Get the Jap and Get It Over! is a 1945 War Manpower Commission poster signed by Allen Saalburg. A ragged Japanese flag flies over a torn swastika flag on a broken pole, and the slur in the headline leads into a plain job-placement line for the U.S. Employment Service (NARA 514373).
Content note: the headline uses an ethnic slur for the Japanese. It is quoted here as the poster printed it.
The sheet
The archive describes two enemy flags on one broken pole. A tattered Japanese rising-sun flag flies at the top and a torn swastika flag hangs beneath it. The record describes no people in the picture. The words run down the sheet in five lines.
GET THE JAP
AND GET IT OVER!
Work where you're needed
SEE YOUR U. S. EMPLOYMENT SERVICE
WAR MANPOWER COMMISSION
The record also notes the artist's signature, Allen Saalburg, at lower right, and a Government Printing Office number, 1945-O-648346, at the foot.
What it asks for
The request itself is modest. It tells the reader to work where he is needed and to see the U.S. Employment Service. That is a placement office, and nothing on the sheet orders anyone to take a job. The weight of the poster sits elsewhere, in the first line. The archive tags the sheet with name-calling and transfer: one slur stands for a whole nation, and the two enemy flags hang together as a single ruin. The symbols carry the message; no argument is made.
A federal agency put that word on a federal poster. It was wrong to do so. The same agency printed Americans All in 1942, a sheet that quotes Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for full participation of all workers without discrimination. A government that asks citizens of every ancestry to work beside each other weakens that request when its own print shop names an enemy by a slur.
The anti-Japanese WWII hub collects the government's wartime sheets against Japan, including the Army's "Jap... You're Next!" by James Montgomery Flagg and the Navy's Your Enemy the Jap. The internment propaganda page covers the government's own wording on the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry, a separate subject this poster does not mention.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Get the Jap and Get It Over! (War Manpower Commission), 1945. U.S. War Manpower Commission, with the U.S. Employment Service; artist signed Allen Saalburg.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 44, series "World War II Posters," NARA 514373, local id 44-PA-868, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work; NARA use restriction "Unrestricted").
