An Artist Goes to War: Leon Granacki in the South Pacific WWII

By Victoria Ann Granacki

Like so many others who served in World War II, Leon Granacki was an ordinary guy from a working-class immigrant family drafted into the US Army and thrust into the horrors of war in the South Pacific. But through sheer luck and pluck, he leveraged his art talents to survive and thrive, catapulting himself from private infantryman to Master Sergeant and mapmaker for General MacArthur in the Americal Division’s Intelligence section. Inspired by the Southern Cross as his troop transport crossed the equator, he designed the Americal Division patch for the Army’s only named division, created in New Caledonia. Overseas for three-and-a-half years without any stateside furlough, he labored over maps of enemy positions in a primitive tent in the steamy, mosquito-infested jungles of Guadalcanal and Bougainville.

In An Artist Goes to War, author Victoria Ann Granacki paints a portrait of her father, Leon, through his original maps, jungle watercolors, journal illustrations, scrapbook photos, and letters home to “Dear Gang”—his extended Polish American family crowded together in a Chicago “six-flat” apartment building. Despite only slyly alluding to awful conditions to evade the censors’ scissors, his indomitable optimism always comes through. The Polish-language letters directed to his beloved parents are filled with childlike tenderness as he tries to reassure them he’ll be safe. His plaintive longings for family, holidays home, fishing, and a woman to love are poignant reminders of the personal effects of war on reluctant soldiers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665739474

Victoria Ann Granacki

Victoria Ann Granacki is passionate about collecting and preserving old documents, odd artifacts, weird art, and vintage buildings. In her historic preservation career, she wrote scores of landmark nominations and community histories highlighting Illinois’ architectural legacy, and she authored Arcadia Publishing’s Chicago’s Polish Downtown. Granacki has rehabbed four historic buildings in Chicago, and in retirement, she chronicles family history.

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Copyright © 2024 Victoria Ann Granacki.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Interior Image Credits: Victoria Ann Granacki, unless otherwise indicated.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3946-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3948-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3947-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903765

Archway Publishing rev. date: 03/28/2024

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Contents

Prologue to My Father’s Journey

Chapter 1   Drafted US Army

Chapter 2   Camp Forrest Maneuvers

Chapter 3   New Caledonia and the Birth of the Americal Division

Chapter 4   Guadalcanal 1942-1943

Chapter 5   Fiji—Rest, Recreation, Reorganization

Chapter 6   Bougainville—Back to the Jungles

Chapter 7   Philippines

Chapter 8   Coming Home

Epilogue: The End of the Journey

Prologue to My Father’s Journey

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The pair of dark, brooding, jungle paintings hung amidst the bright, airy watercolors of Wisconsin farm scenes. Layered with thick strokes of hunter green and burnt umber, the canvases dangled from S-hooks on a pegboard wall in our family’s dusty basement. My father’s art studio was in the small storage shed on the other side of that basement wall, and he’d retreat there after supper to do freelance sign-painting jobs or just to escape the chaos of 3 young kids running around a modest 1000-square-foot Chicago flat. Sometimes he’d bring me downstairs with him to work on art projects as he patiently groomed me to be an artist just like he was. Coupled with cherished drives together on Saturday mornings down Elston Avenue, veering past the looming Morton Salt warehouse, to junior classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was primed.

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Those oil paintings looked so different from his other work, but I wouldn’t understand why until decades later. The scenes were from Bougainville Island in the South Pacific, where he served during World War II. He had been drafted into the US Army Infantry many months before the US had ever declared war. He was 25 years old, out of high school almost 8 years, and well established in his commercial art career, but still single and ripe for Roosevelt’s pickings. With basic training under his belt by the time Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, he was among the first troops to ship overseas.

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Now it was 1953. Eight years after his discharge. Married and with 3 small kids, my parents had moved out of our cramped 4-room flat in a building packed with extended Granacki family at 1712 N. Washtenaw, and into an almost-as-old 3-flat on Keeler Avenue, still filled with extended Granacki family. Although he never spoke of his military service, that rough basement, out of sight, gave him room at last to sift through it all. He labored over a large scrapbook with a black leather cover and oversized 19 x 24 pages where he carefully masking-taped the corners of original watercolors--like the 2 he selected to create those oil paintings--as well as photos of his army buddies at Camp Croft and Camp Forrest, flyers promoting Americal Division activities, and hand-drawn pen and ink maps of Japanese enemy positions during the Solomon Islands campaign. He’d sent this cherished collection home bit by bit with scores of wartime letters, and his older sister, Joy, lovingly saved it all. I don’t remember if I noticed him working on it at the time. Sadly, it was too late to ask him when, years later, I found it stored away in the bottom of a crooked basement cabinet.

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Growing up in that 3-flat on Keeler, I was aware of a bulging brown binder of old letters sitting on a closet shelf in my tiny bedroom tucked under the stairs. Not sure when, but my Auntie Joy (whose family then lived on the second floor) had given my older cousin, Johnny, a project when he was home convalescing one year. He opened 196 wartime letters inscribed on multiple thin sheets, organized them by date, and stapled each letter onto a page in the binder. Most were written to Dear Folks in my dad’s flourishing script and were intended to be read by his whole extended family squeezed into the 6 flats of that Washtenaw apartment building.

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The folks were married older siblings Al (Helen and 2 small children); Joy (John Rojewski and 2 small children); and Joe (Harriet and 1 son). His 2 younger brothers were Frankie, his best friend, confidant, and drinking buddy, and the youngest one, Rainer, known affectionately as Curly. Eighteen letters of the cache were in his grammar-school Polish and meant for the ears and hearts of his immigrant parents, Joseph and Victoria. Every once in a while, I’d peek into that binder and wonder what it was all about, but I never let on to him that I knew anything. And I was way too timid to ever ask.

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My father died in 1993. The day after new tenants moved into his old flat, I got an excited call: We’ve found something of your dad’s, and I think you’ll want to see it right away. I made a mad dash for Keeler, just a few miles down the street from my own home. As I burst in, they immediately handed me Most Secret: Memoirs from a Doughboy’s Past, the visual diary he began when he landed on Guadalcanal November 11, 1943. The precious little book had gotten shoved to the back end of the tallest shelf in my old bedroom closet. As I gingerly thumbed through the pages, I entered the life of my father the soldier--a life he kept most secret from all of us.

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The father I knew was an artist--it permeated his whole being. He liked to tell people that everything they touched or used or saw had been imagined first through the eyes of an artist. He was a professional artist before the war and was welcomed back to his old job as advertising and display manager at Petersen Furniture Company when he returned. He dressed windows seasonally at all their neighborhood stores and met my mother, Myrtle Meyer, at the Englewood store. Unforgettably, I visited his work where a large drafting table looked out on Belmont Avenue from an old round turret, and pinups of Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and others graced the walls. My father sketched and painted every step of his life, starting at Lane Tech High School, where he was Art Editor of the monthly Lane Tech Prep in 1933, later with pen and ink drawings of local homes for his Old Irving Park Association neighborhood, and ending at Wright Junior College art festivals, where his watercolor nature scenes won First Prize and the Purchase Award in 1990. He shared his passion with his kids and grandkids, who delighted in inscribing their names all over that well-worn basement drawing board. His nieces and nephews, and now their adult children, still hang his paintings in their homes.

At my request, in his final years he wrote an autobiography of his childhood, reminiscing vividly about his elementary school years on a farm in Pulaski, Wisconsin, and later about how his family found their Wisconsin fishing paradise, Squaw Lake. He detailed the family’s move to Chicago on the eve of the Great Depression, when as a naïve farm boy he was thrust into a huge urban school; how he used grit and cocky self-confidence to land his first art jobs. But my father died before he ever wrote a word about his life as a soldier. He spent 4 years 1 month and 30 days in the US Army, being inducted as a private into the Illinois National Guard’s 33rd Division on April 14, 1941, and separating as a Master Sergeant from Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on June 13, 1945. It was a journey of which I knew little, but now I had a treasure of written materials and visual images from his own artist’s hand that he’d painstakingly sent home. Other family members had saved and helped catalogue his story, augmented with their own letters back and forth updating his service. Now it was my turn, and I would chronicle it. I was about to embark on my journey through his life to understand how an artist became a soldier, and then a soldier became an artist again. This is the story of his journey--and mine.

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CHAPTER

1

Drafted US Army

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Credit: Genuine Curt Teich—Chicago, Illinois, C.T. Art Colortone. Postmark August 30, 1943

Saying Good-bye to Home

On a cool, gloomy Monday in April 1941, Leon Granacki grabbed a small duffle bag, bounded down the front steps of his family’s Humboldt Park 6-flat and headed out to report for military service. His excitement tinged with trepidation, he skipped down the 2 short blocks along Washtenaw Avenue, passing a familiar mix of old frame and brick houses and apartments, waving at the firemen sitting outside the corner fire station, and then savoring one last glance at Danny’s Tavern, the Granacki boys’ favorite watering hole. As he turned right onto North Avenue, small shops and offices dotted with signs advising Mowimy po Polsku were still closed but he craned his head to see what new varmints were in the taxidermist’s window. Making his way past the Crystal Theatre to Humboldt Park, he was greeted by the proud statue of Polish American Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko on horseback that stood sentinel at the entrance. Walking along the park’s edge he was soon at the Illinois National Guard’s Northwest Armory.

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The Northwest Armory at 1551 N. Kedzie Avenue was an imposing limestone Art Deco-style building designed by prominent architects Chatten and Hammond. Officially dedicated just before Christmas 1940, it was activated in March 1941 as the home of the Illinois National Guard 33rd Division. With war raging in Europe, Congress had authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to call up National Guard units across the country to be ready to support US Armed Forces if needed. Although Congress and the president were at odds over US isolation versus intervention, the grim march of war across Europe had become terrifying by the fall of 1940. After heated debate in both chambers of Congress, in September the Selective Training and Service Act was passed, creating the first US peacetime draft. A strong, healthy, single, 25-year-old, Leon had registered for the draft as required by law on October 16, 1940, and was a top choice when induction centers opened in February 1941. With busloads of other young men coming from all directions that day, they entered the building’s large auditorium for processing.

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As he waited around in endless lines that morning, Leon remembered the warm send-off the past weekend from his fellow employees at Petersen Furniture Company, where he worked as an advertising and display manager. Despite ambivalence over US involvement in Europe’s war, support for their own was running high at the close-knit, family-run company. Several employees had been called up to serve, including the boss’s son and Leon’s friend, Jurgen Petersen, Jr. Leon’s job at the company was creating pen and ink furniture illustrations and composing newspaper ads, as well as decorating display windows and arranging in-store room settings for the handful of Petersen stores across Chicago. He brought his art experience with him to the army, having no idea how it would later contribute so strategically to the US war effort in the South Pacific.

By the end of a long day at the armory, Leon and others were sent by troop train from the Illinois Central station at Roosevelt Road to Camp Grant Reception Center in Rockford, Illinois. A few days later his mother, Victoria F. Granacki, received a postcard informing her that her beloved son, Army Serial Number 36019870, had been accepted for active military service.

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Mon. nite. Hello Folks--Arrived at Camp Grant in Rockford Ill 12:30 Mon. nite. Very exciting day … Enjoying everything. Food aplenty and tasty. Kind of tired now (8:45 am) after breakfast. Up with the bugler at 5:45 am. Will stay here approximately 1 week. From here destination unknown. A company leaving for Louisiana today. Not homesick yet. Getting our uniforms to-day as well as our shots. Will write more to-nite. Your loving son. Private Leon--Company I 2nd Battalion. (April 14, 1941)

Ensconced at Camp Grant by Tuesday evening and missing his family already, Leon began his prodigious war-time letter writing, recalling the prior day’s chaotic armory experience in his first full letter home:

My Dear People--Well! guess what--at present I am Private L.P. Granacki, of the 2nd Battalion, Company I. And boy! that’s an experience. But that’s putting the horse behind the Irish Buggy as they call it up here in camp. So before going any further I’ll let you folks in on something I had to go thru--Wow! the army is no place for a sissy. After leaving the draft board we arrived at the Armory about 8:30 in the morning. After sitting around, walking around, and waiting, we finally started to get serious. Herding us boys around must be the Army’s pastime because boy! they began giving us the run around. The Army Doctors then took over, and about five (5) hours later we’re pronounced physically fit, which immediately placed us in the armed forces. During the day we had 2 meals on Uncle Sam. Soon after supper, about 4 hours later, we left the Armory and headed for the Special Troop Train, at the I.C. Depot. Left Chicago approximately 8:45. (April 15, 1941)

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Camp Grant was a brief stop for Leon and others who got there that week. After having first opened in 1917 to train soldiers for World War I, by 1924 the camp had been turned over to the Illinois National Guard. But just months before Leon arrived, in February 1941, it was transferred back to the federal government and reactivated as an Army Induction Center. Its main focus was providing physical and medical exams for new US Army soldiers. That first week was exciting and Leon was always the optimist in his letters home. He extolled the apple pie and ice cream and the German brews, enjoyed a concert, and shared fishing stories with another inductee from Hayward, Wisconsin. Here’s more of his account from Tuesday night:

After a monotonous and tiresome trip, which was occasioned by numerous stops and backstops, we arrived at Camp Grant, Ill. at about 11:30pm. Arriving at camp we were ushered into one of the numerous mess halls here and given another hot feed. Which made all in all 3 meals in 8 hours. Incidentally, they give you plenty of grub and the stuff tastes rather good. To-nite’s chow was very delicious to me. It’s all cafeteria style and if you hold your plate there long the cooks will sure pile it on. I’m eating everything they shove at me, which includes all vegetables. Their breakfasts out here are as big as mother’s supper at home, so you see, you really have to pack it down. After a very exciting Mon. and with about 4 ½ hrs. sleep, I rather feel tired now. We get up at 5:45 here and not 7:45!!!!! We have to make up the bed, sweep the floor, and then mop it in the morning before breakfast which was about 6:30 this morning. Our barracks is about 24 men so they all chip in. Was outfitted today and boy! this Granacki sure looks like a fighting Pole now. My pack feels as if it now weighs a ton. But you have to take it here. In spite of all this I’m rather enjoying this life. Following this we were vaccinated, for Typhoid fever and some other fever, which follow for 7 days in succession, and at present my arms feel rather punctured and dead. (April 15, 1941)

Although just a private and a draftee, from the beginning Leon was trying to leverage his art experience into something more with the US Army. He was hopeful of snatching an assignment as draftsman but unfortunately his persistence wouldn’t pay off until long after he was fully trained as an infantryman and shipped overseas.

At present I’m waiting for future plans. I’m with a swell gang of fellows, mostly from Kankakee, Ill. and Georgia. Talk about southern accents--wow!!! Most of them left for town to-nite, so I’m listening to the radio and scribbling this letter on my knee. A bunch of fellows left for Louisiana this morning. Most of these were from Wisconsin. I noticed their baggage, which was marked, Hayward, Crandon, Stevens Point, Antigo, etc. Was interviewed by one of the captains today pertaining to classification. Quite positive they’re putting me into the Engineer Corps as Draughtsman or as an Artist, ‘cause he really studied my life’s history. Will be breaking camp in 2 or 3 days maybe more or less and don’t know my destination from here on so please don’t write to me until you hear from me again as I’ll then be in my permanent camp more or less. Haven’t any idea where it will be. (April 15, 1941)

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Despite Leon’s ever-present upbeat tone at Camp Grant, later in the week there was a dark hint of the controversy roiling the US over potential involvement in Europe’s war--Most boys here have the same idea I have. They don’t think they should have been called. (April 16, 1941) Still, after signing up for $5000 in life insurance, he quipped I’m really worth dough now, yea, man! (April 15, 1941) At the end of the week, another postcard from April 17, 1941, alerted them that he’d sent his civilian clothes home COD and had started what would become over 4 non-stop years of military service and overseas hell.

To the Dear Folks on Washtenaw

When Leon wrote all those letters home to Dear Folks or Dear People or My Dear Gang, he had a wide audience. Home was an old 1910s brick, Chicago front and rear 6-flat apartment building overflowing with his Polish Catholic family. Parents Joseph and

Victoria lived in the cramped, 2-bedroom first-floor rear apartment, while, by 1940, 3 other flats housed his older 2 brothers and his sister with their spouses and growing families. There was the eldest brother, Al with wife Helen and son Cajeton (later anglicized to Clayton) in second-floor front; their only sister, Josephine (warmly called Joy her whole life as the best description of how everyone embraced her) with husband John and son Johnny in second-floor rear; and brother Joe with wife Harriet and son Dale above them in the third-floor rear. Not until after Leon left home did Clay and Johnny each get baby sisters--Marlene and Therese. Leon’s 2 younger brothers were Frankie (his closest brother, whom he repeatedly warned against army life) and the youngest in the family, Rainier (Curly). In those early Depression years, it’s impossible to imagine how they all squeezed into their parents’ tiny, two-bedroom flat, coming from a big, old Wisconsin farmhouse. The shifting fortunes of their tenants in those lean years often made other flats available and the brothers temporarily set up cots in a vacant unit or even the damp basement to spread out. Since the Granacki liquor stash was kept in the basement, that wasn’t as bad a place as it sounds.

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The Dear Folks letters were opened by Leon’s sweet sister, Joy, who passed the news on to the rest of the brood but filtered what she told her parents, who couldn’t read English. For them he occasionally wrote in Polish with the heart of a little boy, ever telling them not to worry about their strong Polish son. Joy wrote back most faithfully to Leon, penning family news twice a week the entire 3 ½ years he was overseas. Once Frankie joined his own branch of service, he was the next most prolific correspondent. It was Joy’s oldest son, Johnny, who later archived the missives she had savored and collected. Here’s Leon’s explanation and then one of Leon’s typical admonishments not to worry:

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Before I start, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing to me, Joy. You know Joy, you really don’t know how much a letter means to you until you’re 1400 or so, miles from home. I would like to write to you, dear Sis, alone, but, if I wanted to write home to the folks everything I would say would be the same in 1, 2 or 3 letters. So, when I address, Gang that means everybody, which gives me more time to concentrate on one, and makes it more interesting…. In finishing, I want to send best regards to everybody. Since it’s pretty lonesome to be away from the gang, all letters are anticipated, and certainly awaited. Tell mother & dad I’m in fine health, enjoying this as much as possible, and not to worry about the old Platoon Guide – I ain’t the fishing guide anymore. Ha ha … Always thinking of you guys and hoping for the best. Your fighting brother, Your loving son Leon. xxx Pvt. L. P. Granacki (May 5, 1941)

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When I was a young child, I lived in that same old 6-flat apartment building. By then, my grandparents were just below us in the first-floor front apartment (the smallest), while the other 4 flats all housed aunts and uncles and cousins. Completely overflowing with family, there were no apartments left for the youngest brother, Curly, and his wife, who had to live a block south. What a wonderful way for a preschooler to be let loose to explore. From the staircase in the middle of the building, I