Captain Joe Foss USMC bags 26 Jap Zeros (1943), a Saturday Evening Post promotion sheet

Captain Joe Foss USMC bags 26 Jap Zeros, the catalog title, comes from the hand-lettered headline on a 1943 Saturday Evening Post promotion sheet. Beside it, a torn-edge copy of the magazine's April 3, 1943 page carries a Marine Corps portrait of Foss and Capt. Garrett Graham's article "OUR NUMBER ONE ACE COMES HOME" (NAID 514029).

A magazine page and a headline

Content note: the headline and the article text use the slur "Jap," as printed.

The sheet has two parts. On the left, per the archive, is a reproduction of a Saturday Evening Post page dated April 3, 1943, its right-hand column torn at the edge, with a photograph of Foss credited to the U.S. Marine Corps. Beside it are a hand-lettered headline and the magazine's logo. An imprint reads "PRINTED IN USA 4-3-43."

South Dakota farm-bred Joe Foss, captain in the Marine Corps Reserve and America's outstanding air hero of the war, blasted 26 Jap planes from the Guadalcanal skies.

OUR NUMBER ONE

ACE COMES HOME

By CAPT. GARRETT GRAHAM, USMCR

[...]

He might have been named Joe Doakes, but as it happens his name is Joe Foss, Capt. Joseph J. Foss, USMCR, who has knocked twenty-six Japanese planes from the skies by official count, and that does not include "smokers" or "probables."

[...]

Captain

Joe Foss

USMC

-bags

26 Jap

Zeros

A magazine selling an issue

The issuer is The Saturday Evening Post. FRAME types it "Media" and the object "Advertisement," with the purpose "Persuade or win support." The byline is a Marine Corps Reserve captain's, Garrett Graham, and the photograph is credited to the Marine Corps. The National Archives holds the sheet among the World War II posters in Record Group 44, and the archive's rights line calls it public domain.

Two words for the same pilots

The article's own sentence says "twenty-six Japanese planes," with the official-count caveat. A shorter line on the same page says "26 Jap planes," and the promotional headline says "26 Jap Zeros." The magazine had both words in front of it. It put the plain one in the body and the slur in the shorter line and the big headline.

The archive tags testimonial and plain folks: the text calls Foss "a typical American boy" and a "farm boy," and lists the jobs of the "kids" who became heroes. Admiring a pilot's record is fair. A real man's courage did not need the enemy's people named with an insult to sell copies.

For a Navy sheet that used the same word as its title, see Your Enemy the Jap. A 1943 magazine reprint of a different kind is Can U.S. Have Peace? The anti-Japanese WWII hub collects related sheets.