For \'Willie & Joe,\' War Is Hellishly Real And Funny

Tag : zinc strip

NPR.org , July 11, 2008 · We don't picture World War II soldiers as ramrod-straight, cleanand bright-eyed. We honor them because they slogged through mud andtook care of their buddies in a conflict that — despite theirfierce dedication — they didn't relish. This image of theslouched, tired "dogface" comes in part from the pen of cartoonistBill Mauldin.
"That can't be no combat man," one of his characters says, watchinga cocky GI pass by. "He's lookin' fer a fight."
Born poor and part-Apache in New Mexico, Mauldin joined the 45thInfantry in 1940 and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooningin 1945, at age 23. Generals raged against the artist's irreverentdaily Stars & Stripes strip, "Up Front … with Mauldin." (In person, Patton oncechewed out the cartoonist so severely that Eisenhower, a fan, hadto intervene.) But enlisted men adored his portrayal of soldiers asunshaven grunts stuck in an apocalypse. The solders' stand-ins,Mauldin's everyman heroes, were a couple of long-suffering,wisecracking infantrymen named Willie and Joe.
If Willie was Mauldin's chatty comic relief, Joe, thecrooked-nosed, square-jawed hero of so many of the artist'sone-panel strips, embodied the way America pictured its footsoldiers: reliable men of few words who shouldered the craziness ofwar with dignity. Their sense of battle was that it was aterrifying ordeal and a numbers game ("I'm beginnin' to feel like afugitive from th' law of averages," Willie once says to Joe).
These gritty, essential cartoons — everything Mauldinpublished during the war that still exists is compiled here —are the real thing and then some. On at least one occasion duringthe war, the engraved plates were made from the zinc lining ofcaskets. That gravity and humanity is among the things that hit youmost about these panels: Even when every vestige of civility andsociety has been stripped away, Willie and Joe remain good anddecent men.