©2019 by John LaTorre
(This is an expanded version of something I posted on Facebook. I thought it deserved a more detailed review, so here it is.)
It's Veteran's Day today. I suggest you spend it doing what I often do: re-reading Bill Mauldin's remarkable Up Front.
I see the book from time to time in used bookstores, where it's usually filed under "Humor" because it consists mainly of the cartoons of soldiers that Mauldin drew for the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper when he served in World War II. If you want to buy a new copy, you'll find that it's still in print after over seventy years, and still regarded as one of the definitive books of World War II.
Mauldin wasn't the first to chronicle a war in cartoons. There was a British artist named Bruce Bairnsfather whose work appeared during World War I and whose stock character of "Old Bill" would be the spiritual father of Mauldin's "Willie and Joe." Bairnsfather was a soldier himself, wounded by poison gas, shellfire, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Removed from the front lines, he convalesced in a London Hospital, where he began drawing war-related cartoons. The war was still going on after his discharge from the hospital, so he was reassigned to a training unit, where he came up with the "Old Bill" character that would make him famous. Unlike many of the cartoonists of the day, Bairnsfather strove for a realism that helped convey what the British soldier was actually seeing and experiencing, a technique that Mauldin admired and would soon make his own. Bairnsfather would eventually return to drawing cartoons for the Stars and Stripes and Yank magazine as an "official cartoonist" for the US Army during World War II, after which he sank into obscurity and died penniless in 1959.
While Bairnsfather was drawing for the Stars and Stripes, Mauldin was already making his own reputation, first with the 45th Infantry Division News and then the Stars and Stripes; by the end of the war, he would be drawing six cartoons a week for the latter newspaper. He accompanied the army's invasions and was eventually given a jeep and a free hand in visiting the front lines, as long as he kept drawing cartoons that reflected the common soldier's point of view. Like Bairnsfather, he would be wounded in action (by mortar fire) and be hospitalized, an occurrence that had the benefit of increasing his credibility with those soldiers. He ended the war with a Purple Heart, the Legion of Merit award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.
But what sets the cartoons in Up Front apart from Bairnsfather's work is the commentary that accompanies the pictures. Mauldin's cartoons were often reprinted in newspapers back in the States, and the commentary was an attempt to let "the folks back home" know something about what inspired the cartoons, so they could make some sense of them. He did that, but he did something else, too: he wrote one of the classic books to come out of the Second World War.
"Me future is settled, Willie. I'm gonna be a perfessor on types o' European soil."
Mauldin tells about how ordinary farm boys and factory workers and clerks are transformed into combat soldiers, and how their lives change irrevocably. The soldier is no longer the boy who left home. He now lives with homesickness, rain, mud, sleeplessness, and "combat fatigue" (which is what they called PTSD back then). His sense of humor is now twisted, and his values are changed. Paradise for him now means dry socks, a hot meal, a warm bath, a stiff drink, and nobody shooting at him. He wonders if he has been forgotten by the folks back home. He gets wounded and spends a few days at a field hospital, but instead of going on leave, he goes back to his unit because he knows they need him there and he doesn't want to let his comrades down. He can feel pity and hatred and compassion all at once for the people he's fighting and for the civilian victims caught in the aftermath of the battles.
Mauldin relates all this flatly, without elaboration. You sense at once that he knows what he's talking about, because he's only telling you what he's seen and experienced it first-hand. He has a reporter's insight into what makes a good human interest story, and a storyteller's gift for telling it. He talks about good officers and bad officers, and the things that the Army is doing well or poorly.
In other hands, it might have come off as scathing indictments of the military, but Mauldin seldom editorializes. If you had asked him to do that, he would probably have responded with "Aw, shucks. I can't do that. I'm just a New Mexico farm boy who just happens to be able to draw a little bit." And he'd give you that broad farm-boy grin, and you'd walk away wondering how that rube could possibly be the same one who created such trenchant cartoons. Even with such a disarming persona, he would occasionally ruffle a feather or two, but he had a friend or two in high places that would take the heat for him. (One of his champions was General Eisenhower himself.)
After the war, he would continue to draw trenchant cartoons, eventually winding up as the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his work. From there, he went on to the Chicago Sun-Times, which employed him for the rest of his career. When he retired in 1991, he was acknowledged as one of the great editorial cartoonists of the century.
He wrote a few more books, but his legacy will always be his first book, Up Front. It is, for my money, the best non-fiction book ever written on the American soldier in combat. Your library probably has a copy. Check it out and read it.
