17. The Lowly GI Who Stood Up to Pressure from George Patton
General George S. Patton was a force of nature. A hard-driving, bumptious, overbearing, often obnoxious, but usually effective force of nature. He was not above physically assaulting his soldiers, as evinced by the time he slapped around a pair of GIs suffering from malarial fever and PTSD. That almost got him cashiered out of the Army, but his undoubted effectiveness as a battlefield commander earned him a second chance. In short, Patton was not the kind of general that a lowly enlisted man wanted to stand up to.
Yet that is precisely what GI cartoonist Bill Mauldin did, when Patton tried to pressure him into self-censorship. William Henry “Bill” Mauldin was born in 1921 in New Mexico. He studied cartooning at the Chicago Academy of Fine arts, before enlisting in the US Army in 1940. He won initial fame in WWII as a cartoonist for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. His sardonic Willie and Joe cartoons, about the travails of two disheveled combat soldiers, were highly popular with the troops.
