When You're A.W.O.L. You're Working for the Axis (1942), the War Production Board on absent workers

When you're A.W.O.L. you're working for the Axis is a 1942 War Production Board poster, number A-15. It is type only, brown and red on yellow, and it applies the military term for absence without leave to a war worker who misses a shift (NAID 513899).

Eight words on yellow

There is no picture. The archive describes brown and red lettering on a yellow ground, with "A.W.O.L." and "THE AXIS" picked out in red.

WHEN YOU'RE

A.W.O.L.

YOU'RE WORKING

FOR

THE AXIS

[imprint:] WAR PRODUCTION BOARD WASHINGTON, D. C. A-15

[imprint:] U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1942-O-469855

The board and the audience

The imprint names the War Production Board in Washington and the series number A-15, and the printing-office job number carries the year 1942. The record lists the audience as "Domestic public," the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance," and the themes as labor and the home front. The National Archives holds the copy in Record Group 44. Where it was posted and in what numbers the record does not say.

A soldier's word for a civilian

A.W.O.L. is the military's abbreviation for absent without leave. For a soldier, absence without leave is a military offense. For a civilian worker, a missed shift is a matter between him and his employer. The poster erases that difference with one borrowed word, and then goes further. It does not say the absent worker slows production. It says he works for the enemy.

The archive tags name-calling, because the label places a worker in the Axis camp without any account of why he was absent, and transfer, because the stigma of the Axis is pasted onto a missed shift. Illness, a sick child, a funeral, and plain exhaustion all fall under the same sentence. A board that called its workers free labor on another poster told them here that a day at home was work for the enemy.

The same board printed Free Labor Will Win, poster A-18, the same year; the two sheets pull in opposite directions. A gentler federal sheet on work, the Employment Service's Can You Do Farm Work?, offered help instead of an accusation. The War Production Board also issued Production Lines Are Battle Lines, which makes the factory floor a front. For the wartime offices and the powers they held, see the Roosevelt administration essay.