Peter Darman - Posters of World War II

D uring World War II, all the warring nations produced thousands of posters to mobilize their respective population for the war effort. world War II was a total war, and thus required the total effort of not only members of the armed forces but also civilians on the home front. The poster was a simple yet powerful psychological aid to mobilizing the nation. Cheap, accessible, and ever-present, the poster was an excellent method of reaching every citizen. Whatever message a poster was conveyingpatriotism, the need for greater security, increased productionit was directed at every citizen, in or out of uniform. As a member of the American Office of War Information (OWI) stated during the war: We want to see posters on fences, on the walls of buildings, on village greens, on boards in front of the City Hall and the Post Office, in hotel lobbies, in the windows of vacant storesnot limited to the present neat conventional frames which make them look like advertising, but shouting at people from unexpected places with all the urgency which this war demands.

To be effective a poster needed to carry a simple yet powerful message, one that was easy to understand by everyone. Subtlety and sophistication were the enemies of an effective poster campaign. Adolf Hitler, head of the German Nazi Party and from 1933 leader of Germany, was under no illusion with regard to the intelligence of the masses: But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.

This reasoning was duplicated in another totalitarian regime: the Soviet Union. Posters played a crucial part in the development of the Soviet regime, first by helping the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War, and then helping them to mobilize millions of people to fulfill agricultural and industrial schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. The poster campaigns were relentless and blunt, and in case anyone failed to get the message there was a vast internal security organizationthe NKVD (Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs)to deter any dissenters or slackers. Those who fell foul of the regime were sent to the Gulag, the vast network of labor camps that existed in the hinterland of the USSR. Once there, inmates carried on working to produce the goods the regime needed.

Once the war broke out in June 1941, the Soviets kept on mass-producing posters, but their message changed. The immediate aim was to defeat the fascist invader, though as German armies crashed into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and neared the gates of Moscow, mobilizing the population to save the state itself became of crucial importance.

In the liberal democracies of Western EuropeBritain, France, and the Low Countriesposter designs were usually more restrained than those of the the totalitarian regimes, and indeed those produced during World War I. There were two reasons for this. First, there was the general postwar disillusionment after 1918, particularly after the exposure of fraudulent atrocity propaganda produced by both sides in the Great War. Thus propaganda was most effective when it was least propagandistic. Second, radio, film, and newspapers combined to reduce the overall importance of the poster. But the poster was still important for conveying simple, powerful messages.

Despite their different political ideologies, the Axis states, the Soviet Union, and the Western Allies all produced posters that had broadly similar themes. First was the appeal to patriotism. If World War II was a total war, then it was axiomatic that each participant had to convince the mass of its population to be loyal to the state. Patriotism was a prerequisite for the creation of vast conscript armies and mass mobilization of those who werent in uniform. Group loyalty was particularly important in the Western liberal democracies, as their governments were making wartime demands on the population that would not be tolerated in peacetime.

Patriotic posters made use of emotive symbols and emblems, such as the swastika in Nazi Germany and the Stars and Stripes in the United States. Many patriotic posters were merely recruitment aids for the armed forces, with state and party insignia repeated on the uniforms worn by the men and women featured in the posters. U.S. posters often added another dimension to the patriotic theme: freedom. This was a peculiar American trait and was lacking in posters produced by other Allied nations, and obviously did not figure in the posters of the totalitarian powers, where individual freedom was sacrificed for the good of the state. For the United States, which even in the dark days in late 1941 and early 1942 was never going to face the prospect of enemy forces fighting on home soil or its cities being bombed by fleets of enemy aircraft, patriotism alone was not enough to mobilize the masses. Freedom, especially freedom from tyranny, is a sentiment that runs deep in the American soul. The promise of bringing freedom and liberating oppressed people overseas was an ideology that many Americans embraced, and helped to convince the American public that the millions of servicemen being sent to Europe and the Pacific were fighting a worthy cause.