Saturday, October 29, 1921. The birth of Bill Mauldin.

On this day in 1921, Bill Mauldin, the great World War Two illustrator (cartoon doesn't suffice to describe his work) was born in New Mexico.

Mauldin while a Stars and Stripes cartoonist.  Mauldin was a tiny man and always looked younger than his hears.  Here he's wearing a mixed uniform, including the wool lined zipper pattern field jacket that some mistakingly now refer to as a "tanker's jacket", a khaki shirt, OD trousers, and paratrooper boots. The boots were a gift from paratroopers.

Mauldin would ultimately become a Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times, but he had an archetypical Western upbringing that impacted much of his personality. His father, Sidney Albert Mauldin, was the dominant person of his youth and was somewhat unstable.  A streak of instability existed in his mother's side of hte family as well.  His father, called "pops", was a very intelligent man but was given to starting and abandoning projects.  Mauldin claimed Native American heritage on his mother's side, and his own appearance suggested that the claim was well-founded.  It was noted in later years that the two characters of his World War Two cartoon series, Up Front!, resemlbed figures from his own family.

His father had served as an artilleryman in World War One and went on to be a farmer, but one who frequently started and abandoned projects of all types  His father's adoptive grandfather had been a civilian scout with the Army during the Apache Wars.  His parents ultimately divorced and Mauldin and his brother Sidney moved to Phoenix Arizona in 1937 to attend high school, with his brother as the primary caretaker, which unfortunately lead to at least an element of delinquency.  Mauldin started illustrating at that time and made money illegally painting pinups on spare car covers.  He did not graduate from high school and, like many men  his age, joined the local National Guard unit, in his case the New Mexico National Guard, when conscription commenced in 1940.  His talents quickly lead him to be an Army newspaper illustrator, and he is most famously associated with The Stars & Stripes.

Mauldin was a great cartoonist and illustrator, but he had a troubled life, probably caused both by his unstable youthful years and the Second World War.  He married his first wife Jean prior to shipping overseas in the war, but he was not faithful to her during the war, and she wasn't faithful to him.  This lead to a post-war divorce, although the marriage actually endured for well over a decade after the war, with the couple having several children.  He married twice more, but perhaps showing the true nature of his first marriage, his wife Jean returned to take care of him as he was invalided in his final months.

"Me future is settled, Willie. I'm gonna be a professor on types o' European soil."

Mauldin's wartime cartoons underwent a rapid evolution in every sense.  They were good early on, but perhaps not really notably different from cartoons that appeared in other military papers and magazines.  In North Africa, however, they suddenly changed and the brush and ink illustrations became very accurate illustrations, while still having a speaking cartoon element.  They were so accurate that only the outright illustrations of William Brody, which have no cartoon element to them at all, surpass them as American Second World War war art.

Yank magazine medic illustration by William Brodie

Indeed, Mauldin's illustrations are so accurate that a person can trace the introduction of uniforms and equipment, and when they were first used at the front, through his cartoons.  Zealous in his work, he traveled to the front for material and was wounded at Monte Cassino as a result, and therefore had the Purple Heart.  A few of his cartoons were censured by the Army for showing new equipment before its knowledge was widely known.

Mauldin's "dog faces" were not glamorous in any sense, and were routinely dirty and unshaven.  They complained about service life and about some things, such as the lack of new uniforms as they were introduced, frequently.  This famously lead him to be the focus of a blistering ill-advised lecture from Gen. George Patton, who hated his cartoons.

During the war Mauldin's Stars & Stripes illustrations were picked up by American newspapers, and he found that he was returning to a ready-made career.  He was uncertain of it however, and at first his cartoons focused on the lives of his two central characters as they went back into civilian life. Those cartoons always had a bit of a false nature to them, however, as it was clear that Willie and Joe only really knew each other due to their being in the Army, and having them as central cartoons in a civilian cartoon didn't make much sense.  Mauldin's cartoons had always had a bit of an "editorial" nature ot them anyhow, and soon he switched to editorial cartoons, although there was no clear demarcation line from one genre to the other.  AS this happened, however, his cartoons lost circulation.

They were good cartoons, however, and ultimately the St. Louis Post Dispatch picked them up.  In later years the Chicago Sun Times did, and he was associated as a first rate editorial cartoonist with both papers.  In retirement, after having been marred three times, he moved back to his native New Mexico.  

World War Two veterans never forgot him and the memory of his wartime cartoons remained fresh throughout his life.  He obtained the status as the greatest military cartoonist of all time, replacing Bruce Barnesfeather in that status during Barnesfeather's own lifetime.  His fame was such that he himself became a reoccurring topic in the great cartoon series "Peanuts", with the character Snoopy visiting him in the cartoon every Veteran's Day.

Colliers ran the following cover:

The Soviet Union announced that it would honor most of Imperial Russia's debt obligation.

The USSR, in spite of the image it was trying to portray to the world, was an economic mess and as continuing to face armed resistance within its borders.  Indeed, just earlier in the week it had been invaded by Ukrainian insurgents who were advancing in the Ukraine, having crossed the Polish border.  None of its neighbors was sympathetic to it, and it was desperately reaching the point where it was trying to secure foreign funding to rescue its economy and save it from starvation.