Help Smash Hitler Now! is a 1943 U.S. Army poster signed Kirby. A drawn soldier with a pistol points back at a tank crashing through a wall marked "Invasion of Europe" and asks for every ton of metal that can be mined and smelted (NAID 514467).
What the poster prints
The archive describes a helmeted soldier, pistol in hand, turning to point behind him. There a tank breaks through a brick wall lettered "Invasion of Europe." His speech balloon is addressed to people who never appear in the picture: the ones who dig and refine ore.
HELP SMASH HITLER NOW !
INVASION OF EUROPE
LOOK !
THAT'S WHERE
WE NEED EVERY
TON OF METAL
YOU CAN MINE
AND SMELT !
U. S. ARMY
[signature:] KIRBY
[imprint:] U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943 O - 529012
Who issued it
The sheet is signed by the U.S. Army and by an artist who wrote only "Kirby." The archive credits other 1943 Army sheets to Rollin Kirby by full name; this record does not, so this page leaves the signature as it stands. The GPO number dates the printing to 1943.
How to read it
The archive tags it as fear appeal and transfer. The transfer is the soldier's voice: the urgency of combat is handed straight to a miner or a smelter worker, who is told that the front depends on tonnage. The fear is in "now" and in the image of a wall coming down.
The enemy here is a named man, Hitler, and a named project, an invasion of Europe. That is a sharper target than many wartime sheets offered. There is no caricature of Germans as a people, and no slur. The poster aims at a regime and asks for work against it, which is the honest version of the anti-Nazi case.
The record does not say when the sheet was posted relative to any landing. As with the Army lumber poster, the request goes to free workers and stays a request. For the wider set, see the anti-Nazi propaganda hub and its poster gallery. Posters that asked for hatred of the Nazi regime are one of the groups in the essay on the Roosevelt administration.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Help smash Hitler now! Invasion of Europe, 1943. U.S. Army; artist signed Kirby.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 514467, local id 44-PA-961, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
