Rumbo a Tokio (1944), the Pacific war mapped for Spanish-language readers

Rumbo a Tokio (Road to Tokyo) is a 1944 Spanish-language poster printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office and signed A. V. G. A photograph of the battleship Iowa firing fills the sheet, with a Pacific globe of attack arrows and a map of Japan's cities and resources (NAID 44268205).

Two maps and a battleship

The sheet is built from a photograph and two maps. The photograph shows the U.S. battleship Iowa firing its main guns. A globe of the Pacific carries red arrows for possible lines of American attack, and a label for the point of greatest Japanese advance. A second map shows Japan itself, with cities and a key to coal, oil, rice, silk, metals and other resources. A Spanish paragraph explains what the reader is looking at.

RUMBO A TOKIO

En estos mapas de la guerra del Pacífico se ven las grandes distancias que hay que recorrer para combatir al Japón. Las flechas del mapa global constituyen cuatro principales preocupaciones para los jefes militares japoneses e indican las posibles direcciones que llevarán los ataques de las fuerzas norteamericanas contra el Japón. En el mapa del Japón aparecen las ciudades y centros industriales estratégicos.

Cañones del acorazado IOWA

de los EE. UU. disparando en el Pacífico

[...]

[imprint:] U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1944—O—[illegible]

A federal sheet for readers abroad

The imprint is the Government Printing Office's, dated 1944, and the art is signed A. V. G. No agency name appears in the transcription. The National Archives holds the poster in Record Group 44 in its World War II Foreign Posters series. FRAME sets the audience to "Foreign public" and the purpose to "Persuade or win support". The record does not name the country or countries where it was posted.

What the maps choose to show

FRAME tags two techniques. Card stacking: the maps show only the American approach routes and Japan's strategic targets. Transfer: the battleship's guns lend their weight to the claims drawn on the maps. Both are mild. The text does not threaten or insult, and it admits that the distances are great.

What is missing is any cost. A map of targets and arrows shows a war as geometry. It names cities and lists their resources, and the text says nothing of the people who lived in them. That is an editor's choice rather than a falsehood, and a reader in 1944 could see it as one.

Irmãos de Armas, published by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, is a Portuguese-language poster of about 1944 on this site. A corporate wall chart of the war is Alcoa's Global Map for Global War and Global Peace. The Roosevelt administration essay describes the wartime information offices and what each could do.