![]() ![]() They were an immediate hit, striking a chord of rueful self-recognition with readers, who saw in the unshaven pair of reluctant warriors an accurate and unsentimental depiction of a soldier’s life at the front in the third long year of America’s war. ![]() Willie and Joe, the sad-faced, war-weary creations of soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin, first appeared together on the pages of Stars and Stripes, the Army’s daily newspaper, in late February 1944, two months after their real-life comrades came ashore at Anzio. Among the thousands of American soldiers slogging through the miserable winter of 1944 in southern Italy after the Allied landing at Anzio were two GIs who existed only on paper, but who became as real to their readers as the mud-covered, K-ration-eating guys sitting next to them in their foxholes. ![]()
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