American Propaganda
Know Your Enemy: Japan, War Department Orientation Film title card, 1945 US film still: Title card of a 1945 U.S. Army film

Know Your Enemy: Japan, War Department Orientation Film title card (OF-10)

Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), the War Department title card

Title card of the 1945 Army film Know Your Enemy: Japan, with an "Official O.F.-10" bar beside the Army seal. War Department, NARA film 111.OF.10.

Techniques named on the archive record

Transfer
Date
1945
Made by
U.S. War Department, Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces (Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps)
Medium
Film stills
Country
United States
Regime
Truman Administration
NARA
Record Group 111
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Internet Archive item 'KnowYourEnemyJapan' (digitised copy of National Archives film 111.OF.10, Record Group 111, U.S. Army Signal Corps) , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
U.S. federal work; Internet Archive Public Domain Mark 1.0 U.S. War Department, Army Service Forces, Information and Education Division; Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps (film credited to Frank Capra and Joris Ivens, uncredited on screen). Digitised by the U.S. National Archives, via the Internet Archive.

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

The opening card of Know Your Enemy: Japan, a 1945 War Department orientation film numbered O.F.-10. It names the Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces, beside the Army seal, and says nothing yet about Japan. National Archives film 111.OF.10, via the Internet Archive.

What the card says

This is the card that opens the film. The archive describes a bar reading "Official O.F.-10" on either side of the Army seal, and a credit line for the division that made the picture. The seal's own lettering is too small to read in the extracted frame, and the transcription leaves it out rather than guess.

WAR DEPARTMENT

ORIENTATION FILM

OFFICIAL O.F.-10

INFORMATION AND EDUCATION

DIVISION

ARMY SERVICE FORCES

Who made it

The maker line is the War Department's Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces, with the Army Pictorial Service of the Signal Corps. The rights line adds that the film is credited to Frank Capra and Joris Ivens, and that neither name appears on screen. The copy the archive used is the Internet Archive item "KnowYourEnemyJapan," a digitized copy of the National Archives reel. The record gives no release date beyond the year and says nothing about how many soldiers saw it.

Reading the card

The archive tags this frame with one technique, transfer. Before any argument about Japan is made, the screen borrows the authority of the War Department, the seal, and the word "Official." A title card always does some of that. What matters is that the label is honest about the source: the viewer knows the government made what follows. That is white propaganda in the plain sense, and it leaves the viewer free to weigh the film as the Army's case rather than as neutral reporting.

Two other frames from the same film are in the archive: a text card quoting a Japanese Army press officer and an animated frame of looming uniformed figures above a crouching farmer. On this site, the case study on the Army orientation films covers the series that began with Prelude to War, and The Battle of Britain is a frame from the fourth film. The Japanese Relocation title card is a film card from a different agency, the Office of War Information. The anti-Japanese WWII hub collects wartime material against Japan.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, Know Your Enemy: Japan, War Department Orientation Film title card (OF-10), 1945. U.S. War Department, Information and Education Division, Army Service Forces (Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps).
  • Internet Archive item "KnowYourEnemyJapan," digitized copy of National Archives film 111.OF.10, Record Group 111, U.S. Army Signal Corps, archive.org, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: U.S. federal work; Internet Archive Public Domain Mark 1.0.