Faces of war: Who are the men in soldier’s WWII sketches?
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Before the Army’s 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.
Now, Ira Dube is on a mission to identify the men in his late father’s 75-year-old artwork. So far he has definitively identified two of the soldiers, both New Yorkers who served in the 27th Division’s 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.
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’s not known whether any of the men depicted in the artwork are still alive.
“These people need to be remembered,” said Ira Dube, 61, a retired Navy veteran living in Woodland Park, Colorado. “I look at these sketches and I see a hero.”