This Isn't War... It's Murder (1943), the Army poster built on a news clipping

This isn't war... it's murder is a 1943 U.S. Army official poster, I.S.D. No. 100. Helmeted soldiers with skull-like faces bayonet toward a figure under a red cross, above a pasted Associated Press clipping headed "Japs Bayonet U. S. Wounded" and the order "Make 'em pay... Keep producing" (NARA 513570).

Drawing and clipping

Content note: the reproduced newspaper headline uses an ethnic slur for Japanese people, and the soldiers are drawn as distorted, near-skeletal figures. Both are quoted and described as printed.

Soldiers in dark helmets, their faces drawn as distorted and almost skull-like, thrust bayonets toward a figure under a red-cross marker. Below the drawing is a pasted newspaper clipping, torn at one edge. The poster's words and the legible part of the clipping read:

THIS

ISN'T WAR

...IT'S

MURDER

Japs Bayonet U. S. Wounded

Ambushed on Pacific Island

By J. Norman Lodge

Associated Press Staff Writer

With United States Troops on New Georgia Island, July 27 (Delayed).—A Japanese ambush attack on wounded American soldiers was [illegible]

[...]

Make 'em pay...

KEEP PRODUCING

U.S. ARMY OFFICIAL POSTER

I.S.D. No. 100

The Army's numbering

The sheet calls itself a "U.S. Army Official Poster," numbered I.S.D. No. 100, and the archive gives the issuer as the Army's Information Service Division. The clipping credits J. Norman Lodge of the Associated Press, datelined New Georgia Island, July 27. The National Archives holds the poster in Record Group 44. The record gives no artist and no print run.

A headline as evidence

The archive tags outrage bait and name-calling. The design borrows a newspaper's authority: the drawing illustrates a wire report, and the report is presented as proof. Much of the report is cropped, so the reader sees a headline, a byline and a first line, and the drawing fills in the rest. Then the anger is given a single outlet, the production line.

An attack on wounded men is a grave charge, and the clipping carries a byline and a dateline. The poster still takes liberties with it. It turns a report about one ambush into a picture of an enemy whose soldiers are hardly human, and it reprints a headline that names them with a slur. The poster's own line is the reasonable part: keep producing. The record does not show where it was posted or what effect it had.

The next number in the same Army series, The Jap Way: Cold-Blooded Murder (I.S.D. No. 101), uses the same pattern of headline and demand. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub and its poster gallery gather related sheets, and the hub says plainly where they went wrong.