Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon (1943), a Forest Service fire poster with Axis faces

Our carelessness, their secret weapon is a 1943 fire-prevention poster of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service and a State Forest Service. Two caricatured enemy heads, one in a swastika cap and one in a rising-sun cap, leer over a burning forest, and the text asks readers to prevent forest fires (NAID 515140).

Enemies drawn over the trees

The archive describes two large caricatured heads leering over a burning forest. One wears a cap with a swastika; the other wears a cap with the rising-sun emblem. The record calls their features exaggerated and distorted. The text is short.

OUR CARELESSNESS

Their Secret Weapon

PREVENT FOREST FIRES

U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE

FOREST SERVICE

STATE

FOREST SERVICE

What the headline claims

The poster does not say the enemy set the fire. It says the reader's own carelessness serves the enemy. That is a sharp way to make a campfire a wartime matter.

The archive tags three techniques: scapegoating, name-calling and fear appeal. The name-calling is in the drawing; the caps carry the emblems of two enemy states, and the record says they were drawn as distorted. The fear is the fire. The scapegoating is the odd part, because the person blamed in the words is the reader, while the faces take the blame in the picture.

A federal and state sheet

Two forest services sign it: the federal one in the Department of Agriculture, and a state forest service that the printed credit does not name. The record's purpose field is "Warn or inform," and its audience is "Domestic public." Nothing on the sheet is an order. It asks for care, and it uses the war to ask.

The Forest Service made the same move earlier with the folder Another enemy to conquer, catalogued at 1941. Its 1946 poster with the Keep Washington Green Committee, Keep'em Green, shows no enemy at all. Caricatures of the two Axis powers on other sheets are collected on the anti-Nazi propaganda hub and the anti-Japanese propaganda hub.