For this week’s project we had to find two or more unusual images that hinted, by their oddness, at a mystery. I decided to use one of the German satirical cartoons produced during the war and published in a well-known German Magazine, talked about below in more depth, and an unexpected photo involving General George S. Patton.
Flipping between photos in a World War II archive I found online, I came across one with soldiers holding a fake tank. Images of real tanks are expected- false tanks not so much; I knew there had to be a story behind this and so I started to dig. Before I go on to explain what I discovered, let me include the image so you know what I am talking about:
The men pictured with the tank all seem serious and this does not look, at a glance, to be posed too terribly much if at all. But what were they doing carrying around a false tank? True, if seem from above this tank could be passed off as real- a tactic such as this is surely suited more to modern warfare than past conflicts. But who was Patton, and by extension the allied forces, trying to fool? And why?
Looking into the context of the matter this is what I learned: The image above was taken as Patton’s plan was about to be set into motion on D day, June 6 1944. It was called “Operation Quicksilver” and consisted of a real general (Patton) show to be at the head of a large (fake) army given the name of “First United States Army Group (FUSAG)” at a location different to where the actual invasion (involving the Third Army, which was a real army that Patton was also involved with) was to take place. In short, it was all a very dramatic decoy plan. The FUSAG was stationed in Britain and boasted not only fake tanks but fake trucks and other structures as well. The selection of Patton for this fictitious army, who was an allied general well-respected by the Germans who was also closely followed in the newspapers (and thus easy for the enemy to “track”), was a wise move by the allies. Even Patton realized has situation when he wrote a letter to Beatrice Patton on February 20th, 1944 stating that:
Yesterday I went into Butch’s room and ran into the whole press, so I just told them I was a ghost and they admitted every one[sic] in town had seen me, no one would admit it. I wish I could stop being incognito but really it makes no difference as I am a very apparent entity.
The next image comes from the German satirical magazine called Simplicissimus which was originally produced by Albert Langen from April 1896 to 1967 (no issues were published between 1944-1954). I was fortunate and found a database with full text high quality image scans of the magazine in digital format on a German archival website at http://simplicissimus.info/ . To date the website has all extant issues from 1896 to 1944 uploaded. This magazine was well known for pushing the envelope with its subject matter. However, by the time World War II came into effect most of the production team had fled the country or been imprisoned and those that were left, namely Erich Schilling and Wilhelm Schulz, converted the magazine into a pro-Nazi war propaganda organ. As far as I am aware, there are no English translations for a majority of these images, and so I put my rusty German skills to use translating one for this post.
The political cartoon comes from August 18th 1943, issue 33 of the Simplicissimus magazine (Issue 33 relates to pages 437-448). A pdf version including the corresponding pages that were bundled into the edition with this cartoon can be found here: http://simplicissimus.info/uploads/tx_lombkswjournaldb/pdf/1/48/48_33.pdf I will post the image in question below on my blog, but for those who wish to use the archive’s viewer please go here: http://dfg-viewer.de/show/?set[mets]=http%3A%2F%2Fweb2.6893-2.whserv.de%2Fsimpl_local%2Fcurrent%2Findex.php%3Fid%3D28%26tx_lombkswjournaldb_pi10%5Bidentifier%5D%3D2385
Translated text: “The path towards victory”
(What looks to be the Italian line at the bottom seems to be saying the same as the German at the top…but I can’t be 100% sure as I don’t speaking that language. But the gambled stuff Google translate gave me seems to correspond to the same meaning)
In this cartoon we have two men sitting on top of a rabid bear with guns under their feet attacking a skeleton clad in red that is hold a red bloodied laurel while standing atop a burning globe that is racing from the light towards the darkness. Wow, that is going on here, the viewer may ponder.
First of all, there are several things that pop out about this image and what it seems to be representing. Going off the clothing, the two men sitting on the bear represent Britain (in red) and the USA (in blue). They are shown unflatteringly as old men, rushing forward with the power of the bear, and not their own power, and so focused on the bloody laurel that their hats are lost in the dash.
The rabid bear’s implied identity, as seen from the star, is Russia. Many of the German cartoons I glanced from 1942 onwards preferred to show Russia in this form. There are several reasons for this I can think of. An important fact to remember is that after 1941 Russia was an enemy of Germany and no longer its ally. One of the books we read for this week, believe it was the Roeder Jr. book The Censored War, astutely noted that cartoons showing enemies to the United States, Esp from cultures that were viewed as far removed (such as the Japanese), often portrayed them as subhuman using animal bodies and features in place of human ones. It seems the Germans as well used this feature in their visual products of propaganda. It is likely that the Germans did not viewed the Russians as having a culture far removed, like with the American portrayal of Japanese during the war, but that the Germans were trying to dispel earlier favorable portrayals, from back when the two nations were still allied, and so took to using harsher visual means when it came to dealing with Russia in order to distance themselves. The fact that the bear is the one being ridden is yet another jab at the allied nations, on several levels.
The way the lighting is in this picture as well as the grim imagery, like the guns below, surrounding the 4 main “people (and bear)” in cartoon suggests that the path to victory is also leading, paradoxically, to destruction and defeat. Victory for the allies would be victory over Germany—and so the skeleton could symbolize both the concept of victory, or more likely Germany itself (while the laurel is victory’s representation). In other words, the path towards victory, this implies, would be the path towards destruction for all sides involved. This is what puzzled me: Why was Germany starting to show such negative and grim cartoons in relation to themselves when earlier they had shown much more confidant propaganda? A dive into the context of the war surrounding this cartoon’s creation date helped shed some light on the matter. By later July and early August of 1943 things were not looking bright for the Germans. By early August of 1943 Germany had to concede defeat and withdraw from Sicily (this occurred around the 12th, roughly 6 days before the cartoon appeared). The Germans not only had an withdraw on their hands but several key defeats in the Pacific as well. Not to mention that renewed challenges by the Kreisau Circle that occurred about this same time, hinting at some internal division that continued to persist. So perhaps this cartoon is not only an attack on the allied nations but also a call to gain resolve and fight on for the German people.
Katelyn Shaver's Blog 
Yeah using the fake tanks, vehicles, structures, etc. was a tactic used multiple times in WWII, but especially in prep for D-Day in order to throw off the enemy and then hit them from a different direction. They were even used sometimes in hopes that the Germans would divert their troops to the fake battlefield and then the Allies could strike elsewhere with less resistance. The Allies would even send out messages for the Germans to intercept to insure that they showed up to the fake battlefield.