Two beleaguered soldiers sit in a muddy field up to their ankles in water. One wraps his arm around the other, thanking him for saving his life “yestiddy” by handing him his “last pair o’ dry socks.” This quintessentially Mauldin cartoon—great mud, sardonic soldiers, and a touch of humanity amid the grimness of war—stood out to me as a kid. I could feel it meant something deep. I also knew that my family had been touched when veterans from around the country had sent my grandfather dry socks as he was dying in a nursing home in California to express their gratitude for helping them to keep their “humanity alive” during the war. It took me many more years before I could identify with how well he captured the experience of the infantry—and how his cartoons still resonate today.
Bill Mauldin was a skinny, high school dropout and mountain hillbilly from the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. He joined the Arizona National Guard in 1940 so he would have something to eat while he figured out how to become rich through his art. Four days after enlisting, his unit was federalized and Bill Mauldin found himself traveling to Fort Sill, Oklahoma as part of the newly mobilized 45th Infantry Division. Desperate to get out of his corrupt quartermaster unit, Mauldin volunteered to transfer to the infantry and trained with an infantry regiment before deploying to Sicily as part of Operation Husky. Private Mauldin managed to finagle his way into a part-time position as a cartoonist for the 45th Division News that he eventually parlayed into a full-time job as a roving, freelance cartoonist in the European theater of operations.
By spring 1945, Sergeant Mauldin was a syndicated cartoonist, the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and renowned for his realistic cartoons of life up front for the infantry, particularly his two dogface soldiers, Willie and Joe. During that time, Mauldin helped to transform “the infantry’s surly alienation and disaffection into the stuff of pride and respect” while thoroughly disregarding the conventions of the time for depicting American military heroes. After the war, he increasingly embraced his role as “stirrer-upper,” becoming a trenchant political cartoonist whose work consistently spoke on behalf of the underdogs of society.
In an era when the chief of staff of the Army is reinvigorating the Army’s professional military writing programs, this week’s anniversary of Bill Mauldin’s death offers a relevant example of a soldier with the gumption to say what needed to be said, even though it wasn’t necessarily what the Army wanted to hear. Mauldin was able to carve a role for himself as cartoonist and as a “champion for the enlisted man” through skill, disciplined practice, and aggressive chutzpah—which allowed him to navigate the bureaucracy to find time, freedom of maneuver, and material to cartoon. He could have easily been shut down had it not been for key advocates, such as General Dwight Eisenhower, who recognized the value of what Mauldin was providing both for the morale of soldiers and also for the war effort. Finally, his message resonated at a time when the president needed to present a less sanitized version of the war to steel the American public for the grim slog yet to come.
Bill Mauldin was certainly not the first cartoonist to find humor in the horrors of war, but he was the first to have such an expansive platform. Prior to joining the Army, Bill had come to the conclusion that he had no other skills except drawing and had thrown himself at becoming an artist once he failed to graduate high school at seventeen. He borrowed $500 (a significant sum for his Depression-hit family) to go to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and learn as much as he could in one year. For that year, he took classes, worked a part-time job, and drew ten cartoons nightly to send to news outlets around the country, staying up until two in the morning to complete them. He received rejections for all but two dozen of them.
After he joined the Army, he would train by day and draw by night. He learned how to photoengrave his own cartoons and scrounge the material required to print cartoons (such as zinc, which could be obtained from coffin liners). He would regularly find a way to the front in Italy for a week to two weeks, immersing himself in the experience of the foot soldiers before spending the same amount of time in the rear producing cartoons daily. He finally managed to draw himself into a full-time job on the 45th Division News and was eventually hired by Stars and Stripes (Mediterranean edition) in February 1944. Amid cartooning daily, he wrote a thirty-thousand-word manuscript that became a bestseller during the war—Up Front. Originally driven by a desire to make it as an artist—and then inspired by the tenacity and plight of the infantry soldiers he had trained with and now was benefiting from—Mauldin hustled to make their sacrifice and his privilege to leave the front worth it. It took a prodigious amount of discipline to produce the amount of work he did and to demonstrate that a cartoonist mattered enough in the Army to be left alone to do his work.
But skill and work ethic alone were insufficient. It took many people who valued the idea of a news source by and for the enlisted man to get him started and to sustain his efforts in the face of criticism. Mauldin benefited from the mobilization of large swaths of civilian society for the war effort, as multiple journalists and newspaper editors became full-time soldiers who brought with them the conviction that a free and vibrant press was vital for soldiers. Mauldin first worked for the 45th Division News, an independent paper started by Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harrison, the assistant chief of staff for intelligence of the division (and former editor of the Daily Oklahoman and Oklahoma City Times). While in Italy, his cartoons drew the wrath of senior “brass” who felt that Mauldin’s cartoons set a “damned bad example” with those “god-awful things you call soldiers.” It took generals like Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Lucien Truscott, Mark Clark, and eventually Dwight Eisenhower to intervene to enable Mauldin to keep cartooning because they saw the importance of someone speaking on behalf of the combat soldier’s frustrations and misery. Truscott assured a concerned Mauldin who had just delivered a signed drawing to his headquarters that “when you start drawing pictures that don’t get a few complaints, then you’d better quit, because you won’t be doing anybody any good.”
Finally, Mauldin’s cartoons were gaining popularity during a time of the war when senior leaders faced a new problem. Allied authorities had censored reporting about the slow progress of 1942 out of fear that public confidence would suffer. By the summer of 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt, the secretary of war, and the Army chief of staff were concerned that news of Allied success in places like Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, North Africa, and Sicily might make people think the war would be over soon. Knowing that the war would probably last longer and needing the public to buy into continued rationing, bond drives, conscription, and wage and price controls, Roosevelt authorized a less sanitized visual coverage of the war. Marshall ordered commanders to support coverage of “the dangers, horrors, and grimness of War.” Amid glamorous depictions of Marines, pilots, and elite units such as the Army’s airborne divisions and Rangers, Mauldin’s cartoons stood out for showing the dignity of the unkempt, dirty, unshaven, and too-old-for-their-years foot soldier slogging it out on the front—at a time when senior Allied leaders realized that these conventional units would be essential for the long slog to defeat Axis forces.
Mauldin’s cartoons still resonate today and his experience is a useful example of the skill, tenacity, and support required to bring forward a message that the establishment may not want to hear. As a new infantry lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division, I was committed to not being “one of them salutin’ demons” my grandfather lampooned. I left a copy of Up Front in my office and was relieved when I saw my squad leaders thaw a little after flipping through it and realizing I might be okay with making fun of officers when they warranted it. I have returned to his cartoons regularly as a way of reminding myself who I have committed to lead and what I expect them to do. As the US Army reflects on the future of large-scale combat operations and emphasizes the need for soldiers capable of competing in multiple domains, with drones, electronic warfare, longer-than-ever-range artillery, and other advanced technology, Ukraine’s foot soldiers are demonstrating that the fundamental role of the infantry has not been replaced. What Mauldin had to do to give voice to the underdog is a reminder to me of how much work goes into developing a message that matters. That he was allowed to continue cartooning is a reminder to those in leadership positions of how much responsibility we have to foster our subordinates’ potential. Finally, the continuing resonance of his cartoons reminds us that the morale of the common foot soldier is an enduring challenge that the Army must address, regardless of technological advancements.
Erin Mauldin is a major in the infantry and teaches courses on the history of the US Army and the history of the Middle East at the US Military Academy. She grew up with the WWII jeep that Mark Clark authorized for the unit “Bill Mauldin” in her front driveway.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.