Just another nerd.
A series of propaganda posters produced from 1942 to 1945. The “Down Winslow Says” one is especially interesting. Don Winslow of the Navy was an American comic strip that ran from 1934 to 1955. There was Universal serials based on the comic strip released starting in October 1941.
The U.S. Office of Facts and Figures created these posters in 1942. They were apparently designed to help soldiers heading abroad to be more familiar with the uniforms of Allied troops.
This World War II propaganda poster encouraged Americans to buy war savings stamps. These were issued in small denominations that could be collected and exchanged for war bonds. War savings stamps were issued during World War I and World War II. According to Wikipedia,
The war savings stamps introduced during World War II were released in five different denominations – 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents, one dollar, and five dollars, all featuring a Minuteman statue. These stamps were purchased at face value and earned no interest. Individuals accumulated their war savings stamps in various collection booklets provided with the purchase of a stamp. Filled collection booklets could later be used to purchase Series E war bonds. For example, a full 25-cent booklet contained 75 stamps and was worth $18.75, which was the initial price of a $25 war bond. Thus, a full 25-cent booklet would be exchanged for a $25 war bond with a time to maturity of ten years.
This “How To Spot A Jap” comic was included in the U.S. Army’s 1942 “Pocket Guide to China,” which it distributed to soldiers who were being sent to fight in China. Milton Caniff, creator of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, did the illustrations.
Instructing people on how to distinguish Chinese from Japanese people was apparently a common theme of World War II-era propaganda. For example, the December 22, 1941 edition of Life magazine ran a feature titled How To Tell Japs from the Chinese.
The D-Day Daily Telegraph crossword security alarm refers to an incident in 1944 where D-Day codewords ended up being solutions in several Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles. According to Wikipedia, these included,
- 2 May 1944: ‘Utah’ (17 across, clued as “One of the U.S.”): code name for the D-Day beach assigned to the US 4th Infantry Division (Utah Beach). This would have been treated as another coincidence.
- 22 May 1944: ‘Omaha’ (3 down, clued as “Red Indian on the Missouri”): code name for the D-Day beach to be taken by the US 1st Infantry Division (Omaha Beach).
- 27 May 1944: ‘Overlord’ (11 across, clued as “[common]… but some bigwig like this has stolen some of it at times.”, code name for the whole D-Day operation: Operation Overlord)
- 30 May 1944: ‘Mulberry’ (11 across, clued as “This bush is a centre of nursery revolutions.”, Mulberry harbour)
- 1 June 1944: ‘Neptune’ (15 down, clued as “Britannia and he hold to the same thing.”, codeword for the naval phase: Operation Neptune).
It turned out that Leonard Dawe, who created the crosswords for The Daily Telegraph, was headmaster at a school near a camp filled with US and Canadian troops preparing for D-Day.
There was much contact between the schoolboys and soldiers, and soldiers’ talk, including D-Day codewords, which were thus heard and learnt by many of the schoolboys.
. . .
Dawe had developed a habit of saving his crossword-compiling work time by calling boys into his study to fill crossword blanks with words; afterwards Dawe would provide clues for those words. As a result, war-related words including those codenames got into the crosswords; Dawe said later that at the time he did not know that these words were military codewords.
Nice World War II photo.
