Anyone Subscribed to The Chronicle of Higher Education?

[livius drusus]

If so, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their Blood, Sweat and Ink (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i17/17b01901.htm) article about WWI and II war posters.

/me loves her some war posters. :wriggle:

[The Lone Ranger]

I don't subscribe, but I often glance through it in the library. Is the link to the entire article, or is there more in the print edition? I'd like to see some direct comparisons between WWI-era and WWII-era posters, for instance.


That having been said, I think the article makes a good point in that posters had to serve different purposes in the two wars. It's worth keeping in mind that warfare was still seen as a "glorious" thing in the opening days of the first World War, and governments doubtless had to work hard to keep the true horrors of war from the public. There was all kinds of talk about the "Knights of the Air" and the "Noble Men on the Battlefield," and so forth. People spoke of how boys marched off to war to become men and all that.

The reality, of course, was that the men in the trenches suffered horribly (disease killed many more than did enemy bullets or artillery), were cold and hungry, and were slaughtered en masse for no good reason. The carnage was almost impossible to imagine. Britain, France and Germany lost almost an entire generation of young men. I remember reading the travel notes of an American tourist in England in the 1960s who remarked with some puzzlement over the huge numbers of women in their 60s and 70s who had never married -- until he realized that they'd never had the chance to get married, because so many of the men their age had been killed in the first World War.


Naturally, after the soldiers came back from the war and told their tales of horror, the public wasn't going to be inclined to believe all the propaganda about the "nobility" of war, so it's understandable that World War II-era posters generally abandoned the attempt to glorify war and instead pictured the Second World War as a struggle for survival itself. For Britain, in particular, that wasn't such a stretch for the public to accept, since it wasn't exactly a secret that Germany was intent on conquering and subjugating the British Isles.

Cheers,

Michael

[livius drusus]

I don't subscribe, but I often glance through it in the library. Is the link to the entire article, or is there more in the print edition? I'd like to see some direct comparisons between WWI-era and WWII-era posters, for instance.


I'm afraid all I can see is the first paragraph of the online article. I have no idea if the print version provides more detail or even what level of detail the link provides in the first place.

That having been said, I think the article makes a good point in that posters had to serve different purposes in the two wars.

Ah, see, this is what I'm unable to access. Could you expand on what the article suggests were the different purposes? Anything besides the glory of war vs. struggle for survival?

[The Lone Ranger]

I apparently have access to the full article. I don't know about copyright issues, but I could copy it if that'd be helpful -- it's pretty short.

The basic gist of the article in terms of the messages the posters were trying to convey is that World War I-era and World War II-era posters served very different purposes. In WWI, posters were about the "glory of war" and all that, whereas Allied WWII-era posters were more along the lines of "we must stop the Axis or our way of life is doomed."

Cheers,

Michael