Just saw this come across. Have some of his books. An important part of America's WWII heritage.


Cartoonist Bill Mauldin Dies at 81
The Associated Press
Jan 22 2003 4:19PM

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) - Bill Mauldin, who dished out snippets of World War II reality laced with humor through cartoon soldiers Willie and Joe and became one of the 20th century's pre-eminent editorial cartoonists, died Wednesday. He was 81.
Mauldin died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, including pneumonia, at a Newport Beach nursing home, said Andy Mauldin, 54, of Santa Fe, N.M., one of the cartoonist's seven sons.

'It's really good that he's not suffering anymore,'' he said. ``He had a terrible struggle.''

Willie and Joe, a laconic pair of unshaven, mud-encrusted dogfaces, slogged their way through Italy and other parts of battle-scarred Europe, surviving the enemy and the elements while caustically and sarcastically harpooning the unctuous and pompous.

They were the vessels that Mauldin, a young Army rifleman, filled with wry understatement to portray the tedium and treachery of war, entertaining and endearing himself to millions of fellow soldiers in the war and to Americans at home.

Mauldin called himself ``as independent as a hog on ice,'' and his nonconformist approach brought him a face-to-face upbraiding from Gen. George Patton. Mauldin continued to draw what he wanted.

In 1945, at age 23, his series ``Up Front With Mauldin'' won him the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning.

Mauldin won the second in 1959, while he was an editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for depicting Soviet novelist Boris Pasternak saying to another gulag prisoner: ``I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?

Bill Mauldin was a man for the ages.

God's speed Bill.

yes he was even Patton went after him until Ike stopped him