Anyone writing about World War II ought to find a gem in Bill Mauldin’s 1945 book “Up Front,” which I’m reading at the moment. I have no plans to write a World War II story, but y’all know the war is kind of a hobby of mine. Reading about it, anyway.
Mauldin is best known, of course, for his cartoons, and admits up front in “Up Front” that’s he’s not a writer. Anyone from the Greatest Generation is familiar with his cartoon GIs, Willie and Joe. Willie was featured on the cover of Time Magazine on June 18, 1945 – and both appeared in a Peanuts comic strip in 1998 (incidentally the last time Maudlin drew Willie and Joe for publication before he died in 2003).
Here’s a great example of what I mean when I say writers ought to find Maudlin useful:
You can usually tell what kind of fighting went on in a town, and how much was necessary to take it, by the wreckage that remains. If the buildings are fairly intact, with only broken windows, doors, and pocked walls, it was a quick, hand-to-hand street fight with small arms and grenades and perhaps a mortar or two.
If most of the walls are still standing, but the roofs have gaping holes, and many rooms are shattered, then the entry was preceded by an artillery barrage. If some of the holes are in the slopes of the roofs facing the retreating enemy, then he gave the town a plastering after he left.
But if there isn’t much town left at all, then planes have been around. Bombs sort of lift things up in the air and drop them in a heap. Even the enormous sheet-metal doors with which shop-owners shutter their establishments buckle and balloon out into grotesque swollen shapes.
In three short paragraphs, Mauldin drops a treasure into the laps of any World War II writer. Many a good scene and many a good character could be inspired by this concise bit of information (kinda like Louis L’Amour implies in his book “Education of A Wandering Man”).
Want more? Here’s the germ of a story right here:
I heard of a soldier who spent his entire time overseas in repple-depples, and went home on rotation without ever having been assigned. His home-town paper called him a “veteran of the Italian campaign.”
(It helps to know a repple-depple is a “replacement depot,” where newly-arrived soldiers and soldiers leaving hospital awaited reassignment to a combat unit.
Mauldin also includes this common-sense caution, aimed (now) directly at writers:
Often soldiers who are going home say they are going to tell the people how fortunate we were to stop the enemy before he was able to come home and tear up our country. They are also going to tell the people that it is a pretty rough life over here.
I’ve tried to do that in my drawings and I know that many thousands of guys who have gone back have tried to do it, too. But no matter how much we try we can never give the folks at home any idea of what was really is. I guess you have to go through it to understand its horror. You can’t understand it by reading magazines or newspapers or by looking at pictures of by going to newsreels. You have to smell it and feel it all around you until you can’t imagine what it used to be like when you walked on a sidewalk or tossed clubs up into hose chestnut trees or fished for perch or when you did anything at all without a pack, a rifle, and a bunch of grenades.
Even with good source material, sometimes the best way to write about something is to be there.
Of course, that’s not always possible. Next best thing? Find someone who’s been there. Like Bill Mauldin.
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