Content note: Text uses the wartime term 'Japs' and refers to 'the Germans or Japs', printed as published. This object is shown as it was published. Why
If you ask me, it's HOME they're fighting for!
Magazine advertisement sheet: a white-haired woman in a lace collar knits, over a quoted statement from a grandmother who says her grandson is fighting to come back home. Below it the Crosley company describes its switch from radios and appliances to military electronics. The plain-folks voice of a grandmother lends the firm's war work a domestic warmth.
Propaganda techniques used in this advertisement
- Date
- 1943
- Period
- Second World War
- Made by
- The Crosley Corporation (Cincinnati, Ohio, and Richmond, Indiana); artist initialled C K
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Advertisement
- Issuer type
- Corporation
- Regime
- Roosevelt Administration
- Leader
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Reassure
- Themes
- Home front, War and the military, Economy and finance
- Event
- World War II
- Regime
- Roosevelt administration
- Leader
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, retrieved October 4, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. government work)
The Crosley Corporation. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 44, 44-PA-1061 (NAID 514585).
Text on the object
This advertisement appears in the SATURDAY EVENING POST issue of July 10. [signature: C K] "If you ask me, it's HOME they're fighting for!" "You can take my word for it—and this is the fourth war I've lived through. I was just running around, knee-high to a tad-pole, when my father came home in '65. But I remember he said then what my husband said in '98 and what my boy said in '18. All three of them expressed it different ways, but what they meant was, 'Thank God our home is still the way it was when I went away!' "And now it's my grand-son's turn and when he's out there waiting under a tropical moon I know what he's thinking. He's thinking about getting back HOME and he's fighting so that it will be just like it was when he left it—with no foot-prints of the Germans or Japs around his front door!" For a long while, "Crosley" has been a familiar name in America's homes. It has been part of happy family groups listening to the radio or playing phonograph records. It has found a place in women's workday lives—giving them welcome, drudgery-saving help with electric refrigerators, efficient gas and electric ranges, washers, ironers, and other useful household appliances. But today, these Crosley peacetime products have been set aside. In place of home radios and phonograph combinations, military radios, radar and electronic devices for war purposes are flowing from Crosley production lines. In place of household appliances such as refrigerators, the larger, heavier, more complex pieces of apparatus that companies such as Crosley can produce are being sent in war-winning quantities to our fighting men. The pace and demands of War have stimulated new inventions and the manufacture of new products with new materials. Crosley, when Peace comes, will make even finer radios, refrigerators with the patented Shelvador and other appliances for the home, and the Crosley Car for civilian use. CROSLEY THE CROSLEY CORPORATION • CINCINNATI, OHIO AND RICHMOND, IND. Peacetime Manufacturers of Radios, Refrigerators, Household Appliances, and the Crosley Car HOME OF WLW, "THE NATION'S STATION" More than 8,000 loyal men and women at Crosley have been awarded the 10% War Bond Flag as a symbol that their savings, as well as their skilled hands, are working for victory.
