Wisconsin Veterans Museum displays unique exhibit of World War II mapmaker's sketches

Meg Jones
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Ask war veterans about their experience and many will say it was long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

In their downtime, World War II veterans played cards, smoked cigarettes, wrote letters home to their sweethearts and read novels.

Not Harold Schmitz.

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison recently opened an exhibit featuring sketches and letters by Harold Schmitz (pictured at right.) "In My Spare Moments: The Art of Harold F. Schmitz" displays more than 40 sketches done by the Milwaukee veteran, who served in the Pacific in an Army map-making company.

The Milwaukee soldier packed a sketch pad in his duffel bag before the Army sent him to the Pacific to create maps in the 955th Topographic Engineer Company. Schmitz's wonderful pencil drawings of his fellow soldiers, military equipment, planes, scenery and South Pacific islanders were carefully stored in a scrapbook when he returned home.

Last weekend, the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison opened "In My Spare Moments: The Art of Harold F. Schmitz" featuring artwork, letters, map-making equipment and an oral history recorded before Schmitz died in 2013 at age 97.

It's unusual for the museum to devote a large exhibit to one person, but Schmitz's talent for sketching what he saw around him as he hopped from island to island creating maps shows a unique and rarely told side to World War II.

Harold Schmitz made sketches of people and places he saw while serving in the Pacific with an Army map-making unit during World War II. He carefully preserved his drawings in an album discovered by his daughter a few years before his death in 2013. She donated the scrapbook to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison, which created a temporary exhibit, "In My Spare Moments: The Art of Harold F. Schmitz."

"He was able to embrace the beauty in the middle of a war," said exhibit curator Yvette Pino.

After earning a degree in advertising design from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee in 1937, Schmitz worked for a Milwaukee printing company, Hammersmith-Kortmeyer. Because of his commercial art experience, when Schmitz was drafted in June 1942 he was assigned to the unit that drew maps of several islands, including Leyte, New Guinea and Luzon.

Because Schmitz carefully dated each sketch, often including identifying information, it was easy for museum officials to create an exhibit that chronologically follows the soldier through his war experience. When he arrived in New Caledonia, Schmitz had a few days to explore before his map-making assignments and spent them drawing landscapes and buildings.

Harold Schmitz drew this picture of a fellow soldier in the Army's 955th Topographic Engineer Co. sketching in the South Pacific during World War II. Schmitz grew up in Milwaukee and was a commercial artist when he was drafted in 1942.

Some of the sketches are blown up and cover walls in the museum. These include the first picture visitors see of a lighthouse near the harbor of the New Caledonia capital of Noumea, likely the same view many GIs saw as they arrived to fight the Japanese.

"Harold turned out to be this precise personality, but there's also a sense of humor," said Pino. "You don't see a lot of preliminary sketches. He's drawing in plein air (outdoors) and many he's doing from memory."

While he was at North Division High School, Schmitz learned to combine floor plans and elevations into perspective images for architects to publish in the real estate section of his hometown newspaper. His skill in perspective can be seen in his drawings of the cathedral in Noumea Harbor.

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison recently opened an exhibit on the artwork of Harold F. Schmitz that includes more than 40 sketches, letters, an oral history and photos from the Milwaukee commercial artist's service as an Army mapmaker in the Pacific during World War II.

After the war, Schmitz returned to Milwaukee and married one of his Hammersmith-Kortmeyer co-workers, Eleanor Hammersmith, a proofreader. They raised two children and from 1950 until retiring in 1983 he was a commercial artist for Northwestern Publishing. His daughter Linda Devitt grew up seeing a couple of his wartime sketches hanging on the walls of their home but never saw her father drawing.

When she helped her father move into a senior living center a few years before he died, Devitt found the album of his World War II pictures. 

"I was just amazed by the beauty of his drawings, his insights," Devitt said in an interview at the museum last Thursday on what would have been her dad's 103rd birthday. 

Devitt heard about the museum from a friend and decided to donate her father's scrapbook, letters and oral history for anyone who wanted to study World War II mapmaking or see his sketches. She never expected museum curators would want to create an exhibit.

Soldiers in the Army's 955th Topographic Engineer Co. making maps during World War II in the Pacific. Army mapmakers frequently updated maps after bombings and battles on islands throughout the Pacific.

When Pino, an artist who served two tours of Iraq in the Army, opened the scrapbook and slowly began paging through one image after another she got excited.

"I could see the quality of the draftsmanship. I couldn't look away," said Pino.

The exhibit includes more than 40 original drawings, copies of his letters and photos from his scrapbook. In one of the letters to his eventual wife, Schmitz asks if she could send him some spiral sketchbooks. Not just any old sketchbook, though. Schmitz was a guy whose lettering was so precise that his daughter recalled his hand-written diary looked like it was typed. So Schmitz asked for Favor, Ruhl & Company No. 1030R books, which cost 35 cents apiece.

The exhibit includes a display case filled with the equipment World War II Army mapmakers used including three-sided rulers, drafting tools, a stereoscope and colored pencils. On the wall are copies of maps Schmitz helped create as well as covers of operations reports.

A display case at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum's exhibit "In My Spare Moments: The Art of Harold F. Schmitz" features mapmaking tools similar to those used by soldiers during World War II. Schmitz was a Milwaukee commercial artist when he was drafted into the Army's 955th Topographic Engineer Co. to create maps in the Pacific.

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Pino found the maps at the Australian National University Library. By reading his letters home and examining his dated sketches, Pino noticed a six-month period when Schmitz didn't make any personal drawings. But she could see how many maps were made during that time and realized his war duties kept him too busy.

"Dad would just be amazed to see his work on the walls of a museum. He was a humble man," said Devitt.

If you go: "In My Spare Moments: The Art of Harold F. Schmitz" will be on display at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, 30 W. Mifflin St., Madison, until summer 2020. The free museum is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. From April through September the museum is also open noon to 4 p.m. on Sundays. wisvetsmuseum.com 

When Harold Schmitz wasn't busy making maps in the Army's 955th Topographic Engineer Co., he found time to make sketches when his fellow soldiers commissioned drawings of their sweethearts back home.