"Up Front"

[Neil Albaugh]

Bill Mauldin was a cartoonist who served in the US Army in Europe during World War II. His drawings of soldiers doing their jobs in wartime appeared regularly in the military newspaper “Stars and Stripes. Mauldin's cartoons were popular with the GIs and after the war ended they were collected into a book titled “Up Front”.

 

In the early 1970s I worked for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory which had offices & labs in Charlottesville, VA. I was sitting in the small break room enjoying a cup of coffee and reading "Up Front". It was funny and my laughing attracted the attention of the well-known astronomer and cosmologist, Dr Sebastian von Hoerner.

 

"Vat ist zo funny?" he asked so I let him have a look at Mauldin's book of GI cartoons. He looked at page after page, laughing and handed me back the book. "It's all ze same- just change ze uniforms!" was his comment.

 

I found out that during World War II he had been an NCO in the German army on the Russian Front and had a pair of binoculars hanging on a strap around his neck when a Soviet bullet hit the binoculars and ricocheted up into his eye. He was evacuated back to Germany for medical treatment just before the whole front collapsed.