Don't Blind Our Pilots with Smoke (1943), a forest-fire poster with an Axis inset

Smoke from a burning ridge fills a red-black sky as a military plane banks through it on this 1943 forest-fire poster from the U.S. Forest Service and a State Forest Service. A small inset of two caricatured Axis officers carries the line "OUR CARELESSNESS Their Secret Weapon" (NAID 514135).

Smoke over a farm

Content note: the inset shows two caricatured Axis officers.

In the archive's description, an aircraft in silhouette banks across a sky of red and black smoke. Below it a ridge is burning. In the foreground are a farm and a ploughed field. A small inset card holds the two officers and the poster's second line.

DON'T BLIND OUR

PILOTS WITH SMOKE

OUR CARELESSNESS

Their Secret Weapon

PREVENT FOREST FIRES

PREVENT FOREST FIRES

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, FOREST SERVICE

STATE FOREST SERVICE

Two forest services, one sheet

The issuer line pairs the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service with a "State Forest Service." No state is named, and the record does not say which one took part. The Government Printing Office number dates it to 1943. FRAME files the purpose as "Mobilize or secure compliance."

"PREVENT FOREST FIRES" is printed twice in the transcription. The record does not say why.

Borrowing the war for fire safety

Fire prevention needs no war to justify it. This poster gives it one anyway. The archive tags transfer: a wildfire becomes a danger to American pilots, and whoever is careless with fire becomes a helper to the enemy. The inset makes that literal by putting two Axis officers beside the words "Their Secret Weapon."

The logic stretches. The sheet does not say where these pilots were flying or how forest smoke at home would reach them. The image is doing the persuading. The advice underneath it is sound. It still shows how far the war's vocabulary had spread: even a ploughed field and a ridge fire are drawn into it.

The Forest Service and a state partner made a war argument in a folder catalogued at 1941, Another Enemy to Conquer, which calls forest fires "another enemy to conquer." After the war, Keep'em Green asked for the reader's care rather than warning of a fire. The Roosevelt administration essay sorts the era's posters by their requests.