Sketching Willie and Joe
BILL MAULDIN:
A Life Up Front
By Todd DePastino
320 pp. Norton $27.95
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
In World War II, the infantry was the worst place a soldier could be. Glamour stuck to the Marines and airmen and even the sailors, but not to the miserable dogfaces who slogged for months up the Italian peninsula, dying by the thousands. Then, suddenly, Bill Mauldin’s bewhiskered, mud-caked, fatalistic Willie and Joe began to show Americans a truth about the war that they had never seen in the newsreels and propaganda movies they watched.
Mauldin sketched hundreds of his famous cartoons from the foxholes, survived the war, sold millions of books, and lived a long life fighting for noble causes. But despite his postwar battles, the people who came in hordes to pay tribute at his deathbed in 1993 were ex-infantrymen—Willie and Joe, old and gray, the ones who still remembered the days of wrath. “He was our champion,” one of them said.
To my mind, Mauldin deserves a longer, more nuanced biography. DePastino tells anecdote after anecdote at a rapid clip, but his settings are scanty. He did his research, but somehow the book never managed to move me until I neared its end. The author devotes only forty pages to Mauldin’s harrowing childhood; another 150 to his years in training camp, “up front,” and on brief leaves from the line with the men he celebrated; and 140 more to his remaining forty-eight years. Despite its shortcomings, however, DePastino’s book does tell what happened, so I am grateful for that.
From beginning to end, Mauldin was nearly always in trouble with officers from lieutenants to generals, and with editors and publishers who feared he’d lose money for them with his fierce cartoons. With rare exceptions, the only place he ever felt comfortable for any length of time was with the dogfaces under f ire—in World War II Italy, in Korea, in Viet Nam, and finally in the first Gulf War. He could not abide authority, and most authorities found him impossible.
Born in the wilds of New Mexico during the agricultural depression of the 1920s, Mauldin barely survived. His father, a mechanical genius who often became a tyrannical drunk, and a mother whom DePastino believes may have been bi-polar, kept him alive, but that was about all. Undernourished, attacked by rickets, he developed a large head and a small body. But nothing was wrong with his brain.
He drew before he could talk; at four he read novels. From his earliest days he single-mindedly dreamed of riches and greatness, and did everything he could to attain them. His parents separated, and at 15 he became a “road kid,” selling posters he drew and colored, painting white-wall tires, doing any job he could find. He almost made it through high school, and took a correspondence course in cartooning. Then he clawed his way to Chicago for a year in art school and more of the same frenetic labor, peddling his drawings and working to improve his skill. Next came the army, where he immediately looked for a way to use his talents. He found it in the 45th Division News, a weekly founded by an Oklahoma editor who entered active service as a lieutenant colonel in Intelligence. From the famous Louisiana maneuvers to the front lines, Mauldin sketched his comrades at their back-breaking and dangerous work. His cartoons continually improved.
In general, wartime governments don’t care for people who tell the unvarnished truth. Roosevelt’s was not much different. From the start, Mauldin’s cartoons riled his superiors. In his sketches, dirty, unshaven soldiers dodged bullets as best they could, horsed around, goofed off, and had no use for anyone not at the front. Mauldin made officers looked stupid—many of them were, of course. Always, however, some unusually bright superior supported him; those officers thought soldiers would behave better if someone else, like Mauldin, let off steam for them.
He rose meteorically, finding his best models and greatest defenders when he sketched Willie and Joe, bearded and resigned, far from the neat, well-groomed soldiers most generals and politicians wanted to see portrayed. He moved from the division newspaper to the Stars and Stripes, which carried those cartoons through the entire theater of war and made Mauldin famous among the troops. Nominally an office job, his work allowed him to join the infantrymen in their foxholes to sketch first-hand the lives of the lowest class of military man. Soon stateside magazines and newspapers began picking up his work, and civilians finally saw something other than spit-and-polish troops in the press.
Mauldin’s best-known clash came in a meeting he was forced to have with Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., who was nearly as famous as Eisenhower and MacArthur. Patton opened the conservation:
“Now then, Sergeant,” he barked, “about those pictures you draw of those god-awful things you call soldiers. . . . You make them look like goddamn bums. No respect for the army, their officers, or themselves. . . . What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?”
Patton would have destroyed Mauldin, but Gen. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, stepped in, telling all his officers to let the irreverent cartoonist do his worst.
Published as a book, Up Front sold millions of copies. Back home, Mauldin continued to draw cartoons, and then wrote columns and more books, always running into trouble with editors, publishers, and politicians, not to mention his wives. He supported causes like the American Civil Liberties Union, feminism, and civil rights. Joining the troops in Viet Nam to sketch their lives, he quickly turned into a “peacenik.” He disliked the VFW and the American Legion, believing that they glorified war.
And he had a private life—married three times, he lost one wife in an automobile accident, and a daughter to lymphoma. He loved married life, but it never lasted. A few months of domestic bliss always turned into conflict. Genius he was, but he never became a happy man.
I still have my beat-up paperback copy of Up Front. Now Mauldin has a biography, but that old book is still the place to look for his heart.
Carter Jefferson, a Navy veteran of World War II—barely—and the Korean War, is editor of The Internet Review of Books.
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