Sue Hart's Vision Of War: World War II

Print advertisement was used as an important pillar of communication during the Second World War. As mentioned earlier, most of the writings discuss the War advertisements of United States than any other country and that too of magazine advertisements. They are referred in this study as both newspapers and magazines share same mode of advertisement i.e. print media advertisement. The messages in war advertisements were focused to meet a variety of purposes including dissemination of war information, propaganda, brand imaging, boosting morale, and increase product sales. All these and such purposes were met by the advertisements, mostly published in magazines. The Advertising Council in America, which during the war time was called the War Advertising

Many of the these ads are found using direct and focused slogans / captions with pictures from the war scenes. These include the pictures of tanks march, soldiers in trenches, bombs dropping from sky. Similarly, some of the captions used in war ads between 1941 and 1943 were, “Loose lips, sink ships”, “Save freedom of worship”, “If you can’t go”, “He gives 100% you can give 10%”, “Are you in this war”, “War bonds are nest eggs that hatch dreams like this”. Sue Hart supports these arguments in M. Paul Holsinger’s “Vision of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture” by claiming that as the war broke out, it became necessary for the Americans to raise patriotism among the public for which advertisement agencies came forward and played their role. At that time, the copywriters in the ad agencies were to face a new challenge and therefore they enhanced the public relation vocabulary and used emotional terms like ‘sacrifice’, ‘obligation’, ‘duty’ to grab readers’ attention and elevate their

These experiences helped them to adopt better techniques during the Second World War which we have been discussing in the earlier pages of this chapter. If we go through a study of wartime advertisement of the British Government that during the First World War we come to know that before the First World War broke, the government advertisements were limited to a certain criteria. The advertisements published at that time were mostly about basic information but soon before the wor broke out the number of government advertisements definitely increased and the nature of messages would also change. Now the advertisements were published about the announcements for recruitment, invitation to apply for the bids for different contracts. Among all purposes, recruitment stood out as one of the major concerns of the British Government which was addressed through the advertisements. The military recruitment ads may take us back to to the early nineteenth century when in 1801, a poster was printed to for recruitment in the Napoleonic War. Similar is the case we find in American advertisements. Susan J. Matt’s article “Frocks, Finery, and Feelings” in “An Emotional History of the United States” discusses the evolution of advertisement in the American society where the advertisement industry observed major changes and shifted to its modern