World War I Cartoons and Pictures

IF ONE PICTURE can capture the nature of war, particularly the grinding, almost always fruitless trench warfare of 1914-1918, this is probably it.

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If you teach about World War I you might be able to use these cartoons and pictures. I’m retired and was playing around with my scanner. First up, a draft notice. I know my students never seemed to understand how the draft worked.

Last I checked, a plan to ask young women to register at 18 had been shelved.

You can usually get a good discussion going by asking students if they believe everyone would be better off if they did service in the military (or non-related government work, like hospitals, parks, age 18-20).

Draft notice.

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Distrust of German-Americans ran strong once the United States entered the war. (Above: caricatures of a German-American defiling the flag; a German-American plotting sabotage.) It was never as virulent as the sentiment against Japanese Americans in 1941; but it had its hard edge.

Anti-German propaganda helped fuel the desire to fight. Almost without exception, governments know it “helps” in war to be dehumanize the enemy. 

Unfortunately, the same process often leads to the commission of atrocities on the battlefields and even behind the lines.

In any case, not everyone was anxious to go off to war.

In these years, Congress passed laws to ease the path to deportation for foreign-born radicals, including labor union organizers, particularly members of the radical International Workers of the World (I.W.W. or “Wobblies”).

An I.W.W. song of that era discouraged young men from enlisting:

I love my flag, I do, I do,

Which floats upon the breeze,

 I also love my arms and legs,

And neck, and nose and knees.

One little shell might spoil them all

Or give them such a twist,

They would be of no use to me:

            I guess I won’t enlist.

I love my country, yes, I do

I hope her folks do well.

Without our arms, and legs and things,

I think we’d look like hell.

Young men with faces half shot off

Are unfit to be kissed,

I’ve read in books it spoils their looks,

            I guess I won’t enlist.

Many Americans, in 1914, hoped the U.S. would remain on the sidelines and let the Europeans fight it out.

As Americans rang in the New Year in 1915, they worried that there might be serious trouble ahead.

Three years after the sinking of the Titanic, with the loss of 1,503 lives, a German U-boat sank the passenger liner Lusitania, with the loss of 1,198 passengers and crew.

The German government cited warnings it had posted against sailing on vessels entering a war zone. Most Americans reacted  to the sinking with fury and disgust.

Students should know: propaganda is designed to stir an emotional response.

Later, an enlistment poster featured a drowning mother and child, evoking German atrocities at sea. 

Oddly topical in 2019: We don’t like it when hostile foreign powers try to shape American public opinion.

President Woodrow Wilson walked a fine line in 1916, alternately trying to pressure the Germans to refrain from attacks on the high seas and still remain neutral, without making the United States seem weak.

A British newspaper mocked Wilson for sending a series of protests to Germany, after the Lusitania was sunk.

A particularly evocative anti-Wilson cartoon from 1916.

While the European powers set about destroying each other, American industry boomed.

As as often been true (1800, 1824, 1876, 1960 and 2000, the election in 1916 was extremely close. For three days it was unclear whether Wilson would win reelection or be replaced by Charles Evans Hughes. 

Wilson won California by only 3,773 votes, and with victory there (13 electoral votes at the time), secured 277 electoral votes to 254 for Hughes.

A century ago, New York had 45 electoral vote, Pennsylvania 38, Illinois 29 and Ohio 24.

Texas had 20, Florida (in an era before air-conditioning, sun worship and bikinis), only 6. Even North and South Dakota had 5 electoral votes apiece. 

In 1916, Wilson campaigned for reelection partly on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” A few months later, that changed.

President Wilson’s attitudes, as well as the attitudes of many Americans gradually shifted, and by early 1917, the nation was preparing for war.

Draft registration notices in multiple languages; as always, many new Americans enlisted to serve their adopted country.

(I will allow you to draw your own conclusions here.)

Once war was declared, the United States geared up to fight. James Earl Flagg produced several famous recruitment posters (below).

Flagg also urged civilians to do their part, planting gardens and increasing the food supply, so that there would be more food for the troops and for export to our allies.

Uncle Sam looks with pleasure upon a good harvest in 1917.

As was true in World War II, in World War I, the U.S. built merchant vessels and warships faster than the enemy could build them.

(It’s interesting to me to think that most ship-building operations in the United States have in recent years been moved overseas.)

I always felt students were more interested when we could humanize the people we were studying. Above, American “doughboys” admire a pretty mademoiselle. I assume, the men of Caesar’s legions, German soldiers in 1917, and our men and women today could all relate in their own ways.

I do think students should focus on the tragic cost of any war, as show here as a mother sews stars on a pennant to represent her lost sons. (Perhaps your students are familiar with the movie, Saving Private Ryan, based on a true story—one line in a Steven Ambrose book.) I know my mother cried the day I left to join the Marines (12/28/1968). I was 19 and too dumb to even understand why.

I got lucky—despite volunteering twice to go to Vietnam—and remained safe and sound at Camp Pendleton, California. I was a supply clerk and used to tell my students I defended America with my staple gun.

American troops greeted as heroes in Paris.

One soldier who paid a fearsome price.

Sgt. Alvin York was the most decorated American soldier in the war. A pacifist, he was initially unwilling to fight; after a change of heart, he put his skills as a backwoods Tennessee hunter to good use. But after the war he never liked to talk about killing his fellow man.

America’s top ace, Eddie Rickenbacker (above), with 26 “kills.” The word “kills” has a much more powerful meaning than your students might think. 

Parachutes were not in use during World War I; and on one occasion a pilot who set fire to an enemy plane watched in horror as his foe jumped out hundreds of feet in the air, hoping to land in a lake. He missed.

The first “tanks” ever to appear in combat—they were primitive machines.

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President Wilson believed the United States was fighting for high ideals.

Uncle Sam takes on the true enemy. In those days, sadly, Americans knew all about lynching at home. (Leo Frank, a Jew accused of murdering a little girl was lynched in 1915.) African Americans were victimized again and again, including veterans who came home from the war, having fought for whatever high ideals it was we were fighting for. A number of particularly bad race riots also occurred in 1918 and 1919. 

World War II - A Few Basics and the Nature of Chance

This first little section is a set of ideas I tried to cover with my American history classes:

The 1930s are era of thug governments; totalitarian states; Mussolini and his Fascist followers believe the “state” has a right to use force to silence enemies. Individual rights are not as important as the nation.

Vocabulary and other details to know:

Arsenal

Dictator

Fascism

Gestapo

Isolationist

Nazi

Neutral

Pacifist

Pact of Paris (1927) said countries would not ____ to win their goals. [resort to force]

Japan is the size of ____ [Montana]

Identify the three main Axis Powers [Germany, Japan, Italy]

Identify the five main Allies [USSR or Russia, United States, China, France, Great Britain]

Mussolini—who does he attack? [Ethiopia in 1935] 

Hitler’s promise at Munich [he will have no additional territorial demands]; and what is the “Lesson of Munich?” [never back down from a bully; LBJ later compares it to letting a bully insult you in your yard; next he’ll be up on your front porch; this lesson leads us into the Vietnam War] 

Attacks start war 9-1-39; what does USSR get? [half of Polish territory]

By the time I retired from teaching in 2008,
I was running into students who did not recognize this man.

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“Neanderthals in airplanes.” 

William Shirer wrote that the Nazis had left “an ugly scar on civilization that will surely last as long as man on earth.” 

Someone once described the Nazis as, “Neanderthals in airplanes.” The Nazi Party had about 8,000,000 members. 

Adolf Hitler says:  “As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership it is acting legally.” 

“I shall shrink from nothing and shall annihilate anyone who is opposed to me,” he also warns.

Hitler used his position of absolute power to exempt himself from taxes; he received a royalty for the use of his picture on stamps and ate with gold eating utensils. He could be quite boring, often keeping aides up to late hours, talking about himself. 

The Nazi government controlled schools, movies, radio, and newspapers. In 1939, in an operation nicknamed “Canned Goods,” the Germans used Polish prisoners dressed as Germans to stage an attack. 

The U.S. was not really neutral after 1940; Cash and Carry; gave 50 old destroyers in trade for bases; Lend-Lease (3/41) U.S. began lending or leasing weapons/equipment to nations that needed them – to be paid for later; FDR calls U-boats “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic;” froze trade with Japan (7/41), cutting off 80% of her oil; also cut scrap iron, cotton; we took over Greenland, Iceland, organized protection for convoys of supply ships; we became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” 

One opponent of FDR said all this help meant plowing under one American boy in four. 

First peacetime draft: October 1940. 

Dwight D. Eisenhower finished 61^st in his West Point class, out of 164; 95^th in discipline. “What am I doing here,” he once wondered. As a boy, he wanted to be a train engineer or a major league shortstop. 

Hitler might have knocked Britain out of the war if he had pushed his attacks; but 360,000 Allied troops were saved at Dunkirk. He was ready to invade England but was unable to gain control of sky. As Churchill said of the Royal Air Force, which fought off Germany’s Blitz: “Never before was so much owed by so many to so few.” At one point Goering focused on bombing air bases, then quit, maybe a week or ten days before the Brits were going to lose. 

Factual matters: Hiroshima, 78,000 killed; Nagasaki, 74,000 killed; the two atomic bombs had an explosive power equal to 20,000 tons of dynamite. Today, there are nuclear weapons with the power of 100,000,000 tons! 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: It worked in my classes to ask students: What would one ton of dynamite do? [You could level most of a school building.]

 

American forces had met fanatical resistance at Saipan, and on Okinawa, and estimates of losses invading Japan ran to four million. 

The U.S. did warn the Japanese, that if they failed to surrender they would face “prompt and utter destruction.” 

Are there limits in war? 

Can you argue that it is “better for a few thousand Japs to die than one of our boys?” Of course, it matters a great deal if it’s your boy.

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“I don’t think God has anything to do with this war.”

This section is about the random nature of chance in combat. All examples come from Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on the U.S. Army in World War II. I highly recommend them three volumes to history teachers or readers, generally. 

I neglected to write down page numbers or books, An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light: 

A night mission, involving 2300 paratroopers from the 504^th Parachute Infantry, who were expected to reinforce the First Division inland, as Allied forces attacked Sicily, went horribly wrong. American antiaircraft guns and everything the invasion fleet had opened up on the 144 C-47s in the dark. Twenty-three went down in smoke and flames or were blown to bits in midair. Another thirty-seven were badly damaged. 

A conservative estimate put losses at 410 killed or wounded, “the worst friendly fire episode in modern warfare.” 

Soldiers often die for no good reason. Slapton Sands, on the southern coast of England, was meant to be a dress rehearsal for D-Day, involving 30,000 American troops. With General Dwight D. Eisenhower watching, German subs happened upon the exercise and sank landing craft at will, with 749 Americans losing their lives. 

They died for nothing.

Going in on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Gordon Gaskill, a reporter, walks along Omaha Beach after fighting has shifted inland; in 400 paces he counts 221 American dead. Corporal William Preston later remembered, “I shall never forget that beach.” One dead G.I. caught his attention. “I wonder about him,” he wrote his loved ones back home. “What were his plans never to be fulfilled, what fate brought him to that spot at that moment? Who was waiting for him at home?” 

A soldier hesitates to cross an open pasture in France, “I lie in the grass pondering whether to take a chance. Yes – no – yes – no.” 

Ernie Pyle, the veteran war reporter, was wearing out, feeling like someone using up “your own small quota of chances for survival.” 

A V-2 rocket strikes a theater in Antwerp where twelve hundreds G.I.s and Dutch civilians are enjoying a matinee performance of The Plainsman, a 1936 movie starring Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok. 

At 3:20 on December 15, 1944, the V-2 makes a direct hit; 567 are killed, another 200 injured. 

“We gamble life and death,” another American wrote home to his family. “Daddy, you will understand this. Just like in cards you may win night after night but you can’t be lucky always … I am always scared to death.” 

Atkinson tells a story about Hitler’s early days: He was invited, out of the blue, to attend a Nazi meeting. Hitler recalled later passing out 80 slips to friends, inviting them to meetings. No one showed. “An hour late, the ‘chairman’ finally had to open the ‘meeting.’ We were again seven men, the old seven,” the future Nazi dictator remembered. 

One wonders: What if Hitler had become discouraged, and given up his political dreams. 

“I don’t think God has anything to do with this war,” remarked one G.I. after his friend was killed. 

The FX-1400 or Fritz-X was an early form of guided bomb, with four stubby wings, a delayed fuse, a 600-pound warhead, and a radio transmitter which allowed a German bomber pilot to steer it with a joystick. Two hit the Italian battleship Roma on September 9, 1943, as the warship sortied to join the British at Malta in the wake of Italy’s surrender from the war. 

Thirteen hundred members of the crew – on their way to safety – were lost. 

A British soldier remarked, “We had learned our first lesson, mainly that fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy. With the same callousness as Army orders, without fairness or judgement, ‘You and you - dead. The rest of you, on the truck.’” 

An American battalion commander was crushed to death in his foxhole by the falling engine of a German fighter plane blown up in the air. 

Captain Helmut Meitzel, 23, had been wounded five times – the last so severely he had to be evacuated on one of the last planes to leave Stalingrad. 

Compared to General Robert T. Frederick, Meitzel lead a charmed life. Of Frederick, a junior officer once said, “His casual indifference to enemy fire was hard to explain.” It might have had something to do with the fact he earned eight Purple Hearts during the war and a reputation as “the most-shot-at-and-hit general” in U.S. history. 

Audie Murphy was knocked unconscious by an exploding enemy shell, the man right next to him killed. 

Two Ranger battalions, 767 strong, advanced in the night, suffered heavy casualties, including 250-300 killed, with most of the rest captured in a total debacle. Only eight escaped unharmed and returned to American lines. The regimental commander would never forget driving to the bivouac area where the men had formed up. There he saw “hundreds of bedrolls and barracks bags … piled on canvas ground clothes, neatly stenciled with the names and serial numbers of men who would never return to collect them.” 

One G.I. wrote: “There is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God.” 

A German bomber, chased by a Spitfire over Anzio, jettisoned its bombs, which fell on a U.S. Army hospital, killing 28, including three nurses and two doctors. 

The infantry made up 14% of the U.S. Army forces and piled up 70% of the casualties. A study done by men far less likely to be hit than the men being studied, found that a typical infantryman soon began to wonder.  It wasn’t a question, any longer, of “whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.” 

Lt. Colonel Jack Toffey was killed in June 1944. “Perhaps he was kept overseas a little longer than his odds allowed,” said one comrade.

Loveland Middle School students with WWII veteran Bill Mansfield.

Year 1940

BUGS BUNNY made his official debut in a cartoon called “A Wild Hare.” For an example of Bugs’ hare-raising escapes, see “Dynamite Dance.” 

Elmer Fudd is foiled again.

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Lawrence Brooks is drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. Brooks, an African American will end up the oldest living veteran of World War II, dying in 2021, at age 112. Like most members of his race, Brooks did service work in the military, taking care of the needs of three white officers, as an enlisted man in the 91^st Engineer General Service Regiment. His unit mostly built bridges, roads and airstrips in Australia during the war. 

Brooks admitted later that he was not sorry to avoid combat, explaining, “I got lucky. I was saying to myself, ‘If I’m going to be shooting at somebody, somebody’s going to be shooting at me, and he might get lucky and hit.’” 

Asked about his experiences in 2014, Brooks remembered that he was treated better in Australia than back home in Louisiana. He told an interviewer it made him angry to think about all the Jim Crow laws, so he tried not to.

 

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February 29: Hattie McDaniel shows up at the Coconut Grove Restaurant in Los Angeles, to accept her academy award, for best supporting actress, in the movie Gone with the Wind. She is shunted off to a side table for two, at the far back wall. The restaurant has a strict “no blacks allowed” policy, but she and her escort are served, as a favor to the movie industry – and her white agent does sit with them. 

In the movie, McDaniel plays a stereotypical role, as "Mammy" to Scarlett O'Hara.

Louella Parsons, a gossip columnist wrote about the moment McDaniel rose from her seat receive her award:

 

Hattie McDaniel earned that gold Oscar by her fine performance of 'Mammy' in Gone with the Wind. If you had seen her face when she walked up to the platform and took the gold trophy, you would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had when Hattie, hair trimmed with gardenias, face alight, and dress up to the queen's taste, accepted the honor in one of the finest speeches ever given on the Academy floor.

 

McDaniel herself called it “one of the happiest moments of my life” and thanked the Academy. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race,” she added, “and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you.” 

That line – that McDaniel would have to prove a “credit” to her race, somehow prove that African Americans had worth, says more about the barriers people of color faced than Parsons, or perhaps even McDaniel understood that night. No white actor had to prove anything about his or her race. 

If they had talent, that was enough. 

Rita Dove, an African American poet, later penned a poem about that night: 

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her smile chastened, purse giddy
with stars and rhinestones clipped to her brilliantined hair,
on her free arm that fine Negro,
Mr. Wonderful Smith.

It’s the day that isn’t, February 29th,
at the end of the shortest month of the year—
and the shittiest, too, everywhere
except Hollywood, California,
where the maid can wear mink and still be a maid,
bobbing her bandaged head and cursing
the white folks under her breath as she smiles
and shoos their silly daughters
in from the night dew … what can she be
thinking of, striding into the ballroom
where no black face has ever showed itself
except above a serving tray?

Hi-Hat Hattie, Mama Mac, Her Haughtiness,
the “little lady” from Showboat whose name
Bing forgot, Beulah & Bertha & Malena
& Carrie & Violet & Cynthia & Fidelia,
one half of the Dark Barrymores—
dear Mammy we can’t help but hug you crawl into
your generous lap tease you
with arch innuendo so we can feel that
much more wicked and youthful
and sleek but oh what

we forgot: the four husbands, the phantom
pregnancy, your famous parties, your celebrated
ice box cake. Your giggle above the red petticoat’s rustle,
black girl and white girl walking hand in hand
down the railroad tracks
in Kansas City, six years old.
The man who advised you, now
that you were famous, to “begin eliminating”
your more “common” acquaintances
and your reply (catching him square
in the eye): “That’s a good idea.
I’ll start right now by eliminating you.”

Is she or isn’t she? Three million dishes,
a truckload of aprons and headrags later, and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, no corset wide enough
to hold you in, your huge face a dark moon split
by that spontaneous smile—your trademark,
your curse. No matter, Hattie: It’s a long, beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing ovation,
so go on
and make them wait.

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In France, Josephine Baker, the famous American dancer, turns to work with the French underground, after Nazi forces overrun France. She has already developed a bitter hatred for Hitler and fascists, in general. As The New York Times notes,

 

On tour in Austria in the early 1930s, churches rang their bells to drown out her performances, and once France was occupied in 1940, she was banned from the stage there, along with all Black and Jewish performers. Undaunted, she joined the French Resistance and collected intelligence while performing in North Africa, smuggling back information written in invisible ink on her score sheets.

 

(In 1961, the French government would award Baker the Croix de Guerre in honor of her bravery. Two years later, she would return to the United States and speak at the March on Washington, organized by civil rights leaders, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)