Bill, Willie & Joe

(See Cover)

Willie was born, full-grown, during the Italian campaign.

He needed a shave and his clothes hung in weary folds on his weary frame. Even on his day of creation, his thick fingers were curved, as though from grasping a pick handle or an M-1 rifle. He did not smile then and he has never smiled since.

Willie was born into the 45th Infantry Division, where his creator, Private Bill Mauldin, also served. Willie had a sidekick, Joe. Together Willie and Joe slogged from Italy to Germany.

Willie and Joe were citizen soldiers. Before their incarnation, they had presumably been peaceful citizens. Now they were veterans of war's hardships, its filth, discomforts and agonizing boredom. War was bad weather and soaking clothes, cold rations and no letters from home. War was mile after mile of tramping, getting just as tired advancing as retreating, sleeping in barns, bathing in icy rivers, scrounging for small comforts.

War was getting drunk on grappa manufactured in stills made from wrecked airplane parts; reading with vacant eyes the labels on K-ration tins or even German propaganda leaflets, just to be reading.

War was praying between artillery barrages; pitying the starved Italian children and the Italian women standing in the midst of their ruined homes. War was watching their friends die, one after the other, day after day after day. War was learning the ecstasy of wiggling a little finger just to see it move and know that you were still alive. War was hell.

Willie and Joe were combat infantrymen.

In any army's vast organization, combat infantrymen are the hundreds of thousands (among the many millions) who are always in the front lines and who carry the dirtiest, heaviest burden of any war. They are the heroes whom the Army this week honors on Infantry Day (June 15)--the anniversary of the day that George Washington was named commander in chief of the Continental Army. Through Willie and Joe, Soldier-Artist Bill Mauldin has honored them in his own way.

Not Broad-Minded. Willie and Joe, speaking their sardonic mouthfuls, usually say what youthful Bill Mauldin himself has to say on the subject of war. But in a book (Up Front, published this week) written around them, Mauldin has added further remarks, for the benefit of those civilians who find Willie and Joe a little bewildering. He explains: "I haven't tried to picture this war in a big, broad-minded way. I'm not old enough to understand what it's all about."

His book is a text (some 30,000 words) to some 160 of his pictures. It throws sharp light on cartoons which are serious and gay, ribald and sentimental, tough, touching and bitter--the best cartoons to come out of the war.

Up Front, which is like a long letter home, sets forth some of Bill Mauldin's favorite gripes, which are the gripes of all infantrymen. Among them: revulsion at "spit & polish" in the field; envy of rear-echelon men who take over the towns after the infantrymen have captured them, occupy all the best spots and drink all the liquor; disdain for brass hats full of arrogance and stuffing.

Some brass hats have squawked at Mauldin's lampooning, which he freely admits is sometimes "seditious." Some brass hats complained that Willie and Joe did the U.S. Army no credit. Well known by now is the story of General George Patton threatening to have Stars & Stripes banned from his Third Army as long as Mauldin's unkempt heroes appeared in it. Patton and Mauldin were told by Eisenhower's headquarters to discuss the matter. Said Mauldin after the conference: "I came out with all my hide on." Stars & Stripes continued to circulate in the Third Army.

Last week in Denver, asked what he thought of Mauldin's cartoons, Georgie Patton snorted: "I've seen only two of them and I thought they were lousy. He's the Bairnsfather of this war and I don't like either of them."*

But plenty of other generals, including Ike Eisenhower, recognized their worth. Mauldin was occasionally lectured but never suppressed.

The Creator. How was it that a 23-year-old soldier from New Mexico, who had never harmed a flea in his life, could achieve such fame--and such authority? A paragraph of Up Front casts some light on the mystery. After five years in the Army, Bill Mauldin fully understands the infantryman, and he has a sharp eye, a good ear and a facile pen for transmitting his understanding. He wrote:

"They are rough and their language gets coarse. . . . Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other." There are all kinds--"but when they are all together and they are fighting, despite their bitching and griping and goldbricking and mortal fear, they are facing cold steel and screaming lead and hard enemies, and they are advancing and beating the hell out of the opposition."

Bill Mauldin was born on a farm in New Mexico's Sacramento Mountains. He was a sickly kid with rickets who, to pass the time while others played strenuous games, drew pictures of himself riding wild broncos. At nine he sold his first picture--of a boy & girl crying over a puppy's grave. Bill sent it to Sergeant's Dog Medicines. The president said he could not use it in company advertising, but he kept it and sent Bill $1.

His early ambition to be a cartoonist was handicapped by the fact that his father, who had been gassed in World War I, had a hard time feeding his family. But when Bill was 17, his grandparents had scraped together enough to send him off to Chicago to study at the Art Institute.

"Dear Mom." In Chicago, he lived at a "magnificent hotel" (the Y.M.C.A.), and wrote numerous letters to his mother. He was impressed by the fact that Chicago had 1,156,000 telephones, 5,100 lawyers, 3,400 dentists, 9,200 physicians. At his first life class at the Institute, he blushed furiously: the naked model was a girl. "Man, does she have a shape!" he wrote to his mother.

He designed restaurant posters in return for his meals and sat up nights working out comic-strip ideas. He wrote Mom: "You asked if I had been dissipating. If two shows and a few chocolate sundaes could be called dissipating then I'm a playboy."

When he sold eight cartoons to the Arizona Highway magazine, he wrote Mom exuberantly: "By return mail will come a BEE-OO-TIFUL check for $16! Of course $2 isn't a heck of a lot to get for a gag, but--."

Finally he went back home to his mother in Phoenix, Ariz, (his parents were divorced). He kept on drawing cartoons. In 1940 he joined the Arizona National Guard, later switched to Oklahoma's 45th Division, so he could draw for the Division's News.

Boy Meets Girl. No one then could have guessed the final destination of the 45th, least of all Private Bill Mauldin, who was spending more than his share of time on K.P. and dreaming of his cartoonist future. In 1941 the 45th was training at Texas' Camp Barkeley. One day Mauldin went in to nearby Abilene. It was raining. On a street corner, he met two girls and another boy. Mauldin knew one of the girls. The other was named Norma Jean Humphries; she was a student at Abilene's Hardin-Simmons University. Jean, now 21, remembers the scene: "Well, he came up to us, and my girl friend said: 'Jean, I want you to meet another friend of mine, Bill Mauldin.' Well, I looked at him and said hello, and he looked at me and said hello, and I guess I gulped and blushed because he did. And then I had to turn my head away. And all this time, this other boy was trying to date me, and I kept telling him I didn't date boys until I knew them pretty well--at least for a month--and pretty soon, I saw my girl friend talking to one side with Bill Mauldin. He kept talking, and kept looking at me, and I thought he was probably saying, 'Gosh, what a silly girl.' But later my girl friend came over and said that he wanted to know if he could have my telephone number, and could he call me up. 'Gosh, yes, I said.'

"That was a Wednesday. On Sunday he called and said 'Now, this is the 30th time I've called you, isn't it?' I said, 'Yes, that's right.' And he said: 'Well, supposing a man was madly in love with you, how often would he call you?' And I said, 'Oh, about once a day, I guess.' And then he said: 'All right, so I've called you 30 times, that means that actually I have known you for quite a long time--like 30 days at least, haven't I?' And I guess I said that was right, and then he said: 'All right, then, if you have known me for 30 days will you have a date with me?' I said, 'Oh yes, if you like. And he came over right away.' "

Two months later, a soldier's wife, Jean was following Private Bill Mauldin on the dreary round of Army camps. In the spring of 1943, when she told him that a baby was on the way, Bill persuaded the Army Times to bring out a book of his cartoons. The Army Times paid him $100 down. Bill sailed off to war. He was in Sicily when his son was born.

Rags to Riches. There he persuaded an Italian printer to bring out another book of sketches, Sicily Sketchbook, which sold 5,000 copies to one regiment, earned him $1,800, earned the News $600. He switched from the 45th Division News to Stars & Stripes, with an assignment to cover the war in cartoons. He landed at Salerno. He was wounded near Venafro. He brought out Mud, Mules and Mountains (sale: 300,000 copies, which the Army printed; he made nothing).

In a jeep named "Jeanie" he covered the fronts, commuting between Cassino and the Anzio beachhead, making his left-handed sketches with India ink, which he got from the engineers, and three carefully guarded worn-out brushes.

He solved the problem of drawing paper by using the backs of portraits of Mussolini and the King of Italy, which he found hanging in virtually every Italian home. He marlp notes up front but did his drawings back in rear areas--not in foxholes, as has been reported. Says Mauldin, "Anybody who can draw in a foxhole has my hat off."

His slight figure, wide grin and puckish face--unlike Willie's, his beard was no heavier than peach fuzz--was better known to the Fifth Army than General Mark Clark's.

It was Ernie Pyle who got him round the last big corner. On the basis of Ernie's glowing comments, Mauldin's drawings were picked up and syndicated by United Feature Syndicate. Bill Mauldin thought his wildest dreams had come true.

By last week he had become both famous and wealthy. His drawings had already earned him $25,000, now bring him upwards of $200 a week. They are sold to 138 newspapers. Henry Holt & Co. paid him $5,000 advance on Up Front (it is a Book-of-the-Month Club choice) and Ladies' Home Journal paid him $10,000 for the rights to publish Ladies'-Home-Journalized. excerpts. He won the Pulitzer Prize for 1944's best cartoon. In Italy last week, at a ceremony crowded with brass hats, Bill Mauldin was presented with the Legion of Merit.

A Little Time. This week Bill Mauldin, with more than 127 discharge points to his credit, was home.

In Arizona was Mom. In New Mexico was his brother Sidney. In San Diego was Pop, married again, working in an aircraft plant. Pop had something to talk over with him. Pop had good-naturedly accused Bill of using him as a model for Willie (see cut). People, noting the resemblance, stopped him on the street. Bill had replied: "I'm not saying anything, Pop."

In Los Angeles was the girl he calls "the little woman." Ecstatic Jeanie Mauldin awaited him in a cheap little house in a drab neighborhood--the only place she could find in the housing shortage. She had lived on Bill's allotment, putting his earnings in the bank. With her was chubby Bruce Patrick, 21 months, the son Bill Mauldin had never seen.

And what about Willie and Joe? Cleaned up, shaved and tidied, they too have come home. They are not going to be problems, Bill Mauldin hopes. Said he:

"They are so damned sick & tired of having their noses rubbed in a stinking war that their only ambition will be to forget it. ... They don't need pity, because you don't pity brave men. . . . They simply need bosses who will give them a little time to adjust their minds and their hands, and women who are faithful to them, and friends and families who stay by them until they are the same guys who left years ago."

Bill Mauldin, too, hoped to settle down as a civilian, some day to be the same carefree guy he was a few years ago. But, like Willie and Joe, he never really would be quite the same.

* Bruce Bairnsfather's "Old Bill," best-known cartoon soldier of World War I ("Well, if yer knows of a better 'ole, go to it"), is the spiritual uncle of Mauldin's Willie.

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