Propaganda can be a powerful weapon, capable of arousing passions, unifying communities, stirring up fear, or changing minds in ways no bullet or bomb can do. During World War II, Allied and Axis forces used propaganda posters to spread their messages around the world.

Stacker searched Getty Archives to find 30 iconic posters from World War II that highlight their power and enduring style. They hail from the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Vichy France. Some of the posters fueled patriotism, faith in the nation, and a belief in the righteousness of the war effort to protect national values and virtues.

Many aimed to boost morale and deliver a message of shared sacrifice. Duty meant scraping together money to invest in a United States war bond or digging a victory garden to feed the family. Every citizen had a job to do.

War could be glorified, with posters showing might and muscle as well as confidence and courage. Soldiers were handsome and fearless, guns were sturdy, and legions of airplanes overhead were formidable. But many were dark reminders of battlefield losses, sinister images of a lurking enemy, or the perils of careless talk or a slit of light breaching a blackout. Some reached out to particular audiences such as women, encouraging them to step out and test out new roles. Those invitations to change would mark the dawn of modern feminism. More than a few had messages that are familiar and popular today, whether they are calls to conserve fuel, travel lightly, or grow food locally on rooftops and in empty lots.

Propaganda posters from all sides were an extraordinary art form that used basic colors and simple words to reach the broadest audience.

The icons survive. Uncle Sam and Rosie the Riveter are still employed today. The works remain stirring and powerful, even as we may hope the brutality and cruelty of such a war remain a thing of the past.

1 / 30

David Pollack/Corbis // Getty Images

‘Buy More War Bonds and Stamps’

In this poster, circa 1942, a powerful fist punches through the image of a swastika, urging Americans to “buy more war bonds and stamps.” The United States issued war bonds and stamps to help finance the war effort.

2 / 30

Hulton Archive // Getty Images

‘We’re Building Things Up!’

This 1932 election poster for Germany’s Nazi Party declares, “We’re building things up!” On it, a muscular man poses against a set of stone blocks etched with the words “work,” “freedom,” and “bread.” He looks down upon two older, weaker rivals offering unemployment, corruption, lies, and more.

3 / 30

Wikimedia Commons

‘I Want You’

One of the most lasting and iconic symbols of U.S. patriotism is Uncle Sam, clad in red, white, and blue with piercing eyes and a pointing finger in this recruitment poster. James Montgomery Flagg, a magazine illustrator, used himself as the model. First produced in World War I, the poster was adapted for use in World War II.

4 / 30

SSPL/National Archives // Getty Images

‘Keep Calm and Carry On’

The slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” was printed on posters by the British government to be distributed in the event of a German invasion. As that did not happen, the poster was never officially used in public, and following the war, copies were believed to have been destroyed in the National Salvage Campaign recycling effort. Decades later, a handful of the posters were found. Today, the saying is the basis of popular memes, from humorous to political.

5 / 30

Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images // Getty Images

‘Come into the Factories’

The “Come into the Factories” poster encouraged women in Britain to fill critical jobs such as manufacturing as the men went off to fight. Efforts to draw women into the war effort were often aimed at those who had never worked outside the home.

You may also like: US Army by the numbers

6 / 30

Galerie Bilderwelt //Getty Images

‘Adolf Hitler ist der Sieg!’

This German poster of the Nazi leader posed behind a chair declares, “Adolf Hitler is victory.” The portrait was created by German artist Rudolf Gerhard Zill.

7 / 30

DeAgostini // Getty Images

Japanese air force poster

Japanese war propaganda posters sought to glorify the nation’s military might. This poster of the Imperial Air Force shows countless airplanes flying over a globe decorated with Japan’s historic sun symbols.

Some like to think of the English language as an orderly sort of thing, a rock of stability in the chaos and uncertainty of life. Yet this is far from true: our language is a sloppy mess. Consider the apostrophe.

There has never been an innocent time in which we all agreed on what the apostrophe was supposed to do. Not only does such consensus not exist in the past, it doesn’t exist now: the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux.

The ‘s’ at the end of a word indicating possession (“The king’s fashion sense”) probably comes from the Old English custom of adding ‘-es’ to singular genitive masculine nouns (in modern English, “The kinges fashion sense”). In this theory, the apostrophe stands in for the missing ‘e’.

The mark we call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory, who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla. Before apostrophe referred to a squiggle on the page, it was a rhetorical term for an address to a usually absent person or a usually personified thing (the word comes from the Greek apostrophē, which literally means “the act of turning away”).

The first grammatical apostrophes addressed absence in a different way. It is widely accepted that the first apostrophes were marks of elision which indicated that something had been taken out of the word. Here’s where things begin to get confusing: the apostrophe would be stuck into a word to indicate the removal of a letter (usually a vowel) which was not pronounced, such as the e in “walk’d.” But sometimes people would simply stick an apostrophe in the middle of a word for no discernible reason, as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick did when he wrote “What fate decreed, time now ha’s made us see.”

To make things even more confusing, people refused to agree on exactly which letters should be replaced with an apostrophe; often it was unvoiced single vowels, but occasionally it was larger pieces of a word, such as the re and as of fo’c’sle.

Then people began using apostrophes to indicate the genitive (or possessive) role of a noun, confusing the public even further. The role of the apostrophe in a phrase like “the apostrophe’s role” was hotly debated for decades. Some people thought that the s at the end of a word indicating possession was simply a stand-in for “his,” and so “the king’s book” would be the shortened version of “the king his book.” This theory is no longer popular. Instead, it seems likely that the genitive apostrophe is an illustration of our language’s older, highly inflectional state.

It’s like this: in Old English it was common to add an –es to singular genitive masculine and neuter nouns. For instance, the genitive form of the word for king, cyning, would be cyninges. In Middle English, feminine nouns tended to be similarly inflected. So the apostrophe is still functioning, in a way, as a mark of elision, insofar as it is standing in for the missing e of a long-disused genitive case.

That’s all well and good, but why are things still in such a jumble? Why haven’t we managed to iron out all the kinks and finally figure out what we’re supposed to do with the apostrophe? The simple answer, once again, is that there has never been any widespread agreement in terms of how we should use the apostrophe. The Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that when Shakespeare’s First Folio was published, in 1623, a mere 4% of the words in it for which we would today use an apostrophe to indicate possession had such punctuation.

Shakespeare was hardly alone in using his apostrophes willy-nilly; in a single article from Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin both uses and omits the apostrophe for the genitive form of it:

If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.

And having calculated the Distance and allow’d Time for it’s Falling, finds that next Spring we shall have a fine April shower.

One does not have to look very hard to find examples of apostrophes being manhandled and put into places where we today would consider them inappropriate. This does not mean that the people who used them thusly were uneducated (see: Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson), but instead shows us that there wasn’t any widespread agreement on the matter.

Here are some now-discarded things that grammarians have said about how to use the apostrophe over the centuries:

The third person singular of certain Verbs, with the Nominative it set before it, is used Impersonally: as, It rain’s, it snow’s, it lighten’s, it thunder’s….
—Jeremiah Wharton, The English-Grammar, 1654

It shouldn’t be used as it’s for “it is” at all: It’s for it is is vulgar; ‘tis is used.
—James Buchanan, A Regular English Syntax, 1767

Today, most of us feel comfortable in the knowledge that we don’t use apostrophes for verbs, and few of us still say or write ’tis. Yet while these are extreme examples from long ago, there are numerous ways in which the apostrophe’s use has changed within the past few decades. A number of institutions, such as Harrods department store and Barclays bank, have decided that the apostrophes that long were part of their names are no longer necessary. And it was formerly more common to write 1930’s, rather than 1930s, but a look at each of these forms in several newspaper databases shows that this practice is changing.

During the 1930’s, the West nurtured a very strong interest in things Chinese, including art.
—David L. Shirley, The New York Times, 17 Apr., 1971

The works were reportedly confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s and ’40s….
—Adam W. Kepler, The New York Times, 3 Nov., 2013

For those who are wholly uninterested in the history of the apostrophe and simply want to know the difference between it’s and its, we have a video that should clear that up. And for those who fear that they will never wrap their heads around all the whys and wherefores (which a small minority has always insisted on writing as “why’s and wherefore’s) of the apostrophe, here’s a cheering thought: no matter how badly you misuse this punctuation, there is a good chance that some famous writer in the past has done the same thing. Furthermore, there is a sporting chance that any mistakes you make with it will one day come back into fashion.

Some like to think of the English language as an orderly sort of thing, a rock of stability in the chaos and uncertainty of life. Yet this is far from true: our language is a sloppy mess. Consider the apostrophe.

There has never been an innocent time in which we all agreed on what the apostrophe was supposed to do. Not only does such consensus not exist in the past, it doesn’t exist now: the role of this troubling little punctuation mark is still in flux.

The ‘s’ at the end of a word indicating possession (“The king’s fashion sense”) probably comes from the Old English custom of adding ‘-es’ to singular genitive masculine nouns (in modern English, “The kinges fashion sense”). In this theory, the apostrophe stands in for the missing ‘e’.

The mark we call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory, who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla. Before apostrophe referred to a squiggle on the page, it was a rhetorical term for an address to a usually absent person or a usually personified thing (the word comes from the Greek apostrophē, which literally means “the act of turning away”).

The first grammatical apostrophes addressed absence in a different way. It is widely accepted that the first apostrophes were marks of elision which indicated that something had been taken out of the word. Here’s where things begin to get confusing: the apostrophe would be stuck into a word to indicate the removal of a letter (usually a vowel) which was not pronounced, such as the e in “walk’d.” But sometimes people would simply stick an apostrophe in the middle of a word for no discernible reason, as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick did when he wrote “What fate decreed, time now ha’s made us see.”

To make things even more confusing, people refused to agree on exactly which letters should be replaced with an apostrophe; often it was unvoiced single vowels, but occasionally it was larger pieces of a word, such as the re and as of fo’c’sle.

Then people began using apostrophes to indicate the genitive (or possessive) role of a noun, confusing the public even further. The role of the apostrophe in a phrase like “the apostrophe’s role” was hotly debated for decades. Some people thought that the s at the end of a word indicating possession was simply a stand-in for “his,” and so “the king’s book” would be the shortened version of “the king his book.” This theory is no longer popular. Instead, it seems likely that the genitive apostrophe is an illustration of our language’s older, highly inflectional state.

It’s like this: in Old English it was common to add an –es to singular genitive masculine and neuter nouns. For instance, the genitive form of the word for king, cyning, would be cyninges. In Middle English, feminine nouns tended to be similarly inflected. So the apostrophe is still functioning, in a way, as a mark of elision, insofar as it is standing in for the missing e of a long-disused genitive case.

That’s all well and good, but why are things still in such a jumble? Why haven’t we managed to iron out all the kinks and finally figure out what we’re supposed to do with the apostrophe? The simple answer, once again, is that there has never been any widespread agreement in terms of how we should use the apostrophe. The Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that when Shakespeare’s First Folio was published, in 1623, a mere 4% of the words in it for which we would today use an apostrophe to indicate possession had such punctuation.

Shakespeare was hardly alone in using his apostrophes willy-nilly; in a single article from Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin both uses and omits the apostrophe for the genitive form of it:

If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.

And having calculated the Distance and allow’d Time for it’s Falling, finds that next Spring we shall have a fine April shower.

One does not have to look very hard to find examples of apostrophes being manhandled and put into places where we today would consider them inappropriate. This does not mean that the people who used them thusly were uneducated (see: Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson), but instead shows us that there wasn’t any widespread agreement on the matter.

Here are some now-discarded things that grammarians have said about how to use the apostrophe over the centuries:

The third person singular of certain Verbs, with the Nominative it set before it, is used Impersonally: as, It rain’s, it snow’s, it lighten’s, it thunder’s….
—Jeremiah Wharton, The English-Grammar, 1654

It shouldn’t be used as it’s for “it is” at all: It’s for it is is vulgar; ‘tis is used.
—James Buchanan, A Regular English Syntax, 1767

Today, most of us feel comfortable in the knowledge that we don’t use apostrophes for verbs, and few of us still say or write ’tis. Yet while these are extreme examples from long ago, there are numerous ways in which the apostrophe’s use has changed within the past few decades. A number of institutions, such as Harrods department store and Barclays bank, have decided that the apostrophes that long were part of their names are no longer necessary. And it was formerly more common to write 1930’s, rather than 1930s, but a look at each of these forms in several newspaper databases shows that this practice is changing.

During the 1930’s, the West nurtured a very strong interest in things Chinese, including art.
—David L. Shirley, The New York Times, 17 Apr., 1971

The works were reportedly confiscated by the Nazis during the 1930s and ’40s….
—Adam W. Kepler, The New York Times, 3 Nov., 2013

For those who are wholly uninterested in the history of the apostrophe and simply want to know the difference between it’s and its, we have a video that should clear that up. And for those who fear that they will never wrap their heads around all the whys and wherefores (which a small minority has always insisted on writing as “why’s and wherefore’s) of the apostrophe, here’s a cheering thought: no matter how badly you misuse this punctuation, there is a good chance that some famous writer in the past has done the same thing. Furthermore, there is a sporting chance that any mistakes you make with it will one day come back into fashion.

Oral History In Progress

The voices of our elders are our area’s true gems.

Filming Local History

No one else brings our local history to light like the Center for Cultural Preservation.

Telling Forgotten Stories That Matter

Many folks don’t realize that North Carolina was the first gold producing state in the United States. Between 1803 until 1838 it produced more gold than any other place in the country until 1849 when gold was discovered in California. Although most of this gold was found in the Piedmont, gold has been found throughout Western North Carolina.

Although there’s unlikely to be any great caches of gold in this region outside of the Biltmore Estates, perhaps the greatest gold mine in our community resides in the legacy of our region’s elders and the folkways that they left behind.  

One of the dreams I’ve had for years has been to make accessible the 500 or so oral histories I’ve collected not only in North Carolina, but throughout the South. Only a small fraction of these interviews ever make it to the final cut of my films, meaning that much of the treasures buried in the interviews with elders never see the light of day. What if ALL of these oral histories could be made available to the world? But it isn’t as simple as it sounds. To make such a treasure chest fully accessible to students, academics, history lovers and all of us, this interface would need to be searchable which requires some intense work by a web programmer, an IT expert and a team of transcribers in addition to editing each interview to be useable.

Fortunately, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History of the University of Kentucky has created a web-based system that allows interviews to be synchronized with transcripts to bring rich repositories like ours to life. This application is mostly used by large universities that have IT departments that can handle the sophisticated coding and transcription involved. But our little ole cultural nonprofit, the Center for Cultural Preservation, based in Hendersonville has chosen to create this landmark program here in WNC.

To understand how valuable this archive truly is, here’s a sampling of what you will soon have access to:

Larry Ball, 7th generation Dana elder was a collector of WNC’s history. He collected small memorabilia but also locally produced tractors, corn stalk cutters, corn shellers and horse-drawn items and he rebuilt three 19th century wooden cabins on his property that were about to be demolished. He gives a tour of his treasures including his rebuilt country store and post office.

Effie Mae Russell discusses canning over an open fire and plowing her farm with oxen with her sister.

Rev. Bobby Hill Dr. discusses the rich African American world in Hendersonville and the racial hatred that surrounded him.

Jerry Wolfe, “Beloved Man” of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, discusses the rich resilient world of the Cherokee Indians.

These interviews include African American, Native American, Scots-Irish, Jewish communities among many others. These oral histories tell the story of the lives of the people whose sweat and tears rests in the soil and whose resilience and craftsmanship is a testament to the powerful interconnected lives that people lived over the generations, connected to the land, to their faith and to each other. You can become a cultural savior by supporting the Center’s work by helping us raise the $40,000 we still need to complete this work and get at least half our archive online by this time next year while we continue our legacy by making additional films.

You can make your tax deductible donation online HERE and earn a host of premiums from DVDs, our long-awaited Appalachian Storytelling Jewels Vol II, a paddling trip and more or you can mail your check to the Center for Cultural Preservation at PO Box 1066, Flat Rock, NC 28731. Thank you in advance for your support!

DONATE HERE

SPOTLIGHT ON A CENTER SPONSOR

Adept Word Management has been transcribing many of our oral histories for nearly a decade. In addition to high quality transcribing of anything from medical records to family histories, they also have translation services and do video captioning.

The Center highly recommends them for all your transcription needs! You can reach them HERE.

FOLLOW US

Questions? Contact us today at SaveCulture.org