Millions of Americans and foreigners see G.I. Joe as a mindless war toy, the symbol of American military adventurism, but that's not how it used to be. To the men and women who served in World War II and the people they liberated, the G.I. was the common man grown into hero, the poor farm kid torn away from his home, the guy who bore all the burdens of battle, who slept in cold foxholes, who went without the necessities of food and shelter, who stuck it out and drove back the Nazi reign of murder. This was not a volunteer soldier, not someone well paid, but an average guy, up against the best trained, best equipped, fiercest, most brutal enemies seen in centuries.
His name isn't much. G.I. is just a military abbreviation meaning Government Issue, and it was on all of the articles handed out to soldiers. And Joe? A common name for a guy who never made it to the top. Joe Blow, Joe Palooka, Joe Magrac…a working class name. The United States has never had a president or vice-president or secretary of state Joe.
G.I. Joe had a distinguished career fighting German, Japanese, and Korean troops. He appears as a character, or a collection of American personalities, in the 1945 movie The Story of G.I. Joe, based on the last days of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Some of the soldiers Pyle interviewed portrayed themselves in the film. Pyle was famous for covering the human side of the war, writing about the dirt-snow-and-mud soldiers, not how many miles were gained or what towns were captured or liberated. His reports paralleled the "Willie" cartoons of famed Stars and Stripes artist Bill Mauldin. Both men emphasized the dirt and exhaustion of war, the fragments of civilization that the soldiers shared with each other and the civilians: coffee, tobacco, whiskey, shelter, sleep. To Egypt, France, and a dozen more countries, G.I. Joe was any American soldier, at that point the most important person in their lives.