16. Willie and Joe, WWII’s Beloved GI Duo
Bill Mauldin started drawing for the 45th Infantry Division’s newspaper. His work attracted the attention of Stars and Stripes, which began publishing his cartoons in 1943, before formally adding him to its staff in 1944. Mauldin was not just a rear echelon creative type. He covered the fighting in Sicily and Italy and was in the thick of heavy combat. He was wounded near Salerno, and after D-Day, he was sent to France and accompanied the advancing GIs into Germany.
While working for Stars and Stripes, Mauldin created his most famous cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, two front-line GIs. They frequently found themselves caught between the horrors of war, and the sometimes ridiculous expectations and directives and pressure from the Army’s higher-ups. The irrepressible duo thus struggled from one cartoon to the next, in order to triumph over both the Wehrmacht and their own rear-echelon officers. Something about the bedraggled duo did not sit well with the spit-and-polish General Patton.
