Credit: Dangerous Minds / Library of Congress

Victor Alfred Lundy was just another architecture student in New York City when the world went mad.

The outbreak of World War II, even for a country like the United States that stayed neutral for a number of years of it, felt very different to the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Within years, the world conclusively proved that ‘The War to End All Wars’ had been little more than a prequel to the real madness to follow. To be fair to the USA, there were several people urging their country to fight against the threat of the Reich long before their hand was forced, but still, it was forced.

The attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 awoke the sleeping giant that was the United States, which joined the war on the side of the Allies shortly afterwards. The following year, hundreds of thousands of American men signed up to fight in the war, and one of them was Lundy, who enlisted in the Army Specialised Training Program in 1942.

He was deployed in September 1944, spending time in Normandy before being finally moved to the Western Front in November 1944.

As a former architecture student who had a talent for art, Lundy had long since been in the habit of journalling his thoughts not with words, but his prodigious sketching ability.

Every moment of his time in the army, from training to deployment to active service to getting wounded yet remaining on active service until October 1945, he turned into these evocative, incredible works of art. The kind that he probably didn’t think twice about at the time, but are invaluable now.

After all, it’s vanishingly rare that we see war depicted authentically from the perspective of an average squaddie. Everything we know about war is filtered through a rigorous propaganda machine first.

So the eight sketchbooks that Lundy filled, with pages small enough to fit in his breast pocket, are a vital document of not only Lundy’s own personal experience, but that of an average soldier seeing the horrors of war first-hand.

While Lundy was wounded on duty, he made it home safe and sound before continuing his education at Harvard and becoming one of the most acclaimed architects of his era. The Warm Mineral Springs Motel, the United States Tax Court Building, the Austin Centre and the One Eleven Congress are all projects that he oversaw, and that would be a legacy for anyone to be proud of. Yet arguably, those sketchbooks are his real legacy.

Few things bring the experience of an average soldier in World War II to life in quite such a manner. They will live forever as well, with those 149 original sketches in eight sketchbooks being donated to the Library of Congress in 2009. What’s more, the man was able to see the direct results of his legacy, living to the grand age of 101 and passing away peacefully on November 4th, 2024.