WWII Cartoon Sketchbook & Postwar Career - Master Sergeant Ralph Duzan Pollard (1911–1992)

Artwork Details
When I first opened this scrapbook, it looked like a curiosity: 93 pencil cartoons by an Army Master Sergeant, lampooning stew, mud, and military life. But page by page, it revealed much more. Pollard wasn’t just a soldier with a sense of humor. He was a trained artist, educated in applied arts, who later became an art director at Procter & Gamble and President of the Cincinnati Art Directors Club.

In the mud of Europe, his sophistication went unrecognized — so he turned it into satire. His cartoons exaggerate himself as a pipe-smoking, stew-obsessed, overfed sergeant, yet behind the buffoonery lies quiet protest: the indifference of a cultivated man whose refinement was going to waste. The themes repeat with deliberate rhythm: Food & Drink as obsession and survival. Authority & Bureaucracy made absurd. Music & Performance turned into parody. Enemy mockery deflating Nazi pomp. Gambling as vice and identity.

Some pages strike at grand moments — victory parades, V-Day speeches, heaven inspections — only to deflate them with irony. Others, unusually, reference his civilian world: the University Club, even Procter & Gamble by name. That makes the scrapbook not only wartime satire but also a bridge to his postwar advertising career.

The Stew Campaign:
Pollard’s most persistent gag is stew — the meal every soldier hated, yet could never escape. Instead of one joke, he builds an ongoing “campaign” that mimics an advertising roll-out: stew sold as dependable, ever-present, even a badge of identity. Each sketch reframes it — mess-line staple, culinary punishment, soldier’s ritual — echoing the methods of marketing repetition. In hindsight, these pages anticipate Pollard’s later work at Procter & Gamble: the parody ad man at war.

Historical Significance:
Seen in hindsight, Pollard’s figure anticipates later comic archetypes like Beetle Bailey’s Sarge Snorkel. What Mauldin was to the infantryman, Pollard was to the NCO — but with the polish of a commercial artist and the wit of a man who would shape mid-century American visual culture. Today, this scrapbook stands as one of the few complete, attributed sets of WWII soldier-cartoon art. It is at once personal coping mechanism, cultural critique, and professional seedbed. To hold it is to hear a voice bridging foxholes and boardrooms — a GI’s laughter carrying forward into postwar America.

Media Type: Pen and Ink
Art Type: Sketchbook
Status: Unpublished Art
Artist: Ralph D. Pollard, Penciller