![]() ![]() It was an apt description of America’s new military. They were just doing their job and wanted only to finish it and go home. There was no gauzy sentimentality in Willie and Joe, no chest-thumping heroics. Mauldin’s characters offered a counterpoint to the clean-cut, gung-ho fighting man put forth by the Army publicity machine. “My reactions are those of a young guy who has been exposed to some of it, and I try to put those reactions in my drawings.” I’m not old enough to understand what it’s all about,” Mauldin wrote in 1945. “I haven’t tried to picture this war in a big, broad-minded way. The caption on a drawing of exhausted soldiers walking hunched over in the rain reads, “Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners.” It’s hard to tell which are the prisoners. “Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an’ I swore I’d pay ya back,” Willie says in another sketch. ![]()
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