Thread by @dfedman

A native of Oklahoma, Stephen Douglas was drafted in 1942 into the 864th Eng. Aviation Battalion and dispatched to the Pacific.

When not maintaining air fields, he created some stunning visual artifacts of the war: painted envelopes he mailed home.

Here are some highlights

Much of the collection focuses on life in the Philippines, where (after hopping from Australia to Papua New Guinea) his unit spent the closing year of the war. 2/

Much of this sort of imagery has a strong orientalist flavor, depicting lush jungles, primitive villages, and exotic women. The colonialist overtones are hard to ignore. 3/

Unsurprisingly, he devotes plenty of ink to griping about the drudgery of everyday living conditions. 4/

One can only imagine what sort of dental trauma inspired this one. 5/

Another major motif are Japanese raids on their various installations -- what appeared to be a regular occurrence. In the main, though, the collection downplays the battlefield aspects of war, focusing instead on the mundane. 6/

Remarkably, Douglas painted all of these with a child's watercolor set he brought with him.

You can find the whole collection at the Smithsonian Digital Archive here:

sova.si.edu/record/NMAH.AC…