The cartoons were for military use only and considered classified at the time. Studios, and most were directed by animation industry giants Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. Private Snafu was produced by Warner Bros. Seuss” Geisel, and voiced by Mel Blanc, who was already famous for his vocalization of Bugs Bunny. Most of the four minute shorts were written by Theodor “Dr. To the GI audience, SNAFU was also a military slang acronym for: Situation Normal All Fouled Up. Director Frank Capra, chairman of the US Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit, came up with the title character, Private Snafu, a bumbling recruit who did everything wrong. To educate young soldiers with minimal formal education on military subjects and to improve morale, a series of cartoons were created by the US War Department. In most cases, the American fighting man was just a teenager who had likely never ventured more than 100 miles from their birthplace before the service. On the other end of the spectrum were the college graduates, who made up only three percent of the army’s ranks.įor high school-aged Americans at the time, military service was a foregone conclusion. One army psychiatrist estimated the mental age of the average soldier to be between 13 and 14 years of age. Of those accepted for military service, 70 percent had dropped out of school, 500,000 had less than a fourth grade education, and 4.4 million had less than an eighth grade education. After the nation was at war, standards for induction into the military were relaxed and rejection rates dropped to 29 percent for the duration. Men were conscripted into military service beginning in 1940, however, 50 percent of men reporting for induction were rejected for military service due to physical or mental deficiencies. Building a military large enough to fight a two ocean war was one big hurdle to overcome. The WWII generation was faced with a set of challenges that we can hardly wrap our minds around today.
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