A closer look
“I Always Had Pads with Me”: A G.I. Artist’s Sketchpad
What can we learn from a soldier’s World War II drawings?
by Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus)
Historical Context
Over the course of the U.S. involvement in World War II, almost a hundred artists—enlisted men and civilians—covered every theater of the war and every branch of the military. After Congress cut funding in 1943, the commercial weekly Life magazine hired civilian professionals to produce art depicting the war, and the pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories recruited artists from among the ranks of American forces. In the meantime, Yank: The Army Weekly, founded in 1942 as a publication dedicated to enlisted men and staffed by enlisted men, counted artists, illustrators, and cartoonists (along with photographers, writers, and editors) among its staff.
But the visualization of the war was not limited to “official” artists (and photographers). American GIs set down their experiences, observations, and reflections about the conflict in private letters home and in journals. In some cases, they recorded their own vision of their war on paper via pencil, ink, and paint.
GI Artist
Twenty-year-old Bronx-born Ben Hurwitz was one of those “unofficial” artists, and his “journal” was a sketchpad. During his two years in North Africa and Italy, Corporal Hurwitz (who later changed his name to Brown) drew and painted his war at every opportunity.
A graduate of the first class of New York's High School of Music and Art, Hurwitz studied art at the University of Iowa before volunteering for the U.S. Army in 1942. After basic training in Oklahoma and maneuvers in Louisiana, Hurwitz's Cannon Company—attached to the Fifth Army, 351st Regiment, 88th Infantry Division (the “Blue Devils”), First Battalion—was shipped to North Africa in 1943. Within a few months he was in Italy, his company dragging .105mm howitzers from Naples across the Apennine Mountains, in the lengthy campaign that would eventually liberate Rome in June 1944.
The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy, which ended in May 1945, was, in the words of one historian, “a hellish battlefield where for two years men strove against mud, mountains, malaria, and a boundlessly ingenious enemy” that ultimately cost 312,000 Allied casualties (including 120,000 Americans wounded and 23,501 killed). Whether in a rolling troop ship, a contested village, or on a steep mountainside, Hurwitz found time to draw. “I had a tremendous desire to sketch,” he commented later. “I always had pads with me.” Rendered in pencil and ink, sometimes supplemented by watercolor and colored pencil, his sketches chronicled the everyday and harrowing experiences of war. A small selection, accompanied by comments he recorded in 1996, is included here.
“Every Nite Nov 15”: En route to Africa
This is on a troop ship. You can see the way the bunks were stacked close together. The hold of the ship was all tiers of bunks. It was a Liberty ship and the officers were in the cabins up above and we were down in the hold.
This is what the hold of the ship looked like: bunks going all the way up and one ladder. Once you got down there, of course, all of you weren't going to be able to go up the ladder in an emergency. I think there were probably several companies of men down there. It was very noisy and every night was a crap shooter’s paradise in the center of the floor.
You’d get about two hours sleep a night. And then you'd crap off during the day because we had nothing to do, no place to go. A lot of time to draw. “Should have volumes of cigarette smoke,” I scrawled on the sketch.
If you could draw they’d line up because if you gave them a picture and they sent it home—my God.
“Everybody Was on Mules”: Crossing the Apennine Mountains
My company didn’t move on foot, we were always mounted in the three-quarter-ton trucks pulling the guns. Except in the Apennines we couldn’t get the trucks up the roads, they were too narrow. So we took the guns apart and mounted them on a string of mules. It was dark and this is how I remember it. You put your own personal crap on top of it, too, and you got on and you tried to see the mule in front . . .
Everybody was on mules. Except that the mule that I was on took a misstep and fell off the mountain and everything I had went with him. I went with him part of the way. Then I fell off the mule and he kept going.
“A Jug of Wine—a Loaf of Bread . . . and a Jug of Wine!”
That’s my own foot and that’s my machine gun and that’s a wine barrel. We’d hole up in places like this for a day or two.
“Dusty Road to Formia—June 1944”: Halfway between Rome and Naples
That’s a wrecked German tank—[equipped with] the dreaded 88. Its projectile went so fast, you would hear it only after it passed.
Christmas 1944
This was probably up near Leghorn [Livorno, Tuscany], Christmas 1944. This town was heavily bombarded. It didn’t have two stones one on top of the other.
“Professional” and “Personal” War Art
Often working under harsh, dangerous circumstances, the “official” artist-correspondents strove to provide honest observations about combat. For the most part professionals working for news media or employed in some capacity by branches of the armed services, their task involved creating and completing works for publication and exhibition at home, rendering images with the aim of public consumption and an eye toward meeting popular expectations. One artist put it this way: “My finished paintings were not a scene but . . . were a combination of all sorts of things relating to that particular event.” But as “property of the U.S. Army,” their images also faced military restrictions, some due to the standard censorship during warfare, some reflecting the mores of midcentury America (nudity, for example, was unacceptable).
In contrast, “unsponsored” wartime art such as Hurwitz’s images offers a sustained pictorial narrative of the lengthy and difficult Italian campaign from a distinctively personal perspective and with a detailed “gaze” that in some instances captures aspects of wartime life unrecoverable by photography. For example, despite the portability of the 35mm camera, few photographs successfully convey the claustrophobia of troopship quarters. Similarly, Hurwitz’s visual chronicle often reveals the spectrum of conditions and emotions in a GI’s life—from the momentary serenity on awakening in an abandoned Tuscan barn, to the trepidation of riding gear-burdened mules along treacherous mountain passages.
After the war, Hurwitz continued to work in the fine arts, illustration, and cartooning. His wartime art and photographs, comprising 130 loose drawings, two sketchbooks, and a photograph album, are now housed at the New-York Historical Society.
Visit the online picture gallery of the PBS documentary They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II (https://www.pbs.org/theydrewfire/gallery/index.html). Compare a few of these images by “official” military artists to “unofficial” artist Corporal Ben Hurwitz’s examples. What do the “sponsored” and “personal” images have in common? Do you see differences between the ways they presented the experience of war?
Reflection Questions
Visit Life magazine’s online photo collection, World War II in Color: The Italian Campaign and the Road to Rome (https://www.life.com/history/world-war-ii-in-color-photos-italian-campaign/). Consider how photography informed and influenced U.S. viewers during the war as well as what they may convey to us today. Then, after viewing the sampling of Corporal Ben Hurwitz’s art, discuss if and how drawings and paintings offer additional insights about the war and soldiers’ wartime experiences.
Additional Reading
“I Always Had Pads with Me”: A G.I. Artist’s Sketchpad, 1943–1944,” https://joshbrownnyc.com/GIartist.htm
Frederick S. Voss, Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage of World War II (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), chapter 7.
Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).