WHO WERE THE FIRST GREAT COMBAT artists of WW II? They were the advertising illustrators who worked every week from late 1941 to 1945 to capture the drama, urgency and energy of the war in the air. They painted air conflicts as fast as the facts came in from Allied fronts as a way to sell the War and the war-machine makers to a public eager for news. And where can we see their work? Look for it in the popular magazines of the day: Life, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Time, Newsweek, The American Weekly and many others.

Examples include Republic P-47 Thunderbolts diving in formation in a full-color ad by Pontiac, which made the assault rockets. The ad copy states: "The flier in the rocket plane bores in on the Japanese carrier through a screaming sheet of Hell from every gun that can be turned against him. He presses a button. Without recoil, with only a swooshing whistle, a salvo of high velocity, assault rockets lance off toward the target. They strike with the pulverizing punch of five-inch shells, setting up purple mushrooms of smoke, flame and debris. The Navy can send its guns aloft today!"

"GI's by proxy" says the headline of a photo of a Bell Airacobra being repaired in the Russian winter. The explanation: Bell sent technical advisers to wherever the Airacobra flew, from the Russian front to the Iranian desert. An ad for Oldsmobile shows the colorful Walt Disney Studios' insignia of the carrier-based Sea Wolf Squadrons of Curtiss Helldivers. The ad is one of more than a dozen produced by Oldsmobile, each featuring a different combat group's insignia.

The ads appeared in a variety of magazines, and they are a striking collection of war art that was produced while combat was going on. Hundreds of ads were sponsored by the manufacturers of everything from planes to cannon to landing gear and self-locking nuts. Combat scenes were even featured in ads for safes and cigarettes; safes were shown protecting blueprints from spies, and pilots were shown smoking cigarettes while waiting for their next flight assignments.

Every week, magazine advertisements showed Americans how the U.S. industrial might was winning the War. The ads were sponsored not only by Boeing, North American, Lockheed, Martin, Bell and Chance Vought, but also by automobile manufacturers that had converted production lines to war materiel almost before the smoke had dissipated at Pearl Harbor. The ads told Americans what wonderful things Chrysler Corp., General Motors, Packard, Nash and Hudson were making for the War effort. The more powerful those wartime ads, the more memorable the company name would be.

Artists such as Ben Stahl, Dean Cornwell, Elmo Anderson, Frederick Teilander, Gordon Charles Ross, clayton Knight, Jon Vickery, Walter Richards (and many others who did not sign their illustrations) illuminated the technology of American industry by showing the drama of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. Most of these artists are long gone and forgotten, but their art continues to fascinate ad collectors.

Today's combat artists do not work under the censorship of the War Department when it comes to what they can and cannot show in detail. Today, every rivet, aileron and canopy is carefully rendered, but in WW II wartime illustrations, details were purposely left out to avoid giving information to the enemy.

About 60 percent of the ads used illustrations rather than photography because illustrations allowed far more drama through close-ups and the use of unusual angles. Situations that would have been impossible to stage for a camera were brought to life by the brushes and brains of commercial illustrators. Photographs were heavily retouched to avoid revealing classified information.

The original ad art is 99 percent lost, primarily because commercial art was the property of the ad agency or sponsor, and it was usually tossed out after it had been converted into a printing plate. Nobody needed last month's art when this month's was being prepared. And the materials (paper, board-even the paint) were not made to last longer than it took to finish the assignment. So these printed pages are the only available record of these images.

Ads were typically two sizes: about 8½ inches (Time and Newsweek) and about 10x14 inches (Life, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, etc.). For those who are., interested in collecting the ads, Internet auction sites such as eBay offer them at reasonable starting bids. A series of CD-ROMs produced by The Archives of Advertising preserves these old ads (www.archivesofadvertising.com).

The combat art produced today is not without distinction. But it's fun to see the roots of combat art-ads that were created while the smoke was still in the air and the battle had not yet been won.