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This is the cartoon I mentioned in the tags to @spitandvinegar‘s post about Steve Rogers learning to drive. 

The book Up Front doesn’t seem to be in print anywhere. It was published in 1945 and collects most of the comics he did for the US Army’s newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, while embedded with an Army division that came ashore at Anzio in the Italian campaign. 

It’s a wonderful, short, poignant book, very pithy and vivid. He tells a story of being in a forward hospital and a soldier dragging himself in with pneumonia and not wanting to leave his friends or make a fuss but his buddies had made him go in because his coughing was giving away their position, and also they thought he might die. He had a fever of 102.

I’m off-topic, though– he addresses terrible driving again with a cartoon that nearly got him fired. It was a resupply convoy, gathered around for a briefing of the drivers, and the head guy is saying solemnly, “Some of you may not come back. A French convoy has been sighted on the road.” 

And then he proceeds to talk about how while the Americans were pretty bad drivers, the French were absolutely terrifyingly horrible, and yet the brass didn’t really want him bad-mouthing their allies like this. But, he assures the reader, the French drivers were terrible. 

It’s a wonderful book, and that’s the thing that always drew me to WWII history– how recent it was meant there were so many primary sources like that.

By the way, if you’re at all interested in today’s military, the Stars and Stripes remains an excellent news source, and are actually the main news source I follow because their target market is such an oddly international one. They cover a lot of crises very firmly from the perspective of “are our readers going to have to go there and get shot at or not?” and it’s a pretty interesting take. (Also they frequently cover the results of high school-level sports tournaments for the schools on various international military bases and it’s kind of cute.)

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dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
dragonlady7

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