Career officers found Mauldin's work offensive- George Patton even threatened to "throw his a- in jail" when Bill lampooned the General's order that all men were to be clean-shaven. In early '44, Mauldin was given his own jeep to further material-gathering he created 6 cartoons a week for the soldiers' paper. The cartoon character Willie was based on Bill's friend Irving Richtel, and Willie's buddy Joe was an amalgam of typical G.I.s. By then he was contributing to STARS AND STRIPES. Twenty-two year-old Mauldin traveled as newspaper correspondent with the 45th Infantry Division on the Sicily invasion and Italian campaign. This unchaptered book presents a unique soldier's-view perspective of the last two momentous years of the war in Europe. Mauldin is easily as fine an author as artist. On page one of the book, Mauldin claims to not be a writer and that his text is primarily an attempt to explain how the 160 single panel cartoons reproduced here came to exist. There were at least seven printings in 1945 of Bill Mauldin's UP FRONT- my copy is from the 7th run.
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