The late artist Harold Schmitz served in the Army Air Corps as a map maker in the South Pacific.
In 1942, Harold Schmitz was stationed on Espiritu Santo, the island cheerily recalled on Broadway by Rodgers and Hammerstein as the setting for South Pacific.
But this was not musical comedy war. “Some Enchanted Evening” was not sung here, even in
Harold Schmitz in 1937.
imagination. It rained at least 15 days each month, 21 days in March. Average annual rainfall: 9.6 feet. The deadliest enemies were not Axis powers, but the malaria and tuberculosis that drove many among the population of 40,000 to consult their local shaman.
Schmitz was drafted to the 13th Army Air Corps and tapped for the role of map maker with the 955th Topographic Engineer Company. His weapons were India ink and lettering templates, T-square and triangles, penholders and nibs. He was a Milwaukee commercial artist, chosen to serve in a platoon of artists. Before battle and afterward, the war would continually be updated, played out in the most minute detail upon his drawing board.
Schmitz’s wartime work is currently on display in an exhibit at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum on the Capitol Square. Schmitz died in 2013.
In My Spare Moments includes Schmitz’s handwritten letters, an oral history, lots of his sideline portraiture and landscapes, some of his drafting instruments, and, of course, maps far more detailed than anything Google offers today.
“When people come through they’re drawn in to look at the line work and detail,” says Yvette Pino, the museum’s traveling art exhibit coordinator. “What’s interesting is when they turn the corner and start looking at the map-making instruments.”
Schmitz, who earned an advertising design degree from the Layton School of Arts in Milwaukee in 1937, served through 1945. The arc of his wartime career fascinates. Never idle, he found time to, first, record his setting. He then moved to figure and face. Far from home, he reinterpreted the period’s pinup culture.
“He obviously was a master of portraiture, but he was incredibly conscientious of his studies as an artist of the figure,” says Pino. Schmitz took commissions from fellow servicemen to create formal pen-and-ink glamour illustrations from wallet photos of girlfriends and creating idealized portraits of native islanders.
Schmitz’s later work moves from a limited palette of colored pencils toward black and white. “The portraits include more map-maker marks,” remarks Pino, noting Schmitz’s use of stipple and hatching. Schmitz takes methods used to mark elevation, for example, and applies them to human form.
But first and always came map-making. Schmitz and his platoon relied on a huge team of surveyors, aerial photographers and especially mathematicians. “They had to build up 3-D images and then bring it back down to 2-D,” says Pino, explaining the challenges of reproducing and printing maps in the middle of jungle.
Even today, it is difficult to imagine any war without a map.
“While he was not directly in the midst of the battle, the work that he was doing was critical to that daily mission,” says Pino. “War does not just mean conflict in the physical aspect. There are so many different elements that go into the role of the battlefield.”
Plans for a traveling exhibit are under consideration. In the meantime, In My Spare Moments will be on display at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum through spring 2020.
