After card eighteen the compositions of the Horrors of War cards seemed to open up and grow less crowded. In addition, the subject matter expanded from the Sino-Japanese War to the Spanish Civil War that began in July of 1936 and to the October 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Sino-Japanese war cards continued to be clearly anti-Japanese. They called the Japanese “Japs” and dwelled on their brutality. Indeed, they were so vigorously anti-Japanese that some members of Congress complained and accused GUM, INC., Phila. Pa. of conducting ”Bubblegum Diplomacy.”
Although card 47 shows a “fierce Wallega tribesman” stabbing an Italian aviator dressed in a white linen suit through the heart with a spear, the Ethiopian war cards were generally pro-Ethiopia and anti-Mussolini. That was the way most of America felt.
The early Spanish Civil War cards were ambiguous. The newly elected Popular Front government was dominated by socialists and communists. Many of their supporters were fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-Monarchist. Card number nineteen, the first to touch on the war in Spain showed the Socialist Assault Guard killing mourners at the funeral of Calvo Sotelo, a university professor, ex-cabinet minister and leading member of the Falange and Spanish Renewal Movement. Considered a right-winger, he’d been falsely arrested and taken from his home and family in the middle of the night and beaten to death by Assault Guards.
That murder and subsequent killings at his funeral were a precipitating cause of the rebellion led by Francisco Franco, a Spanish general at the head of the Spanish forces in Morocco. Assisted by German and Italian armaments, Franco invaded mainland Spain and defeated the government in an extremely brutal civil war. The war lasted two years and turned into a dress rehearsal for World War II in that Italy and Germany assisted Franco while Russia and many individual Americans, British and French fought against Franco in an International Brigade.
Three thousand Americans formed themselves into the Lincoln Brigade and went to Spain to join the fight against fascism. Two thirds were members of the U.S. Communist Party and two years later many of them proved more pro-communist than anti-fascist when they supported Stalin after he and Hitler signed Soviet-German Anti-aggression pact. Poorly trained and armed, a thousand members of the Lincoln Brigade were killed in Spain.
In the earliest numbers in the series, the sympathy of the cards leaned toward Franco’s forces. They were called the “Insurgents,” while the Popular Front forces were called “Leftists.” Card forty-two chides the burning of Madrid’s Cathedral by Leftists and reports the destruction of one hundred seventy-one churches and the damaging of two hundred fifty-one more. As the war continued, however, German and Italian weapons became more of a factor, particularly the airplanes used in bombings of civilian populations in Guernica, Barcelona and Madrid. Gradually, the cards turn more sympathetic to the government forces and begin calling them Loyalists and Republicans. Franco’s forces come to be called Rebels and fascists. Most Americans sympathized with the Loyalists and many contributed money or clothing to their cause.
As the card numbers mounted toward the originally planned two hundred forty the back of the cards announce that a second series on its way. The second series begins with card 241, first in a group of cards depicting a series of skirmishes between Japan and Soviet Russia along the Manchukuo-Siberian border during July and August 1938.
Card 274, one of the last in the second series shows the bombing of the Ramblas de las Floras in Barcelona. The description reads, “Note the flowers and shrubbery being torn up by shrapnel as shoppers were killed, children annihilated.” Card 276, the last dealing with the war in Spain, describes “savage attacks” by Insurgents on civilians fleeing along the Ebro in the rain. Overhead, heavy bombers are shown bombing and machine-gunning civilians while a father digs a roadside grave. “His family gathers around the new made grave which contains the un-coffined body of their crippled grandmother who was killed by shrapnel. Note the injured children and the elderly victim’s crutches now awaiting new users!” Obviously the cards’ sympathies have changed.
Horrors of War Cards came out at a time when communism and fascism were thought to be polar opposites and when many Americans, British and French were fleeing to the one in order to avoid the other. Communist Russia and Fascist Nazi Germany signed their non-aggression pact in August 1939. The pact divided up Poland, Rumania, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania between them and, days later World War II began in Europe with the German and Soviet invasion of Poland.
It soon became clear that Communist Russia, Fascist Germany and Italy and Shinto Japan were more alikes than opposites. In all four countries, all political power--executive, legislative and judicial—and all economic and social power were in the hands of a small group at the top. Below them, everyone else was a slave. After the signing of the pact, people recalled that Hitler and Mussolini had been heads of socialist parties before they became fascists, and many long-time communists recognized that no one fulfilled the qualifications of a fascist better than Chief Communist Josef Stalin.
The last few cards in the series go beyond the originally planned two hundred eighty. One shows a visit to the Czech border by Hitler. Another shows French troops conducting maneuvers in reaction to the two-million-man German army. A third depicts rioting in the Sudetenland after the Anschluss of Austria into Germany left Czechoslovakia surrounded on three sides by German territory. Another shows Chamberlain visiting Hitler in Berchtesgaden and deciding that the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia ought to be ceded to Germany in the interests of peace.
Card 287 shows Premier Milan Hodza of Czechoslovakia meeting with two Czech generals. He has declared he will fight rather than accept a plebiscite in Sudentenland that would allow part of his country to transfer itself to German rule. The Czechs have a crack army of two hundred thousand, reserve forces of a million eight hundred thousand. The Skoda armament and munitions works, a close rival of the Krupp Works of Germany are in Czechoslovakia. Outside the window of the room in which the three men are speaking, the Czech army can be seen marching with Skoda cannon. At the bottom of the card, the last sentence is in parentheses. (On September 22nd Premier Hodza resigned.)
On September 29th France, England, Italy and Germany met in Munich to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. In March of 1939 Hitler’s forces occupied all of Czechoslovakia. The crack Czech army was dissolved. The Skoda Works became part of Germany’s armament industry. The Czechs became German slaves, all in the interests of peace in Europe.
At the same time, thousands of miles away and across the Atlantic Ocean, kids on the upper west side of Manhattan were pitching cards depicting these and other gruesome scenes against the walls of apartment buildings. Or we stood in groups of three, holding the cards waist high and flipping them so that they turned over and over before landing on the sidewalk. If two landed picture side down and one picture side up, the kid whose card landed picture side up won the other two. He knelt picked up all three cards and we flipped again. It wasn’t that we were heartless or insensitive. Nor were we completely ignorant. It was that it was all so very far away. As we pitched Horrors of War cards against the wall in 1938 and 1939, matched them against one another, traded them away, none of us imagined that any of the horrors they depicted and described would ever have any effect upon any of us.
To be continued
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