Loose lips

The campaign

Britain went first. In February 1940 the Ministry of Information issued a series of posters under the line "Careless Talk Costs Lives", drawn by the Punch cartoonist Fougasse, Cyril Kenneth Bird, who gave his work free. The drawings showed Hitler and Goering eavesdropping from bus seats, telephone boxes, and the wallpaper of a sitting room while ordinary Britons chatted. They were funny, and that was the design: Fougasse argued that a poster had to disarm the viewer's resistance to being told what to do, and humor did it.

The American campaign began after Pearl Harbor and ran through the Office of War Information, created in June 1942, and through private sponsors who used the theme in their own advertising. "Loose Lips Might Sink Ships" was drawn by Seymour R. Goff for the House of Seagram, the distiller, in 1942, and distributed to bars; the shortened "loose lips sink ships" became the campaign's permanent slogan. Frederick Siebel's "Someone Talked!" (1942), a drowning sailor pointing at the viewer, and the series "A careless word… a needless loss" and "… a needless sinking", which showed the consequences of gossip as a dead body in the water, carried the theme into darker territory. The posters went up in factories, railway stations, post offices, and bars across the country, alongside the Treasury's bond drives and the War Production Board's exhortations to output.

Who ran it and why

The British and American governments ran the campaigns through their information ministries, and private companies joined because a security message was a respectable way to keep a brand in front of the public when there was nothing to sell. The stated purpose was operational: convoy sailings, troop movements, and factory output were secrets, and a remark in a pub could, in principle, reach an agent.

The real purpose was broader. Historians of both campaigns have found little evidence that civilian gossip caused losses; the Axis powers' intelligence in Britain and the United States was weak, and the information that mattered was not the kind a shipyard worker's wife possessed. What the campaigns did was make every civilian a participant in the war, with a duty, a risk, and a share of the guilt. A population that watched its words was a population that felt itself to be at war, and that was worth more to morale and to compliance than any secret the posters protected.

The techniques, in order of weight

Appeal To Fear carried the campaign, and the fear was of two things at once: of the enemy, who was everywhere, and of oneself, as the person who might talk. "Someone Talked!" is the purest version: the drowned sailor is your fault.

Guilt By Association and the related mechanism of personal guilt: the posters made ordinary conversation a potential act of treason and connected a remark in a bar to a body in the sea by a chain the viewer could not check.

Common Enemy: Fougasse's Hitler in the wallpaper and the American posters' lurking spies gave the enemy a face and put him in the room.

Oversimplification: the campaigns reduced the complex question of what information was sensitive to a rule that everything was. The viewer was not asked to judge; he was asked to be silent.

Slogan and Repetition: "Careless talk costs lives" and "Loose lips sink ships" are among the most durable slogans ever produced, and their rhythm did much of the work.

Flag Waving, in the background of every sheet: silence was patriotism, and talk was its opposite.

The artifacts

The two campaigns produced posters in very different registers, and the archive sets them side by side. Fougasse's "Careless Talk Costs Lives" series of 1940 is drawn in a light cartoon line: two women on a bus with Hitler and Goering in the seat behind, a gentleman in a club with the Führer's face in the portrait on the wall, a telephone box with the enemy's ear at the receiver. The threat is absurd and the viewer is invited to laugh at it, and in laughing to accept the rule. The Ministry of Information printed more than two and a half million copies, and the series was the most popular it ever issued.

The American posters are not funny. Siebel's "Someone Talked!" (1942) is a drowning sailor, his face lit from below, one hand raised and a finger pointing out of the frame at the viewer; the design won the National War Poster Competition that year. The "A careless word" series, from the Office of War Information, pairs a line of text with a photograph of a dead serviceman or a sinking ship. Goff's "Loose Lips Might Sink Ships" for Seagram is tamer, a cartoon of a torpedoed vessel with the slogan in red, and was meant for bar walls, where the distiller's name on it did a second job.

The difference in tone reflects a difference in situation. Britain in 1940 was under direct attack and its public needed steadying as much as warning; America in 1942 was mobilizing a population that had not been touched, and the posters' job was to make the war real. Both sets used the same device, the civilian made responsible for the fighting man, and the archive's pins mark where each poster places that responsibility.

What happened

The campaigns were popular, in the sense that the posters were liked and the slogans remembered, and they were obeyed, in the sense that both populations accepted a degree of self-censorship that would have been resisted in peacetime. Whether they prevented a single loss is unknown and probably unknowable. Their lasting effect was cultural: "loose lips sink ships" entered the language, Fougasse's posters became collectors' items, and the idea that a citizen's speech is a security matter was planted in two democracies and did not entirely leave with the war.

The posters also established a visual grammar, the eavesdropping enemy, the pointing victim, the consequence in the water, that later security campaigns borrowed. Cold War civil defense, workplace safety, and the public information films of the 1950s and 1960s all used the structure of a small personal lapse leading to a large shared catastrophe.

The campaigns also illustrate a technique of production rather than of message: the use of private sponsors to carry a public campaign. Seagram's poster, the New York subway's "If you talk too much, this man may die", and the dozens of security posters paid for by manufacturers and insurers show how a government theme can be amplified by companies that want to be seen doing their part, with the company's name attached. The practice continued into the Cold War and is the ancestor of the corporate public service announcement, in which the sponsor's interest and the public message are deliberately hard to separate.

What it teaches

The security campaigns are the case for a technique that produces compliance through fear and guilt rather than information. The posters did not tell civilians what was secret or why; they told them that talking was dangerous and that the danger was theirs. The lesson for a reader is to notice when a message makes you responsible for an outcome you cannot see or check, and to ask whether the responsibility is real or whether it is the message's way of keeping you quiet.