 As the school year ends and many families plan summer vacations, thousands will head to our nation’s capital. This year Washington D.C.’s mall boasts a massive new World War I tribute, a fifty-eight-foot bronze relief installed in September 2024: it is breathtaking. A Soldier’s Journey is the fruit of eight-plus years of intense artistic labor by American sculptor Sabin Howard and his team in Englewood, New Jersey. It is our nation’s own Sistine Chapel Ceiling. And Sabin’s physical sacrifice in sculpting it rivals Michelangelo’s back-breaking work on the scaffold. It took twice as long and left him with an unusually jutting thumb. It left us with a masterpiece.
Thirty-eight figures surge from this narrative sculpture, which – as the title proclaims – follows a soldier’s journey: he bids farewell to the sanctuary of home, enters the camaraderie of warriors, experiences the horror of battle, the physical toll of war, the sorrowful mercy of healing, and finally returns to the sanctuary of home. The agony of combat and the pieta-like figures center-right rivet the viewer. A Soldier’s Journey speaks powerfully to the immense tragedy and redemptive skeins of war in our very bloody twentieth century. Many historians consider World War I the beginning of the contemporary era. One high school student text begins with the definitive declaration: “Your world began in August 1914.” World War I was the decisive break with a Victorian past and the first salvo into what one historian described as "the war of the world." The horrors of World War I repeated themselves on an even more massive scale in World War II. The nearly eighty years of peace since have been a triumph – and from a historical standpoint, an anomaly. On this Memorial Day, let us, along with teacher/sculptor Sabin Howard, remember those who sacrificed. Indeed, the original title for the sculpture was to be “the weight of sacrifice.” 4.7 million Americans served in World War I and 117,000 died. World War II would quadruple both those numbers. The sculpture, which has been called “a movie in bronze,” presents the twentieth century’s cycle of violence and redemption. It begins with a soldier kneeling to accept his helmet from his daughter, as he leaves to fight “the war to end all wars.” One imagines him praying to be worthy of the charge. His wife’s arm initially rests on his shoulder, then unsuccessfully seeks to restrain him as he joins his comrades in parade and battle. War is not glorified here. The “doughboys” unite, charge, lunge, and are felled, their expressions anguished and agonized. To the center right medics and nurses tend the fallen under a cross-like image in the background. Some are lost, some join the ranks of shell-shocked soldiers, trudging home, their mission finished if not accomplished. The soldier who once knelt before his daughter seeking worthiness, now stands before her, weapon down, returning his helmet of war. She peers within, perhaps seeing his enormous sacrifice or perhaps the coming of World War II, the ongoing cycle of war, courage, sacrifice, and peace that has made up our era. What a gift we have been given. A Soldier’s Journey is the largest free-standing bronze sculpture in the world, but it is ornate -- intricate even. Every face, every physical strain, every moment of agony and resolve is captured here. A gigantic project. The process of making it alone was of Renaissance proportions, and indeed, its sculptor claims Renaissance roots. Sabin Howard is the son of an Italian mother and American father, both of whom were university professors. His youth was spent between Torino, Italy and New York City. And it was from Italy – the Renaissance greats of Donatello, Michelangelo, and Baroque genius of Bernini -- that he drew his inspiration. Like his Renaissance predecessors, he believes that art is above all a “call to beauty” and sees the human form as one of the great embodiments of that call. He asks us to return to the “architecture of the body.” Howard’s fascination with sculpting the human form well and precisely, spurred him to employ the latest digital technology in this otherwise classical work. The figures (among them Jewish, Asian, and African American soldiers) drew their form from live models in authentic World War I uniforms. He and his team took over 12,000 photographs and employed digital modeling and casting by collaborating with workshops in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The initial drawings represented 750 hours of work. A maquette was 3-D printed, allowing Sabin to refine poses and expressions. All the figures were then painstakingly hand sculpted in clay. Howard himself spent more than 45,000 hours on the physically grueling work, which was then cast in bronze. Only in the United Kingdom could Howard find a foundry capable of casting such a large and complex high relief work. When the twenty-three separate bronze pieces were cast and assembled into a seamless 58-foot relief they were shipped to the United States for final patination beneath the hot DC sun, where Sabin endured more hours of physically grueling labor. Howard’s goal, of course, was to draw attention not to himself, but to the soldier’s journey, inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell’s description of The Hero’s Journey in his work: departure, immersion (trials, transformations), and return. The soldier is a noble embodiment of sacrifice, loss and courage. His daughter stares into his helmet at the end and wonders perhaps how long his sacrifice will matter. When will the next trial occur? In the case of World War I, the answer was: right on its heels. And the narrative cycle speaks as well to that major conflict. This Memorial Day we are blessed to still bask in the nearly 80-year international peace that succeeded World War II. There have been smaller scale wars in this time, and the world is now re-aligning, but on May 26 we do well to recall the heroic sacrifice of those who endured the tragedy and horror of war. And gave their lives that we might be free. And we do well to celebrate the artists who are seeking “a new Renaissance” in art, bringing timeless wisdom to life with the heart-wrenching beauty of their creations. Sabin Howard believes art is in the service of beauty, and that its goal is to reflect universal human experience and thus bring us together. The renewal of classical figurative art, he believes is a “call to the eternal” and a way to create community. Our nation’s latest monument – with its themes of sacrifice, courage, and redemption -- does just that.
0 Comments
2025 is a year of eightieth anniversaries for those who lived World War II. February 3 of this year marked eighty years since “Liberation Day,” when American troops freed the nearly four thousand Allied civilians of Santo Tomas Internment Camp from Japanese imprisonment. The emaciated men, women, and children had endured 37 months of captivity, overcrowding, disease, cruelty, and ultimately starvation. By January they were dying at the rate of one a day.
The toll of starvation had been compounded by the toll of fear: would American troops arrive in time to save them? And even when they did, would the Japanese kill them before they could return home? On the heels of liberation, the Japanese shelling of the camp left nineteen internees (children among them) dead after surviving three years of privation and captivity. Those memories of horror, hunger, fear and uncertainty gave the 80th anniversary celebrated by many Santo Tomas survivors this month – Homecoming Day -- greater richness and depth. When the navy transport ship USS Admiral Washington Lee Capps sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on April 8, 1945, hundreds of former prisoners rejoiced to finally be home. Not much has been written about the repatriation of Santo Tomas internees, but homecoming journeys often offered hope, healing and promise. Such was the case for three teen girlfriends who had been through the ordeal of captivity together: along with their families, Leonore Iserson (aka Lee), Marylouella Cleland (aka Lulu), and Ellen Thomas (aka Nellie) were blessed to return on the same ship: the Admiral Capps. Their journey began on March 10 when the public address system in Santo Tomas announced: “The following internees will be ready to leave for Nielsen Airfield, the island of Leyte, and the United States of America within ninety minutes.” Sixteen-year-old Lee whooped her joy when she heard the “Iserson” name read aloud and raced to her mother, who was standing in line for chow. Ninety-two-pound Agnes Iserson’s response: “we are not going anywhere before lunch.” And they didn’t. But later that afternoon the Isersons, Clelands, and Thomases boarded bulky C-47s in what for many was their first plane ride ever. They headed for the U.S. naval base at Leyte, where ships home and -- more important to the girls -- tens of thousands of GIs awaited them. That’s right -- tens of thousands. When Lee, Lulu, and Nellie descended the steps from the plane, they did so to applause, cheers, whistles, and whoops. Lee wrote: “Those boys had forgotten what a God’s-honest-American girl looked like.” And they were very happy to be reminded. Some of the GIs hopped in Jeeps and followed the girls to the Convalescent hospital, promising great adventures on their exit. After two days of hospital quarantine, friendships and romances blossomed. Lulu’s romance with Private First Class Al Burgess lifted her starved teen spirit, and he was eager to show her around the island – here’s where MacArthur had landed and wouldn’t she like to go to the movies in the nearby dark Quonset hut -- where they were not left alone by her best friends who felt called upon to protect her. For their part Lee and Nellie were invited to dance at the Officer’s Club to sip cokes and hear latest records from the States. Lieutenant Jimmy Anderson (“a tall, dark, and handsome son of Texas” according to Lee) was Leyte’s youngest officer (24) and Lee’s date. He told the girls about a new singing sensation in the States: a skinny kid named Frank Sinatra. He regaled them with stories of the “Columbus Day Riot” of bobby-soxers at Sinatra’s concert in New York City the previous October. The girls puzzled over why – with all the strong, beefy American men in evidence here on the island – teen girls at home would swoon over a string bean kid. After their ten days on Leyte, the girls, their families, and hundreds of other Santo Tomas internees boarded a spanking new floating city. The USS Admiral Capps was embarking on its second voyage across the Pacific. The ship had been designed to transport up to 5000 soldiers across the seas but now sped approximately 3100 soldiers and 800 newly liberated prisoners of war to freedom. The girls couldn’t get enough of the Capps’ splendor. Massive, clean, modern. Six hundred nine feet long, five decks deep, boasting a five-ward hospital for wounded soldiers heading home, along with an infirmary, laundry, bakery, butcher shop, library, rec room, barber shop, chapel, post office, and berthing areas. But it was the Dining Room, the Officer’s Mess, that truly dazzled. On the first night the teens and their families were welcomed to a carpeted salon filled with tables topped by white cloths and silver bowls filled with apples--not mangoes, but apples. None of the former internees had seen an apple in years. A Navy steward in starched white coat escorted each of the arriving families to tables, where a card announced the fare: roast beef, carrots, peas, mashed potatoes, red cabbage, white bread and ice cream for dessert. “It was Heaven,” Nellie recalled. The industrious GIs did not limit their internee welcome efforts to food. When Navy crewmen learned they were going to have almost a hundred children on board the Capps for a month, its carpenters flew into action. They’d spent the week before the ship’s departure from Leyte building sandboxes, play tables, and even cobbling together swings, which they attached to a superstructure on the deck. During their time at sea, the little kids were mightily entertained on this playground. Well, some were. The high-spirited pre-teen boys aboard were another story. They considered themselves too old for sandboxes, and became masters of pranks. They spent time greasing handrails, marking up bulkheads with crayons and chalk, and generally playing jokes on the crew, whom they regarded as big-brother co-conspirators. Weary mothers just let it happen, so crew members came up with schemes to tame them. One ingenious solution was Sundaes for Spotters. With the war still on, the waters traversed by the Capps had been actively mined by the Japanese. Day and night a sailor perched high on the foretop lookout, scanning the sea with binoculars and when he spotted a mine, the ship zigzagged around it and blew it up. But it occurred to one Sergeant that they could immobilize the older kids by employing them: the crew offered an ice cream sundae to any child at any time who spotted a mine and alerted the lookout. Even if the lookout had seen it first (always), this tactic kept dozens of boys, and a few girls glued to the rail, watching the sea for hours at a time—occasionally meriting a sundae at mid-morning or late afternoon. To children who had lived starvation, the incentive was overwhelming. For the teen girls aboard, daily life on the Capps was a romantic adventure. Many of the ship’s crew and soldiers returning home were not that much older than the girls. Healthy, hardy and handsome nineteen and twenty-year olds in uniform lifted their spirits and the admiration was mutual. Lulu had said goodbye to Al, and now fell head over heels for Randal Dean Eckenrode (“Randy”), who planned to study medicine and serve the poor in South America – at least that’s what he told Lulu. Nellie (just fifteen) dated Sergeant Allen Tubby of South Carolina. Lee found a buddy-turned-beau in Staff Sergeant Emmett Wellington Osborne (“Ozzie”) – a staff sergeant from Minnesota, who had a girl back in Chicago. If the girls were looking for distractions other than boys during the next five days, their stop at Pearl Harbor provided one. By April 1945 Pearl was a bustling powerhouse of steel docks, battle ships, aircraft carriers, planes, warehouses and servicemen. The hull of the U.S.S. Arizona sunk on December 7, 1941 still poked its head from the sea, testifying to the early sucker punch. But around it ranged an awe-inspiring display of military might: hundreds of ships built in California, planes from Seattle, and Jeeps from Detroit. All America seemed to be represented here, amassed for final battle against the Japanese. The FBI even wondered if they perhaps they had some Japanese collaborators aboard the Capps. Passengers of the Capps were not allowed to disembark. This was a one day stop to refuel, and according to Captain Haugen, to be interrogated! One of the oddest events of the repatriation voyage was the team of FBI investigators who boarded the ship at Pearl Harbor. Their job: to ask have you in any way, at any time, aided and abetted the enemy? They had a list of folks they wanted to talk to. Lulu, Nellie and Lee were not among them but Lee’s indignant response was: “of all the nerve!” She was prepared to loathe them. But as the teen girls watched the agents board the gangway of the Capps were won over by … their suits! The young men with full heads of wavy hair wore white and silver-grey suits with wide lapels, broad shoulders and folded squares poking out of their breast pocket as they ascended the gangplank. Coming from the land of barong-tagalogs and more recently threadbare tee-shirts, Lee and Lulu marveled “will you look at those suits?!” The GIs prodded them: hey, you’re supposed to love a guy in a uniform! But speculation followed among the three teens about whether the shoulders of those jackets were padded, or were these men in well-tailored clothes simply classic American HE-men? They decided the latter. The GIs did not take this rejection to heart. Crossing the international date line was an excuse for a GI sponsored show, the comic “King Neptune and His Court” where they wowed an audience of rapt internee girls. In this initiation ceremony, “Slimy Pollywogs,” those sailors who had not crossed the international dateline before, endured a trial at the hands of “Trusty Shellbacks” – loyal subjects of King Neptune. Hilarity held sway. Lee’s seventeenth birthday (April 3, 1945) brought a birthday surprise she would never forget. Her “pal” Ozzie proposed to her. Lee thought he was “the swellest guy ever” and wrote that she could talk to him about anything and everything but she was thunderstruck by his proposal of marriage. What about his girl in Chicago? She admonished him: “of all the unfair things I’ve ever heard of that is the most unfair!” Lee told him he had to go home and see if true love still awaited him in Illinois. And by golly, it did. He wrote her a letter two weeks after disembarking that “All I can say, Lee, is that you were right, very right.” She concluded in a later letter to Lulu: “He’s a grand guy but he’s lucky that girl of his had a guardian angel by the name of Lee.” Five days later, on the morning of April 8, 1945, hundreds of internees lined the deck of the Capps as the fog lifted, revealing the swooping red lines and towering heights of the Golden Gate Bridge. This mountain-high miracle of a bridge pulsed against the skyline, its great steel arms reaching out to them. Applause and wild cheers exploded from the Capps' passengers as they headed for port. The journey's end was as good as any Hollywood script: not simply family members but a United States Army Band waited to welcome them. As the crew of the Capps secured the vessel portside, an eager crowd of former prisoners waited to disembark. Did they really have to wait for musicians to play God Bless America? But suddenly, a fast-paced roll on a snare drum split the morning air and the blare of jazz trumpets caught everyone by surprise. Sliding trombones swung into action. The Army’s musical salute? There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. They were home. In the nearly 250 years of American history, love of country has inspired many to go beyond self and put their lives on the line for their nation and its ideals. We owe a great deal to those who “in liberating strife, more than self their country loved,” as Katherine Lee Bates described them in “America the Beautiful.” And every February, my family has special reason to be grateful to those self-sacrificing patriots. Because without them we wouldn't be here.  February third is special because on that date in 1945, the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division and its 44th Tank Battalion crashed through the iron gates of Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. Hundreds of young GIs liberated nearly four thousand American and Allied civilians. Those men, women, and children had experienced captivity, disease, squalor, cruelty, and unrelenting hunger for more than three years. Many were dying of starvation. My mother, sixteen-year-old Leonore (“Lee”) Iserson, was among the cheering throngs who greeted the GIs that night.
Lee and her family had been living and doing business in the Philippines (American territory before the war). They and many others were caught off guard on December 8, 1941. Just hours after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Rising Sun forces attacked Clark Air Base in Manila and the U.S. fleet at Subic Bay. By Christmas, American troops under Douglas MacArthur marched out of the city, and on January 2, 1942, the Japanese marched in. Within a month the Imperial Japanese Army imprisoned thousands of American and Allied civilians at the University of Santo Tomas, where they were held in deteriorating conditions for thirty-seven months. On the night that GIs liberated them, young Lee was five-foot-five inches tall and weighed 93 pounds. Her equally tall mother, Agnes, was down to 87 pounds. At 9 PM, when tanks with terrifyingly long guns crashed through the camp gates, internees at first feared the worst. Was this the Japanese military come to finish them off? But huge uniformed men with submachine guns walked beside the tanks, and a burly mountain of a man with machine gun in hand surged from the well of one tank. He shot a Japanese guard in a watch tower, and another tank wheeled around to take out a Japanese machine-gun nest near the Main Building. Shouts of “They’re ours! They’re Americans!” rang out, and delirious internees swarmed the liberators, cheering, blowing kisses, and yes, climbing on the tanks. One GI shouted to an effusive matron: “Get out of the way, lady. We gotta a war to fight here!” And another yelled, “Moms and Dads, hold the kids! Don’t let them on the tanks!” The ex-prisoners had the presence of mind to back off a bit, and within an hour tanks Battlin’ Basic, Georgia Peach, Ole Miss, and San Antone had secured the camp. Behind them came dozens of jeeps and the tanks Block Buster and Crusader. That night a battle raged outside the gates of Santo Tomas, and even within, a stand-off took place between liberating troops and Japanese soldiers holding hostages in the camp’s Ed Building. But joyful delirium reigned on the university’s front lawn. One gunner in the tank Ole Miss surveyed the jubilant civilian crowd and drawled, “We been liberatin’ jungles and swamps. Now, women and children—this is more like it!” GIs tossed candy bars and Lucky Strikes to the hungry crowds, and children again scrambled up on the tanks to kiss them. In one corner of the university’s front lawn, a small group of internees started singing God Bless America. Their voices swelled, and as the din subsided, more grateful internees took up the song. Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her. My grandmother’s husky alto voice rose for the first time in three years, as strains of Kate Smith’s signature song welled everywhere around them. Lee recalled: “At that moment pride in my country, so deep that it was almost painful, rushed through me.” Through the night with the light from above. A crescent moon gleamed overhead and one brilliant star of the Southern Cross seemed to wink right at her. From the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam. On the banks of Manila Bay, the entire camp sang, Brits and Aussies happily joining in. Lee sang as loudly as she could. God bless America, my home sweet home. God bless America, my home sweet home! In the stillness after the last note, one of the GIs on the San Antone choked out, “I ain’t never heard that sung better.” Tears streamed down his face, and a deafening chorus of cheers erupted from the internees. Throughout her life, Lee would reflect on her family’s extraordinary thirty-seven-month ordeal at Santo Tomas, but also, on the internees' unwavering faith in their country. “We were sure our boys would be back for us. We never gave up.” And neither did the U.S. armed forces, those hero-boys from Montana, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Mississippi and Ohio, who were prepared to put their own lives on the line for the freedom of their countrymen. God bless America. And God bless those who more than self their country love. Mary Beth Klee, Ph.D. This article was adapted from Dr. Klee's column "Love of Country" originally published on the Core Virtues website (www.corevirtues.net) in February 2018. |
AuthorMary Beth Klee is the author of Leonore's Suite, and the daughter of Santo Tomas Internee Leonore (Lee) Iserson (Klee). ArchivesCategories |
RSS Feed