Back the Attack! (1943), the paratrooper sheet for the 3rd War Loan

Back the Attack! The 3rd War Loan Is On! is a 1943 Treasury War Finance Division poster. A helmeted paratrooper stands in a blue night scene beside a shield announcing the drive, with "Buy bonds here" at the foot (NAID 513919).

What the poster prints

Three lines of type do the work. The archive describes the picture behind them: a paratrooper with a helmet and a submachine gun, canopies in the sky, a transport plane, all in night blue. A red shield with a starred roundel carries the name of the drive. A red bar at the bottom tells the reader where to act.

BACK THE ATTACK!

The 3RD WAR LOAN is on!

BUY BONDS HERE

[imprint: ☆ U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943—544025]

Who issued it

The issuer is the Treasury Department's War Finance Division. "Buy bonds here" tells us the sheet was made to hang where bonds were sold. The record gives no artist. The archive holds other sheets from the same drive under the same slogan, which is why this page names the paratrooper in its heading.

How to read it

The archive tags the method as transfer. The soldier's courage is placed next to a purchase, and some of it is meant to rub off on the buyer. That is a standard device and an honest one as far as it goes: the drive was raising money for the war the soldier in the picture was fighting.

The constitutional point is simple. A war bond was a loan, offered to citizens and taken up by choice. The Treasury asked; it did not levy. A poster that sells a voluntary loan with a hero is persuasion, and a free country allows persuasion by its own government so long as the citizen can still say no. For a darker bond sheet from the same year, compare A Boy Died Last Night, and for one built on a slur, the payroll sheet "Japs Execute Doolittle Men". The poster index lists more. Henry Morgenthau's Treasury ran these drives, and the Roosevelt administration essay sets it beside the Office of War Information and the censorship office.