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World War II Cartoonist Bill Mauldin Dead at 81

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — 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?

Mauldin wrote and drew 16 books and acted in two movies, including John Huston's 1951 production of The Red Badge of Courage starring real-life war hero Audie Murphy.

Mauldin was born near Santa Fe, N.M., and spent much of his life in the West. He described his father, part Chiricahua Apache and part French Basque, as sort of a gypsy with an itchy foot, and recalled growing up as a child of the Depression on a hardscrabble farm.

"We ended up in Arizona because he had this idea that he was going to be a citrus farmer," he recalled in an Associated Press interview. "He never got around to it."

Mauldin said his father instilled a strong work ethic in him and his brother. While still a youngster, Mauldin took to drawing and saw it as his life's pursuit.

"It was a way to work without having to get off my ass," he said. "It's that simple. I just figured how I ought to make my living. It was a deliberate thing."

At Phoenix Union High School, a teacher nurtured his nascent talent for art and encouraged him to go to study in Chicago.

So Mauldin talked his grandparents into lending him all the money they had -- "their last 500 bucks" -- to grubstake him.

"All I could afford was one year," he said. "So I knew I had to make the most of it. And I did."

He repaid them with his support the rest of their lives.

Mauldin attended the Academy of Fine Art in Chicago, learning from such teachers as cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for the Chicago Daily News.

Then came the war.

Mauldin enlisted in 1940 and, assigned as a rifleman to the 180th Infantry, started drawing cartoons depicting training camp for the Division News, the newspaper for the 45th Division.

Through soldiers' eyes and pithy comments, Mauldin portrayed the miseries, the humors of military life, the tiny victories of common sense over the myopic bureaucrats and the horrors of war.

Once Mauldin's 45th Division shipped overseas, Stars and Stripes, the servicewide newspaper, began publishing his drawings, without his permission.

"Eventually my stuff took hold to the point where they realized they couldn't live without it," Mauldin said, "which is exactly what I had plotted."

His career took off and his freedom grew through Stars and Stripes.

Mauldin spent most of his time with the 45th Division, where his material came from, he said. He ended his five-year military career as a staff sergeant. After the war, Mauldin free-lanced for a time, producing cartoons focused on the fiery social issues and political commentary of the times, most prominently civil rights, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

He joined the Post-Dispatch in 1958. After a falling out with publisher Joe Pulitzer, he went to work for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962.

It was at the Sun-Times that he drew one of his most poignant and famous cartoons on the day of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The drawing showed a grieving Abraham Lincoln, his hands covering his face, at the Lincoln Memorial.

During the mid-1990s, Mauldin suffered a debilitating injury to his drawing hand while working on the engine of a jeep he was issued while in the military. The block fell, mangling several of his fingers and costing him the end of one.

He spent years rehabilitating his hand, continuing after he moved to Tucson, in an effort to draw again.

Late in life, Mauldin remained amazed that the Army had let him portray soldiers as he did -- unshaven, disheveled, irreverent, not easily impressed.

He said a colonel once told him, "There will never be another Mauldin. We would never let it happen."

"And that's basically the truth," Mauldin said. "I was a fluke, I was an accident. It never should have happened."

Mauldin's father was the model for Willie and he used himself as the pattern for Joe. Yet he never intended either to be the everyman.

"I've never been an advocate of the common man theory," he said. "I don't like common men. I like and admire uncommon men, and I always have."

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," he wrote.

Author David Halberstam wrote: "One senses that if a war reporter who had been with Hannibal or Napoleon saw Mauldin's work he would know immediately that the work was right."

More than a half-century after World War II, NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw espoused the belief, in the best-selling book The Greatest Generation and two sequels, that World War II's veterans represented the nation's greatest generation.

Mauldin disagreed.

"I don't think we were all that special," he said. "But it's nice of him to say so. Don't think I don't appreciate it.

"They were human beings, they had their weaknesses and their flaws and their good sides and bad sides," Mauldin said. "The one thing they had in common was they were a little too young to die."