So, Memorial Day was yesterday; cope

Burial detail, Camp O'Donnell, 1942.

Aboard a POW ship, en route to Japan.

Self-portrait of Ben Steele in Bilibid prison hospital in Manila, 1943.

The New York Times has an article by Michael Norman and Ben Steele about Ben's art from World War Two:

In the fall of 1940, Ben Steele, a 22-year-old Montana ranch hand, enlisted in the Army Air Corps at the prodding of his mother. A year later, his unit, the 19th Bombardment Group, was shipped to Clark Field in the Philippines, part of an unsuccessful American effort to deter Japanese aggression in the Pacific. (Soon after Private Steele arrived, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines.)
Private Steele then took part in the first major land battle for America in World War Two, the battle for the peninsula of Bataan in the Philippine Islands— a 99-day fight that ended on 9 April 1942, in the surrender of more than 76,000 men under American command, the worst defeat in United States military history. Afterward, the Japanese set their sick and starving American and Filipino captives on a 66-mile walk under a broiling sun to a prison camp, an infamous trek now known as the Bataan Death March.
Early in his three years of captivity, Private Steele, crippled by malaria, jaundice, blood poisoning, and beriberi, became an invalid in a prisoner-of-war hospital in Manila. One day during his slow recovery, he pulled a burned stick from a cooking fire and started making scratches on the concrete floor. With some tutoring from a fellow prisoner who was an engineer, those scratches turned into sketches, and soon cellmates were scrounging paper and stubs of pencil for him.
When Navy POW doctors noticed Private Steele’s talent, they suggested that he secretly begin to document their experience. He made fifty such sketches, which an Army chaplain hid in the false bottom of a Mass kit. The chaplain was then shipped to a prison camp in Japan; en route, his vessel was sunk by American aircraft. Though the chaplain survived, Private Steele’s sketches ended up at the bottom of the South China Sea.
When he returned home to Montana after the war, Mr. Steele began to recreate and refine his early work, filling scores of sketchbooks. His aim, he says, has always been to remember the more than 10,000 American prisoners from the Philippines who died in Japanese captivity from April 1942 to August 1945.
For more than six decades, Mr. Steele, who went on to become a professor of art at Montana State University, has done just that. Now 91, and one of the last surviving Death March veterans, he still draws pictures from the war. “I try to say something through those images, though I don’t know what it is,” he told me. “It’s hard to describe. My head is full of that stuff. It comes pouring out.”
The illustrations, published to commemorate Memorial Day, come from various of his sketchbooks from 1999 to 2008. For his “war work”, as he sometimes calls it, Mr. Steele avoids paint, preferring the starkness of pen and ink because, he said, “I want my work to get right to the point.”

Michael Norman is the co-author, with Elizabeth M. Norman, of the forthcoming Tears in The Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Ben Steele is an artist.