Up Front

Up Front by Bill Mauldin is one of the most famous books to emerge from the Second World War, a classic in every sense of the word. In his drawings of the infantry dog-faces Willie and Joe, done while he himself fought in campaigns in Sicily and Italy, Mauldin created the immortal archetypes of the American fighting man. He knew, as one who had been there himself on the front lines and in the slit trenches, drenched with mud and rain, that Willie and Joe - with their unshaven faces, their gallows humor, their fortitude, and their dislike of privilege and cant - exemplify something enduring and surely noble about Americans at war. He knew their gripes, their fears, their jokes, and their opinions, and he recorded their talk with the most pungent accuracy. As for the timelessness of this book, David Halberstam puts it best: "One senses that if a war reporter who had been with Hannibal or Napoleon saw Mauldin's work, he would know immediately that the work was right". This new edition of Up Front is being published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. It reproduces the exact design of the interior of the original 1946 edition as well as its front cover art. Up Front endures today as a piece of living history and a potent reminder of the sacrifices made by the men who fight our wars, whether that fighting takes place in Italy or France or Korea or Vietnam or the Persian Gulf.