## The Sketchbooks Come to Light
One of the most striking aspects of the Ghost Army’s rediscovery in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was the revelation that many of the artist-soldiers had produced detailed visual records of their service.
The men of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, trained as painters and designers, had filled sketchbooks and canvases with images from their time in Europe. These were not official records; they were personal documents, the visual diaries of artists who happened to be soldiers. They showed the towns and landscapes of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. They showed the camps where the unit lived, the vehicles and equipment, the faces of colleagues. They showed the work of the unit, though necessarily in ways that did not reveal classified operational details.
When these personal records became accessible — as veterans died and their families found the materials in attics and storage, or as veterans themselves decided to make them available — they provided a visual richness to the Ghost Army’s history that official documents could not match. The paintings and drawings of Ellsworth Kelly and his colleagues were works of art in their own right, independent of their historical significance as records of a secret wartime operation.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington mounted an exhibition of Ghost Army artwork that brought these visual records to a public that could now, for the first time, see what the men of the 23rd had seen during their twenty months in Europe. The exhibition drew significant attention and contributed to the broader process of public recognition that culminated in the 2024 Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.