Bill Mauldin's Army: Bill Mauldin's Greatest World War II Cartoons

Some of the best cartoons ever made on a subject that is very hard to make lite of.Mauldin's cartoons show army life as it is, and the soldier as it is. Men doing a job, not liking the job all that much, wanting to get it over with as soon as possible but doing the job and coping with it.The Humor is in the realism, the acceptance of what we can't even dream of as a regular part of life. It a real mirror not only of the soldiers but of the times and the people in them. their fathers had dealt with WWI and their grand fathers had fought in the civil war. They themselves had lived through the depression and knew what life was and how it worked.Many modern cartoonists owe a great deal to Mauldin. So does the country as a whole. Buy it and understand.

Bill Maudlin died last week at 81, but his immortality was assured during World War II when the cartoonist created Willie and Joe, a pair of unshaven, hollow-eyed, grimy dogfaces who appeared in the pages of "Stars and Stripes," the Army newspaper. For Willie and Joe it was not just a question of fighting Germans on the way to Berlin but dealing with lousy K rations, boredom, wet socks, and officers who insisted on telling the men what to do. In 1945 these army cartoons, collected here in "Bill Mauldin's Army," won the then 23-year old cartoonist a Pulitzer Prize. The brass hated the strips, which they considered disrespectful, but Willie and Joe were loved by the G.I.'s. No other cartoonist was so identifiable with a subject since Thomas Nast took on Tammany Hall. It would take him fourteen years to earn a second Pulitzer but in good time his political cartoons, such as the one of the statue of Lincoln in his memorial bent over with his head in his hands after JFK's assassination, would make him equally respected by new generations. In his cartoons Mauldin battled injustice and pretense with irony and humor, not only through his drawings but also his captions. Of course, as the cover shot of the soldier about to shoot his broken jeep amply evidences, he did not always need the captions. Other times the caption carries the cartoon, as when Willie and Joe are huddled in the snow and asking, "Remember the warm soft mud last summer?" Another classic shows an exhausted infantryman standing in front of a table where medals were being given out, saying: "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart." Many of these cartoons were originally published in "Up Front," Mauldin's 1944 best selling book. I agree, there is much to said for the chronological arrangment of these cartoons, but at least somebody has been them altogether in one book for us to enjoy.Mauldin's "Army" work deserves to be remembered, not only because of his recent death, but also because of the resurgence of interest in World War II, because of things like "The Greatest Generation" and "Band of Brothers." There is some irony in this, because as Mauldin explained about returning soldiers in "Up Front," if they were lucky their memory "of those sharp, bitter days will fade over the years into a hazy recollection of a period which was filled with homesickness and horror, and dread and monotony, occasionally lifted and lighted by the gentle, humorous, and sometimes downright funny things that always go along with misery." Mauldin added, that he wanted to talk about some of things he would remember from the war, "and then I'd like to forget them myself." Fortunately, because of collections like this, Bill Mauldin's work will not be forgotten.

The original G.I. Joe was not a spiffy little action figure. He was a put-upon dogface with a sidekick named Willie. Together the two friends faced the rigors of training camp, the mindless bureaucracy of a massive army, and the horrors of war. As Dilbert helps modern workers cope with corporate insanity, Joe and Willie helped their generation deal with war's insanity.This little collection of cartoons offers us a window into an earlier time fraught with hardships we modern Americans can't even imagine. Buy the book, look through that window. You will not only be entertained, you will be informed.

I wasn't old enough to be with them; I really wanted to be, but 13 year old infantrymen were considered a definite liability. Willie and Joe were the prime movers for the pivotal episode in our old lives; Mauldin made sure we knew that. This collection reminds us of a clearer age and purpose and focuses Andy Rooney's statement about D-Day: "-the most unselfish thing any group of people ever did for another-." 54 years late, I just visited the Normandy beaches and the military cemetery at Colville-sur-Mer; re-reading this collection puts all that in proper perspective.For me, and for a lot of other old guys, totally worthwhile.

EVERYTIME I OPEN THE COVER TO THIS OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION FROM A MAN WHO WAS THERE,I CAN TASTE THE MUD OF THE FOXHOLE AGAIN. WHO CAN EVER FORGET THE CAVALRY JEEP WITH THE BLOWOUT.