Up Front

The 1945 classic book of text and drawings with a spectacular foreword by Stephen E. Ambrose.

Up Front is one of the most famous books to emerge from the Second World War and remains an icon of the "greatest generation." In his drawings of the infantry dogfaces Willie and Joe, done while he himself fought in campaigns in Sicily and Italy, Bill Mauldin created the immortal archetypes of the American fighting man. He knew, as one who had been on the front lines and in the trenches, that Willie and Joe—with their unshaven faces, their gallows humor, their fortitude, and their dislike of privilege and cant—exemplify something enduring and noble about Americans at war. Up Front is a vivid piece of living history and a potent reminder of the sacrifices of the men who fought and won our greatest war.

Throughout World War II, cartoonist Bill Mauldin documented the adventures and misadventures of dogfaces Willie and Joe, symbols of the hard-pressed infantry, "the group which gives more and gets less than anybody else." In Up Front, recently reissued as a 50th-anniversary volume, Mauldin joins an absorbing narrative account of just how hellish combat is to a selection of those cartoons. Reading through this powerful book, one sees why Mauldin, in demythologizing the war, was often accused of undoing the efforts of the morale officers and politicians who assured the home front that our boys were having a fine time of it in Europe. No, Mauldin replied through Willie and Joe, our boys are being maimed and killed every day. For his honesty, the troops loved him -- and Mauldin loved them= back.