Sunday,
March 02, 2008
WWII Brutally Mismanaged Italian Campaign
Exposed by
The
ANNOTICO Report
His favorite TARGETS, publicity-mad
Mauldin struck "a delicate balance between representing
. . . the men of the lines -- and fulfilling his official charge to bolster
morale." He couldn't tell the grisly truth about the brutally mismanaged
Italian campaign. But in the fiercest fighting of 1943-44,
when the infantry had to scale sheer cliffs under fire and cross rivers under Wehrmacht machine-gun fire, his panels "dripped
with insinuations and veiled meanings." And "his fans in the foxholes
read the truth between the brushstrokes."
BOOK REVIEW
'
By
Clancy Sigal
March 2, 2008
Todd DePastino
W.W. Norton: 370 pp., $27.95
Willie & Joe
The WWII Years
Fantagraphics: 650 pp., $65
As Todd DePastino writes in his deeply felt,
vivacious and wonderfully illustrated biography, Mauldin's "morbid,
angry, compulsive humor" was born of the frontline soldier's resigned
sense that he was a walking dead man because "few would survive the war
with anything less than a life-altering wound." Mauldin's native
genius, like that of his predecessor satirists Hogarth and Daumier and today's
Garry Trudeau, was to assimilate "the [enlisted] men's grievances into his
own," which for a hungry kid from the Great Depression were many and
intractable.
Laden with an M-1 rifle, grenades and a backpack full of drawing paper, brushes
and ink he'd scrounged, Mauldin waded ashore with the 45th in bloody beach
invasions in
Willie, fierce-beaked and tramp-like, and Joe, battle-weary and
dazed-looking, were the war's Everymen. Top brass
like Gen. Patton despised these defiantly low-class creatures for spreading
"a cancer of insubordination." But ordinary soldiers came to love
them -- and Mauldin -- because the kid cartoonist "came closest to
representing the experience of combat." After all, his 170-man rifle
company had suffered over 1,000% casualties.
Like
Mindful of military bureaucrats who regarded Willie and Joe as "unsoldierly," Mauldin struck "a delicate
balance between representing . . . the men of the lines -- and fulfilling his
official charge to bolster morale." He couldn't tell the grisly truth about the brutally
mismanaged Italian campaign. But in the fiercest fighting of 1943-44, when the
infantry had to scale sheer cliffs under fire and cross rivers under Wehrmacht machine-gun fire, his panels "dripped with
insinuations and veiled meanings." And "his fans in the foxholes read
the truth between the brushstrokes."
Readers can judge for themselves. In addition to Mauldin panels in DePastino's book, there's a terri fic, new two-volume
collection (edited by DePastino) that traces the
artist's development from 1940 to the end of the war. With a few chiaroscuro
strokes and a wry caption, Mauldin cuts to the bone. For example: Willie and
Joe, unshaven, ragged and exhausted after a battle, look up at a clean-cut
soldier swaggering toward them, fire in his eye. "That can't be no combat man. He's lookin' fer a fight," observes Willie. And when two
officers on a mountaintop gaze at a gorgeous sunset, the captain says to the
major, "Beautiful view"; below it a caption reads, "Is
there one for the enlisted men?" In another, Willie and Joe, cowering
in a ditch, mutter to a general standing upright, "Sir, do ya hafta draw fire while yer inspirin' us?"
DePastino suggests that Mauldin was so successful
because, unlike other Army-oriented comics (such as "Sad Sack" and
"GI Joe") that flooded the market after
After the war, some critics expressed surprise, even dismay, at Mauldin's
anti-racist, anti-Red Scare cartoons for the newspapers that had competed to
hire the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Chalk it up to the 45th Division.
Despite the Army's rule of strict segregation, his "was the most
integrated regiment in the country" full of "rough and literate men
who seemed to delight in defying stereotypes." His buddy Rayson J.
Mauldin, "the angriest baby" his grandmother had ever seen, was
born into a "weird bunch" in the bleak "
A wild, fighting-mad desert child, young
LIKE so many GIs, including this reviewer, Mauldin had trouble finding his feet
in peacetime. Babies, divorces (three) and quiet suburbia unsettled him. Being
"the most famous enlisted man in the United States Army," then hailed
as "the most important artist of his age," was disorienting. His
books, especially "Up Front," became bestsellers and made him rich,
but J. Edgar Hoover's FBI tagged him a dangerous communist because he
criticized the House Un-American Activities Committee and spoke out against
racial discrimination. Briefly, he became a
In the late 1960s, Mauldin grew his hair hippie-long, enjoyed the
counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb and later got his nose broken by one of
Chicago
At the age of 80, beset by Alzheimer's, Mauldin lay dying in a
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