The Congressional Gold Medal, authorized by President Biden in 2022 and presented in 2024, is Congress’s highest civilian honor. It has been awarded to military units before — the Nisei soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team received it, as did the Tuskegee Airmen — but each award reflects a specific judgment by Congress that the service being recognized was of exceptional national significance and remained insufficiently acknowledged by existing recognition.
For the 23rd, the gap between service and recognition was extreme even by the standard of delayed military honors. The men who carried rubber tanks across France and Belgium and Germany in 1944 and 1945 spent most of their lives unable to explain what they had done. The ceremony in 2024 was the official acknowledgment that what they had done deserved not just acknowledgment but honor.
## The Sketchbooks as Historical Document
The practice of sketching that characterized many of the 23rd’s soldiers produced something that had no precedent in American military history: a substantial body of observational visual art created during combat operations, now serving as a primary historical source for understanding what the soldiers experienced.
These were not official records. They were private documents, personal responses to the experience of being a soldier in wartime Europe. They show the faces of French civilians, the ruins of bombed towns, the interiors of barns and farmhouses where soldiers slept, the landscapes of roads and hills and rivers that the soldiers crossed. They show boredom and fatigue and the occasional moments of unexpected beauty that wartime produced alongside destruction.