Ouch! The Japs Don't Like Mosquitoes (1942), a PT-boat recruiting poster

Ouch! The Japs don't like mosquitoes is a 1942 U.S. Navy recruiting poster, No. 441 of the Bureau of Naval Personnel. A speech bubble beside a portrait of a decorated lieutenant and a speeding PT boat carries the slur, and a small cartoon shows a figure in spectacles running from a mosquito.

What is on the sheet

The third word in the speech bubble is a slur for Japanese people, and the cartoon inside the bubble mocks the enemy. This page quotes both as printed because they are the record.

The layout pairs a hero with a joke. According to the archive, a portrait of a lieutenant wearing ribbons sits beside a PT boat moving fast, and a speech bubble holds the text. In the bubble a small cartoon shows a spectacled figure running from a mosquito that wears a cap. The mosquito is the boat.

Ouch! The Japs don't like mosquitoes —

especially the PT variety, with men like Lieutenant Bulkeley

at the wheel and a picked crew shooting "stingers" into the

sides of their warships and merchantmen.

If you like to be where the attack starts — there's a place for

you right now in the U. S. Navy. Go to your nearest Navy

Recruiting Station today!

No. 441

NRB—32682—6-13-42—10M.

Who printed it

The maker line is the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Naval Personnel, recruiting poster No. 441, printed by the Government Printing Office. The code line at the foot reads NRB—32682—6-13-42—10M; the record does not decode it, and neither does this page. The copy comes from Northwestern University Libraries, not the National Archives, so there is no NAID. The record lists the issuer type as military, the purpose as "Recruit," and the themes as war and the military, and race and ethnicity.

The slur and the sales pitch

The text names one man, Lieutenant Bulkeley, as the kind of officer at the wheel, and the archive notes that the portrait and ribbons lend the recruiting appeal the officer's standing. Whether the portrait is Bulkeley is not stated, so this page does not assume it. The pitch itself is ordinary recruiting: dangerous work, a picked crew, and the chance to be "where the attack starts."

The archive tags name-calling, and the slur is why. The sentence is aimed at an enemy navy's "warships and merchantmen," a military target. The word chosen for the people aboard is an ethnic insult, and the cartoon draws an enemy figure in spectacles running from an insect. A recruiter for the armed service of a republic did not need either one to describe PT boats. The Navy printed both.

Other sheets that used the same vocabulary are on the anti-Japanese propaganda hub and in its poster gallery. Alaska - Death-Trap for the Jap was made for the Navy's Thirteenth Naval District the same year. The Roosevelt administration essay separates sheets aimed at a race from sheets aimed at a regime.