A soldier’s WWII scrapbook
New photos show war-torn Europe through young doctor’s eyes
By Richard Salit
Journal Staff Writer
The negatives stayed in the cigar box long after Capt. Michael Di Maio returned from World War II, stored his Army uniform and put away his $5 camera.
His medical practice kept him busy, and it wasn’t until his retirement nearly 50 years later that he again turned his attention to the cigar box and the photos he never printed.
What emerged from the darkroom he built in his Providence home were hundreds of pictures taken by a physician with an artist’s eye, images that sent Di Maio reeling back through the years and captured the pain and passions and pranks of young soldiers at war.
Seen today, they depict the beginning of the end of the war — from the invasion of Normandy to the liberation of Paris to the defeat of the Nazis. But rather than chronicling the battles along the way, the snapshots are more of a scrapbook, evoking a soldier’s journey with his wartime buddies through inspiring humanity and unimaginable inhumanity.
The photos even capture world-famous figures of the era since Di Maio had the good fortune to be around for wartime visits Europe by Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton Jr. and movie star Ingrid Bergman.
The collection is so touching and artistic that more than 40 of Di Maio’s photographs are now on display at Salve Regina University, in an exhibit titled “Through the Eyes of a Soldier.” At the show’s crowded opening several days before Veterans Day, Di Maio, now 93, downplayed the worthiness of his photographs.
“These photos were never intended to be exhibited. They’re not that good. They were snapshots for my family,” said the diminutive, white-haired veteran. “I didn’t know anything about photography. That’s why I bought a cheap camera.”
But those who helped coordinate the exhibit disagreed, including Gerry Perrino, a professor in the art department who is associated with the university gallery. He and gallery director Craig Coonrod were asked about displaying the photographs by Di Maio’s son, Michael Di Maio Jr., a philosophy professor at Salve.
“We thought this was going to be a charity thing for an old guy. But it’s turned out to be one of the most successful shows in the seven years I’ve been here,” Perrino said. “He has a great eye. There is a lot of artistic merit.”
BORN AND RAISED in Providence, Di Maio had an interest in art and considered going to the Rhode Island School of Design. Instead, he chose medicine and went to Johns Hopkins University Medical School, graduating in 1939. Two years later, while he was an intern at Rhode Island Hospital, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on his birthday, Dec. 7, and the war began.
Di Maio volunteered for the Army Air Forces in 1942, qualifying as a flight surgeon, and was assigned to the 380th Fighter Squadron, 363rd Fighter Group of the 9th Air Force. The 31-year-old physician left behind his fiance, Livia, when his squadron of P-51 fighter planes was deployed to Europe in 1943.
His fiance and family mailed him “127″ film from the United States, the type required for the Falcon camera he bought for $5 from a nurse and was not available in Europe. But while there, he had the opportunity only to develop the film, never to make prints.
Di Maio figured he would do that back in the States. But after his return in 1946, he undertook a postgraduate medical fellowship at Brown University, started a medical practice in Providence, got married and had children. And the negatives went into the cigar box.
“I didn’t print any. My medical practice took precedence,” he said.
He retired in 1983 and a couple of years later began pondering what to do with his newfound time. His thoughts returned to the negatives in the cigar box. With some 4,000 shots in the collection, he decided to invest in a darkroom, developing equipment and books to teach himself about photography.
“He didn’t come out of there for three years, except for meals,” his wife joked.
Di Maio said that the experience sent him traveling back in time, refreshing his memories of his days in war-torn Europe.
“It was quite exciting to relive the events of the war,” he said.
Judith Di Maio said her father has never really talked about the war. It wasn’t until the family attended a ceremony at the World War II monument in Washington that she saw him shed a tear. When she asked him why, he said he hoped none of the children at the ceremony would ever have to witness the horrors he did.
NONE OF the photographs selected for the exhibit show any of the bloodshed the young doctor saw. Although he took such photographs, Di Maio has no interest in exhibiting them. Instead, he selected portraits of destroyed cultural icons, of people whose lives have been shattered by war, and of soldiers in moments of meditation and relaxation. Some of the pictures are moving, some droll. Di Maio not only matted and framed each picture, but he also wrote captions for them.
One depicts a wall adorned with Di Maio’s pinup girls, which he described as an art form that was “an important feature of the American scene during the war.” Another, taken during one of Di Maio’s seminars on sexually transmitted diseases, shows a wise-acre soldier wearing a rubber apron, gloves and boots. “Total body condom,”Di Maio notes in his caption. Then there’s the one of a bare-bottomed soldier after skinny-dipping at Utah Beach and another of a soldier standing beside a fence, answering a call of nature.
The black-and-white pictures capture plenty of somber scenes, too, such as two French children begging for food, “an old Frenchman mourning loss of family, friends and property,” bombed-out churches and chateaus, refugees in wagons, rubble in the streets, a temporary German burial site and the stark and abandoned concentration camp at Dachau. The first shot he took on French soil was the bodiless head from a statue of Apollo that had been blown apart.
Several of the pictures capture a young soldier’s eye for romance, such as two “friendly French mademoiselles” walking down the street with long legs exposed, “young German frauleins” strolling along the Rhine River and an utterly gorgeous and completely nude woman on the beach.
“I don’t know the story behind her,” joked Livia Di Maio.
“I’ve never told,” said her husband.
rsalit@projo.com / (401)277-7467
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