To further confuse the matter, there was a cartoonist named Bill Mauldin, who started working for “Stars and Stripes” around 1940, and created the comic “Willie and Joe” which was hugely popular with the soldiers. W&J were GIs.
handsomeharry, I can’t find your speech, yet, but I’m going to keep looking.
Where is Unca Cecil when you need him?
Bill Mauldin IMdB page: Bill Mauldin - IMDb
Bill Mauldin Wikipedia page: Bill Mauldin - Wikipedia
on the way to Kokomo.
The full name of Tommy was Tommy Atkins, of long lineage although most famous through Kipling’s:
I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
Bar-girls were silly little things back in the '90s…
Anyway, speaking of war cartoonists, I noticed that Bruce Bairnsfather’s * famous WWI character Old Bill is claimed here by the Americans in this edition of “** Well, If You Knows of a Better 'Ole, Go to It !**”
The breadcrumb trail is:
SHOP > world culture > north american cultures > united states culture > united states history > world war i
Sometimes one despairs of the internet.
Oddly enough Bairnsfather did become official cartoonist to the American forces in Europe, but that was WWII, not the previous episode.
“Tom and Jerry” as a phrase refers back much further:
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/03/28/tom-jerrys-life-in-london/
Yes, but they don’t all openly acknowledge it to the world like that. 
Recalls to mind a thing I saw long ago, drawn by the prolific British cartoonist Rowland Emett (1906 – 1990); most renowned for cartoons of crazy and highly elaborate machines a la the style of America’s Rube Goldberg (sp?), and of doings on comical branch-line railways – but he also drew cartoons on many other themes. This one, from the World War II era, showed a scene of the local lord and lady of the manor entertaining a group of servicemen from the local US military base, with everyone trying hard, to be as nice to each other as possible. The caption has the lady-of saying, “Now for an interesting social experiment we’ve thought up. Earl and Chester here, will make for Edwin [the butler] a Pimms No. 1 [English “cocktail” long favoured by the upper classes]; while he makes them a mint julep.”
These fellows – Tom, Jerry, and Bob Logic – get a brief “walk-on” appearance in George MacDonald Fraser’s novel Black Ajax, about the bare-knuckle boxing scene in England in the very early 19th century.