(1917-2016) 2012 Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame Inductee
Ben Steele was born in Roundup, Montana in 1917. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 and was stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines in late 1941. The soldiers there were ordered to the front lines of battle against the Japanese at Bataan, where food and medicine were in short supply. After three months, Bataan was surrendered to the Japanese. Malnourished and in poor physical shape, the over 70,000 American and Philippine POWs were forced to march over sixty miles to prison. This “death march” proved too much for many who were already weak from exhaustion and lack of food, and they died from starvation, disease, heat, and Japanese brutality. Estimates of the death toll are as high as 11,000 from the march alone, while another 2,000 American prisoners died after only six weeks at the prison.
Ben spent three years at the prison where he witnessed the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers and the humiliation of fellow prisoners, some forced to dig their own graves. With his natural artistic talent and a need to escape the daily horrors surrounding him, Ben began drawing pictures on whatever scraps of paper he could find that depicted his Montana heritage-cowboys, horses, farm life. He soon felt a responsibility to record for posterity the injustices that were taking place around him. His drawings depicted the degradation and cruelty that the prisoners suffered. He risked a great deal, as the consequences of being caught could have resulted in his death, but he felt a need to continue to record this important part of history as a tribute to those who did not survive.
His drawings themselves did not survive the war. They were lost at sea. Upon his return home, partly as a means of rehabilitation and partly to keep the story from being forgotten, Ben began to sketch from memory his renditions of the death march and life in the prison camp. During his career, Ben’s work – pen and ink drawing, watercolors, oils, and lithographs – have appeared in one-man and group shows in galleries and museums across the country.
Ben’s pen and ink drawings of prisoner of war life illustrate the New York Times best seller, Tears in the Darkness, by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman. Published in 2009, it documents the Bataan Death March and the POW experience.
The Ben Steele World War II POW Collection is now part of the permanent collection of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture at the University of Montana, Missoula. With his wife Shirley, he received the Montana Governor’s Award for Art in 1992. He was awarded the Humanities Montana Heroes Award in 2012.