Rollin Kirby signed this 1943 U.S. Army poster asking civilians for scrap metal. An officer in a round inset says "WE NEED YOUR METAL TO HELP FIGHT THE U-BOAT!" over a sinking ship, survivors in the water and a periscope inside a swastika-shaped shadow (NAID 513738).
A sinking ship and an officer's request
Content note: the drawing includes a dead seaman on a raft.
The archive's description gives two parts. In a circular inset, a uniformed officer speaks the poster's request. Below him a ship sinks and smokes, survivors are in the water, a body lies on a raft, and a periscope rises inside a dark patch the cataloguer reads as swastika-shaped. The sheet does not name the officer.
A MENACE WE MUST BEAT!
"WE NEED YOUR METAL TO HELP FIGHT THE U-BOAT!"
U. S. ARMY
[signature: Rollin Kirby]
[imprint: U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943 O - 536381]
Army issue, Kirby's signature
Three short lines of type carry the whole message, and the issuer line is plain: U.S. Army. Rollin Kirby's signature sits in the art, and the Government Printing Office job number dates the printing to 1943. The FRAME tombstone gives the audience as "Domestic public" and the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance." It records no print run and no place of display.
A Kirby signature also appears on Help Smash Hitler Now!, a 1943 Army sheet on this site that asks miners and smelters for every ton of metal they can produce.
Drowning as the argument
The archive tags two techniques here: fear appeal and testimonial. The fear is the drowned man. The testimonial is a voice in quotation marks that belongs to nobody in particular; the uniform stands in for a person.
The request itself is ordinary. Metal was a war material, and asking people to give it up is a fair thing for a government at war to do. What the sheet adds is the claim that a reader who keeps scrap at home shares in a sinking at sea. It names no law, quota or penalty. Turning in metal stays a choice, and the poster works on the conscience to get it.
For other salvage appeals on this site, compare the War Production Board's America Needs Your Scrap Rubber, which lists pounds of rubber per object, and the privately printed Save Your Scraps to Bomb the Japs. Salvage was one of many requests the wartime government put to civilians, and the Roosevelt administration essay lays the others out.
Sources
- FRAME object record, A menace we must beat!, 1943. U.S. Army, artist Rollin Kirby. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-291, NAID 513738, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026.
