Murder in Cold Blood: Let's Force the Japs to Pay (1942), a war-plant ammunition poster

Murder in cold blood is a 1942 war-plant poster credited to TCOP Poster Studio. Three soldiers drawn with yellow-green faces and squinting eyes aim rifles at the viewer in front of a wrecked plane marked with a white star, above the lines "LET'S FORCE THE JAPS TO PAY. MAKE EVERY BULLET GRADE 'A'" (NARA 534789).

Rifles at the reader

Content note: the slogan uses the slur "Japs," and the soldiers are drawn as racial caricatures. Both appear here as the record gives them.

The guns point out of the sheet. Three soldiers in Japanese-style caps and puttees aim their rifles straight at whoever is looking, and the archive describes their faces as yellow-green with squinting eyes. Behind them lies a wrecked aircraft bearing a white star. The headline is an accusation; the base line turns it into a job instruction.

MURDER

IN COLD BLOOD

LET'S FORCE THE JAPS TO PAY.

MAKE EVERY BULLET GRADE 'A'

TCOP POSTER STUDIO

An unnamed sponsor

The only credit printed is "TCOP Poster Studio." The record's maker line calls the sheet a war-plant ammunition-quality poster whose sponsor is not otherwise stated, and the issuer type is "Mixed." Its purpose field reads "Mobilize or secure compliance," for a domestic audience, and its themes are labor, war, and race and ethnicity. The archive took the image from Wikimedia Commons, where it is a National Archives file (NARA 534789, local id 179-WP-938). The rights line says it was published in 1942 without a copyright notice. Where the record leaves the sponsor blank, so does this page.

Quality control by hatred

The request is reasonable on its own terms. Defective ammunition fails the men who carry it, and a plant that wanted every round to pass inspection had cause to say so. The archive tags name-calling and fear appeal for the way the poster says it.

The rifles are aimed at the viewer, and the remedy on offer is better ammunition. The enemy is drawn as a skin color and a squint. The demand is to "FORCE THE JAPS TO PAY," a debt charged to a people, while the evidence in the picture is a wrecked aircraft, the work of an armed force. The poster asks for careful work and supplies a racial grudge as the motive, when the men who would fire the bullets were reason enough.

The same appeal ran through other plant posters. They're Closer Than You Think!, a 1942 Army Ordnance sheet, sets a caricatured German soldier and a caricatured Japanese soldier over a machinist at his lathe. The Tokio Kid series did it with a cartoon character, and the anti-Japanese propaganda hub gathers the rest.