My hand is itching for drawings

Lt. Steinberg states that MO personnel were completely misunderstood and misemployed by commanding officers who could see no direct use for their work. Therefore they were assigned all sorts of tasks for which they were not particularly suited, and in fact some of the Colonels seemed to think that Lt. Steinberg’s function was merely to draw dirty pictures which they could put up in the villas. Steinberg flew to San Francisco on May 1, 1943, and reported directly to the Twelfth Naval District headquarters, where he was told that the Dutch ocean liner Nieuw Amsterdam, commandeered as a troop ship, was leaving the next day and he would be one of the seven thousand men on it. He thought himself fortunate to share a cabin with only five roommates, especially during the first few days, when he was felled by “a very unromantic sickness.” The Nieuw Amsterdam was big and slow and lumbered across the equator twice without encountering the enemy. Some of the officers passed the time by creating a shipboard newspaper, for which Steinberg drew the “funnies on Sundays.” They stopped in Wellington, New Zealand, long enough to parade “with music and people cheering and old ladies crying” and then did the same in Perth and Freemantle, Western Australia. By the time Steinberg left the ship on June 4 at Colombo, Ceylon, he had lost all his money playing cards and gambling. He partied there for several days and thought it was a paradise compared to his next stop, Calcutta, India, which he reached on June 11 after five days on a small and dirty train; he was distressed by the poverty and filth he saw at first hand. By the eighteenth he was moving from one base to another toward his eventual destination, Chungking, but he was still in India on the twenty-ninth. He compared being stuck there to being in a doctor’s waiting room, passing the time reading old, bedraggled magazines and hoping his turn would soon come.

Ostensibly he was to show other MO divisions how to set up and operate printing equipment, but in reality he did next to nothing because equipment was either hard to come by or lacking, and no one seemed to have any clear idea of what MO officers were expected to do even if the presses were up and running. The weather was hotter and more humid than in Santo Domingo, and left him too enervated to pass the time by making his own drawings. He thought Calcutta was “not a good place to live in, really too hot and too many people around.” He did have a private room in the officers’ quarters, but a continuous procession of cleaners, barbers, and salesmen invaded it, clamoring for attention, and there was no respite when he left because more vendors besieged him. In haste to elude them, he often stumbled and fell over sleeping bodies on the street. He did get to see several temples and was intrigued by the many monkeys and the overwhelming number of sacred cows, all of which he drew.

A monthlong circuitous train journey finally ended at the air base in Chabua, north Assam, when he boarded a cargo plane on July 16 for the three-hour flight over the Hump to Kunming, China, not minding the extreme cold because of the clear sight of the Himalayas. He went directly to his base camp on the northeastern outskirts of Chungking, dubbed “Happy Valley” by those stationed there. It took him four days to adjust to the heat, which sometimes reached 106 degrees and left him “perspiring like a waterfall” and gobbling salt pills and vitamins as if they were candy.

Happy Valley was a small village surrounded by even smaller ones clinging to the hillsides that cradled it. All about the place there was “heat, dirt, discomfort, and discouragement,” but he liked China better than the “chic and comfort” of Calcutta.

He was billeted in quarters that were more like Chinese houses than navy barracks. The furniture was primitive, but food was plentiful, even though there were only chopsticks with which to eat it. Water had to be boiled and drunk when still hot and tasted “like the rice paddy from which it comes.” Not surprisingly, all the sailors were felled from time to time by “the extraordinary Chinese diarrhea, a national malady that is cured with a medicine called ‘the cement.’ ” Malaria was rampant, and the mosquitoes were “like dive bombers asking for blood.” He was glad that he brought the extra netting Hedda had insisted on, even though the navy routinely equipped every bed with it. He was also grateful for her many gifts, for he would have been lost without the big black portfolio for drawings and the mirrored shaving kit that enabled him to be the only officer with a decent shave.

Steinberg in China at his first wartime duty station. (illustration credit 10.1)

He was among “some very nice fellows” who were billeted two or three to a room, and he drew his for Hedda, showing the mosquito netting enclosing the bed he had learned to make with navy-style square corners. He drew his desk, which held his framed photo of her and some of the decorative ivories and other small objects he had begun to buy on trips into town. One afternoon his roommate returned after an hour away and was surprised to find that Steinberg had covered one full wall with a mural of Manhattan featuring “a table, two chairs, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, [positioned] near a window which looked down upon Times Square.” He also drew his commanding officer as he walked back to his quarters from the shower hut in his underwear, returning the salute of a Chinese soldier in full uniform. He made many more drawings of his fellow officers, but the one they liked best and remembered more than forty years later showed them relaxing in deck chairs all in a row, with their feet on the porch railing in front of them. They all stared off into the distance at the hillside villages with undulating rice paddies above and below them, while the little English bulldog one of them brought from Australia snored contentedly on the floor behind them. There was even a library of sorts, where Steinberg found and reread one of his favorites, Voltaire’s Candide. He told Hedda he had everything he desired but her and something he wanted even more: cold water.

The rainy season started in August, but the heat continued. His commanding officer gave him permission to make drawings for any New York publication that wanted them, but between the heat and the lack of letters from Hedda, who did not write every day as he did (sometimes several times), he was despondent. His main concern was that he had nothing suitable for the magazine that meant the most to him, The New Yorker, because he refused to submit anything but his very best to its editors. He had to be in “a special mood” to draw for them, and inspiration was sorely lacking in his little village, permeated as it was by the stench of human waste, with which the peasants fertilized every inch of cultivated soil. He thought there was nothing he could draw in such a place, where “the atmosphere is quite different from anything sophisticated or anyway respectable the way The New Yorker is.”

In actuality, his impressions of daily GI life in China turned out to be the first of a series of highly successful drawing-essays he sent to the magazine from his various postings, which totaled sixty-nine drawings filling twenty pages throughout 1944 and 1945. Many were originally drawn as illustrations for naval information and propaganda pamphlets, and all of them were so successful that both his supervising officers and the censors agreed they could do the second and equally important job of lifting the morale of the folks back home by showing their GIs’ daily life. Not only did they help boost the magazine’s sales, they also helped to solidify Steinberg’s reputation.

Steinberg’s work in China, like everything else about his military service, was far from ordinary or routine. Despite Wild Bill Donovan’s insistence that he was needed by the OSS, the navy assigned him to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, affectionately dubbed by those who served in it as “the Rice Paddy Navy.” Intelligence-gathering had not yet coalesced into the unified entity it became under the CIA, and each of the services had its own official spying apparatus. The Chief of Naval Operations recognized the need for such a group in China shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and ordered the formation of the top-secret Naval Group China. Its mission was to gather intelligence about the weather and transmit it to air bases and ships patrolling the coastal waters, to infiltrate behind Japanese lines and monitor all activity on shore and at sea, and to prepare information that would be useful for an Allied invasion. Within SACO, Steinberg was attached to a sabotage training center where his official title was “psychological warfare artist,” and his work was deliberately described vaguely: “to prepare background for future PW [psychological warfare] operations in China.”

The officer in charge was Commander (later Rear Admiral) Milton E. Miles, an old China hand (as officers who had served in the Far East before the war were called). Miles was a graduate of the Naval Academy, where his fellow midshipmen gave him the affectionate nickname Mary after the movie star Mary Miles, and it stuck. He ran his command at Happy Valley on an informal first-name basis, which was awkward for the somewhat puzzled Saul, who stuttered at calling him Mary and whose only prior knowledge of anything military was the pomp and circumstance of his grandfather’s uniform shop in Buzău. Mary Miles ran a military camp that operated on very unmilitary principles: there were no ceremonial flag raisings or bugles playing reveille or taps, the men did not salute, and the uniforms were whatever the men found handy. Surprisingly, it worked.

At the inception of his China command, Mary Miles was the official coordinator of the OSS in the Far East as well as the founder of SACO. His counterpart was the shadowy General Tai Li, “one of China’s most mysterious, most respected and most dreaded men.” Tai Li commanded the Chinese version of the OSS in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, and he and Miles forged such a deep personal friendship that they sometimes merged their soldiers and sailors for the infiltration and sabotage of enemy encampments. Miles was a fervent supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and an adversary of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the commander of the China-Burma-India theater (CBI), who was not. Eventually, long after Steinberg had been transferred to other duty stations, Miles was effectively marginalized by Donovan, Stilwell, and others in various commands as they enfolded some of SACO’s operations into their own intelligence groups and shut down the rest entirely.

However, during the brief time Steinberg served under Miles’s command, one of his major tasks was to assess whatever information the front-line spies gave him and, along with the rest of his psychological warfare cohorts, to prepare everything from leaflets that were dropped behind enemy lines to brochures that instructed both American and Chinese soldiers in how to engage with the maximum respect for each other’s culture. He also drew derogatory cartoons of Japanese leaders that were dropped from planes or that showed up mysteriously in cities and towns deep in enemy-held territory. One of his most important assignments was to analyze data gathered by agents and draw precise maps of the South China coast that would guide downed airmen to safe passage outside Japanese-held territories. His work required precision and discipline and was often top secret, but there was another part that was strictly fun.

A group such as SACO needed something visual to tie its disparate divisions and individual members together, and as Miles rejected Tai Li’s offer to bring in “politically checked [that is, disease-free] women,” insignias, pennants, flags, and emblems had to suffice. Steinberg contributed one of the best known and loved when he drew a poster that also became a sleeve patch. It showed one of his long-nosed cartoon characters, a flat-footed, heavyset man wearing a pith helmet and Lone Ranger mask, outfitted in a coolie uniform, carrying every weapon from a hatchet to a handgun and about to insert chopsticks into his open mouth. He is surrounded by a tent made of mosquito netting with anchors extending out on either side and a rakish American eagle, also wearing a Lone Ranger mask and a pith helmet, upon which two tiny birds perch. Two banners stream down from the eagle, one saying “What the hell” and the other “E pluribus per diem.” A third banner at the bottom of the drawing completes it, this one saying “Confidential.”

Miles considered Steinberg a valued member of his team and wanted to keep him in China, but the OSS still wanted him and finally succeeded in having him transferred in December 1943. His official orders detailed a journey that would eventually deposit him in Algiers, Algeria, on “temporary duty.” It would start as soon as he reported to the area’s chief army OSS officer in China, who would issue orders instructing him to return to Calcutta. The orders were confusing, not only because they were issued by the army rather than the navy, but also because once the temporary duty in Algeria ended, he was to receive a new set that would send him back to his official posting with SACO in Happy Valley.

On December 8 he told Hedda that the “news” he had hinted about in previous letters was finally happening, for, apropos of nothing definite, he had convinced himself that Algiers was only a way station and his eventual destination would be Rome. The night before he was to leave Happy Valley, he was deeply touched by the farewell party his fellow officers gave him, especially when one of them opened a bottle of scotch he had been saving for six months. He was sorry to leave his friends but eager to start for where he hoped to end up—Europe—and he chafed at one delay after another as he experienced firsthand the military complaint “Hurry up and wait.” There was no transportation available until December 19, and he had nothing to do until then.

THIS TIME THE FLIGHT OVER THE Hump encountered “some excitement with [Japanese] Zeros” before the plane landed safely in Chabua, Assam. Steinberg left for Agra on December 23 en route to Karachi, where he stayed until December 26. On Christmas day he was in a navy liaison house, “very chic and formal” and a bewildering contrast to Happy Valley’s informality. Unused to the spit and polish of dress uniforms and silver flatware at table, he drank so much of the local Manhattan cocktail that he was sick for two days. On the twenty-seventh he boarded another plane, which made several stops in India and Africa before dropping him at Khartoum, Sudan, where he stayed until the twenty-ninth. He was in Cairo on New Year’s Day 1944, still in transit and miserable at having to sleep in a barracks with fifty other men. He tried to see the places Hedda had seen on a trip with her mother and brother before the war, but Egypt filled him with a curiously different sensation, and he described himself as akin to a horse that senses his stable is near and wants to get there. The smells reminded him of Romania and the Levant but mostly reminded him of Italy, the place he still thought of as his real home, and of how close he was to it, and yet so far away.

HE ARRIVED AT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to be his final destination, Algiers, on January 2, but for the next four days he had to fly from one unnamed place to another, which he described with deliberate vagueness as “somewhere in West North Africa.” He was assigned to a “curious outfit” that left him feeling “kind of lost and sad,” and in each place the local Morale Operations unit put him to work setting up printing presses and doing other mechanical work for which he had no prior experience and no aptitude. There was so little work that he feared he would be sent back to China. Also, he was the only naval officer in an army unit, which was strange in itself and made even stranger because, after the informality of Happy Valley, he had “to be now all the time well dressed, regulation uniform and so on.” His army colleagues remembered him fifty years later because he was the only naval officer among them, but they also remembered how private he was, and how “taciturn.” He was even more noticeable because all his luggage was lost somewhere in China and he had to wear his only uniform every day, which made keeping it clean and pressed difficult. His erratic wanderings never took him to a naval base where he could buy new uniforms, and because it was cold, he had to borrow a non-regulation army overcoat. He grew tired of having to explain to superior officers why he was out of uniform.

At work, he had problems with a number of high-ranking officers who had no understanding of the local culture. The OSS often sent out officers who were native-born Americans from the business world and who spoke only English, so these men handled agents as if they were managing a sales force. Most of the agents were like Steinberg, transplanted Europeans who were fluent in several languages and cultures, so they simply ignored their bosses and did what they thought needed doing. Steinberg, for example, was enlisted to make cartoons that were “dropped in millions of copies over the occupied territories.”

But he still had too much time to pass, so he drew a letter in the form of a newspaper for Hedda, listing himself as “publisher, editor, and lover of Hedda.” Once again her letters had not caught up with him, so he filled the paper with his news: his uncle Harry Steinberg had received a letter from Saul’s sister, Lica, via the Red Cross, and she was now married and living on a street he did not remember; the barber had shaved off his mustache and he was lost without it; he was smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day; most of all, he wanted to go home and get married. Preparing this newsletter was such a happy diversion that he planned another one to be illustrated by “the famous Ensign,” which was to be “The Anniversary Issue!” because it would soon be the first Sunday in February 1944, one year to the day since he had met Hedda. He ended by begging her to marry him: “Heddina, a no from you will kill me. Please say yes and be my wife. I need you and it’ll be good for you. Send me a telegram with a yes, a kiss for you, I love you a lot.” Several days later, he was “happy happy happy” because she sent a telegram in which she did say yes. “God bless you for that,” he replied, adding several gushing paragraphs to tell her again and again just how happy she made him.

HEDDA’S ACCEPTANCE OF HIS PROPOSAL WAS the only settled thing in his life. The good cheer he had worked hard to convey in every letter to her dissipated in an explosion of negativity on January 24. He was “sick of being attached to the Army,” tired of flying all over Northwest Africa and having little to do, of the navy sending him to temporary duty with the army and the army sending him right back to the navy. By Valentine’s Day, he concluded that “this war is a war of pants sometimes, pants destroyed by sitting down on hard chairs and waiting.”

Finally, on February 23, 1944, the orders he had been hoping for arrived from the Allied Force Headquarters. Stamped MOST SECRET, they ordered him to proceed “on or about February 24 from this station to Naples, in order to carry out an assigned mission and upon completion of temporary duty return to proper station.” He hoped that “proper station” meant Washington, because all military personnel were entitled to home leave after eighteen months of service, and his temporary duty in Naples might last long enough for him to reach the magic number. There was the fear, however, that he would be in Naples such a short time that he would be sent back to China without reconnecting with any of his Italian friends.

On February 24, after a rough flight in heavy rain, fog, and wind, he reached the southern Italian province of Calabria. “I was really scared,” he admitted to Hedda. He was on special detachment to the Fifth Army Headquarters of the OSS-AAI (Allied Armies in Italy), but he was not allowed to tell her his exact location or what work he was doing. Most likely he was in Bari or Caserta, where the 2677th Regiment, to which his MO unit was attached, made its headquarters at various times before moving on to Rome. All he could say was “I’m finally here and I’m very much confused. Things have so much changed … poverty, confusion, I’m upset by things I’ve seen.”

For the next month he was moving constantly from place to place and finally seeing “some of the real war.” He wanted to find enough time to draw what he had seen, “the convoys, trucks, guns, tanks, rolling in a long snake line up in the mountains, all mixed with refugee vehicles and bicycles and just people in a wonderful place, towns and hills with every top of hill covered right on top by a village of small houses and in the center a baroque church with tower.” But then he thought perhaps he should not draw it, because (as he tried to explain in his still imperfect English) “this sort of scenery, which is beautiful in reality but which usually turned out to be corny in a drawing, too much like cheap style, imagination.”

Being in Italy was frustrating in so many ways, starting with the impossibility of communicating with any of his friends in Milan. The 2677th MO was charged with installing printing presses in Naples to create and distribute propaganda throughout as much of the country as the Allies had penetrated, but the commanding officer instituted a logistical nightmare when he stubbornly insisted that the staff had to be billeted in Caserta, headquarters of the Allied Command in Europe and more than an hour’s ride from Naples if the trains were running, even longer if the men had to cadge rides on roads clogged with military traffic. Steinberg and his army counterparts never knew when or where they would work from one day to the next, and the constant moving around induced another sad and unsettling experience: “In Italy, I used to be just one of them and feel at home but now because of the uniform I’m for them just another sucker, another tourist easy to fool and belonging to a strange superior class.” His feelings of displacement were heightened when he listened to Radio Bucharest and felt “silly and sad. I never been in years so near to that place.” Hearing his native language raised another bittersweet emotion: he was so close to his family, so eager to have news of them and even to see them, yet he was reluctant to do anything that might make his superiors think about sending him to Bucharest, even if only for temporary duty.

By mid-April 1944 he was more or less in a routine as he went back and forth between Naples, Caserta, and several other southern Italian towns. He had now been overseas for a year, and he thought it was time to take an inventory of how much he had changed. First he listed his one bad habit: he thought he smoked far too much, at least three packs a day. Then he listed what had happened to him: he had finally finished the required inoculations, which made him sick in bed for a week, and he was fascinated when he read Italian magazines to see how those he had worked for had changed or evolved in the three years since he left. He was happy to see that he still had “a few imitators” who were imitating his style of drawing from three to five years before. He sent these observations to Hedda, accompanied by some drawings made by his imitators, including one of a tiny man on a huge rearing horse.

TIME STILL HUNG HEAVY OVER HIS DAYS, and mail delays so he did not receive Hedda’s letters made them heavier. He was sure the slowness of the mail was all due to “coming attractions” (that is, the D-Day invasion), so he spent most of his time shopping for things for his and Hedda’s future home. He loved to shop and told Hedda proudly that he had collected a lot of “junck [sic], and you know how I like junck.” He played tourist by visiting local southern Italian ruins, but the incompetent guide and the ignorant tourists depressed him. He preferred to go off by himself to buy postcards to add to the collection he was amassing. It was lonely and frustrating to be stationed in a backwater where nothing ever happened, especially after he was put in charge: “I’m the commanding officer of this place because I’m the only officer and the only sort of fun is to play cards with the sergeants.” By May 10 there had been so many last-minute changes to his orders that he “almost cried for days.”

Then suddenly everything became a frenzy of activity. On May 11, 1944, an offensive began that had him moving toward Rome with one of the convoys. For five days there was “lots of excitement,” including the death of one of his roommates. Then just as suddenly everything changed: troops were on the move to Rome, but Steinberg was sent back on the “dead road” to North Africa. He gave up on reaching Rome and also Bucharest, to whose radio broadcasts of lies and propaganda he had become addicted.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but as soon as I get used to one place I have to move,” he wrote from North Africa, as once again he was sent from one small town near Algiers to another. Hedda teased him that he always needed a list of things to worry about, and he admitted it was true, but now he had something genuine: he should have been promoted to lieutenant JG (junior grade) several months earlier, but he was so far from his original unit in China that no one there remembered to submit the required paperwork. He didn’t care about the rank, but he wanted the salary increase, so he started the process himself, as it seemed likely he would be in North Africa for the duration of the war.

Once again he was in debilitating heat and unable to work. Algiers was a “stupid city,” and he was sharing “a dark dirty room with another fellow” without even a drawing table. Even worse, he was required to spend the equivalent of business hours sitting in an office in full uniform, to take his turn as officer of the day, to supervise all administrative activity, to sleep in his uniform at night, and to be ready to assume command on the off chance of enemy action. He also had to censor the enlisted men’s mail and supervise the collection and burning of confidential trash every day at five o’clock. He hated it.

D-Day, June 6, 1944, initiated several days of excitement as news of the Normandy invasion filtered down the continent to Africa, but Steinberg’s morale remained low. By June 11 things had returned to the boringly normal, and he continued his daily routine, spending evenings glumly alone in his office making drawings for The New Yorker. His hands were “itching for drawings” as he was itching for any sort of action, no matter what kind. His uncle Harry wrote to say that he had received two telegrams from Moritz and Rosa sent via the Red Cross, and they were well. It was the first news Steinberg had had of his family for over a year. His birthday was June 15, but having ruined his stomach on Spam and army rations, he could only watch as his army colleagues drank the whiskey he bought for them at the navy exchange. Now his unit was working around the clock and he was “running around and busy as hell, extremely unusual for me.” By the end of the month, his unit was on the move back to Italy. Only one thing made him sad to leave Algeria: the pet baby goat they had to leave behind, in the care of “a bastard who ate him.”

THIS TIME HE WAS JOINING THE push to Rome via Sicily and up the coastal roads of southern Italy, where he saw nothing but “destruction … an extraordinary tragic thing.” He kept a small black pocket notebook in which he drew “frightened villages.” He saw “entire cities completely forever destroyed where people still wandered looking for things and living in what little is left out of the walls, bewildered and hungry.” One of the “most pitiful” sights was burning palm trees; one of the most tragic was tailor-made for his ironic sensibility: a German tank that exploded after colliding with a monument of “the usual horseback Garibaldi or somebody you’ll always find in the piazza of an Italian town.”

By mid-June the paperwork for his promotion was complete and he became a lieutenant JG. He bought the gold braid and had it sewn onto the summer uniforms he had finally managed to buy, only to find that the navy had changed them from khaki to blue-gray and once again he was out of uniform. By July 22 he had been moving around in such confusion that he had not had time to unpack the small amount of baggage he had carried from Algeria in early June. He compared his morale to his dirty laundry, “accumulated for days and days, and I buy new shirts instead of washing the old ones.” He was billeted in a series of elegant houses that had formerly belonged to high-ranking Fascist followers of Mussolini, all of whom were now on the run. Local people had looted the places, but he managed to sleep in “fancy beds in fancy houses” without running water or electricity, where he wrote or drew by candlelight.

Because he could keep clean and had enough to eat, he felt guilty: his life was so comfortable compared to that of the “hungry population who don’t realize they’ve lost the war.” After so many years of identifying himself with Italy and all things Italian, he now observed the local population from an American perspective and thought he had made a big mistake by angling so hard to return there: “I’m very much disgusted about the whole business, the atmosphere of little misery and intrigue and other European tricks I forgot about in the last three years. Now I see it again with new eyes and I’m very much homesick for the big generous America.”

If he saw nothing but the ugly side of things in Naples, Rome was far worse. Quite by accident he ran into some “so-called” friends he had known there and in Milan. After the first “enthusiastics and cheerings,” he found them like “ghosts and shadows” who were difficult to talk to: “I changed in many ways or rather I think I found myself better in the past 4–5 years.” When friends who remembered his drawings from the 1930s said they were surprised to see how much his style had changed, he was glad, “because I always suspected my old drawings of being just silly (and they indeed used to be enjoyed by silly or snobs).”

One old friend he met by happenstance was the journalist Mikhail Kamenetzki, who had taken the name Ugo Stille after he endured many of the same tribulations as Steinberg during his quest to immigrate to the United States. Stille was working for Corriere della Sera and wanted to write an article about Steinberg for the newspaper, but nothing came of it. Steinberg was unable to reestablish contact with Aldo or get news of him and Ada until after the war ended, but he did meet several other friends from the Politecnico who were in Rome. Steinberg’s uniform made Alberto Lattuada uneasy, so their meeting was strained and uncomfortable. It was even more awkward with two of his Bertoldo friends, Mario Ortensi and Mario Brancacci. After that, he stopped seeking out Italian friends and, unless they sought him out, limited his socializing to American colleagues.

HE BEGAN TO DROP CLUES TO Hedda about what he had done and where he wanted to go that he hoped would pass the censors. He wrote that he hoped to see his father on his father’s birthday, July 15, a hint that he was angling for a furlough to Bucharest. He said that when he looked at magazine photos of Italian women in bathing suits, his “Sicilian heart” was jealous not to be at the beach with them, a way of letting her know that he had been in Sicily and was on the move again. His next letter was more straightforward, as he said that he was sick and tired of moving constantly and was “again in a bad place, hot and flies and uncomfortable, I’m dirty and my eyes burn.” That meant Algiers. To let her know when he was back in Rome, he described himself as one of the sloppiest naval officers “in a neighborhood where regulations and etiquette dominated, as was usual with outfits far from the front lines.”

Two things were uppermost in his mind: returning to the United States, and having a furlough in Bucharest. By mid-August 1944, because of “the exciting news about landings all over the place,” he was so sure that his orders to go home were on their way that he told Hedda he would not write as often because he would soon be with her in person. He was shocked and dismayed when his orders came and instead of going to Washington, he was assigned for “two weeks or less” to temporary duty in Toulon, France, where his assignment was to deliver “certain classified materials” to the OSS regiment somewhere in Provence. His selection as a courier was nothing out of the ordinary, for some of the most important information that guided sabotage operations and propaganda campaigns on the French Riviera originated in OSS field offices in Caserta and Algiers and was then funneled into France by whoever was available to carry it. Steinberg was probably chosen because he had previously made a number of similar trips between Italy and North Africa. However, the Toulon assignment was dangerous, because it came just after the Allied invasion of southern France, when the country appeared poised for civil war between Resistance fighters and collaborators. For someone who had not seen actual combat, it was particularly nerve-racking, and he was glad when it was over and he was once again back in Italy.

ON AUGUST 23, 1944, KING MICHAEL of Romania staged a royal coup, dismissing the military commander, Ion Antonescu, withdrawing his country’s allegiance to Germany, and capitulating to the Allies. In early September, Steinberg learned that an American plane was being sent to Bucharest to recover two important prisoners of war and that he could be on it. His orders were to fly from Rome to Bari and then on to “such other points in Italy as may be directed” before landing in Bucharest. By mid-September he was back in the homeland he had previously wanted to be free of forever.

Bucharest had been hit hard by bombings once Allied planes stopped targeting the Ploesti oil fields, and Steinberg found devastation everywhere. He knew that his parents were still living on the street where the workshop was, Rahova Road, and he decided to go there first, even though Lica was the person he most wanted to see. He knew she had been married in April 1942 and was living with her husband, Ilie “Rica” Roman, in a neighborhood whose name Steinberg neither recognized nor remembered.

Before he left Italy, he raided the PX for everything he could take to his family, from canned rations to candy bars, but once he got there, the visit was traumatic. During the war, he did not write of it to Hedda, who was the only person to whom he confided his innermost thoughts. After the war, when he resumed contact with Aldo Buzzi, he merely said that he had managed to get to Bucharest and found it unchanged. The only time he described in detail what he saw in 1944 came fifty years later, during a reunion in Israel with his old high school friend Eugene Campus.

He told Campus that when he got out of the jeep that took him to his parents’ house, he was shocked to see how it and all the others on the street looked abandoned and were boarded up. As he stood there gazing up and down the bomb-damaged street, a curious child who had never seen a navy uniform began to wave American flags and dance around him and then around the jeep. Steinberg asked in Romanian what had become of his family and all the neighbors. The child told him everyone still lived there, but they had all gone to the synagogue because it was Yom Kippur. Steinberg surprised his parents when they returned from the services, but the visit was disturbing and he left as soon as he could get away. With the jeep outside and all the PX loot dumped on the table, he felt like a “caricature of Prince Charming returning home on his fiery steed, he’s incapable of performing any miracles. He can’t even justly punish the criminals.”

If photos are any indication, the reunion was far from joyous. Steinberg is in uniform, his face serious to the point of being grim. He stands next to his parents, who are seated at what appears to be a kitchen table, and they appear to be uneasy, regarding him warily, as if he were a stranger who dropped down from an unknown world and whose language they can neither speak nor understand. This visit marked the only time he had returned to Romania since he spent his summer vacation there in 1937. From then on, the Romania of his youth became “a closed chapter” he never wanted to open. He was “afraid [of having] a brutally emotional response to the old childhood places” where he had “suffered … felt miserable and humiliated … Like in a prison.” In his old age, he reminisced about the “disasters of a visit to the tribe” and wondered why, ever since childhood, he had always “looked for ways to escape and avoid families.” In his last decade he often revisited the facts and events of his life in Romania, but only long enough to use his hand to transpose some of them into art.

Steinberg on his last visit to his family in Bucharest: his parents, his sister, and her husband, Ilie Roman. (illustration credit 10.2)

AFTER THE LIBERATION OF ROME ON June 4, 1944, Steinberg’s unit, the 2677th MO, was among the first to enter the city and set up operations. By his June 15 birthday, a printing plant had been commandeered, and the work Steinberg did from then on was probably the most sustained and valuable contribution he made toward helping to win the war. The MO unit was a team of twenty-two men and one woman who were “straight out of [journalism’s] Central Casting.” Among them were Eugene Warner, who directed the operations; Norman Newhouse, of the newspaper publishing family (and later the owners of The New Yorker); William T. Dewart, Jr., the publisher of the original New York Sun newspaper; Temple Fielding, the travel writer whose guidebooks created his financial empire; and, most important of all, a forty-five-year-old corporal from Chicago, Egidio Clemente, an Italian-American printer in civilian life who kept the presses up and running. The only woman was a Czech-born American WAC, Barbara Lauwers (later Podoski), who was fluent in German and several central European languages.

The unit worked out of a safe house where the staff gathered daily for brainstorming sessions, during which they thought up hilariously funny projects that were seldom executed and others that were deadly serious and resulted in significant successes in ending the fighting and reaching the civilian population. The MO unit conceived a newspaper called Das Neue Deutschland, which was allegedly printed and distributed in Germany by anti-Nazi resistance groups united under the auspices of a fake peace party supposedly operating inside the country, but actually originated in Rome. The deception succeeded so well that Heinrich Himmler went to great lengths to see that the paper was exposed and denounced as an OSS ploy. To create it, the staff had to find paper and typefaces of a quality that would have been used within Germany, no small feat in war-ravaged Italy. They had to depend on agents planted in Germany to get the newsprint to Rome, so publication was sporadic. There was no problem finding native German-speakers to write the articles, because one of the main tasks of the three colleagues who had spoken the language since birth was to interrogate German prisoners of war and determine which could be persuaded to assist the Allies. In many of the MO brainstorming sessions, Steinberg’s colleagues who spoke German were struck by his replies: despite his fluency in the language, he always replied in Yiddish.

Steinberg’s drawings filled each issue of Das Neue Deutschland, and here again, since the goal was to make people read the paper rather than avoid it for fear of Nazi reprisals if they were caught with it, his cartoons were more whimsical and laugh-provoking than frightening or off-putting. His Hitler was befuddled, his face a sort of figure eight with a long nose, drooping mustache, and downturned mouth. To poke fun at the Volkssturm, the home defense army composed of those either too old or too young to fight in battle, Steinberg resurrected the Zia Elena figures from his Bertoldo days, this time as two fat German housewives on roller skates, wearing Nazi armbands and wielding brooms and umbrellas instead of guns.

Much of what Steinberg drew was distributed widely within Germany as well as Italy. One of his more imaginative creations was rolls of toilet paper that bore the visage of a downcast Hitler and the instruction to use it “this side up.” He created the “entwined heart” button that decorated the propaganda folder of a fictitious “League of Lonely War Women.” The folders were dropped behind German lines and urged soldiers to wear the button when home on leave, as it would attract hordes of women eager to provide sex beyond their wildest dreams. The subterfuge was so credible that it even fooled the Washington Post.

In his work, Steinberg was able to indulge in one of his lifelong passions: postcards. He created both pictures and messages that were supposedly written by members of the German underground as well as ordinary citizens, all urging the population to rise up and overthrow the Nazi tyrants. The postcards provided some of his earliest practice at the different kinds of handwriting that filled so many of his drawings after the war, particularly the fake diplomas that he created for friends. He also created official-looking rubber stamps and certificates for the postcards, and they too prefigured many of his later ones. Some of the postcards were comic, such as the ones where little men shot bows and arrows at Allied planes from sagging hot-air balloons that bore the inscription “Luftwaffe.” When MO created a phony German “League of War Mothers,” whose members were allegedly urging their sons to surrender to the Allies, Steinberg’s postcard showed dejected and embattled soldiers under the heading “Our Sons in Foreign Lands.”

The MO used an ingenious distribution method to get the postcards into Germany, loading them into official mail sacks that had been stolen by operatives and smuggled into Italy. Air force planes then dropped the filled sacks of phony mail onto trains during bombing and strafing raids, and once the raids were over, railroad personnel unknowingly unloaded them along with the genuine mail. Here again, official German newspapers and radio stations had to warn citizens to beware of American fakes.

Most of the MO staff called Steinberg their official art director because of the variety of his work. When Edward Lindner wrote a song along the lines of Kurt Weill’s “Wie lange noch?” (How Much Longer?), Steinberg created the cover illustration for the sheet music, which was printed as a lithograph and became a popular sensation when distributed behind enemy lines. And when Barbara Lauwers learned that several hundred Czech and Slovak soldiers had been conscripted into the German army, she created the text for a small white folder that Steinberg designed, inviting the soldiers to cross over to the Allied side, waving the folder as they came. More than six hundred soldiers did as the folder directed, and Lauwers won the Bronze Star for it.

For all of these projects in 1944, Steinberg drew his creations on shoddy paper that came from Germany, paper so scarce that much of what he used was the blank back side of official military forms. He did MO work on the blank side, but he also embellished and embroidered the official side with his own fanciful creations, all of which showed the new turn his work had taken since he joined the 2677th MO: he had completely stopped drawing with pencil and now used only pen and India ink. There was a crisis when he lost the fountain pen Hedda had given him, which he had carried everywhere from China to Italy, but she sent a variety of others to replace it, and he liked and used them all.

Around this time, he began to decorate his letters to her with some of the rubber stamps that became one of his favorite postwar devices, among them the fingerprint and the pointing finger with various admonitions (“rush,” “secret,” “confidential,” etc.). After the war he took delight in telling the apocryphal tale of how he used the pointing finger marked “secret” to identify his underwear when he lost the laundry marker that bore his name: “Then, when I was suddenly assigned home … I got all my laundry except the underwear marked Secret. I kept imagining this long grey underwear … wrapped up in a safe somewhere and guarded by MPs.” It made a whimsical story that he liked to tell to distract overzealous reporters who wanted to hear about his wartime adventures, but it wasn’t true.

STEINBERG HAD SEEN MANY THINGS IN wartime that raised conflicting emotions, and he often could not decide whether to try to forget them or to immortalize them through drawing. One event that came to the forefront of his memory every time it rained was of a group execution he had witnessed in Kunming. Nine Chinese men on their way to be shot for theft were marched in a line with a rope around their necks tying them to each other, all of them goaded and prodded by Chinese soldiers holding rifles. Incongruously, the prisoners were allowed to carry umbrellas to protect them from the rain. Five of the nine were “real robbers,” but the other four were paid replacements for the actual thieves: “This is a law in Yunan province. A man condemned to jail or death can buy a poor man to die in his place. The poor man has reasons, he has a farm to buy for his family, or wants to improve life conditions for his father, so he cashes the money and goes to die happy. Life doesn’t mean much anyway.”

In Italy, Steinberg saw a convoy of German prisoners, “just kids 16, 17 years old and as a group they don’t look at all like superior beings.” He, who had only experienced air raids or listened to the stories of soldiers returning from the front about the violence of battle, wondered how he could convey what they had experienced to a civilian population that had no comprehension of total destruction and annihilation. In the cities he saw crowds of many nationalities who had supported the Axis cause—all of whom were suddenly in crisp American uniforms bought on the black market and professing fidelity to the Allies. Even though he could appreciate the desire for survival at any cost, the cynicism of the turncoats was deeply upsetting. All the adult Italians he talked to were depressed; their only ambition was to get to America, and nobody wanted to stay and rebuild the country. He feared there would be a violent internal struggle once peace was declared, and indeed there was. When the Psychological Warfare Branch enlisted his services as an interpreter, he was dismayed by the attitude of a handsome and healthy boy of nineteen who told him that England and America had started the war and Mussolini was a great man who was betrayed by the traitors around him. Democracy may be all right in America, the boy said, but Italy needed order and somebody to give the orders. Steinberg feared that the Italy he knew and loved was lost forever.

After the war, Steinberg wanted to draw this and the other things he had witnessed in the form of visual stories. While he was stationed in China, he had devised classes in which he tried to persuade some of the sailors to draw, because “everybody should know how, every child makes drawings.” The trouble with drawing, as he saw it, was that people grew up and thought they had to copy photographs, “with real proportions and prospective,” and he thought this was wrong because these “grown‑up drawings were just science, a trick.” He would tell the sailors, “Take it easy, here’s a sheet of paper and a pencil. Don’t worry about reality, make it wrong, make from memory a scene that impressed you and you remember well. Make details and keep working.” The sailors usually drew something about their hometown, their families, or events that had meaning for them, such as holiday parades and high school football games. Steinberg thought they were all “excellent” and “beautiful.” After the war he wanted to do more along these lines, “to pick up people and give them paper pencil colors and being my guests for a week or so with the obligation to work a few hours a day for me turning out artwork.”

He wanted to write about all these things as well as to draw them, but he worried that whatever form his effort took, the result would be “too simple.” He poured out his emotional reactions to the war in letters to Hedda and found it “curious, how no ideas remain in my mind but only facts, only things connected with life and especially my life. My memory simply refuses to take care of general truth found now and then in people’s words.”

The memories of Steinberg kept by those who served with him covered a range of emotions. Barbara Lauwers remembered how much fun he was; he would sneak up behind her and put his hands on her hips, calling her by her nickname, Zuska, drawing it out in his pronunciation as “Zoooshka!” “Give me all your Tootsie Rolls for my hot date tonight,” he would cajole, and of course she would. He was always ready to take her and anyone who wanted to join them to see “the real Rome, off the beaten track.” Lauwers never got over his “off-the-center vision.” After the war she lived in Greenwich Village for a few years, during which she saw him fairly often. One night at dinner in an Italian restaurant, a man came to the table soliciting donations for charity. Those who gave dropped their money into the slit in an empty can of peaches. “Now how the hell did he get the peaches out?” Steinberg wanted to know. Lauwers cited it as an example of “the kind of thing he was always wondering about in Italy.”

Peter Sichel was the MO financial officer, and because of his job was the recipient of much of the group’s personal and privileged information. He thought Steinberg was “a strange and private man” who went out of his way to avoid telling even the most ordinary fact about himself. Sichel wondered how much of his behavior was due to Steinberg being a naval officer bewildered by being plunked down in the midst of an army unit, never mind that he was also a foreigner who had to learn all things American by instinct.

Others, such as Edward Lindner, thought that his behavior might have had something to do with his being anti-military in general. Lindner remembered how Steinberg hid under a desk when an admiral came to visit the unit so he would not have to salute him. Lindner also saw Steinberg in New York for the first few years after the war and corresponded with him in the last decade of his life. His lasting impression was that Steinberg “had a lot of Weltschmerz” and was “bitter about the purpose and result of the war,” with “an acute sense of futility about it all.” He quoted a phrase Steinberg repeated many times after the war, that “it was all for nothing. Everything we did was worth nothing.” Steinberg reserved his particular bitterness for the Holocaust and how little was done to prevent or stop the murder of six million Jews. For him, everything about the war was “too little, too late.”

The colleagues who retained the happiest memories of their friendship with Steinberg were the men who served with him in China, where he seems to have formed his deepest friendships and his own happiest memories. After he left China for Italy, he corresponded with most of them, nostalgic for the work of “the Miles organization,” which he found as dangerous and fascinating as ever. The affection he felt for the men with whom he served in China is evident in the drawings he chose to include in his first book, All in Line, published the year after he returned to civilian life. Under the section titled “War,” Steinberg included vignettes from each of the theaters in which he served, but only China has groups of sailors engaging in communal activities, from buying souvenirs in village stores to eating with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant (this became his first cover for The New Yorker). Sailors have smiles on their faces when mail call brings them letters and they sit dejectedly when none come for them. Steinberg treats the Chinese with affectionate respect, even those who have to carry the heavy Americans in sedan chairs. All the other wartime theaters—India, North Africa, Italy—depict scenes a tourist might see with only a solitary soldier or two, or occasionally a WAC, sitting bored and tired in front of them. In Italy he tried to draw convoys scaling hillsides in preparation for battle or village squares with their ubiquitous monuments, but these drawings are ordinary and without the wit and bite of most of his others.

Steinberg wore his Navy uniform after the war. Shown here with Tino Nivola and Aldo Bruzzichelli in Springs, New York. (illustration credit 10.3)

STEINBERG LIKED THE NAVY AND WAS proud to be in “the society service.” After the war, even though he was earning good money and could afford to buy the finest civilian clothes, when he dressed casually he continued to wear his navy-issue khaki trousers, shirts, and web belt with the brass buckle (which he kept polished). As for the army (especially the units with which he served), that was quite another matter. On November 8, 1944, several days before Steinberg received orders to return to Washington and was released by the 2677th MO, he was interviewed by an intelligence officer in the OSS. He began the interview by saying he did not think it was “fair play” to discuss the troubles he had encountered, but he did speak briefly of being assigned to tasks for which he was unsuited, including drawing “dirty pictures” that senior officers could put up on the walls of commandeered villas. He told the interviewing officer that he found very little tangible value in the work he did as a morale officer: “SO [Special Operations] and SI [Special Intelligence] have something to show for their work, that is, you can see a bridge before and after it is blown up, and an SI man can present a current list of intelligence reports.” As for MO, “there is no way of measuring the effectiveness since the work which is accomplished is done without visible or measurable results, hence, we can never tell how much MO influenced the enemy.”

The interviewing officer asked how Steinberg thought MO officers should work in future times, and his reply could have been the description of how twenty-first-century terrorist cells should operate. He thought MO workers should be “extremely intelligent and crafty minded,” but they should be recruited long before any war began and sent to live in the country where they would work. They should become completely integrated into the area where they are stationed, and because their work is so dangerous, there should be no communication between the operatives and their handlers: “They have their directives and they know better than the people outside do what is going on in the region where they are working … They know the best way they can poison the minds of the population.”

AFTER THE INTERVIEW, AND AFTER MORE than a year of being attached to the army in Europe and Africa, Steinberg was on his way back to Washington and duty with the OSS Naval Command. True to his love of “junck,” he shipped boxes of it back to Hedda. Besides her letters and the books and papers he had collected, he shipped a German helmet, cap, hood, cartridges, gun holster for a Colt automatic pistol, New Testament, French horn, whisk broom, several boxes of miscellaneous souvenirs, and “one book of cartoons” that would mostly go into All in Line. He also shipped “drawers and undershirts, wool,” and like everything else, it arrived safely at Hedda’s in good time.

Steinberg may have dismissed his work as unimportant, but he kept the things he brought back from the war for the rest of his life, and he used many of them in his art. He made photocopies of his dog tags and official ID card; of the fingerprint he affixed to his commission and discharge papers (on which he embellished flourishes and fake writing); bills from the hotels he stayed in, such as the Great Eastern in Calcutta, complete with flourishes and symbols; and foreign currency, particularly Chinese. Some of the elaborate engravings of steam trains, buildings, and the people on paper currency and the pagodas, flowers, and trees on coins all found their way into his drawings in years to come, as did a faded yellow paper entitled “Chinese Lesson,” with characters, phonetic pronunciation, and English translation.

He had served in three theaters of war, the Asian Pacific, European, and American, and he was authorized to wear the appropriate medals, including the Victory Medal. These too appeared in various guises in drawings throughout his long career, but after the war he put them away, never wearing them and seldom looking at them. He was in New York on a thirty-day leave at the end of November 1944 when he received a letter from Eugene Warner, the chief MO officer, who was still in Rome, expressing his great pleasure at being able to forward a commendation from General Donovan to “Each Member of the MO Branch, 2677 Regiment, OSS.” Donovan praised them all for their “splendid teamwork and high morale in the face of hardships,” which he enumerated: “inadequate equipment and transportation, insufficient number of trained personnel, security restrictions, and a rapidly changing tactical situation.” Steinberg filed it away with all the rest of his war souvenirs.

NAVAL OFFICERS RECEIVE PERIODIC FITNESS REPORTS from their commanding officers, and their promotion is dependent on them. Because Steinberg was attached to the army for so long, the last one he received from the navy came from Milton E. “Mary” Miles, then his commanding officer in Chungking, on May 31, 1944. Miles described Steinberg as “excellent in intelligence, judgment, initiative, cooperation and loyalty,” but only “mid-range in Force and Moral Courage” and “low” in “Leadership.” Commanding officers were asked to provide “commentary” on these judgments, and Miles did so: “His specialty is cartooning in which field he is outstanding. His performance of duty has been very satisfactory. He is recommended for promotion when due.” But it was more difficult for the army to evaluate him a year later. At the end of 1945, he was adjudged “a difficult officer to appraise and impossible to compare with others.” The evaluating officer praised his “unique qualifications … in the special field of sophisticated cartoon and caricature art work,” dismissing it as a “talent he applies with great success in illustrating aviation training manuals.” He was strongly recommended for promotion, but only if his duties were “confined to his specialty.”

The navy did recommended him for promotion, and after several bureaucratic snafus he was promoted to lieutenant. He was obligated to stay in the Naval Reserve until 1954, when he was finally and officially discharged. Until then, every time he left the country, he had to secure permission to travel and inform the commandant of the Third Naval District (New York) when he returned. It was a mere formality, but he fulfilled the obligation with personal dignity and respect for the institution.

Meanwhile, in September 1944, he was terrified by the rumor that he would be given two weeks’ leave and then sent back to Rome. “I don’t want two weeks leave,” he wrote to Hedda. “I want to go home and stay there!” He wanted to get away from the war, get married, get his first book published, and solidify his working relationship with The New Yorker. To prepare her for the man she would soon see, one who had lost so much weight because of malaria, chronic diarrhea, and digestive distress, he enclosed a drawing of a small dog that resembled a spaniel trying to jump a fence. “Greetings,” read the caption. “This is me (I lost some weight).”

Most of all, he wanted to sit in a room side by side with Hedda. “My hand is itching for drawings,” he told her. “I have a thirst for sitting on a tall chair at a drawing table covered with white-yellow paper as a background or cover, and then a book of white smooth paper, a bottle of Indian ink, colored ink, aniline, sharp pencils, small pens, brushes and quiet afternoon, and Hedda painting somewhere in the room.”

He returned to New York on the first of October, and even though he had to report to Washington for duty with the OSS Naval Command when his one-month leave ended in November, his war was essentially over.

CHAPTER 11

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30