A soldier steps from Germany to Japan, a 1945 Pacific sheet

This 1945 color sheet from the Psychological Warfare Branch of U.S. Army Forces, Pacific, shows an American soldier striding from a globe with a white flag over a swastika onto a globe labeled only with the characters for Japan. It is held in the Library of Congress.

What the sheet prints

Two globes stand side by side. On the first, a white flag flies over a swastika. A helmeted American soldier, with a second soldier behind him, steps off it and onto the second globe. That globe carries one word, the only text on the face of the sheet.

日本

Who issued it

The Library of Congress lot entry names U.S. Army Forces, Pacific, Psychological Warfare Branch. The archive marks the source as "unidentified," its category for a source that is "blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure." Its audience field reads enemy forces. No artist, print date, or leaflet number is recorded.

How to read it

This is an end-of-war picture made before the end. Germany is shown already beaten. Japan is shown as the next step, and nothing else is said. The archive tags it bandwagon and fear appeal. The sequence is the argument: what happened there will happen here.

Because the sheet has almost no words, it can only assert. It gives no figure, no date, and no terms. A reader in 1945 had to supply the rest. Whether a soldier holding it would have believed it is not something the record can show.

The swastika is shown as a defeated symbol, under a white flag. That is a depiction of the enemy state, not of a people, and it carries no caricature. Compared with the domestic posters that used slurs, such as Flagg's 1944 "Jap... You're Next!", this one is restrained. It names Japan by its own name, in its own script.

The archive files the sheet under the Roosevelt administration. Other Pacific leaflets here are the air-raid advance notice and leaflet 18-J-1. The war against Germany as the American home front saw it is gathered under anti-Nazi propaganda; against Japan, under anti-Japanese propaganda.