Vintage Poster Archives
Vickery WW2 Ordnance 1943 | Home Front Poster
Vickery WW2 Ordnance 1943 | Home Front Poster
Couldn't load pickup availability
A helmeted GI strides through dry ochre grass, right arm drawn back with a grenade, left arm thrown wide for balance. Above him, a flat cadmium red sky carries the words 'God help me if this is a dud!' in white script. Below, in bold black and red condensed type: HIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS. The composition is built on a single moment of physical tension, the figure caught an instant before the throw, the grenade small and dark in the fist.
Designed by John Vickery (1906–1983) for the United States Army Ordnance Department in 1943, the poster was distributed to labour-management committees at munitions plants across the country. Its message was industrial as much as military: every sub-standard grenade sent to the front could cost a soldier his life. Vickery was an Australian-born illustrator who had moved to New York in 1936 and was, by the time of this commission, working across advertising illustration and fine art. He is the only Australian artist known to have been commissioned by the US government to produce a WW2 poster, and later became the only Australian member of the New York School alongside Pollock, de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.
The poster sits in the tradition of American WW2 home-front graphic design that addressed production workers directly, peer to peer, rather than rallying them with abstract patriotism. The red-and-cream palette, the bold integrated typography, and the visceral physical specificity of the illustration place it among the more technically accomplished works in the Ordnance Department's campaign.
Restored from an archival source and produced as an archival print. A natural fit for anyone interested in WW2 home-front communication design, American wartime illustration, or the graphic design of industrial mobilisation.
