Sarkis Bartigian

Before the war, Sarkis Bartigian was a professional. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he earned his living painting murals for restaurants and movie theaters. He was a commercial artist with real training and a real career. He was also thirty-six years old when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, far older than the teenagers and twenty-somethings who filled the barracks around him.

The Army sent Bartigian to the Pacific, to the 43rd Bomb Group's 64th Bomb Squadron. The Fifth Air Force operated in New Guinea and the Philippines, in conditions that made the European Theater look civilized. Tropical heat, jungle mud, malaria, and Japanese fighters that were frequently more maneuverable than the American aircraft they attacked.

On the fuselage of B-24J number 44-40973, Bartigian applied everything he had learned at RISD and in the commercial art world. He painted a dragon clutching a nude woman, rendered in full color, spanning the entire length of both sides of the Liberator's fuselage from the nose turret to the tail turret. It was the largest known nose art in World War II, and it was painted by the only formally trained professional muralist known to have served as an enlisted nose art painter.

He also painted "Mabel's Labels," a portrait of his wife Mabel on another B-24. The personal and the professional merged on aluminum.

After the war, Bartigian returned home to Mabel. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1955. He was forty-nine years old.

The Dragon and His Tail, his masterpiece, had been scrapped at Kingman, Arizona, years earlier. The workers at the scrapyard had tried to save it, setting it aside while they processed the other bombers, hoping someone would pay the two thousand dollars to buy the aircraft. Nobody came. The finest piece of nose art in the Pacific Theater was melted down with the rest.