They're Closer Than You Think! (1942), enemies over the lathe

They're closer than you think! is a 1942 poster of the U.S. Army Ordnance Department for its "Keep 'em shootin'" campaign. A machinist works at a lathe while a German soldier and a Japanese soldier, both drawn with exaggerated features, loom over him (NAID 513559).

What the sheet prints

Content note: the Japanese figure is drawn as a racial caricature. It is described here as printed.

In the foreground a machinist bends over a lathe, absorbed in his work. Above and behind him, too large for the room, stand two enemy soldiers. One is German, in a helmet, holding a model bomber in his fist. The other is Japanese, with a rising-sun badge on his cap. The FRAME record notes that both faces are drawn with exaggerated features. The words are short.

They're closer

than you think!

ORDNANCE DEPARTMENT, U.S. ARMY - KEEP 'EM SHOOTIN[G]

Who issued it

The Army's Ordnance Department issued the poster under its "Keep 'em shootin'" line. The record names no audience, but the lathe in the picture points at the people making ordnance. The record names no artist and gives no print run. The National Archives holds it in Record Group 44.

How to read it

The headline is a threat about distance. The poster does not show either enemy army literally inside an American machine shop. It means something else: that a slow day at the lathe helps them, and that the war is present in the plant even if the front is far away. That is a fair point dressed as a false one.

The drawing goes further than the slogan. Two real enemy armies become two oversized, distorted faces bending over an unsuspecting American. The German figure is a soldier; the Japanese figure is drawn toward a racial type. A production poster did not need either face to make its case, and the distortion invites the worker to see a people, not just a uniform.

Nothing here is compulsory. The pressure is fear, not law. Compare Production Lines Are Battle Lines, which makes the same link between the plant and the front with no enemy at all, and Tokio Kid, a plant poster that leans entirely on caricature. Both enemies have hubs here: anti-Nazi propaganda and anti-Japanese propaganda. Production posters like this one sit in the essay on the Roosevelt administration beside the offices that held real power after Pearl Harbor.