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Posted on 10/24/2003 3:53:18 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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| Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support. The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer. If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions. We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.
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 Sergeant, United States Army and Cartoonist Many people have described their wartime experiences in letters home. But very few have chronicled war for the people doing the fighting. Bill Mauldin, World War II's most famous cartoonist, is one of them.  "Radio th' ol' man we'll be late on account of a thousand-mile detour." William Henry Mauldin was born October 29, 1921 in Mountain Park, New Mexico. Though he did not graduate from high school, he took a correspondence course in cartooning, and later attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1940, just five days before the National Guard was federalized, Bill Mauldin enlisted in the Arizona National Guard. This is truly where his career as the world knows it began. While serving in Oklahoma Mauldin began doing drawings for the Oklahoma City newspaper, and the 45th Division News. Sergeant Bill Mauldin, K Company, 180th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division was with the division when it shipped out for combat duty in the European Theater of Operations in 1943, when he was 21. Upon his arrival in Sicily, he joined the Stars & Stripes, while still drawing for the 45th Division News.  "So I told Company K they'd just have to work out their replacement problem for themselves." After Ernie Pyle, America's most popular journalist in the Second World War, wrote an article about the work of Mauldin, he was picked up by United Feature Syndicate in 1944 and his cartoons began appearing in newspapers all over the United States. He later recalled that: "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 even when you don't think life could be any more miserable."  Mauldin earned a Purple Heart at Cassino. He did not spend all of his time cartooning and working for the 45th Division News during the war. He made sure he spent time with K Company, his fellow infantrymen. In fact, around Christmas 1943, while sketching at the front, a small fragment from a German mortar hit his shoulders, as he noted in The Brass Ring, "My only damage was a ringing in my ears and a fragment in my shoulder. It burned like a fury but was very small. The wound hardly bled." When Mauldin received the Purple Heart for his injury he protested that he had "been cut worse sneaking through barbed-wire fences in New Mexico," the aid told him to take the medal, which might get him discharged earlier at the end of the war.  "Nonsense. S-2 reported that machine gun silenced hours ago. Stop wiggling your fingers at me." Willie and Joe, Mauldin's now famous cartoon characters, were two combat hardened dogfaces. These were muddy and exhausted, but their spirit was never broken. They hated every second of sitting in rain filled foxholes, trudging through hills and valleys loaded down with rifle and pack, and facing enemy fire, but they never gave up.  "Able Fox Five to Able Fox. I got a target but ya gotta be patient." Mauldin's characters were the average GI. He depicted their boredom, rebellion against bad food, lousy living conditions, and clueless officers. Willie and Joe came to be loved by the lower ranks, and by their families back home. In his classic book "Up Front," Mauldin wrote that the expressions on Joe and Willie are "those of infantry soldiers who have been in the war for a couple of years. If he is looking very weary and resigned to the fact that he is probably going to die before it is over, and if he has a deep, almost hopeless desire to go home and forget it all; if he looks with dull, uncomprehending eyes at the fresh-faced kid who is talking about all the joys of battle and killing Germans, then he comes from the same infantry as Joe and Willie."  Mauldin draws Pvt. Robert L. Bowman in May 1944. A notable exception to the American love of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe was General George Patton. In 1945 he wrote a letter to the Stars & Stripes threatening to ban the newspaper from Third Army if it did not stop carrying "Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline."  "Awright, awright — it's a general! Ya wanna pass in review?" General Dwight Eisenhower did not agree and was concerned that any attempt at censorship would undermine morale. In hopes of reconciling the differences he set up a meeting between Mauldin and Patton. Mauldin went to see Patton in March 1945. He had to endure a lengthy lecture on the dangers of producing "anti-officer cartoons". Mauldin's response was the rightful argument that the soldiers had legitimate grievances that needed to be addressed.  Bill Maudlin wrote about his meeting with General George Patton in his book, The Brass Ring (1971) There he sat, big as life even at that distance. His hair was silver, his face was pink, his collar and shoulders glittered with more stars than I could count, his fingers sparkled with rings, and an incredible mass of ribbons started around desktop level and spread upward in a flood over his chest to the very top of his shoulder, as if preparing to march down his back too. His face was rugged, with an odd, strangely shapeless outline; his eyes were pale, almost colorless, with a choleric bulge. His small, compressed mouth was sharply downturned at the comers, with a lower lip which suggested a pouting child as much as a no-nonsense martinet. It was a welcome, rather human touch. Beside him, lying in a big chair, was Willie, the bull terrier. If ever dog was suited to master this one was. Willie had his beloved boss's expression and lacked only the ribbons and stars. I stood in that door staring into the four meanest eyes I'd ever seen. Patton demanded: "What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?" Patton then launched into a lengthy dissertation about armies and leaders of the past, of rank and its importance. Patton was a master of his subject felt truly privileged, as if I were hearing Michelangelo on painting. I had been too long enchanted by the army myself to be anything but impressed by this magnificent old performer's monologue. Just as when I had first saluted him, I felt whatever martial spirit was left in me being lifted out and fanned into flame. If you're a leader, you don't push wet spaghetti, you pull it. The U.S. Army still has to learn that. The British understand it. Patton understood it. 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. Frederick S. Voss wrote about the meeting between Bill Maudlin and George Patton in his book, Reporting the War (1994) Pulling from a drawer some clipped samples of Mauldin's work, he asked their creator to justify their anti-officer tone. In doing so, Mauldin thought he acquitted himself fairly well. By making soldiers laugh at their grievances and letting them know that someone else understood them, he said in effect, he was helping them to let off steam in a relatively harmless way and thereby preventing the mutiny that Patton was so sure he was causing. Patton was clearly unconvinced. "You can't run an army like a mob," he declared when Mauldin was done, and after a handshake and a smart parting salute from Mauldin, the interview was over. Official recognition for his work came in 1945, when Mauldin was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. The award read, "For distinguished service as a cartoonist, as exemplified by the cartoon entitled, 'Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners,' in the series entitled, 'Up Front With Mauldin." Bill Mauldin was 23 years old at the time.  Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners. The first collection of cartoons "Up Front" was published in 1945 in book form, and later republished for it's 50th Anniversary in 1995. His first collection of postwar cartoons was entitled "Back Home" and was published in 1947. These cartoons focused on the plight of the GI upon returning to the States, and the political situations that abounded.  "He thinks the food over there was swell. He's glad to be home, but he misses the excitement of battle. You may quote him." Mr. Mauldin became a national phenomenon for awhile. He was on the cover of Time magazine, acted in two movies in 1951 -- "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Up Front". He wrote about the war in Korea for Collier's magazine, and unsuccessfully ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress from the state of New York. As a member of the United Feature Syndicate Mauldin's cartoons attacking racism, the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism appeared in newspapers all over the United States. Mauldin's cartoons were unpopular with the newspapers in small towns and he had difficulty getting them published. Disillusioned, Mauldin gave up cartooning.  He returned in 1958 and found a home with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1958. He proceeded to win his second Pulitzer prize the following year. In this prize winning cartoon, Mauldin was commenting on the plight of Soviet author Boris Pasternak. One prisoner in a Siberian camp says to another, "I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"  The year 1962 found Mauldin working for the Chicago Sun-Times. While there, one of his best-known cartoons was created. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy this cartoon (showing Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, with his hands covering his face) was published.  During his career Mauldin wrote and illustrated more than twelve books. This included Up Front (1945), Back Home (1947), Mud and Guts (1978), Hurray for B.C. (1979), Bill Mauldin's Army (1983) and Let's Declare Ourselves Winners and Get the Hell Out (1985). On Wednesday, January 22, 2003 Bill Mauldin died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, including pneumonia, at a Newport Beach nursing home, said Andy Mauldin, 54, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the cartoonist's seven sons. "It's really good that he's not suffering anymore," he said. "He had a terrible struggle." He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. Section 64, Grave 6974. Accordingly, he is now at rest among his beloved GI's. For many years on Veteran's Day, Charles Schulz, the "Peanuts" creator, had Snoopy dress in his old uniform and go over to Bill Mauldin's house to reminisce and quaff a few root beers. Symbolically, this was a tribute to all veterans, their sacrifice, their loss of innocence. Snoopy would become sentimental and sometimes end up in tears. It was also a tribute to Mauldin and his importance to the G. I.s of World War II. Schulz himself had been a machine gunner in Europe. Mauldin didn't romanticize war. His was a war of rain and mud, hunger and stupidity, arrogance and ignorance, and Willie and Joe did their best to just keep going.       |
Bruce Bairnsfather (1888-1959) was the creator of 'Old Bill', the cartoon character who perhaps best illustrated the practical philosophy of the British private soldier during World War One.
Following schooling both in India and in Britain Bairnsfather signed up for a period with the army in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Finding himself quickly bored however he left the army and enrolled as an art student at the Hassall School of Art.
Emerging from his training he was initially employed designing advertising posters for household staples such as Lipton Tea and Player's tobacco. Unable to secure further art work however he was engaged by a firm of electrical joiners as a representative.
Recalled to his old regiment with the outbreak of war in August 1914, Bairnsfather was rapidly promoted Lieutenant and, following the British army's stand at Mons, sent to the Western Front to help relieve the chronic shortage of manpower experienced at that time by the British in Flanders.
Assigned command of a machine gun section (at that stage using the Maxim rather than the Vickers machine gun) Bairnsfather confessed later to feeling appalled at the horrors he experienced at the front (so much so he claimed that he declined leave home on the grounds that he would probably be disinclined to return).
Bairnsfather participated in the one and only Christmas Truce of the war, in 1914, remarking that:
"It all felt most curious: here were these sausage-eating wretches, who had elected to start this infernal European fracas, and in so doing had brought us all into the same muddy pickle as themselves... There was not an atom of hate on either side that day; and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed."
While serving at the front Bairnsfather began to draw sketches of day to day trench life from the perspective of the average soldier, that saw initial publication in the Bystander magazine in 1915.
Suffering from the effects of a chlorine gas attack in the wake of the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, Bairnsfather was subsequently wounded by a shell explosion and sent home to Britain to recuperate.
While at the London General Hospital in London he was diagnosed as suffering from the effects of shell shock. It was while in hospital that the Bystander commissioned him to produce a series of weekly drawings that were subsequently published as the six-volume Fragments from France.
With his recuperation complete the government dispatched Bairnsfather to the Isle of Wight to oversee the training of fresh recruits bound for France and Flanders. It was during this period that he created the character 'Old Bill', which rapidly brought its creator widespread praise and popularity.
The government, recognising the propaganda potential of Bairnsfather's cartoons, chose not to return him to the battlefields (performing no further active service). Instead he was sent on drawing missions to cover the U.S. and Italian forces.
Numerous plays and films based upon Bairnsfather's Old Bill character were produced during the 1920s and 1930s. Bairnsfather, somewhat embittered by the treatment of returning veterans following the war, often acted as their unofficial spokesman, and opposed the construction of the Menin Gate in Ypres, opened in 1927 (the money would have been better spent on wounded veterans he argued).
Bairnsfather continued to produce further books and drawings including Carry on Sergeant! (1927), Old Bill Looks at Europe (1935) and Old Bill Stands By (1939), although he never regained his wartime popularity. During the Second World War he was employed an official cartoonist to the U.S. forces stationed in Europe.
Having published two volumes of memoirs, Bullets & Billets (1916) and From Mud to Mufti (1919), Bairnsfather died on 29 September 1959 in Worcestershire at the age of 71.
(She deserves it though).
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Beirut Remembered
 A U.S. Marine stands in front of the ruins of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, on Oct. 24, 1983. The building was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack on Oct. 23, 1983, that killed 241 servicemen. On the 20th anniversary of the attack, hundreds of survivors, relatives and other veterans and friends gathered in Jacksonville, N.C., on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, to honor the victims and other U.S. service members who died in peacekeeping efforts in Beirut in the 1980s. (AP Photo/Jamal, File)  Retired Gen. Alfred Gray, former Commandant of the Marine Corps, second from right, Brig. Gen. Robert Dickerson, right, Jacksonville Mayor Elsie Smith, and U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., far left, honor the flag, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., during a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps headquarters building in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan )  A hand touches a name on the Beirut Memorial on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., after a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan )  A Marine honor guard salutes during the playing of Taps, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., during a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps headquaters building in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen.(AP Photo/Bob Jordan)  Amy Battle Taylor, whose father, Sgt. David Battle, was killed 20 yearsago in Beirut, wipes away tears, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., during a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps headquarters building in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan)  Navy Senior Petty Officer Darrell Gibson touches names on the Beirut Memorial on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., after a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan)  An unidentified young girl touches a name on the Beirut Memorial wall, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003, in Jacksonville, N.C., after a service to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Marine Corps headquarters building in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 servicemen. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan )
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G'morning peoples ... :)
to visit the tribute page
"The Era of Osama lasted about an hour, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty." 
Toward FREEDOM
"They wish to hell they were someplace else, and they wish to hell they would get relief. They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot. They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then they climb out and crawl through minefields and fight some more." - Bill Mauldin, Up Front.
thanks from an old Stars and Stripes reader.
Love it. Hi ex-snook.
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