During a war, there are different rankings of soldiers in the army. There are the soldiers such as generals in the back who are high up in the ranks that make all the orders and then there are the soldiers up front who execute those orders. After World War II ended in 1945, Bill Mauldin, a military journalist and cartoonist for Stars and Stripes published a nonfiction narrative with several of his cartoons called, Up Front. In the book, Mauldin focuses on the infantry soldiers on the frontline of a war that he calls “dogfaces”. These dogfaces, are the soldiers who are fighting in the war seeing friends killed, ex the aftermath of a battle, and live in the most treacherous of conditions where they know that they could die at any moment. The
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His cartoons also faced two types of censorship resulting in three of them being banned because of the sensitive nature of the material. The other type of censorship was from General George S. Patton, “because in the general's opinion, it showed a lack of respect for military hierarchy and protocol” , due to the fact that neither Willie nor Joe were shaved and he wanted the cartoons to be permanently banned as a result. In Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II, Kenneth Ward explains that it became extremely intense between the general and Mauldin that, “Patton put pressure on Stars and Stripes either to force Mauldin to shave Willie and Joe or to stop running the strip, and when Patton received no satisfaction from this quarter he even took his complaints to supreme Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower” . Eisenhower did not honor this because it was the newspaper for the infantrymen, not the generals. Not all the brass had a distaste for Mauldin’s cartoons like Patton. For example, when a corps commander wanted one of Mauldin’s original cartoons and he said to him, “When you start drawing pictures that don’t get a few complaints, then you’d better quit, because you won’t be doing anybody any good ” which is a form of encouragement for
His cartoons also faced two types of censorship resulting in three of them being banned because of the sensitive nature of the material. The other type of censorship was from General George S. Patton, “because in the general's opinion, it showed a lack of respect for military hierarchy and protocol” , due to the fact that neither Willie nor Joe were shaved and he wanted the cartoons to be permanently banned as a result. In Myth and the Greatest Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II, Kenneth Ward explains that it became extremely intense between the general and Mauldin that, “Patton put pressure on Stars and Stripes either to force Mauldin to shave Willie and Joe or to stop running the strip, and when Patton received no satisfaction from this quarter he even took his complaints to supreme Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower” . Eisenhower did not honor this because it was the newspaper for the infantrymen, not the generals. Not all the brass had a distaste for Mauldin’s cartoons like Patton. For example, when a corps commander wanted one of Mauldin’s original cartoons and he said to him, “When you start drawing pictures that don’t get a few complaints, then you’d better quit, because you won’t be doing anybody any good ” which is a form of encouragement for