Vintage Poster Archives
Somebody Blabbed 1942 | Albert Dorne WW2 Propaganda Poster
Somebody Blabbed 1942 | Albert Dorne WW2 Propaganda Poster
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A grey hand breaks the surface of churning cobalt waves, fingers splayed, reaching upward toward a white US Navy sailor's cap drifting just beyond reach. The image needs no caption to land, but Dorne gave it one anyway: 'SOMEBODY BLABBED' in bold condensed black above, 'BUTTON YOUR LIP!' below, and a torn-cartouche overlay mid-composition reading '...don't talk about ship movements! / ...don't talk about war production!' The restraint of the palette, cream ground, blue-teal ocean, a grey hand in monochrome against saturated colour, concentrates the eye on the single moment of consequence.
Albert Dorne (1904–1965) drew this in 1942 for the US Office of Facts and Figures, the wartime federal agency that coordinated home-front communication before the Office of War Information absorbed it later that year. The poster was printed by the US Government Printing Office (GPO Jacket No. 451041) and distributed nationally as part of the same careless-talk campaign that produced 'Loose Lips Sink Ships'. Dorne was, by 1942, the highest-paid commercial illustrator in America, his work appearing regularly in Life, Collier's, and The Saturday Evening Post. He brought that authority to government service, and the result is one of the more sobering images in the wartime poster canon.
The National Archives holds multiple format variants of this design, all confirmed unrestricted for reproduction.
Reproduced from archival sources as a fine art archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks with no optical brighteners. The design is from 1942; the print is freshly produced.
