By Popular Demand

Like many another collegian, Charles Ross Greening* had been diverted from his major study (art) at Washington State College to one of his minors (military science). He flew on the Tokyo raid with Doolittle, and was the man who invented the expendable 20-c- bombsight which Doolittle used instead of the secret (and invaluable) Norden. Afterwards, Greening flew 27 missions over Africa and Italy. After the 27th, in July 1943, he was shot down. He just missed parachuting into the crater of Vesuvius.

Instead, Greening landed in the Italian P.W. camp at Chieti, and there learned that art sometimes pays. For Greening it paid a pack of cigarets or a can of jam per portrait of his fellow prisoners. "On lean days," Greening remembers, "my roommates and I would eat jam until we were sick. Sometimes when the food ran out all over we'd give the jam back to the guys it came from." Greening also staged an art show in an unused latrine, which was held over "by popular demand."

Craft in a Cave. Shipped north, Greening bolted from the train during an air attack. Winter caught him on the Yugoslav border and he holed up in a cave with two New Zealanders. To pass the long days they whittled statuettes and model airplanes, invited kids from the nearby villages to come look. One night a German patrol looked in too and recaptured them.

When he found himself at Stalag Luff I in Germany, Greening was "sort of worn out from the going over the Gestapo gave me." There was nothing at all to do, and Greening discovered that "from inaction the guys were going around the bend. So after a while I tried to work up a craft committee, but still some of them stayed in their sacks all the time."

Crepe for Color. The Germans did not encourage art at Stalag Luff I. Greening had to be resourceful. "We used our own hair for paintbrushes," he recalls. "We baked twigs to make drawing charcoal. Coffee made dye. We boiled crepe paper and can labels to get color for paints."

One day a Y.M.C.A. package arrived, with watercolors and paper, and Greening really got down to business. By then the whole camp was interested. His idea was to illustrate the planes and air battles they all remembered. "We had some awful debates," Greening says, "about the exact positions of the wings and details like that." Greening put up a notice that $10 would eventually buy his War watercolors in reproduction, and 5,000 fellow prisoners lined up to hand him I.O.U.s.

When he got home (he is still in the A.A.F., stationed in Florida) he expected that the I.O.U.s might be quickly forgotten. They weren't: in a short time Greening had his money, and arranged with a printer to publish a book of his watercolors. By last week all 5,000 books had reached the subscribers, and there were already 1,000 requests for more. Colonel Greening's careful watercolors were not first-rate art, but for the graduating class of Stalag Luft I they made a historic yearbook. And to men who had survived air combat, his paintings rang true.

*Not to be confused with Alaska's Ernest Gruening (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.