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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."