![]() ![]() ![]() It was during the Sicily campaign in the summer of 1943 that Patton began complaining about Mauldin’s cartoons. ![]() Patton, with his insistence on discipline as a key to the survival of his troops on the battlefield, would strongly dislike Mauldin’s archetypal GI characters. In retrospect it seems hardly surprising that Gen. Although a number of senior officers thought Mauldin’s cartoons were bad for good order and discipline, the Army’s War Office not only supported their syndication (which meant that they were also published in the United States) but also believed they were a good representation of how tough a war the nation was fighting. Before he earned renown as a cartoonist, Bill Mauldin was also a fine soldier who was in harm’s way (he was wounded by shrapnel from a German mortar in Italy in 1943) for a good deal of World War II: first in the Mediterranean with the 45th Infantry Division, and later in the European Theater of Operations, where he roamed the front lines to gain ideas and inspiration for his cartoons.īy early 1944 Mauldin was re-assigned from the 45th Division to the GI newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and what had been occasional cartoons in the Forty-Fifth Division News (the first division newspaper to be published during the war), now began appearing six days a week in the Stars and Stripes.Īs Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoons grew in popularity, the young sergeant became a genuine hero to the GIs and their plight that he depicted so well. ![]()
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