Somebody blabbed - Button your lip! is a 1942 Office of Facts and Figures security poster signed Albert Dorne. A limp hand in a sleeve lies beside a rifle butt tangled in barbed wire on a red ground, under warnings against talk of ship movements and war production (NAID 515450).
What the sheet prints
Albert Dorne's picture is a limp hand in a sleeve, lying beside the butt of a rifle caught in barbed wire, all on a red ground. A torn-paper panel carries two warnings. The headline and the command bracket them.
SOMEBODY BLABBED
...don't talk about ship movements!
...don't talk about war production!
BUTTON YOUR LIP!
[signature:] ALBERT DORNE
For additional copies write to Graphics Division, Office of Facts and Figures, Washington, D.C. . . . Specify GPO Jacket No. 451239.
[imprint:] ☆ U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1942—O
Who issued it
The sheet tells readers to order copies from the Graphics Division of the Office of Facts and Figures, by GPO jacket number. It is signed by Albert Dorne and printed by the Government Printing Office in 1942. The Office of War Information case study notes that the Office of Facts and Figures was folded into the new Office of War Information on 13 June 1942. The archive's audience field reads the domestic public, and its purpose field reads warning or informing, under security and surveillance. There is no print run in the record. The catalog title's parenthesis marks this as the soldier's version; the archive also holds a sailor's.
How to read it
The archive tags fear appeal and names the tell: a fallen soldier is tied to careless talk, with no incident named. The picture states a death. The headline states a cause. Nothing on the sheet connects the two except the arrangement.
The two warnings in the panel are specific, and they are the defensible part. Ship movements and war production are the kind of thing an enemy would want, and asking civilians to keep quiet about them is a reasonable request in wartime. The headline is broader. "Somebody blabbed" assigns guilt to an unnamed speaker for an unnamed loss, and it invites readers to look at each other. A free people can keep a secret without being taught that the man next to them is the reason soldiers die.
The poster asks; it does not threaten. No law is cited and no penalty is named. Compare Koerner's Someone Talked!, a competition winner from the same year; the Office of Facts and Figures sheet Pipedown Soldier; and the rumor clinics case study.
Sources
- FRAME object record, Somebody blabbed - Button your lip! (soldier's hand and rifle in barbed wire), 1942. Office of Facts and Figures (GPO Jacket No. 451239); artist Albert Dorne.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1777, NAID 515450, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
