Bill Mauldin was an 18-year-old "dogface" in the U.S. Army in 1940, when he created Willie and Joe.

Willie and Joe weren't super-soldiers, wielding a chattering machine gun in each hand, like Sgt. Rock or Sgt. Fury. Nor were they pathetic losers like Sad Sack, or screw-ups like Private Snafu.

They weren't over-the-top caricatures of the types found in military life, like many of the characters in Beetle Bailey, either.

They were just ordinary guys, there because that's where they were, doing a job because that's the job they were doing — the Everyman of the World War II American army.

"Why th' hell couldn't you have been born a beautiful woman?"

"... forever, Amen. Hit the dirt."

He knew from an early age that he wanted to make cartooning his career, and after high school, began studying toward that goal at Chicago's Academy of Fine Art.

Mauldin's early war cartoons made fun of camp life and the inadequate facilities for soldiers.

It wasn't until he crossed the Atlantic that he seriously began exposing the difficulties of the soldiers' lives.

"I'm naked!"

"Tell th' old man I'm sittin' up wit' two sick friends."

Between shooting and getting shot at, he found time to supply cartoons to the 45th Division News.

Their fame spread throughout the service, and in 1944 he went to work as a full-time cartoonist for Stars & Stripes.

In his 1945 book "Up Front" Mauldin said "... there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears."

"They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties."

"Now that you mention it, it does sound like th' patter of rain on a tin roof."

"Remember that warm, soft mud last summer?"

"Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other."

"They are normal people who have been put where they are, and whose actions and feelings have been molded by their circumstances."

"There are gentlemen and boors; intelligent ones and stupid ones; talented ones and inefficient ones."

"But when they are all together and they are fighting, despite their bitching and griping and goldbricking and mortal fear, they are facing cold steel and screaming lead and hard enemies, and they are advancing and beating the hell out of the opposition."

"Joe, yestiddy ya saved my life an' I swore I'd pay ya back. Here's my last pair of dry socks."

"Th' hell this ain't th' most important hole in th' world. I'm in it."

"They wish to hell they were someplace else, and they wish to hell they would get relief. They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot. They want to go home."

"But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then they climb out and crawl through minefields and fight some more."

He later recalled that: "I drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something out of the humorous situations which come up even when you don't think life could be any more miserable."

"Didn't we meet at Cassino?"

He noted in The Brass Ring, "My only damage was a ringing in my ears and a fragment in my shoulder. It burned like a fury but was very small. The wound hardly bled."

"Just give me the aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart."

"I can't git no lower, Willie. Me buttons 
is in th' way."

Real-life soldiers loved Willie & Joe. But the characters' doings and observations sometimes made the brass uncomfortable because they reflected a front-line soldier's day-to-day life a little too accurately, with humor and affection but no sugar coating.

In addition, many officers thought the feature fostered an anti-authority, possibly mutinous attitude.

General George Patton, for example, was an outspoken critic, and made no secret of the fact that he'd love to see Mauldin's cartoons suppressed.

Patton got the opposite of his wish.

A 1944 article by Ernie Pyle brought Mauldin and his creations to the attention of the civilian press.

"Beautiful view! Is there one for the enlisted men?"

"Don't look at me, lady. I didn't do it."

In 1945 General George Patton wrote a letter to the Stars and Stripes and threatened to ban the newspaper from his Third Army if it did not stop carrying "Mauldin's scurrilous attempts to undermine military discipline."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower did not agree and feared that any attempt at censorship would undermine army morale.

Mauldin went to see Patton in March 1945 where he had to endure a long lecture on the dangers of producing "anti-officer cartoons".

Mauldin responded by arguing that the soldiers had legitimate grievances that needed to be addressed.

"Tell them leaflet people th' krauts ain't got time fer readin' today."

"Another dang mouth to feed."

Will Lang, a reporter with Time, heard about the meeting and questioned Mauldin about what happened. Mauldin replied, "I came out with my hide on. We parted friends, but I don't think we changed each other's mind."

When the comment appeared in the magazine Patton was furious and commented that if he came to see him again he would throw him in jail.

In 1945, Mauldin's cartoons on the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize. The citation read: "for distinguished service as a cartoonist, as exemplified by the series entitled "Up Front With Mauldin".

Mauldin, the youngest person to be awarded the prize, was now one of the best-known cartoonists in the United States.

 His book, Bill Mauldin's Army, was published in 1951.

"Ya don't git combat pay 'cause ya don't fight."

"Why ya lookin' so sad? I got out of it okay."

He won a second Pulitzer in 1959, so it was almost an anticlimax when, two years later, he took home The National Cartoonists' Society's Reuben Award, as Cartoonist of the Year.

By the time he retired, in 1992, his cartoons were being syndicated to about 250 papers. 

V-E Day: "Th' hell with it. I ain't standin' up till he does!"

Mauldin died at a nursing home in Newport Beach, Calif., where he had lived since mid-2001 while battling Alzheimer's disease. More recently, he had contracted pneumonia. The cause of death was respiratory failure.

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