Give Us More B-17's is a 1944 U.S. Army official poster, ISD No. 154, signed Heaslip. It pairs a drawing of a damaged Flying Fortress with a quoted Army Air Forces account of one mission and asks workers for more bombers (NAID 514391).
What the poster prints
Most of the sheet is a drawing: a B-17 heeling through cloud with German fighters around it. Beside it sits a box of text in quotation marks, credited to an Army Air Forces report. The demand comes last, in large type.
U. S. ARMY
OFFICIAL POSTER
"The B-17 was homeward bound when 6 Focke-Wulfs queued in for an assault. 20 mm. shells tore through tail compartment and top turret..set oxygen and flares afire..the plane hurtled down 10,000 feet before it could be brought under control. Yet with hydraulic system out, brakes gone, riddled with shells, the Fortress came back for a good landing —with 4 enemy fighters to its credit."
Army Air Forces report
Give us
MORE B-17's
[signature: HEASLIP]
ISD No. 154
Who issued it
The maker line is the U.S. Army, Army Air Forces, with the artist's signature Heaslip. The ISD number places it in the Army's numbered poster series. The pool this page draws from holds a run of sheets with the same headline for other aircraft, from B-24s to P-51s. This is one of them, chosen as the example.
How to read it
The quoted report is the poster's evidence. It is specific: six attackers, a ten-thousand-foot fall, four fighters claimed. The sheet does not name the crew, the date, or the target, so a reader cannot check it from the poster. The archive tags it testimonial and card stacking, because only the outcome that flatters the airplane is told.
That is a fair description, and it is not an accusation of invention. The four claimed fighters are the report's number, unverified on the sheet, and a single good landing says nothing about the bombers that did not come back. What the poster does well is put a worker's rivet next to a crew's survival. What it leaves out is the cost. Both belong in an honest reading.
Army production appeals on this site include Stay on the Job. Enemy aircraft appear here as hardware, not as caricature; for posters that depicted the German enemy, see anti-Nazi propaganda. The poster program is indexed on the Office of War Information hub. The Roosevelt administration essay sorts out which wartime office held which power after Pearl Harbor.
Sources
FRAME object record, Give us more B-17's, 1944. U.S. Army (Army Air Forces), Heaslip. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 514391, 44-PA-886, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
