Korean War leaflets, posters and cartoons, 1950–1954

This gallery collects 46 records from the FRAME snapshot on the Korean War: UN Command leaflets run by the U.S. military, State Department and USIA posters about the war for readers in Korea and across Asia, and Jim Berryman's Evening Star cartoons for Americans at home. Cards run in date order.

The grid holds three groups. Eighteen items come from the military effort: sixteen leaflets in Korean or Chinese, MacArthur's 1950 letter on prisoners, and a 1951 Army photograph of a leaflet bomb being loaded in Yokohama. Twenty-one are posters from the State Department's information program and its successor, the U.S. Information Agency, filed by the National Archives with its posters distributed in Asia: Korean-language photo sheets, the germ-warfare rebuttal in eight languages, Tagalog and Thai sheets, and the eight-sheet Thai Korea Exhibit of 1954. Seven are Berryman cartoons from the Washington Evening Star, held with the Senate's records.

Most of the official sheets are not in English, and that is the point of including them. What the United States told enemy soldiers, Korean civilians and Asian allies is the subject. Translations on the essay pages are the archive's machine renderings, marked as not checked by a fluent reader, unless the page says otherwise. This site does not supply its own.

Where this site has an essay, the card opens it; otherwise it opens the FRAME record. If the line under the title says "no primary id in the snapshot," the record gives no NARA number, and none is supplied here. Most of the leaflets came to the archive through Wikimedia Commons, the North Dakota State University archives, or a 1993 paper on leaflet themes, not through the National Archives, so most have no NARA number.

The Korea Exhibit sheets of August 1954 postdate the armistice; they are here because their subject is the war's treatment of prisoners and civilians. Several of them, and some of the leaflets, show the dead. North Korean and Chinese leaflets are outside this site's scope. The parent page is US and UN Command messaging in the Korean War, 1950–1953.