The wartime drawings and memoir of T/Sgt. Burton “Pat” Christenson, Easy Company’s only combat artist, and the second man out the door behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump.
“I wanted my best, most dependable man right behind me, the number two man, and that was Pat again.” Major Dick Winters · Commander, Easy Company, 506th P.I.R.
The letter Winters wrote the Christenson family, the day after Pat died in 1999, is the first thing you read when you open the book.
Twelve days after D-Day, Pat wrote home from France. His family knew the invasion had happened. They did not know whether their son had survived it.
Every V-mail passed through a censor before it left the theatre. He could not tell them where he was, what he had done, or who was gone.
I wrote mother yesterday but I’m still able to write, so I’ll try again. I’m in FRANCE now, you probably know that by now… I’m fine, but I’m living in the wrong country; France is more primitive than England and that’s considering war conditions. England to us would be paradise now. Perhaps when we return I’ll be able to tell you a little about this nite mare, but until then information is taboo. Pat Christenson, 18 June 1944
What he could not put in a letter, he put on paper later. It took him forty years.
Burton “Pat” Christenson was born in Oakland on 23 July 1922 and enlisted on 21 August 1942, five days after the 101st Airborne was activated. He did not wait to be drafted.
He was an original Toccoa man. He carried the light machine gun through training and finished with the highest physical fitness score in the company, four points off the best in the entire regiment. Dick Winters chose him to carry the company guidon.
They flew out late on 5 June 1944 and jumped shortly after midnight, into the early hours of 6 June. Winters went out the door first. My father went out immediately behind him, carrying a machine gun. Normandy, Holland, seventy-two days on the Island, Bastogne until trench foot put him in hospital, then Germany, one of the Kaufering camps, and Berchtesgaden at the end.
“Some things you don’t need to talk about.” Pat, when his son asked why he never drew the camp at Kaufering
In the years after the war, working from memory, he finished 46 drawings of what he had seen and left a seven-volume typed memoir. Stephen Ambrose drew on Pat’s account when he wrote Band of Brothers, and called the drawings “almost priceless.”
Pat’s homecoming with his mother and father in Oakland, California, 1945.
Two photographs, same tree, same fence, minutes apart. His father stands beside him with his arms at his sides, a man from a generation that did not show what it felt, just standing there proud of his boy. His mother has both hands on his arm. She had spent three years not knowing whether he was coming back, and she was not going to let go of him again.
Almost no soldier-made visual record survives from inside a rifle company in the European theatre. Censorship prevented it being made at the time. In December 1943 Pat wrote home that he could not even draw them a picture, and would explain in his next letter.
So he did it afterward, at a drawing board with his journals and reference books spread around him. Where a date or a road did not reconcile, he wrote to the men who were there and corrected himself in the margins.
Releasing my suspension lines I quickly came out of my slip… A moment of terror seized me. 70 feet below and 20 feet to my left, a German multi mounted 20mm antiaircraft gun, that moment, opened up, firing at the C47’s above. Their direction of fire put their backs to me as I came swiftly into the orchard, and crashed into what I thought later to be an apple tree… My camouflaged parachute covered the top of the tree, cocking me in deep shadow. The Germans never saw me. Pat Christenson, on the Normandy jump
Easy Company’s headquarters plane, Stick 66, was piloted by Lieutenant Harold A. Capelluto. Aboard were the company commander, 1st Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, First Sergeant William Evans, and the rest of the headquarters section, the command element of the entire company. The plane was loaded with Bangalore torpedoes and other high explosives.
Ernie Turner, a fellow pilot flying Stick 74, watched Capelluto’s plane take anti-aircraft fire and saw that he was in real trouble. Another pilot, H. Warren King in Stick 76, saw it more clearly: tracers were pouring into the aircraft, bullets going through the fuselage and out the top, throwing sparks. The plane flew steady for a moment, then did a slow wingover to the left. Its lights came on, it seemed like they might make it, and then the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded.
Everyone aboard was killed. In a single explosion, Easy Company lost its commanding officer and its top enlisted man before a single paratrooper from the company set foot on French soil. Command fell to Dick Winters, who was jumping from a different plane. The plane my father was in, right behind him.
The dog tags of 1st Sergeant Evans were found in a Norman field forty-four years later.
From A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words
Three of the forty-six. Forty-five were exhibited at the Band of Brothers premiere in 2001, and all forty-six are in the book.
The eagles swooped down into withering fire, their quest to best the enemy was their only desire. They trained for this mission for two solid years. Trained to a knife’s edge to better their peers. Though eagles were sacrificed on that moonlit night, for many of them died during that God-awful fight, but for every one in tan that lay on the ground, there were ten in Wehrmacht green that made not a sound. The eagles were victorious, that volatile night and their devastating ferocious determination proved they could fight. T/Sgt. Pat Christenson
Original graphite on paper, drawn from memory · The Christenson Family Collection
“Superb sketches and drawings by a member of the company are obviously almost priceless.”
Named Lipton, Gordon, Rader and Christenson as the four men who worked hardest on Ambrose’s book. Pat corrected all thirteen draft chapters.
Winters had copies of the drawings sent to the production company as reference for the writers of the HBO series.
Forty-five of Pat’s drawings were exhibited at the Band of Brothers premiere.
One of his drawings is etched into the memorial there.
The signed hardcover, and a signed, numbered 16 × 20 print of my father’s D-Day drawing, the one that ran in Band of Brothers, with a numbered certificate of authenticity.
The 25th Anniversary Edition is limited to 500. I set it at 200 to begin with, and the response since has been far beyond anything I expected, so I have opened it to 500 and closed it there. Each one is signed and numbered by hand, shipping now, well before the book reaches stores on September 8.
“Guard those paintings. Their true value will be realized by collectors of war memorabilia all over the world.” Major Dick Winters
Dad spent decades trying to bring his words and his artwork together into one permanent record of what he and the men of Easy Company had been through. He died in December 1999 before he could do it.
I inherited his letters, his writings, his research and his drawings, and the responsibility that came with them. I spent eight months, seven days a week, building this book plate by plate so his war would be told the way he told it.
To millions of people he became one of the men of Band of Brothers. To me he was just Dad.
The full-size edition, printed case laminate, with the hero drawings on full facing spreads. Signed and shipped direct.
Order signed copy →The complete book, drawings and memoir together, in a softcover edition. Signed and shipped direct.
Order signed copy →A fixed-layout digital edition that keeps every drawing exactly as laid out on the page.
Pre-order on Amazon →Order a signed copy today. The book reaches Amazon and bookstores on September 8.
Seven volumes, forty-six drawings and hundreds of photographs. We are still working through it. Leave an address and we will send you the next one.