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Alongside Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, Mauldin's stoic, unshaven pair took their pinup places in foxholes, tents and barracks all over Europe. The G.I. could richly appreciate the saw-toothed irony of Mauldin's cartoons. In one, a dog-tired and shambling Joe guards the three equally exhausted Germans he has flushed from some bloody pocket of the war. Mauldin's caption, inspired by a news dispatch: "Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners." A cavalryman sadly administers the coup de grâce to a Jeep with a broken axle. Relaxed before battle, Willie angrily casts his eye on his buddy's unlovely countenance: "Why th' hell couldn't you have been born a beautiful woman?"
Purple Band-Aid. A three-stripe sergeant, Mauldin soon had the prerogatives of a general. He cruised the front in his own Jeep—a gift from Lieut. General Mark Clark—twice as famous, and twice as welcome, as any other visitor outside of Marlene Dietrich. He liberated artist's material where he could find it: in Italy he often sketched on the backs of the Mussolini portraits that hung in most Italian homes. "I was no hero," says Mauldin. "I wasn't leading a perilous life." But he got close enough to the shooting to be superficially injured by a mortar shell fragment in fighting near Cassino in 1943. Applying for a fresh Band-Aid, he was handed a Purple Heart to go with it—and turned the incident into an incisive cartoon. "Just gimme a coupla aspirin," says Willie to the Medical Corpsman offering him a medal. "I already got a Purple Heart."
Constitutionally opposed to authority, Mauldin attacked the military caste system without mercy. "Them buttons wuz shot off when I took this town, sir," growls a slovenly Willie to a spit-and-polish rest-area lieutenant. "One more crack like that," snarls a private to a major, "an' you won't have yer job back after th' war." Inevitably, this kind of enlisted man's license landed Mauldin in trouble. It culminated in a personal confrontation with Lieut. General George S. Patton in Luxembourg in 1945.
"It seems," says Mauldin dryly, "that General Patton didn't like the sloppy, insubordinate-looking soldiers I was drawing. He pulled several of my cartoons out of a drawer. I asked him if he thought I was inaccurate. He admitted that the men do look like that at the front. Then I asked him if he wanted me to make inaccurate pictures of the men. He said no—he didn't want me to do that. Then he changed the subject." From the encounter, Mauldin—and Willie and Joe—emerged in unrepentant triumph.