by Deirdre Bair
The rainy season started in August, but the heat continued. His commanding officer gave him permission to make drawings for any New York publication that wanted them, but between the heat and the lack of letters from Hedda, who did not write every day as he did (sometimes several times), he was despondent. His main concern was that he had nothing suitable for the magazine that meant the most to him, The New Yorker, because he refused to submit anything but his very best to its editors. He had to be in “a special mood” to draw for them, and inspiration was sorely lacking in his little village, permeated as it was by the stench of human waste, with which the peasants fertilized every inch of cultivated soil. He thought there was nothing he could draw in such a place, where “the atmosphere is quite different from anything sophisticated or anyway respectable the way The New Yorker is.”
In actuality, his impressions of daily GI life in China turned out to be the first of a series of highly successful drawing-essays he sent to the magazine from his various postings, which totaled sixty-nine drawings filling twenty pages throughout 1944 and 1945. Many were originally drawn as illustrations for naval information and propaganda pamphlets, and all of them were so successful that both his supervising officers and the censors agreed they could do the second and equally important job of lifting the morale of the folks back home by showing their GIs’ daily life. Not only did they help boost the magazine’s sales, they also helped to solidify Steinberg’s reputation.
Steinberg’s work in China, like everything else about his military service, was far from ordinary or routine. Despite Wild Bill Donovan’s insistence that he was needed by the OSS, the navy assigned him to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, affectionately dubbed by those who served in it as “the Rice Paddy Navy.” Intelligence-gathering had not yet coalesced into the unified entity it became under the CIA, and each of the services had its own official spying apparatus. The Chief of Naval Operations recognized the need for such a group in China shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and ordered the formation of the top-secret Naval Group China. Its mission was to gather intelligence about the weather and transmit it to air bases and ships patrolling the coastal waters, to infiltrate behind Japanese lines and monitor all activity on shore and at sea, and to prepare information that would be useful for an Allied invasion. Within SACO, Steinberg was attached to a sabotage training center where his official title was “psychological warfare artist,” and his work was deliberately described vaguely: “to prepare background for future PW [psychological warfare] operations in China.”
The officer in charge was Commander (later Rear Admiral) Milton E. Miles, an old China hand (as officers who had served in the Far East before the war were called). Miles was a graduate of the Naval Academy, where his fellow midshipmen gave him the affectionate nickname Mary after the movie star Mary Miles, and it stuck. He ran his command at Happy Valley on an informal first-name basis, which was awkward for the somewhat puzzled Saul, who stuttered at calling him Mary and whose only prior knowledge of anything military was the pomp and circumstance of his grandfather’s uniform shop in Buzău. Mary Miles ran a military camp that operated on very unmilitary principles: there were no ceremonial flag raisings or bugles playing reveille or taps, the men did not salute, and the uniforms were whatever the men found handy. Surprisingly, it worked.
At the inception of his China command, Mary Miles was the official coordinator of the OSS in the Far East as well as the founder of SACO. His counterpart was the shadowy General Tai Li, “one of China’s most mysterious, most respected and most dreaded men.” Tai Li commanded the Chinese version of the OSS in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, and he and Miles forged such a deep personal friendship that they sometimes merged their soldiers and sailors for the infiltration and sabotage of enemy encampments. Miles was a fervent supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and an adversary of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the commander of the China-Burma-India theater (CBI), who was not. Eventually, long after Steinberg had been transferred to other duty stations, Miles was effectively marginalized by Donovan, Stilwell, and others in various commands as they enfolded some of SACO’s operations into their own intelligence groups and shut down the rest entirely.
However, during the brief time Steinberg served under Miles’s command, one of his major tasks was to assess whatever information the front-line spies gave him and, along with the rest of his psychological warfare cohorts, to prepare everything from leaflets that were dropped behind enemy lines to brochures that instructed both American and Chinese soldiers in how to engage with the maximum respect for each other’s culture. He also drew derogatory cartoons of Japanese leaders that were dropped from planes or that showed up mysteriously in cities and towns deep in enemy-held territory. One of his most important assignments was to analyze data gathered by agents and draw precise maps of the South China coast that would guide downed airmen to safe passage outside Japanese-held territories. His work required precision and discipline and was often top secret, but there was another part that was strictly fun.
A group such as SACO needed something visual to tie its disparate divisions and individual members together, and as Miles rejected Tai Li’s offer to bring in “politically checked [that is, disease-free] women,” insignias, pennants, flags, and emblems had to suffice. Steinberg contributed one of the best known and loved when he drew a poster that also became a sleeve patch. It showed one of his long-nosed cartoon characters, a flat-footed, heavyset man wearing a pith helmet and Lone Ranger mask, outfitted in a coolie uniform, carrying every weapon from a hatchet to a handgun and about to insert chopsticks into his open mouth. He is surrounded by a tent made of mosquito netting with anchors extending out on either side and a rakish American eagle, also wearing a Lone Ranger mask and a pith helmet, upon which two tiny birds perch. Two banners stream down from the eagle, one saying “What the hell” and the other “E pluribus per diem.” A third banner at the bottom of the drawing completes it, this one saying “Confidential.”
Miles considered Steinberg a valued member of his team and wanted to keep him in China, but the OSS still wanted him and finally succeeded in having him transferred in December 1943. His official orders detailed a journey that would eventually deposit him in Algiers, Algeria, on “temporary duty.” It would start as soon as he reported to the area’s chief army OSS officer in China, who would issue orders instructing him to return to Calcutta. The orders were confusing, not only because they were issued by the army rather than the navy, but also because once the temporary duty in Algeria ended, he was to receive a new set that would send him back to his official posting with SACO in Happy Valley.
On December 8 he told Hedda that the “news” he had hinted about in previous letters was finally happening, for, apropos of nothing definite, he had convinced himself that Algiers was only a way station and his eventual destination would be Rome. The night before he was to leave Happy Valley, he was deeply touched by the farewell party his fellow officers gave him, especially when one of them opened a bottle of scotch he had been saving for six months. He was sorry to leave his friends but eager to start for where he hoped to end up—Europe—and he chafed at one delay after another as he experienced firsthand the military complaint “Hurry up and wait.” There was no transportation available until December 19, and he had nothing to do until then.
THIS TIME THE FLIGHT OVER THE Hump encountered “some excitement with [Japanese] Zeros” before the plane landed safely in Chabua, Assam. Steinberg left for Agra on December 23 en route to Karachi, where he stayed until December 26. On Christmas day he was in a navy liaison house, “very chic and formal” and a bewildering contrast to Happy Valley’s informality. Unused to the spit and polish of dress uniforms and silver flatware at table, he drank so much of the local Manhattan cocktail that he was sick for two days. On the twenty-seventh he boarded another plane, which made several stops in India and Africa before dropping him at Khartoum, Sudan, where he stayed until the twenty-ninth. He was in Cairo on New
Year’s Day 1944, still in transit and miserable at having to sleep in a barracks with fifty other men. He tried to see the places Hedda had seen on a trip with her mother and brother before the war, but Egypt filled him with a curiously different sensation, and he described himself as akin to a horse that senses his stable is near and wants to get there. The smells reminded him of Romania and the Levant but mostly reminded him of Italy, the place he still thought of as his real home, and of how close he was to it, and yet so far away.
HE ARRIVED AT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to be his final destination, Algiers, on January 2, but for the next four days he had to fly from one unnamed place to another, which he described with deliberate vagueness as “somewhere in West North Africa.” He was assigned to a “curious outfit” that left him feeling “kind of lost and sad,” and in each place the local Morale Operations unit put him to work setting up printing presses and doing other mechanical work for which he had no prior experience and no aptitude. There was so little work that he feared he would be sent back to China. Also, he was the only naval officer in an army unit, which was strange in itself and made even stranger because, after the informality of Happy Valley, he had “to be now all the time well dressed, regulation uniform and so on.” His army colleagues remembered him fifty years later because he was the only naval officer among them, but they also remembered how private he was, and how “taciturn.” He was even more noticeable because all his luggage was lost somewhere in China and he had to wear his only uniform every day, which made keeping it clean and pressed difficult. His erratic wanderings never took him to a naval base where he could buy new uniforms, and because it was cold, he had to borrow a non-regulation army overcoat. He grew tired of having to explain to superior officers why he was out of uniform.
At work, he had problems with a number of high-ranking officers who had no understanding of the local culture. The OSS often sent out officers who were native-born Americans from the business world and who spoke only English, so these men handled agents as if they were managing a sales force. Most of the agents were like Steinberg, transplanted Europeans who were fluent in several languages and cultures, so they simply ignored their bosses and did what they thought needed doing. Steinberg, for example, was enlisted to make cartoons that were “dropped in millions of copies over the occupied territories.”
But he still had too much time to pass, so he drew a letter in the form of a newspaper for Hedda, listing himself as “publisher, editor, and lover of Hedda.” Once again her letters had not caught up with him, so he filled the paper with his news: his uncle Harry Steinberg had received a letter from Saul’s sister, Lica, via the Red Cross, and she was now married and living on a street he did not remember; the barber had shaved off his mustache and he was lost without it; he was smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day; most of all, he wanted to go home and get married. Preparing this newsletter was such a happy diversion that he planned another one to be illustrated by “the famous Ensign,” which was to be “The Anniversary Issue!” because it would soon be the first Sunday in February 1944, one year to the day since he had met Hedda. He ended by begging her to marry him: “Heddina, a no from you will kill me. Please say yes and be my wife. I need you and it’ll be good for you. Send me a telegram with a yes, a kiss for you, I love you a lot.” Several days later, he was “happy happy happy” because she sent a telegram in which she did say yes. “God bless you for that,” he replied, adding several gushing paragraphs to tell her again and again just how happy she made him.
HEDDA’S ACCEPTANCE OF HIS PROPOSAL WAS the only settled thing in his life. The good cheer he had worked hard to convey in every letter to her dissipated in an explosion of negativity on January 24. He was “sick of being attached to the Army,” tired of flying all over Northwest Africa and having little to do, of the navy sending him to temporary duty with the army and the army sending him right back to the navy. By Valentine’s Day, he concluded that “this war is a war of pants sometimes, pants destroyed by sitting down on hard chairs and waiting.”
Finally, on February 23, 1944, the orders he had been hoping for arrived from the Allied Force Headquarters. Stamped MOST SECRET, they ordered him to proceed “on or about February 24 from this station to Naples, in order to carry out an assigned mission and upon completion of temporary duty return to proper station.” He hoped that “proper station” meant Washington, because all military personnel were entitled to home leave after eighteen months of service, and his temporary duty in Naples might last long enough for him to reach the magic number. There was the fear, however, that he would be in Naples such a short time that he would be sent back to China without reconnecting with any of his Italian friends.
On February 24, after a rough flight in heavy rain, fog, and wind, he reached the southern Italian province of Calabria. “I was really scared,” he admitted to Hedda. He was on special detachment to the Fifth Army Headquarters of the OSS-AAI (Allied Armies in Italy), but he was not allowed to tell her his exact location or what work he was doing. Most likely he was in Bari or Caserta, where the 2677th Regiment, to which his MO unit was attached, made its headquarters at various times before moving on to Rome. All he could say was “I’m finally here and I’m very much confused. Things have so much changed … poverty, confusion, I’m upset by things I’ve seen.”
For the next month he was moving constantly from place to place and finally seeing “some of the real war.” He wanted to find enough time to draw what he had seen, “the convoys, trucks, guns, tanks, rolling in a long snake line up in the mountains, all mixed with refugee vehicles and bicycles and just people in a wonderful place, towns and hills with every top of hill covered right on top by a village of small houses and in the center a baroque church with tower.” But then he thought perhaps he should not draw it, because (as he tried to explain in his still imperfect English) “this sort of scenery, which is beautiful in reality but which usually turned out to be corny in a drawing, too much like cheap style, imagination.”
Being in Italy was frustrating in so many ways, starting with the impossibility of communicating with any of his friends in Milan. The 2677th MO was charged with installing printing presses in Naples to create and distribute propaganda throughout as much of the country as the Allies had penetrated, but the commanding officer instituted a logistical nightmare when he stubbornly insisted that the staff had to be billeted in Caserta, headquarters of the Allied Command in Europe and more than an hour’s ride from Naples if the trains were running, even longer if the men had to cadge rides on roads clogged with military traffic. Steinberg and his army counterparts never knew when or where they would work from one day to the next, and the constant moving around induced another sad and unsettling experience: “In Italy, I used to be just one of them and feel at home but now because of the uniform I’m for them just another sucker, another tourist easy to fool and belonging to a strange superior class.” His feelings of displacement were heightened when he listened to Radio Bucharest and felt “silly and sad. I never been in years so near to that place.” Hearing his native language raised another bittersweet emotion: he was so close to his family, so eager to have news of them and even to see them, yet he was reluctant to do anything that might make his superiors think about sending him to Bucharest, even if only for temporary duty.
By mid-April 1944 he was more or less in a routine as he went back and forth between Naples, Caserta, and several other southern Italian towns. He had now been overseas for a year, and he thought it was time to take an inventory of how much he had changed. First he listed his one bad habit: he thought he smoked far too much, at least three packs a day. Then he listed what had happened to him: he had finally finished the required inoculations, which made him sick in bed for a week, and he was fascinated when he read Italian magazines to see how those he had worked for had changed or evolved in the three years since he left. He was happy to see that he still had “a few imitators” who were imitating his style of drawing from three to five years before.
He sent these observations to Hedda, accompanied by some drawings made by his imitators, including one of a tiny man on a huge rearing horse.
TIME STILL HUNG HEAVY OVER HIS DAYS, and mail delays so he did not receive Hedda’s letters made them heavier. He was sure the slowness of the mail was all due to “coming attractions” (that is, the D-Day invasion), so he spent most of his time shopping for things for his and Hedda’s future home. He loved to shop and told Hedda proudly that he had collected a lot of “junck [sic], and you know how I like junck.” He played tourist by visiting local southern Italian ruins, but the incompetent guide and the ignorant tourists depressed him. He preferred to go off by himself to buy postcards to add to the collection he was amassing. It was lonely and frustrating to be stationed in a backwater where nothing ever happened, especially after he was put in charge: “I’m the commanding officer of this place because I’m the only officer and the only sort of fun is to play cards with the sergeants.” By May 10 there had been so many last-minute changes to his orders that he “almost cried for days.”