the early 1970s with his third wife. There he smoked pot with young hippies, sculpted at Shidoni Foundry, lectured, taught himself how to play the guitar, took in pets, drank, and wrote, according to DePastino. He did less and less cartooning, but the events of his past always surfaced to remind him of his greatest hour: as he toured the country on the lecture circuit, Mauldin came across World War II vets who wanted to reminisce about Willie and Joe and the hell they'd all been through together.

Late in 2002, as Mauldin was on his deathbed, suffering from a number of ailments, including a respiratory infection and Alzheimer's disease, vets from around the country paid tribute to him by either writing him letters or showing up to visit him. "Those World War II veterans mattered most to Bill at the end," DePastino writes. "He didn't always recognize friends or family. He remembered nothing about his marriages or career. But he seemed to know them. They were the source of his sovereignty, the ones who'd exalted him to an office no government or institution could grant." Mauldin died in January 2003.

Even though he was grateful to have survived the war, Mauldin didn't want to die in bed, according to his son David. "The last I'd heard," David Mauldin explained, "he wanted to crash his airplane into a swimming pool."

details

Lecture by Todd DePastino on Bill Mauldin
7-8:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3
Community Room, Santa Fe Public Library, 145 Washington Ave.
No charge, 955-6781

Todd DePastino signs Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front
3:30 p.m. April 5
Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., 986-0151

The birth of a dedicated duo

Willie & Joe: The WWII Years is something of a misnomer, since several cartoons date back to early 1940, and at least one is from 1938. But it's fair to say this is a fairly comprehensive collection of Bill Mauldin cartoons, with an emphasis on the war years.

Mauldin joined the Army as an enlisted man in the autumn of 1940, and he worked as a visual journalist of sorts, drawing the realities of war in a straightfumorous manner.

The book is published by Fantagraphics Books and edited by Todd DePastino, author of Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). According to DePastino, there are roughly 700 cartoons in this collection, including many that have never been reprinted. The book includes some previously unpublished cartoons as well as some civilian cartoons Mauldin drew for Arizona Highways magazine.

The pre-Pearl Harbor military cartoons often focus on the banalities of Army life: training exercises, faulty equipment, and trying to impress women (OK, so that's not so banal). The names Willie and Joe show up a lot in these early pieces, but the characters are not yet the two hardened trench pals who came to speak for many American soldiers fighting overseas. It took Mauldin a few years to fully develop his two star figures.

"The cartoons appear in chronological order, but not strictly so," DePastino writes in the introduction. "Mauldin published in many different places at the same time. He created two separate and simultaneous features titled 'Star Spangled Banter' intended for two different audiences, one military, the other civilian."

The cartoons in the collection are mostly labeled by date and publication, though some of the work, DePastino notes, is impossible to trace in terms of when it was written and where — or if — it was published.