Content note: Japanese wartime leaflet for Allied troops using the wording 'ugly-looking cripples' and a suggestive scene, shown as issued. This object is shown as it was published. Why
Japanese leaflet in English, "What's the use of thinking of those ugly-looking cripples" (Pacific, c. 1942)
Colour leaflet: a couple in evening dress, with three bandaged, helmeted soldiers drawn as ghostly faces above them. Text: 'Aw! Heck! What's the use of thinking of those ugly-looking cripples, you're sound and I'm sound, so let's' (trailing off). The tell: it stages a woman at home being urged to forget wounded men, playing on a soldier's fear of being replaced; the soldiers' nationality is not stated and no issuer is named.
Propaganda techniques used in this leaflet
- Date
- 1942
- Period
- Second World War
- Made by
- Empire of Japan (Japanese military psychological-warfare leaflet; no issuer named on the leaflet)
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Theme, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- East Asia
- Country
- Empire of Japan
- Medium
- Leaflet
- Issuer type
- Military
- Regime
- Showa Japan
- Leader
- Hideki Tojo
- Audience
- Enemy forces
- Purpose
- Mobilize or secure compliance
- Theme
- War and the military
- Event
- World War II
- Leader
- Hideki Tōjō
- Source
- Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons, retrieved October 11, 2026
- Rights
- Openly licensed (CC BY 2.0, per Wikimedia Commons; Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections)
Japanese propaganda, circa 1942, Propaganda Collection (COLL/3541), Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections, Quantico, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Text on the object
Original (English) · read from the image, not independently checked
Aw! Heck! What's the use of thinking of those ugly-looking cripples, you're sound and I'm sound, so let's ...................
Read from the 960 px rendering; the hand-lettering is clear. The sentence is left unfinished on the leaflet; the dots are as printed.
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