Some time ago Stefan Landsberger1 sent me some images of propaganda posters from the War with Japan. I have not blogged about them as yet due to laziness, but a couple are very appropriate as classes wind down.
As an academic I do almost no real work of any sort ever, but at least during the semester I have to turn up for class on occasion. In the summer I still have work to do, but there is not much to force me out of bed other than my own work ethic.
This apparently makes me similar to a Nationalist soldier. These two posters were apparently meant to be hung in hospitals and to encourage wounded soldiers to follow hospital instructions, get better, and hurry back to the front. It seems sort of interesting to me that they needed posters for this, since as soldiers you would think they were under orders and did not need to have their enthusiasm raised, they just had to follow orders. Actually I am not sure how much control the Nationalists would have had over their troops. According to Bill Mauldin even the American army had a lot of trouble keeping track of soldiers who were supposed to be returning to the front after being separated from their unit for whatever reason. Needless to say if going back to the front did not much appeal to you there would be lots of opportunities to delay the process. I suspect that there were more and larger cracks for Chinese soldiers to fall through than in a lot of other armies. Perhaps we need posters like this to encourage our unsupervised faculty (and students) to get on the stick.
This is one of the advantages of having a blog. Cool people with all sorts of interesting stuff send it to you. If you have not been to Stefan’s Chinese Propaganda Poster site you really should ↩
