It's You ... and the Rest of the Team, an Army Air Forces ad that recruits men of 17 with a bombing run

It's You ... and the Rest of the Team is a 1944 Army Air Forces recruiting advertisement placed by the agency Geyer, Cornell & Newell. A painted Liberator bomber flies over burning targets above a second-person story that makes the reader the bombardier, and a box tells men of 17 how to enlist (NAID 514672).

The story it tells

Content note: the advertisement's text uses the wartime slur "Japs" for Japanese forces, and it describes a bombing run from inside the aircraft. Both are quoted as printed.

The archive describes a painting of a Liberator bomber over targets on fire. Below it runs a short story in the second person. The reader is the bombardier: he remembers the classroom grind, hunches over the sight, releases the bombs, and hears the tail gunner call the hits. Then the story widens to the whole crew.

You jab the release. "Bombs Away!"

[...]

Well ... ! Your chest starts to swell ... and then all at once you see that it wasn't just you who smeared that Nazi base. It was Pete, up in the pilot's seat ... Cliff, with his navigation charts ... the gunners, Jim, Tony, Beezy, Lou. It was you ... and the rest of the crew ... flying as a team ...

The same kind of team that paved the way for the landings in the Gilberts ... that cleaned up the Japs on Kiska ... that flattened Bremen and Wilhelmshaven...that is carrying the war to Japan...

The A.A.F. ... the greatest team in the world!

[...]

MEN OF 17...
You can get ready now for your place-as Bombardier, Navigator or Pilot-on this great A.A.F. team. [...] If you qualify, you will receive Enlisted Reserve insignia ... but will not be called for training until you are 18 or over.

The offer in the box

The small type is specific. A qualified 17-year-old joins the Air Corps Enlisted Reserve now and is called at 18 or older. Training is set out as five months at a college after a brief conditioning period, then eight months of full flight training. A graduate receives a $250 uniform allowance and pay of $246 to $327 a month. The box also sends boys to the Civil Air Patrol and to their high school's Victory Corps, and it tells essential workers in war industry or agriculture not to apply. The archive credits the U.S. Army Recruiting Service and the Army Air Forces, with Geyer, Cornell & Newell, Inc. as the agency; the painting appears signed Clymer, as the archive reads it.

Selling the sight

Identity fusion and glittering generalities are the record's two tags. The fusion is the second person. The reader does not watch a bombardier; he is one, with a pilot who calls him "Slugger" and a cigar waiting. The generality is "the greatest team in the world," repeated as a slogan.

The ad states its terms on pay, training, and age plainly, and that is to its credit; the reader can check them. It is less honest about the work. The target is a "base," the first wave's bombs are "eggs," the hit earns a cigar, and the enemy on Kiska is named by the slur. The story never leaves the aircraft; the fires below are scenery. The reader the box addressed was 17, and the choice to enlist was his, made on this account of the job.

An Army poster of the same year that asked workers for bombers is Give Us More B-17's. More of the period's material aimed at the Japanese is on the anti-Japanese propaganda hub.