Bill Mauldin, the Army sergeant who created Willie and Joe, the cartoon characters who became enduring symbols of the grimy, irrepressible American infantrymen who triumphed over the German army and prevailed over their own rear-echelon officers in World War II, died yesterday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 81.
The cause was pneumonia, his family said. Mr. Mauldin had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
After Willie and Joe won the war, Mr. Mauldin became a syndicated newspaper cartoonist and went on for more than 50 years to caricature bigots, superpatriots, doctrinaire liberals and conservatives and pompous souls in whatever form they appeared. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, once in 1945 for his World War II work, again in 1959 for his commentary on Soviet treatment of Boris Pasternak.
Mr. Mauldin gave up regular cartooning assignments in the early 1990's, complaining that arthritis made drawing too difficult.
He frequently lamented that editorial cartoonists were too soft and that more of them needed to be ''stirrer-uppers.'' Mr. Mauldin worked full time at being a stirrer-upper, and while he was on duty nobody was safe from his editorial brush. During the war, he excoriated self-important generals, grassy green ''90-day wonders,'' insensitive drill sergeants, palate-dulled mess sergeants, glamour-dripping Air Force pilots in leather jackets, and cafe owners in liberated countries who rewarded the thirsty G.I.'s who had freed them by charging them double for brandy. He was nothing short of beloved by his fellow enlisted men.
But no Mauldin characters were more memorable than Willie and Joe, the unshaven, listless, dull-eyed, cynical dogfaces who spent the war fighting the Germans, trying to keep dry and warm and flirting with insubordination. They were the stars of ''Up Front,'' Mr. Mauldin's wartime best seller, and their exploits were reported regularly in various service publications, including Stars and Stripes and the 45th Division News. Their likenesses were found in pup tents and bivouacs from Brittany to Berlin, tacked up next to the inevitable glossies of those other G.I. favorites, Betty Grable and Dorothy Lamour. Mr. Mauldin began his sojourn with the 45th, which arrived in North Africa and fought into Italy, but he sampled many divisions and places as his fame grew.
Willie and Joe were the guys who always got sentry duty when it rained or snowed and shrapnel in their backsides whenever they left their foxholes. It was they who contended with lice and fleas, complained constantly about the K rations they were supposed to eat, slept in rat-infested barns, never seemed to find the soap when they had the rare opportunity to bathe, and suffered the incessant, grinding, morale-destroying boredom that only the infantry soldier knows.
The only thing that could never be questioned about Willie and Joe was their determination to survive and win. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, looked forward to their adventures, and Gen. Mark Clark so appreciated them that he saw to it that Mr. Mauldin got a specially equipped Jeep in Italy so that he could go where he wanted and draw what he wished. Ernie Pyle, one of the G.I.'s favorite correspondents, termed Mr. Mauldin the best cartoonist of the war because he drew pictures of the men who were ''doing the dying,'' even though nobody could ever kill Willie and Joe.