Remembering a Veteran: Captain John W. Thomason, 5th Marines—Warrior, Author, and Artist

A New Marine Lieutenant

By Keith Muchowski

I was checking out the stalls of an indoor bazaar (some time ago), when I saw something that instantly seemed familiar. It was a drawing by John W. Thomason, Jr. The name may not be familiar, but Colonel Thomason was one of the great sketch artists of the early 20th century. He also authored what many consider to be the authoritative account of American involvement in the First World War. That was why the image looked so familiar, because I had seen his work decades ago when I first read Fix Bayonets! Naturally I bought the small, framed image. It now hangs in my office.

John Thomason in France

The drawing, which is displayed below, shows a young French woman walking past a trio of weary Marines. The wear and tear on her shabby clothes are testimony to how desperate things had become in Europe by 1918. The duck is something of a Thomason trademark. He included them frequently in his work. Growing up in Texas, he was quite the hunter and outdoorsman. Thomason was born in Huntsville in 1893.

John W. Thomason attended the Art Students League in 1914 and was a struggling artist for a few years. He found his calling as a Marine/artist when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. He began as a lieutenant in the 5th Marine Regiment, 2nd Division, AEF, and fought at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and Blanc Mont Ridge.

Thomason stayed in uniform after the Armistice and was active in both military and artistic circles for decades. His drawings and stories were increasingly in demand in the Saturday Evening Post and other literary periodicals of the day. Charles Scribner's Sons published Fix Bayonets! in 1926. That same year the firm released Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway admired Thomason greatly and considered him an outstanding military officer. The two men eventually collaborated on a massive anthology called Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. This 1,000-page collection, published in autumn 1942 as American troops were about to land in North Africa, explored the meaning and ordeal of combat from antiquity to the present.

Thomason did not live to see the end of the Second World War. Years of hard living, including struggles with alcohol, eventually caught up with him. John W. Thomason Jr. died in 1944. He was 51.