Cartoonist Bill Mauldin, friend of GIs as creator of 'Willie and Joe,' dies at 81

As they trudged back home from the trenches of World War II, U.S. soldiers would tell stories of how they knew they couldn’t lose because they had a secret weapon on their side.

It wasn’t a gun or a bomb, but a fellow soldier named Bill Mauldin, who took pen to paper and depicted the horrors of war, often with sharp-edged humor.

"I'm convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else."

Mauldin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist best known for his drawings in Stars and Stripes, died Wednesday. He was 81. One of the 20th century’s pre-eminent editorial cartoonists, Mauldin died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, including pneumonia, at a Newport Beach, Calif., nursing home, said Andy Mauldin, one of the cartoonist’s seven sons.

Mauldin, who was an Army rifleman, drew a pair of tired and downtrodden soldiers named Willie and Joe, whose wry observations of life on Europe’s front lines were loved by soldiers and loathed by many in command, including Gen. George S. Patton.

Mauldin enlisted in the Army in 1940 and, assigned as a rifleman to the 180th Infantry, started drawing cartoons depicting training camp for the Division News, the newspaper for the 45th Division.

Once Mauldin’s 45th Division shipped overseas, Stars and Stripes began publishing his drawings.

"I was a born troublemaker and might as well earn a living at it."

Mauldin called himself “as independent as a hog on ice,” and his nonconformist approach occasionally brought him trouble from the top.

A meeting between Patton and Mauldin was arranged after Patton threatened to stop distribution of Stars and Stripes in 3rd Army areas because of cartoons and photographs which depicted soldiers in “unsoldierly” appearance.

Mauldin recalled the meeting in his book, “The Brass Ring,” published in 1972: “There he sat, big as life even at that distance. … A mass of ribbons started around desktop level and spread upward in a flood over his chest to the top of his shoulder, as if preparing to march down his back, too.

“‘Now then, sergeant, about those pictures you draw, where did you ever see soldiers like that? You know damn well you’re not drawing an accurate representation of the American soldier. You make them look like bums. No respect for the Army, their officers or themselves.’”

Patton grilled Mauldin about his cartoons, finally telling Mauldin that they “understand each other now.”

"I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes."

Mauldin wrote: “Years later, I read of Patton’s reaction when [Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s aide, Navy Capt. Harry] Butcher read my account of the meeting to him over the phone. When he quoted me as saying I hadn’t changed the general’s mind, there was a chuckle. When he came to the part about his not changing my mind, either, there was a high-pitched explosion and more talk about throwing me in jail if I ever showed up again in 3rd Army.”

After he left the military, Mauldin did freelance work. He joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1958, and moved to the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962.

It was at the Sun-Times that he drew one of his most poignant and famous cartoons when President Kennedy was assassinated. The drawing showed a grieving Abraham Lincoln, his hands covering his face, at the Lincoln Memorial.

But for World War II veterans, Mauldin will be best remembered for uplifting their spirits during the darkest days of the war.

"The combat man isn't the same clean-cut lad because you don't fight a kraut by Marquess of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you. He tricks you and cheats you, and if you don't beat him at his own game you don't live to appreciate your own nobleness. But you don't become a killer. No normal man who has smelled and associated with death ever wants to see any more of it. In fact, the only men who are even going to want to bloody noses in a fist fight after this war will be those who want people to think they were tough combat men, when they weren't. The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry."

Many of Mauldin’s admirers had showered him with letters of thanks in recent years as his health slowly declined.

Mauldin is survived by former wives Jean Mauldin and Christine Lund and all of his sons. Burial is planned in Arlington National Cemetery.

His life was remembered by Chaplain (Major) Douglas Fenton and about 50 mourners, mostly family, that gathered in a cold drizzle to pay their respects.  The chaplain listed war heroes and leaders buried at Arlington, then spoke of “the man we honor today, loved by the ‘greatest generation,’ a man who led hearts and warmed smiles” with his distinct talents. Fenton mentioned one of the thousands of letters Mauldin received while in the nursing home, relaying that the soldier said Mauldin’s “humor kept them moving forward, even in the face of adversity.” 

And with the Pentagon behind them in the distance, seven soldiers from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, The Old Guard, fired three volleys into the cold air for Mauldin, a Purple Heart recipient. After Taps was played, Sergeant Major of the Army Jack Tilley took the flag from the honor guard and presented it to Sam Mauldin, the 16-year-old son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist.

One of Mauldin’s other sons, David, spoke after the ceremony. Before taking questions, he insisted that those who wrote to his father in the last months of his life be thanked. “The family is so grateful to the soldiers and veterans who wrote to Dad at the nursing home to express their thoughts and feelings. It really made a difference to Dad.” Though Alzheimer’s disease had begun to rob Mauldin of his faculties, he still understood the significance of the gestures. “It’s hard not to understand, when boxes of letters and mementos come into your life, that you’re still important to people,” David said.

Newspaper columnist Bob Greene wrote in August that the cartoonist was in failing health, and provided an address where admirers could send their wishes. Asked how many letters his father had received, David paused.

“A couple of months ago, it went past 10,000,” he said. 

The younger Mauldin noted, as did many at the brief ceremony, that the cold and drizzle was the perfect setting for his father’s funeral. “It would make sense for him to die in the middle of winter, in terrible weather with lots of mud,” he said. It was so dismal one had to wonder if Willie and Joe, his bleary-eyed protagonists in many a cartoon, were not there in spirit.

David Mauldin recalled a cartoon in which his father captured the camaraderie of soldiers at the front.

Sitting down in the reeds, their feet lost in the muck, Willie thanks his buddy with the best gift he could give, given the circumstances. “Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an’ I swore I’d pay ya back. Here’s my last pair of dry socks,” reads the caption.

“One person sent me a pair of socks,” David said. “A guy named Bill Ellis sent the socks after [Dad’s] death. That moved me to tears.”

And he started to cry.