Save Your Cans (1942), McClelland Barclay's ammunition belt of tins

Save your cans, help pass the ammunition is a 1942 poster of the War Production Board's Salvage Division, signed by McClelland Barclay, USNR. A machine gun is fed by a belt of tin cans, and four numbered steps tell households how to prepare cans for the scrap drive (NAID 515347).

What the sheet prints

A helmeted soldier fires a water-cooled machine gun through smoke and flame. The belt feeding it is not cartridges but a row of food tins, and the nearest one still shows a tomato on its label. Into the frame comes a woman's hand, offering the next can. Under the picture, the poster changes register from drama to housekeeping.

SAVE YOUR CANS

Help pass the Ammunition

PREPARE YOUR TIN CANS FOR WAR

1 REMOVE TOPS AND BOTTOMS

2 TAKE OFF PAPER LABELS

3 WASH THOROUGHLY

4 FLATTEN FIRMLY

Who made it

The signature is McClelland Barclay's, followed by "USNR," the Naval Reserve. The issuing office is the Salvage Division of the War Production Board. The National Archives holds the sheet in Record Group 44. The record gives no print run and no distribution list.

How to read it

This is a useful poster wrapped in a dramatic one. The four steps at the bottom are real instructions, the kind a household needed if the tin it saved was going to be worth collecting. Anyone who has sorted recycling will recognize them.

The picture above them makes a stronger claim than the steps can support. A washed and flattened can was raw material; it was not a round in a gun, and the poster does not say how much tin a household could supply or what it became. The belt of cans compresses a long industrial chain into a single image so the kitchen and the front line touch.

The appeal is also gendered in a quiet way. The soldier is a whole man; the home front appears only as a woman's hand. That was the common division of the period's posters, and it sits beside other 1942 sheets in which women ran the machines themselves (Women in the War).

Nothing on the sheet is compulsory. Saving cans was asked of households, not ordered of them. For the salvage drive's harsher cousin, see Save Your Scraps to Bomb the Japs. The Office of War Information index gathers other home-front posters of the year. The powers that were compulsory, including mail censorship and Executive Order 9066, are set out in the Roosevelt administration essay.