![]() ![]() He planned to plaster them on every wall and telephone pole in Italy, as an admonition to GIs to ‘ack like sojers.’” ![]() “He wanted, so help me,” Mauldin remembered, “to take the original drawing and have thousands of huge poster copies printed. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, a flesh-and-blood colonel entered the newspaper’s office and presented Mauldin with what he thought was a brilliant idea. The day after the cartoon appeared in the U.S. When we ain’t fightin’ we should ack like sojers.” As a young, fresh-scrubbed corporal levels his gaze at them, Willie says, “He’s right, Joe. In the midst of it, twenty-one-year-old cartoonist Bill Mauldin, assigned to the regiment’s K Company, did a drawing of the two infantrymen who were his main subjects, Willie and Joe, slouching against a ruined doorway and looking utterly bone-weary-so disheveled you could almost smell them. ![]() In late September 1943, the 45th Infantry Division’s 180th Regiment was in Naples, embroiled in the brutal, soul-deadening fighting typical of Italy at that time. Bill Mauldin’s timeless characters captured the lot of the common soldier of World War II-and every war. ![]()
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