They did their part is OWI Poster No. 42, printed in 1943. A photograph of five smiling sailors in Navy caps and peacoats sits under five blue stars and the caption "the five Sullivan brothers 'missing in action' off the Solomons" (NAID 514265).
What the sheet prints
The poster is a photograph, not a painting. Five young men in U.S. Navy caps and peacoats smile, grouped around a ship's hatch marked with a V. Above them are five blue stars. The words are spare, and the archive notes that "THEY" is underlined.
five blue stars
the five Sullivan brothers
"missing in action" off the Solomons
THEY DID THEIR PART
OWI Poster No. 42. Additional copies may be obtained upon request from the Division of Public Inquiries, Office of War Information, Washington, D.C.
[imprint:] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1943-O-510254
(in photograph: U.S. NAVY on caps; V; 1-117 CREWS QUARTERS C-206-L; OPEN)
Who issued it
The imprint numbers the sheet 42 in the Office of War Information's poster series and offers further copies from the office's Division of Public Inquiries. The GPO job number dates the printing to 1943. The record names no photographer and gives no print run. What it does carry is the wording the government chose for the men's status: "missing in action," in quotation marks, off the Solomons. This page does not add anything to that status from outside the record.
The weight of five stars
The record's two techniques are transfer and plain folks. The plain folks are the brothers themselves, five ordinary sailors from one family. The transfer runs from their loss to the reader: the stress on "THEY" turns a caption into a question about everyone else.
This is one of the quieter OWI sheets, and one of the harder ones. It shows real men, by name, and its claim on the viewer rests on a family's loss rather than on an enemy's face. Its message is that the reader has a part to do, and it does not say what that part is; the reader supplies it. A government that uses a family's grief to ask for effort owes that family accuracy. The sheet prints their status in quotation marks and does not dramatize it with an invented scene.
Other numbered OWI sheets on this site include A Careless Word... Another Cross (No. 23), Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty (No. 26), and Above and Beyond the Call of Duty (No. 68), which honors the sailor Dorie Miller. The Office of War Information hub and its poster gallery cover the series.
Sources
- FRAME object record, The Five Sullivan Brothers 'Missing in Action' off the Solomons: They Did Their Part, 1943. Office of War Information (OWI Poster No. 42).
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 514265, local id 44-PA-777, catalog record, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
