The pastel-colored scenes on the front had a yellowish tint and depicted so much death and violence some parents forbade their children to buy them. The first twenty in the series were as lacking in perspective and as packed with figures and incident as a pre-Giotto narrative painting.
‘To know the HORRORS OF WAR is to want PEACE,” it said on the back of every gory card. “This is one of a series of 240 Picture Cards. Save to get them all. Pictures and Text Copyright 1938, GUM INC. Phila. Pa.”
These were the famous two-and-a-half by three-and-an-eighth inch HORRORS OF WAR cards that came in penny packages of pink bubble gum in the late 1930s and early forties. Today they’re sold for hundreds, even thousands of dollars and though we all had cigar boxes full, none of us kept any.
The first in the series described and pictured the Japanese attack on the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July 1937, generally considered the start of the second Sino-Japanese War. “There the Chinese and Japanese met for some of the bloodiest fighting of the war,” it said on the back of the card. “Automatic rifles were brought into action behind sandbags. Snipers got to work…The troops of the Mikado returned fire and hand grenades… Some met horrible deaths at the point of the bayonet. Meanwhile the Japanese were being reinforced by troop trains from Manchukuo.”
On the front of the card, at the bottom of the picture plane, a Japanese soldier is firing his rifle over some sandbags into the back of a Chinese soldier. A second is plunging his bayonet into the same Chinese soldier’s chest. Higher in the picture plane (farther away) other Japanese soldiers brandish rifles and broadswords while hand grenades explode overhead. Highest in the picture plane (farthest away), a locomotive puffs smoke and draws passenger cars of reinforcements from Manchukuo; all this on a single two-and-a-half by-three inch card.
Card number eighteen showed the Japanese Air Force bombing the Sisters of Charity orphanage near Shanghai. According to the card, the pilots bombed the orphanage again and again. The sisters took the children to an emergency shelter, but one of the pilots intentionally bombed the emergency shelter killing twenty-six girls between the ages of nine and fifteen. Another bombed the nursery, killing sixty infants.
Other cards showed the sinking of the gunboat U.S.S. Panay in the Yangtze River near Nanking and the strafing of its escaping lifeboats by the Japanese Air Force. Still others showed bloody street fighting in Shanghai and scenes of the rape of China’s ancient walled capital of Nanking where the new Commander of the Nipponese Army, Prince Asaka, ordered all captives killed. According to reports by the Nazi German military attache’ and others, three hundred thousand surrendering soldiers and civilians were massacred and tens of thousands of women and girls as young as seven were gang-raped by roving bands of Japanese soldiers. Babies were tossed into the air and caught on bayonets as Japanese forces made a systematic effort to spread terror. Their plan was to occupy the eastern coast of China and roll westward, conquering China first, then India, Europe and the rest of the world.
The U.S. Government was aware of the Sino-Japanese War, but did not consider it a major threat to American interests. The U.S. had had a position in the Philippine Islands since the Spanish American War and since 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft negotiated the Portsmouth Treaty following the Russo- Japanese War. In 1934, Congress granted commonwealth status to the Philippines with the promise of full independence in 1946, and President Franklin Roosevelt sent General Douglas MacArthur, accompanied by Major Dwight Eisenhower, to the islands as Military Advisor to President Quezon.
MacArthur saw the Philippines as a potential “Pacific Switzerland” that could control Japanese shipping lanes through the South China Sea and to what were then the Dutch East Indies, (now Indonesia) and all South Asia. He, Eisenhower and their staff undertook development of a ten-year-plan that would make the Philippines invulnerable to attack from Japan or other quarters.
The Horrors of War Cards foresaw a possible air attack on America from Asia, Europe or Latin America. Card forty-nine of the series illustrates the hypothetical bombing of a school building somewhere in America. Teachers hug frightened children and lead them from the burning building. Other children leap from second floor windows as twin-engined bombers dive low to attack. “This is not an exaggeration as to what we could expect if America should be attacked by air,” reads the description on the back of the card. “Happy youngsters at play in the schoolyard, surprised by cruel enemy bombers! Before the eyes of horrified teachers the school building totters and crumbles, countless little ones are slain! When the rain of death is ended, a smear of gore and of bones is all that remains of what was once a playful band of children…the hope of a nation….No longer is distance a safeguard. Planes have already demonstrated their ability to fly from Europe. Experiments in air travel from the Orient have proved only too successful South American interests bring the chances even closer, and Mexico is just across the border!”
After card forty-nine the tagline on the back changes from “This is one of a series of 240 picture cards,” to “This is one of a series of True Stories of Modern Warfare.” The new cards still urged you to, “Save to get them all.”
The reaction? There were no congressional investigations of Gum, Inc of Phila. Pa.. The society for prevention of mental cruelty to children never picketed Ma’s Junk Shop or any of the other shops that sold the cards. People were left to take care of themselves back in those days.
What about the children? We played matching games with the cards and pitched them against walls, exactly as we did with Play Ball cards. In pitching cards you stood in the gutter at the edge of the curb and sailed a card toward the wall of the apartment building at the far edge of the sidewalk. You pitched one or more cards per round against one or several other kids. The card that landed closest to the wall won all the other cards.
In addition to pitching or matching the cards, we traded them. Horrors of War cards held an eerie fascination for me; I can picture them still today. Eeriest of all was number eighty-eight, which showed a box that a terrorist had just delivered to the desk of the editor of the American-owned Shanghai Evening Post. The message inside the box was meant to warn the editor of the penalties that lay in store for publishers of anti-Japanese stories. In the scene on the front of the card, the box lay open on the editor’s desk. Its contents had tumbled out and the editors stood with hands thrown high in dismay and horror. The box had been filled with over a dozen severed hands. The hands had spilled out of the box onto the editor’s desktop where they lay in a pool of blood.
I had to trade two other cards and a piece of bubble gum to get number eighty-eight. It’s gone now. My mother probably threw it out one of the days she picked to clean out my closet. Or maybe my little brother attached it to his bicycle so the spokes would make a motorcycle sound as he rode down Eighty-Eighth Street. If I still had it, it might be worth as much as my car.
oldtimewriter.com
I wonder why I don't remember those cards? Maybe my mother was one of those that forbade us to buy them. Thank you for such an interesting post. I do remember that we got cards in gum packages but I can't remember what any of the were. The Dixie Cups of ice cream that had pics of movie stars inside the lids are the only thing I remember collecting.
To platform5
I hadn't remembered the movie star pictures until you just reminded me. I think I remember a covering between the picture and the ice cream you licked free of ice cream, and peeled off and I clearly remember the flat wooden spoons in a band-aid type of envelope that came with each Dixie. The ice cream was half chocolate and half vanilla and weren't the cups themselves red, white and blue?
Thanks for reminding me of one more forgotten detail that led to remembering several others.
Herb L
oldtimewriter.com
Herb- It seems to me that the earlier Dixie cups with ice cream were white background with black writing but I may thinking of the black and white photos that had the names of the star written on it. I don't remember a covering on the lid between, but there must have been. There is a story about my childhood and those movie star photo lids that I am ashamed to tell, but I may just post it one day.
