A second front in Europe
The pins
Context
For discussion
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1
Glittering generalities The soldier A British soldier at a run with a Thompson gun, landing craft behind him. The invasion is drawn as a sprint; two years later it took the largest fleet ever assembled.
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2
Oversimplification "Europe" The continent is a word on a beach. Where to land, with what shipping, and against what defenses are not the poster's concern.
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3
Slogan The headline "A second front in Europe," the demand of 1942 rallies and wall chalkings. The phrase was the campaign; the strategy behind it was the Soviet Union's.
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4
Card stacking "The way to win this year" An attack now is the way to win in 1942. The Dieppe raid of August 1942, in which most of the landing force was killed or captured, is the answer the poster did not wait for.
A Communist Party of Great Britain poster of 1942 demanding an Allied landing in France to relieve the Soviet Union. After June 1941 the British party swung from opposing the war to urging its escalation, and the second-front campaign was its largest of the war, with rallies in Trafalgar Square and posters like this. It is an Allied-side poster that was not the government's, which is why it is here.
- Who made this, and whose interest did it serve?
- A map is a kind of argument. What does this one leave out?
- Can propaganda be for a good strategy? Was this one?
See also
Same era, or the same techniques.
