perdidobay
<font color=green>Will work for travel ;-)<br><fon
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2001
- Messages
- 6,216
Even though I grew up on Walt Disney cartoons, and I was born 12 years after the end of WW2, I was most influenced by Bill. I grew up drawing and reading cartoons of all kinds. His were my favorite. If you've never read one of his books, do it soon.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose darkly funny renderings of GIs Willie and Joe won him the love of the grunts in the foxholes but a dressing down from Gen. George S. Patton, died on Wednesday in a Southern California nursing home of Alzheimer's disease
Andy Mauldin, one of his eight children, said the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist died at age 81 of advanced stages of the disease. The walls of his room were plastered with letters and thank you notes from veterans who had learned of his plight.
"You never forgot us." one 80-year-old veteran of the 94th Infantry Division wrote him, adding "We will never forget you."
Andy Mauldin praised the letter writing campaign that spontaneously erupted when people learned of his father's plight, saying, "It was really moving. It was typical of the outpouring of goodwill and affection toward my father. He brought a little bit of light to people living through some dark times."
And while his father did not recognize people nor remember much in the last months of the his life, the cards and letters seemed to cheer up the man who waded ashore with the troops in the invasion of Sicily, armed with a sketchbook, pen and ink instead of a gun.
His job was to cover the 45th Infantry Division which he had joined after dropping out of art school in 1940. He thought he would be a rifleman but the division had a newspaper and soon he was drawing for it, creating Willie and Joe, the two GIs in desperate need of a shave -- a predicament that every infantryman could and did identify with.
THEY MARCHED ON
They marched on, weary dogfaces, asking each things like "Remember the warm soft mud last summer?" Or explaining to a medic, "Just give me two aspirins I already got the Purple Heart."
The New Mexico-born Mauldin caught the attention of famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle and he was soon transferred to the army newspaper "Stars and Stripes with his "Up Front" cartoons of the war being syndicated in newspapers back home.
"I drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something out of the humorous situations which come up when you don't think life could be any more miserable."
Mauldin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1945 at age 23, making him the youngest person to win the
prestigious journalism award. He won it again in 1959 when he was staff cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch for a cartoon showing Soviet writer Boris Pasternak in a prison camp saying to another prisoner, "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime."
His most famous cartoon was after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and showed the majestic statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting in the Lincoln Memorial weeping.
While the soldiers loved Mauldin, Gen. George S. Patton, the commander of the Third Army, didn't like him because his cartoons made fun of officers and thought about throwing him in jail. Patton even wrote a letter to "Stars and Stripes" telling the Army newspaper that he would ban it from the Third Army if it did not stop "Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline."
Under orders from Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, the two men met and Patton gave Mauldin a speech about how a mob can't run an army. Mauldin later wrote that he thought Paton was insane but a great general.
Mauldin's son David said in a November 2002 interview with Jim Frost of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, Journal, that his father's basic philosophy was "that if he saw something big, he hit it" and he eventually discovered that a cartoon could pack a stronger punch than a fist.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose darkly funny renderings of GIs Willie and Joe won him the love of the grunts in the foxholes but a dressing down from Gen. George S. Patton, died on Wednesday in a Southern California nursing home of Alzheimer's disease
Andy Mauldin, one of his eight children, said the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist died at age 81 of advanced stages of the disease. The walls of his room were plastered with letters and thank you notes from veterans who had learned of his plight.
"You never forgot us." one 80-year-old veteran of the 94th Infantry Division wrote him, adding "We will never forget you."
Andy Mauldin praised the letter writing campaign that spontaneously erupted when people learned of his father's plight, saying, "It was really moving. It was typical of the outpouring of goodwill and affection toward my father. He brought a little bit of light to people living through some dark times."
And while his father did not recognize people nor remember much in the last months of the his life, the cards and letters seemed to cheer up the man who waded ashore with the troops in the invasion of Sicily, armed with a sketchbook, pen and ink instead of a gun.
His job was to cover the 45th Infantry Division which he had joined after dropping out of art school in 1940. He thought he would be a rifleman but the division had a newspaper and soon he was drawing for it, creating Willie and Joe, the two GIs in desperate need of a shave -- a predicament that every infantryman could and did identify with.
THEY MARCHED ON
They marched on, weary dogfaces, asking each things like "Remember the warm soft mud last summer?" Or explaining to a medic, "Just give me two aspirins I already got the Purple Heart."
The New Mexico-born Mauldin caught the attention of famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle and he was soon transferred to the army newspaper "Stars and Stripes with his "Up Front" cartoons of the war being syndicated in newspapers back home.
"I drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something out of the humorous situations which come up when you don't think life could be any more miserable."
Mauldin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning in 1945 at age 23, making him the youngest person to win the
prestigious journalism award. He won it again in 1959 when he was staff cartoonist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch for a cartoon showing Soviet writer Boris Pasternak in a prison camp saying to another prisoner, "I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime."
His most famous cartoon was after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and showed the majestic statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting in the Lincoln Memorial weeping.
While the soldiers loved Mauldin, Gen. George S. Patton, the commander of the Third Army, didn't like him because his cartoons made fun of officers and thought about throwing him in jail. Patton even wrote a letter to "Stars and Stripes" telling the Army newspaper that he would ban it from the Third Army if it did not stop "Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline."
Under orders from Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, the two men met and Patton gave Mauldin a speech about how a mob can't run an army. Mauldin later wrote that he thought Paton was insane but a great general.
Mauldin's son David said in a November 2002 interview with Jim Frost of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, Journal, that his father's basic philosophy was "that if he saw something big, he hit it" and he eventually discovered that a cartoon could pack a stronger punch than a fist.
