P.O.W. experience captured in John Hay exhibit

Sketches, watercolors, memoirs and diaries from soldiers captured and held by enemy forces from the Civil War to Operation Desert Storm are among the items on display.

by Mary Jo Curtis

Friday, May 15, was “quite a day,” according to Capt. John K.M. Pryke.

First, there was new clothing and, then, an evening meal of sausage, tomato and bacon batter pudding.

“We had the best supper ever… it was simply wonderful,” said Pryke, whose upbeat mood was likely also due to a third pleasure of that day, “more back mail from Lee – December March (sic) letters.”

The year was 1942. Pryke, who served with the British Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Crete until being captured and imprisoned by German troops, recorded the events of May 15 in a small, worn diary, where he penciled regular entries between Oct. 1, 1941, and April 30, 1943. Sandwiched between his written accounts are several tiny pencil sketches of the German prisons where he was incarcerated for nearly three years until his release in May 1944.

Pryke’s diary, recently donated to the John Hay Library by his son, is now part of the library’s latest exhibit, “POW: The Prisoner of War Experience,” a collection of sketches, watercolors, memoirs and diaries from soldiers captured and held by enemy forces from the Civil War to Operation Desert Storm.

Although Pryke’s diary entry struck a light note, the exhibit assembled by Peter Harrington (above), curator for the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at the Hay, clearly illustrates the somber – and often deadly – aspects of life as a prisoner of war. T. H. Mann, who was imprisoned at the Andersonville Stockade, the most notorious of the Confederate POW camps during the Civil War, documented his arrival at the camp in his diary.

“We joined inside the inclosure (sic) thirteen thousand comrades who had preceded us more than two months before, but they were hardly recognized as human beings,” he wrote. They were “emaciated forms, half human and half spectral, black with filth and dirt and smoke and swarming with vermin.”

It is, however, the artists’ renderings that most intrigue Harrington, who came to Brown from his native England to do graduate work in 1981 and began working with the Hay’s Military Collection in 1983. He has continually expanded the collection donated to the University by Anne S. K. Brown in 1981; it now includes more than 12,000 books, 18,000 albums, sketchbooks, scrapbooks and portfolios, 5,000 toy soldiers and more than 13,000 works of art.

“My particular interest is in artwork. I view myself as a curator rather than a librarian, so I focus on the visual,” Harrington said.

The works he selected for this exhibit are drawn from two centuries of war by artists of varied experience and talent. Laurence McInnis made his first attempts at art – several primitive watercolors – while serving with the 82^nd Airborne Division during Operation Desert Storm in 1990. David Rose and caricaturist Harry Reeks, on the other hand, were professional artists long before they saw combat in World War II.

An artist for Walt Disney, Rose enlisted in an Army unit of Hollywood artists commanded by legendary director Frank Capra. He was assigned to sketch out story lines and gags for a cartoon series for the troops under the supervision of Maj. Ted Geisel – aka Dr. Seuss – but also took on far more serious work. His stark watercolor, “Angels of Liberation,” depicts the first appearance of American fighter pilots over the Dachau concentration camp just before its liberation by U.S. forces in late April 1945.

Artist Ben Steele rendered his experiences in Japanese POW camps from memory. In “The Tayabas Road Detail” and other scenes from a forced labor camp in the Philippines, he portrays conditions that took a heavy toll: Only 50 of the 325 prisoners assigned to that labor detail survived. Many of the dead were buried in unmarked graves, only to be washed away by later floods or lost in jungle growth.

Harrington suggests that the imprisoned artists painted to relieve the stress of their experience. He explained,“There’s a liberation of feelings and emotions on canvas.”

The exhibit will be on display at the John Hay Library through May 20.