Veteran Keith Soward was there when history happened, and he
helped document it.
By PATRICIA JIAYI HO
Special to the Free Lance
Veteran Keith Soward was there when history happened, and he helped document it.
Soward was a combat artist during World War II. The 85-year-old Gilroy native, now retired in El Dorado Hills, served from 1942 to 1946. Upon graduation from the California College for Arts and Crafts, he enlisted in the army.
”I dropped everything,” he recalled upon returning for the Memorial Day celebration in Washington D.C. commemorating the new National WW II Memorial. ”Like everybody else, I wanted to get in there.”
His first stop after training was North Carolina. The army put his artistic talent to use and had him illustrate training manuals for troops. In 1944, he was shipped to the Pacific, where American forces under General Douglas MacArthur’s command took back the Philippines from the Japanese.
One of his duties was to sketch key figures in the military. Soward remembers when, at the Malacanang Palace in Manila, he was asked to draw Tomoyuki Yamashita, commanding general of the Japanese Army.
”They moved me into a little room and said, ‘Here he is. Do a portrait of him,’ ” Soward said, commenting on the unexpectedness of the request.
At the end of the war, Soward turned all his sketches in to the Army, and hasn’t seen them since.
Their whereabouts is a mystery. He was told they might be at the Smithsonian Institution, but when The Dispatch called the Institution’s National Museum of American History, records of Soward’s work were not found.
While he did not get to revisit his sketches, Soward was able to visit another documentation of World War II: the Memorial in Washington, D.C.
”It was a beautiful thing to see,” he said.
Initially, health concerns kept Soward grounded, but a fellow veteran who heard his story intervened. Soward, his wife Violet and family members were flown over via private jet, courtesy of Alex Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers.
“It was especially heart rendering, the number of people there,” said Violet Soward, herself a veteran.
She recalled how many asked to shake their hands. One man there explained that his World War II veteran father recently passed away, and asked for permission to embrace the Sowards.
“It made me want to cry,” she said. “Memorials do that to you.”
Keith Soward is glad that, as memories of the Second World War fade, the memorial has been built.
”I wondered if they were ever going to get around to it,” said Soward. ”We lost many troops in that war. Now there’s something to show for it.”
