The most famous cartoonist of WWII was Bill Mauldin. He was born on October 29, 1921. He enlisted in the National Guard and three days later his division was federalized. The 45th Infantry Division served in Sicily and Italy. He was a cartoonist in the press corps. Later he was transferred to the ”Stars and Stripes” army newspaper. His cartoons sometimes lampooned military discipline and the idea of following orders without thinking. Patton called him an “unpatriotic anarchist”. He developed the famous characters Willie and Joe. At age 23, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon showing exhausted American soldiers escorting prisoners, but with the caption parroting a typical press release: “Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners”. Mauldin was wounded by mortar shrapnel while visiting front line soldiers. After the war, he became a political cartoonist. He was a civil libertarian and many of his cartoons evidenced that. In 1959, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon about the recent Nobel Prize for Literature winner Boris Pasternak. The cartoon shows Pasternak in a gulag with the caption: “I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?” Probably his most famous political cartoon was after the Kennedy assassination. The cartoon shows a grieving Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. Mauldin had a very short movie career. He starred with Audie Murphy in “The Red Badge of Courage” in 1951.
Categories: Anecdote
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