Lubbers Don't Live! is a 1943 U.S. Navy training sheet from the Bureau of Naval Personnel. In verse, a phone talker named Grey leaves his jackbox uncovered in the rain and next day finds his circuit grounded, shouting into a dead phone beside a gun mount (NAID 514932).
The verse
The sheet tells a four-line cautionary tale. First comes the gear: a sound-powered telephone headset and a jackbox left open in the rain. Then comes the result, a sailor bawling into a phone that no longer works, with a gun mount behind him. A red banner carries the series slogan.
OH WEEP LONG AND LOUD FOR A TALKER NAMED GREY
WHO FORGOT TO RECAP HIS JACKBOX ONE DAY
LUBBERS
DON'T LIVE!
CONTROL-
CONTROL-
D--*@???!
THESE
PHONES !
IT RAINED ALL THAT NIGHT AND GREY WAS ASTOUNDED
NEXT DAY, WHEN HE FOUND THAT HIS CIRCUIT WAS GROUNDED!
[imprint:] U.S. NAVY, BUREAU OF NAVAL PERSONNEL, TRAINING AIDS · · · NAV. PERS. 900,008 A-11
[imprint:] ☆U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943-O-561903
Who made it
The imprint names the Training Aids section of the Navy's Bureau of Naval Personnel and gives the sheet number NAV. PERS. 900,008 A-11. The Government Printing Office printed it in 1943. The archive lists the audience as the Navy's own forces and the purpose as warning or informing. No artist is named, and no print run is recorded. Lubbers Don't Live! is a series title; the archive holds several sheets under it, including "Short story" and "Oh mourn loud for these two lads."
How to read it
The archive tags fear appeal and calls it comic. The penalty is real enough: on the archive's reading, one man's neglect leaves a gun crew cut off, and the gun mount in the drawing reminds the reader what the phone is for. But the tone is a limerick, and the cursing is printed as symbols. The fear is in the slogan, which says careless sailors die, and in what the reader knows a gun crew needs.
Like the Army's Joe Dope sheets, this is a service talking to its own people about their own work. It names no enemy and asks nothing of civilians. Nothing in this sheet reaches past the deck it was meant for, and the only person it mocks is the sailor in its own verse. Compare the Army Ordnance comic The Murder of a Fine Cal. .50 Killer, and the Navy's recruiting voice for the Women's Reserve in Enlist in the WAVES. Where the Navy's training sheets sit among the government's wartime messages is set out in the Roosevelt administration essay.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Lubbers Don't Live! Oh weep long and loud for a talker named Grey, 1943. U.S. Navy, Bureau of Naval Personnel, Training Aids.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1309K, NAID 514932, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
