Books

As a small boy – he was 3 by his own account – a lightly parented Bill Mauldin wandered from his hardscrabble border neighborhood to a Mexican bordello. The ladies merrily took him in more than once, but young Bill wrote off these interesting companions rather quickly. They would not let him smoke.

He was an unlikely Army hero, a sickly New Mexico kid turned scrawny teen whose fantasy about going to West Point was scorned by his older brother's assessment of his physical fitness ("You couldn't pass the tests for a barracks rat.")

But young Bill took his fiercely independent streak, and his certainty of his cartooning potential, into the military and soon astonished his superiors with a request to transfer from his quartermaster unit to the infantry.

In person jug-eared and childlike, he was hard to take seriously, writes author Todd DePastino. But on paper he defined a war, and a generation, in gritty, realistic images that foot soldiers saw as their own and folks on the home front grew to appreciate.

The military brass was slow to embrace him. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., for one, saw Mauldin's images of out-of-touch officers, wasted lives, unspeakable living conditions and frustrated soldiers as insubordination if not treason. Patton also thought Mauldin's Joe and Willie characters both needed a haircut and a shave.

Patton's threat to jail him was overcome by the appreciation of other generals. Mark Clark squelched one of many uproars by asking for the signed original of a strip that had offended some thin-skinned officers, and Mauldin was on his way to being a star.

Home from the war and ensconced briefly in Hollywood, he was taken under the wing of Orson Welles, who appreciated the difficulty of being declared a genius at an early age. "Our problem, Bill," Welles muses during a steam-room huddle, "is that it all came too fast, too soon for us." Where else could they go now, Welles and the author wonder, except backward?

Mauldin, however, had plenty of momentum throughout his life and despised many pressures to rehash his WWII days. Instead, he pushed himself to develop as an editorial cartoonist, a writer, a painter, a politician and a public speaker in turn. Along the way, he battled the American Legion, J. Edgar Hoover and forces he considered "against nature," such as young Republicans.

The author's almost dispassionate study of Mauldin's passions make the cartoonist a vivid figure, whether he's scrounging for paper or printing presses in Italy's wartime black market (the only scenes from the book with a vaguely Hogan's Heroes patina) or having a flame-out with one of his wives once he's stateside. Mr. DePastino follows Mauldin through WWII and later conflicts that the cartoonist refused to pretty-up as noble or triumphs of the human spirit.

The book's greatest success may be an almost subversive recognition that the Greatest Generation's war was as ugly as any other. But Mr. DePastino does the heavy lifting for us, packaged with Mauldin's cartoons and sharp ironies that left readers sadder, wiser, proud, disturbed and, somehow, usually laughing.

Mike Peters is a freelance writer in Anchorage, Alaska.

A Life Up Front

Todd DePastino

(Norton, $27.95) Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners. (news item)

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