SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. \u2014 Before the Army\u2019s 27th Infantry Division was decimated in a bloody World War II battle, Stan Dube sketched portraits of his fellow soldiers. The 17 drawings were forgotten after the war and stashed in an attic for decades before being found a year ago by his son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, Ira Dube is on a mission to identify the men in his late father\u2019s 75-year-old artwork. So far he has definitively identified two of the soldiers, both New Yorkers who served in the 27th Division\u2019s 105th Infantry Regiment, which suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific. One was killed on Saipan; the other died in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the 27th was a former New York National Guard unit, Dube believes most or all of the other 15 men also were New Yorkers. He recently donated the original sketches to the New York State Military Museum and Veterans Research Center in hopes its artifacts and records could be used to help identify more of the soldiers. It\u2019s not known whether any of the men depicted in the artwork are still alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese people need to be remembered,\u201d said Ira Dube, 61, a retired Navy veteran living in Woodland Park, Colorado. \u201cI look at these sketches and I see a hero.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dube found the signed sketches in the attic of his sister\u2019s home in Mississippi early last year while they were going through their father\u2019s belongings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stan Dube, who died in 2009, was drafted into the Army while studying architecture at Syracuse University, and he put his drawing skills to use by sketching pencil- and charcoal-on-paper portraits of his fellow soldiers while the 27th Division was stationed in Hawaii in 1943.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sure-handed sketches mostly show young men looking pensively into the distance, though a few crack a smile. Dube drew no backgrounds and barely sketched out his subjects\u2019 shoulders, but he took care to capture his subjects\u2019 eyes and faces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On all the drawings, Dube put the month, year and his signature in the lower right corner. Three of the soldiers signed their names next to Dube\u2019s: Kenneth Reid, Joseph Joner Kratky and Joe Orbe, who added his nickname, \u201cSolid Jackson.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Using information he found online, Ira Dube was able to track down Kratky and Orbe\u2019s relatives in upstate New York. Kratky was killed on Saipan in 1944. Orbe, a New York City native, survived the war and died in 1974. Dube hasn\u2019t definitively identified the soldier in the Reid sketch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The unidentified drawings were delivered to the military museum Dec. 1. Director Courtney Burns said the sketches will be posted on the museum\u2019s website and likely will be displayed in an exhibit this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe may never know who any of them are,\u201d Burns said. \u201cBut I think that\u2019s part of the mystery and part of the intrigue of them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wilfred \u201cSpike\u201d Mailloux, a 105th Regiment veteran who was wounded during a massive banzai attack near the end of the Saipan battle, recently perused the sketches at the museum to see whether he recognized any of the soldiers. None looked familiar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was such a long time ago,\u201d said Mailloux, 94, a General Electric retiree from the Albany area who\u2019s one of the last surviving 105th Regiment veterans. \u201cWe were young squirts back then.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before the Army\u2019s 27th Infantry Division was decimated in a bloody World War II battle, Stan Dube sketched portraits of his fellow soldiers. The 17 drawings were forgotten after the war and stashed in an attic for decades before being found a year ago by his son.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":37117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[143,15,35,16,146],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2331],"class_list":["post-34041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-good-news-report","category-news","category-newsletters","category-off-duty","category-retirement-e-report"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"J5ZFCAU2PVDSHNLERK7VBDIL5E","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-army\/2018\/01\/04\/who-are-the-men-in-soldiers-wwii-sketches\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n