Bad Medicine For Big Bombers: An Illustration For Westinghouse Electric

     It's easy to gravitate to Walter DuBois Richards's World War II illustrations.  While his career spanned nearly seven decades, there is a certain excitement and awe connected to this four year period that draws in my attention.




     This action filled illustration by WDR gives us a good idea of just how intense a naval battle could get.   The above scene seems to depict the British Navy's QF 2 Pounder naval gun, also known as the 'pom pom.'   


     The Westinghouse Electric elevator company division was given the responsibility of producing gun mounts that controlled the aiming of anti-aircraft artillery guns or batteries found on many US Navy warships.  
    This illustration advertisement appeared in Collier's on May 2, 1942.  Like most American corporations during WWII like GE and GM, Westinghouse Electric devoted most of it's resources to giving the allies an edge over it's enemies, and wanted the home front to know it.    

"Tin Fish... from the sky!" A 1943 Illustration for Pontiac.

     One way I've discovered previously unknown illustrations my Grandfather produced has been by looking over scanned pages of Life Magazine on Google Docs.  It is quite impressive; Google has uploaded virtually every page of every Life Magazine, published by-weekly, since at least the late-1930s (where I started looking).  
     It's a tedious process, requiring a careful examination of each page with an illustration, and by the 1940s, at least half of all advertisements were still drawn (not photographed).   
     This was the first illustration I found by Walter DuBois Richards.  It appeared May 3, 1943 on page 78.  At the time, Wally was an illustrator at the Charles E. Cooper Studio in New York City.

     What a thrill, I had no idea he made such exciting war-time illustrations.  


     At first glance, the focus here seems to be the United States Navy's Torpedo Bomber, the Grumman TBF-1 Avenger, attacking what appears to be a Japanese Aircraft Carrier in the South Pacific.  The carrier looks similar to the Akagi, but in it's pre-WWII deck configuration. By 1939, Akagi had one long deck that extended from the bow to the stern.  
     In fact, this illustration is a short action piece illustrating the torpedo specifically.  According to this write-up, they were mass produced by Pontiac, a division of General Motors, throughout World War II.

     The aerial weapon illustrated here was probably a Bliss - Leavitt Mark 13 torpedo, the torpedo of choice for the Navy Avenger.     

Click to see larger version.

  

Hopefully, if I've designed this blog correctly, you should be able to click on any of the images in this blog to view them in a larger size on Flickr.  I've included the dialog from the illustration here so that you can click on it and read a larger, clearer version of it.  If I become more ambitious, I'll add the dialog from the illustration to the blog itself, since it is an entertaining mini-action story of the illustration Wally made.