January 22, 2003
is dead. Web writer Robert Sherrill wrote this not too long ago:
A lot of World War II servicemen behaved for years, until that old debbil dotage crept up on them, and they began to think of themselves as heroes, strutting around at memorials, D-Days, V-Days, and Armistice Day parades and whatnot, strangling in VFW and Legion jackets, their fore-and-aft caps cocked high and low, gongs, patches, and other inscrutable garbage all over them. Some might have been heroes, who knows?I read Up Front and Back Home when I was ten or eleven. I’ve never forgotten them. Bill Mauldin knew the score, lived the story, and told the truth. Farewell. [10:13 PM]This disturbed me and got me to thinking about heroes, real ones—and after a long spell, I poked my head up and my hero ambushed me. He was not Sgt. York or Audie Murphy, he was the World War 2 dogface.
[…] The real source and catalyst of this spirit was Bill Mauldin’s Up Front and Back Home. In Up Front, Mauldin tells about his life as a doggie and the cartoons of two dogfaces, Willie and Joe, show it. It is a fine work—funny, grim, and sad, the only indispensable book, as the critics say, on World War II. […]
Mauldin, boy soldier, seems to have always been at war with himself. Conflicting feelings are, I feel, the surest crucible of art. His work stripped bare war and life, and himself, with humor and honesty. He was a strong, clear, and open writer. His anecdote about the 20-year-old staff sergeant who was shredded when a German dropped a potato masher in his hole is a little lesson in how to write. How to be. In a picture of him in the field, I noticed that he was left-handed. As he asked: Whoever heard of a left-handed artist? He led a somewhat privileged life, but don’t be fooled; he was a doggie, a 45th Division doggie.
NPR ran a nice tribute today, with an old interview with Maudlin.
He had a beef with Patton, and vice-versa. I'd like to learn more about that...
Stefan, there's a nice recounting of Maudlin's meeting with Patton in 1945 in the biography of Patton that was written by Carlo D'Este a few years ago that I recommend to you. I will mention that during the meeting Maudlin thought about petting Willie, Patton's pit bull, but decided that he'd better not risk his drawing hand... ;-)
For those of you who like Mauldin, you might be interested in the work of Arthur Syzk, a prominent Jewish political activist and cartoonist who was roughly Mauldin's contemporary. There was recently a fantastic exhibition of his work in the special gallery of the Holocaust Memorial down in my neck of the woods.
One of the more jaw-droppingly clueless reviews I read of Saving Private Ryan asserted that a major problem with the movie was that it showed a self-doubting moral ambivalence about War that everyone knows only came to be with the Boomers and Vietnam.
{snort}
While there were others that I thought of as refutations of that -- Spike Milligan, Norman Mailer, Paul Fussell, and that fact that this was the generation that gave us fubar and snafu -- Bill Mauldin was in the crowd. I, too, read Up Front at a young age, and still quote from it. (A recurring one when I think I'll get something done eventually, just not right this second: "Artillery? I gotta target for ya, but ya gotta be patient...")
Ave, Bill. Hope you get to see the Officers' Sunset.
The Library of Congress has a set of pages about Arthur Szyk. The haggadah described on the exhibition page is a neat piece of work; it's what I've been reading from each Passover since I was a kid. (At least, I think that's the same one. I don't remember the dedication page. Most likely mine's a later edition.)
Yes. My father had a print of the Syzk Haggadah, and it remains my warmest Pesach memory to this day. I loved it because it was the first time I had ever seen Jews depicted as armored warriors (the image of Aaron and Hur holding up Moses' arms sticks most in my mind. At least, I think that's who it was in the image.)
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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