WW2 Propaganda Posters: The Campaign Scrapped in Four Weeks

In the autumn of 1939 a poster went up on walls across Britain. A red ground, a crown, and cream capitals you could read from the far side of a road. FREEDOM IS IN PERIL. DEFEND IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT.

A second went up beside it. YOUR COURAGE, YOUR CHEERFULNESS, YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY.

Within four weeks the Ministry of Information had scrapped the entire campaign.

There was a third design in the same series, printed in two and a half million copies, held back and never issued at all. That one said KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, and it is now the most reproduced British poster in the world.

The failure is the right place to start, because it is the part most writing about wartime posters leaves out. The posters everyone remembers are not the ones that worked. Two of the most famous were barely seen at all.

The four weeks that taught Britain something

The Ministry of Information began work on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, though its home publicity planners had been meeting since the spring.

Money shaped the campaign before anything else did. The Ministry's own estimate for a seven-design campaign came to £112,000. The Treasury was unimpressed, and what went forward instead was a revised application for £45,000 covering two and a half million copies of a single design. Twenty designs were produced, cut to a shortlist of five, and those five went in front of the Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, on 4 August 1939. Final contracts were signed on 31 August. Production was still running when war was declared.

Three slogans came out of it:

Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory

Freedom Is in Peril, Defend It With All Your Might

Keep Calm and Carry On

The first two went up. The Imperial War Museum's assessment of how that went is blunt: they were "seen as patronising and rather abstract and people didn't really know what was being asked of them."

Look at the pronouns in the first one and you can see the problem. Your courage will bring us victory. There is a government on one side of that sentence and a public on the other, and the public is the one being asked to supply the courage.

The Ministry was attacked in a hostile parliamentary debate and mocked in the press as a campaign of waste and paste. It scrapped the entire commercial poster campaign after four weeks.

Keep Calm never joined them. It was held back for use after heavy bombing or invasion, neither of which arrived on the schedule Whitehall expected. Officials had their own doubts in the meantime. The Treasury official responsible for approving the spend worried that the population "might well resent having this poster crammed down their throats at every turn". A.P. Waterfield, the civil servant who had planned the Ministry, thought the slogan "too commonplace to be inspiring" and added that "it may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves".

Stocks were kept until April 1940 and pulped after that, in a cross-government drive to deal with a paper shortage. One folded copy turned up at the bottom of a box of books bought at auction, found in 2000 by Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Alnwick, who framed it with his wife Mary and hung it by the till. Everything that has happened to that design since came out of that box.

What replaced the lecture

The British campaign that worked was the one that stopped telling people things.

Fougasse, the cartoonist Cyril Kenneth Bird, gave the Ministry eight posters in February 1940 under the heading Careless Talk Costs Lives. He worked from a diagnosis of the problem that is still the best short account of why most posters fail. The obstacles, as he set them out, were "firstly, a general aversion to reading any notice of any sort; secondly, a general disinclination to believe that any notice, even if it was read, can possibly be addressed to oneself; thirdly, a general unwillingness even so to remember the message long enough to do anything about it."

Three obstacles, and an instruction clears none of them. So he drew jokes instead. Two women talking on a train, with Hitler and Goering listening from the seat behind. You read it because it was funny, and the point arrived afterwards. Our piece on Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb covers what the same message looked like without the humour, and how badly it read women.

The other survivors work the same way. Dig for Victory, launched by the Ministry of Agriculture in October 1939, asked for something specific and physical and let a boot on a spade do the talking. Allotment numbers rose from around 815,000 before the war to over 1.4 million by 1943, though nobody can show how much of that the posters did. The Ministry of Food invented Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot. The National Savings Committee had Phillip Boydell draw the Squander Bug, a grinning swastika-covered creature who talked you into wasting money, which is a far sharper piece of persuasion than an instruction not to. It reached the press in January 1943 and became a national character.

Characters, jokes and jobs. Not instructions.

America had the same argument, louder

The American campaign is usually described as the cheerful one, and that is too neat.

The Office of War Information was created by executive order on 13 June 1942, absorbing the earlier Office of Facts and Figures, with Elmer Davis in charge. Most of its posters were printed by the Government Printing Office, and distribution was something Britain never matched. The Boy Scouts ran it: posters delivered to street-level shops every fortnight, in around 2,300 participating communities.

But the OWI had its own crisis about tone, and it was more public than Britain's. In April 1943 several of its writers resigned, saying the agency had been handed to people who preferred slick salesmanship to honest information. The quarrel was whether to show the war or sell it. Congress then cut the domestic branch's funding sharply, partly on the suspicion that it had become a campaign office for the president.

What came out the other side looked a great deal like advertising, because to a considerable extent it was advertising, made by the same industry working through what became the War Advertising Council.

And American posters scolded plenty. The National WWII Museum puts it directly: posters were produced "to encourage and inspire Americans, but also to warn, scold, and scare Americans". Rationing. Travel restrictions asking whether your trip was really necessary. The security campaign that produced Loose Lips Sink Ships, which is Careless Talk in a different accent. America even imported the Squander Bug, in a version drawn by Dr Seuss for the war bond campaign.

So the tidy version, Britain lectures and America sells, does not survive contact with the material. Both did both. What separated them was mostly money, a better distribution network, and an advertising industry the government could put to work.

The two most famous posters of the war are both modern

This is the part that matters if you are buying one.

Keep Calm and Carry On was never issued for general display. Two and a half million copies, pulped, one found again in a bookshop in 2000. Its entire public life has happened since. It is a poster of the 2000s that happens to have been printed in 1939.

We do not sell it. Partly because the market is saturated past the point of parody, and partly because we run an Etsy shop ourselves and would rather not become the thing this paragraph is making fun of.

We Can Do It! is not a government poster and was not called Rosie the Riveter. J. Howard Miller drew it for Westinghouse's own War Production Coordinating Committee, and it hung inside company plants for about two weeks from 15 February 1943. It was internal communication, aimed at morale, absenteeism and keeping questions flowing to management, not a public recruitment campaign. The connection between that image and the name Rosie appears to date from the early 1980s, four decades after the war. Kimble and Olson, who did the scholarly work on it in 2006, conclude that "the poster has become a modern-day myth."

The wartime Rosie was a 1942 song, and then a Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post in May 1943, and she looked nothing like the woman on the Westinghouse sheet. We go through that in the Rosie piece.

Neither of these is a reason not to own one. They are a reason to know what you own. We sell the Westinghouse sheet, catalogued under the name its designer gave it rather than the one the internet gave it forty years later.

The ones that were actually on the walls

If you want posters people genuinely saw, the list looks different.

Fougasse's Careless Talk series went up across the country. Dig for Victory ran the length of the war. The Squander Bug became a national joke.

Abram Games produced around a hundred designs as the War Office's Official War Poster Artist, and was good enough at it to get into trouble. In 1942 the Army Bureau of Current Affairs commissioned him and Frank Newbould to produce a series under the heading Your Britain, Fight For It Now. The brief had a trap inside it, because somebody had to decide which Britain. Newbould answered with a shepherd driving his sheep across the South Downs, a country worth defending for what it already was. Games answered with modern buildings, among them Berthold Lubetkin's Finsbury Health Centre, drawn rising behind a ruined building and a child with rickets. A country worth defending for what it was about to build.

Churchill saw the Finsbury sheet, considered it nothing short of a libel on conditions in British cities, and had it taken down from a wartime poster exhibition at Harrods in 1943.

The Army wanted a picture of the country worth fighting for. Churchill saw a picture of the country that needed fixing.

In America, James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam was the genuine mass object, though it belongs to the previous war. It first appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly on 6 July 1916, around four million copies were printed after America entered the war in 1917, and it was brought back for the second war. Its British ancestor is the subject of our piece on Lord Kitchener Wants You, which argues that even that sheet is not the poster everyone thinks it is.

Why so few survive

Wartime posters were printed in millions and survive in handfuls, for mundane reasons.

They were pasted up, rained on and papered over. They were printed on poor wartime stock. And they were actively destroyed. Britain ran a paper salvage drive from 1939, and from late 1940 collection became compulsory for larger local authorities. That is what consumed the Keep Calm stock.

A poster that did its job got pulped. A poster that failed sometimes sat in a warehouse and survived, which is the same paradox behind the George magic posters from a decade earlier.

The major holdings are the Imperial War Museum, the Library of Congress and the US National Archives, with substantial collections at the Hoover Institution and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

Collecting it today

Original wartime sheets in good condition are scarce and priced accordingly. Most people who want one on a wall want a good reproduction, honestly described, and the condition of the source matters more than anything else. Our piece on what we actually do to a damaged sheet sets out where the line sits between repairing a fold and inventing detail.

Vintage Poster Archives sells digitally restored reproductions, printed locally on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art paper. Never originals, and never sold as such. The wartime material sits in the War & Propaganda collection.

Frequently asked questions

What were WW2 propaganda posters for?

Four jobs, mostly. Security, meaning say nothing about troop movements. Production, meaning work harder and turn up. Thrift and salvage, meaning grow food, mend clothes, save paper and waste nothing. And money, meaning buy war bonds. Recruitment mattered less than it had in the First World War, because both countries were operating conscription.

Who made British WW2 posters?

The Ministry of Information, which began work on 4 September 1939, ran and coordinated the campaigns, usually on behalf of other departments. Dig for Victory came from the Ministry of Agriculture, Make Do and Mend from the Board of Trade, the Squander Bug from the National Savings Committee, Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot from the Ministry of Food. HMSO was generally the publisher, with the printing contracted out to commercial firms whose names often appear in the bottom margin.

Who made American WW2 posters?

Chiefly the Office of War Information, created by executive order on 13 June 1942 and wound up in 1945, with most of its posters printed by the Government Printing Office. Other agencies produced their own, including the Treasury, the Office of Price Administration and the Office of Defense Transportation, and the advertising industry contributed heavily through the War Advertising Council.

Was Keep Calm and Carry On used during the war?

No. Around two and a half million copies were printed in late August 1939 and held in reserve for a national emergency such as invasion or sustained heavy bombing. It was never issued for general display, and stocks were pulped from April 1940 for paper salvage. One copy was rediscovered in 2000 at Barter Books in Alnwick, and every version you have seen since dates from then.

Is the We Can Do It! poster the same as Rosie the Riveter?

No, though almost everyone now treats them as one thing. We Can Do It! was drawn by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse's internal war production committee and displayed in company plants for roughly two weeks from 15 February 1943. It was not a government poster and it was not called Rosie. The association with the name appears to date from the early 1980s.

Which WW2 posters were most widely seen?

In Britain, Fougasse's Careless Talk Costs Lives series, Dig for Victory, and the Squander Bug. Abram Games produced around a hundred designs for the War Office. In America, the Office of War Information's output reached around 2,300 communities through a Boy Scout distribution network, refreshed every fortnight.

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