Word: 45th
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Willie was born into the 45th Infantry Division, where his creator, Private Bill Mauldin, also served. Willie had a sidekick, Joe. Together Willie and Joe slogged from Italy to Germany...
Finally he went back home to his mother in Phoenix, Ariz, (his parents were divorced). He kept on drawing cartoons. In 1940 he joined the Arizona National Guard, later switched to Oklahoma's 45th Division, so he could draw for the Division's News...
...Meets Girl. No one then could have guessed the final destination of the 45th, least of all Private Bill Mauldin, who was spending more than his share of time on K.P. and dreaming of his cartoonist future. In 1941 the 45th was training at Texas' Camp Barkeley. One day Mauldin went in to nearby Abilene. It was raining. On a street corner, he met two girls and another boy. Mauldin knew one of the girls. The other was named Norma Jean Humphries; she was a student at Abilene's Hardin-Simmons University. Jean, now 21, remembers the scene...
Rags to Riches. There he persuaded an Italian printer to bring out another book of sketches, Sicily Sketchbook, which sold 5,000 copies to one regiment, earned him $1,800, earned the News $600. He switched from the 45th Division News to Stars & Stripes, with an assignment to cover the war in cartoons. He landed at Salerno. He was wounded near Venafro. He brought out Mud, Mules and Mountains (sale: 300,000 copies, which the Army printed; he made nothing...
...into Aschaffenburg, where they ran into some of the nastiest opposition yet-fanatical Nazi boys, girls and old men. They smashed on into the Nazi shrine of Nurnberg, crossed the Danube, and with the 42nd liberated the prisoners of Dachau. A week before V-E day, the weary 45th marched into Munich...