Howard Brodie transferred to Europe after doing his first combat art on Guadalcanal (see previous posts). He participated in the Battle of the Bulge and sketched this drawing of a German prisoner executed by firing squad. He could be a member of Otto Skorzeny’s commando unit that was tasked by Read more
Mary Godwin was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Her parents were famous writers and political radicals. In 1814, she began an affair with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. They eloped to Europe and in the summer of 1816 they joined Shelley’s fellow poet Lord Byron in Read more
When King Philip of Macedonia invaded Greece in 338 B.C., he defeated an Athenian/Theban army at the Battle of Chaeronea. Resistance ceased as all the other Greek city-states submitted to Philip’s victorious army. All except Sparta. When Philip arrived outside Sparta, he halted his army and awaited the Spartan emissaries Read more
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a poet and an opium addict. One day in 1797, he went to sleep under the influence, after having read about Kubla Khan’s palace at Zanadu. When he awoke, he began to feverishly copy down a poem he had dreamed. It began with the famous line: Read more
Litter bearers (also called “stretcher bearers”) don’t get enough credit. Possibly the most famous litter bearer was Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War. This sketch by combat artist Howard Brodie (see the previous picture post for more information on him). His words at the bottom say it all for Read more
In the middle of his dramatic victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson was shot by a French sniper and mortally wounded. Nelson was carried below deck while the battle raged. The captain of the HMS Victory was able to come visit Nelson as he lay dying. Nelson Read more
Howard Brodie was a combat artist for the Army when he was sent to the island of Guadalcanal. He sketched this drawing for Yank magazine. Brodie depicts five tired infantrymen on the march. Brodie wrote on the drawing “the stench of dead Japanese was nauseating”. You see a dead Japanese Read more
Mozart once bet fellow composer Haydn that he could not play a piano composition that Mozart had written that day. Haydn accepted the bet and sat down at the piano with the music in front of him. He started out well, but then reached a part of the composition Read more
The painting is called “Sub at Sea” by Adolf Bock. It is a u-boat in the Atlantic in WWII. U-boats like this one sank 175 warships and 2,825 merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. The most successful u-boat commander was Otto Kretschmer who sank 47 ships in 15 Read more