Willie and Joe

THE BRASS RING

by BILL MAULDIN

275 pages. W.W. Norton. $7.95.

They never shaved. They were so dirty that even the paper on which they appeared seemed to take on a grubby look. Yet the faces of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe were as admired and familiar to Americans during World War II as Dwight David Eisenhower's. Irreverent toward rank and cynical about the war--"Just gimme th' aspirin," Willie tells a medic. "I already got a Purple Heart"--Willie and Joe were more than cartoon characters. They were the American G.I.

Drawing for Stars and Stripes, the Army's newspaper, Mauldin was telling it like it is long before that dreadful phrase was invented (see cut). Mauldin also became a kind of ombudsman for the G.I. in his war with officers and gentlemen. When the general who administered Naples, for example, started handing out four-day jail terms to war-weary troops for minor dress infractions, Mauldin--and Willie and Joe--were there with a cartoon. "Them buttons was shot off when I took this town, sir," a bedraggled Willie tells a well-scrubbed rear-echelon lieutenant. In Mauldin's view, noncombat officers were there to be put down.

General George Patton, among others, thought that Mauldin's attitude toward discipline and authority was subversive. The funniest scene in this often funny book--which Mauldin calls "a sort of a memoir"--is the confrontation between the 23-year-old cartoonist and the famous general. "Now then, sergeant," Patton says in his most tolerant tone, "about those god-awful things you call soldiers. You know goddamn well you're not drawing an accurate representation of the American soldier. You make them look like goddamn bums. No respect for the army, their officers, or themselves. You know as well as I do that you can't have an army without respect for officers. What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?"

Mauldin continued to lampoon the brass. The top command thought, correctly as it happened, that Willie and Joe were morale boosters, and even Patton could not touch them. Far from being incitements to mutiny, they were escape valves for the frustrations of the ordinary soldier. Mauldin's humor was often biting, but it was never mean.

For two decades, Mauldin has been one of America's better-known political cartoonists. Yet his approach to his own story, which he carries only up to his mustering-out day in 1945, is one of embarrassed wonder and unembarrassed pride. His boyhood had been spent well below the poverty line. Yet just ten years after he started cartooning from a correspondence course, Willie, his best-known creation, was on the cover of TIME, a book of his cartoons was No. 1 on the bestseller list, and 200 newspapers had signed up for his future output. He was still only 23.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.