Dick Tracy and World War II

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2013, Volume 12, Issue 2
https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2013/weigel.htm

 

Richard D. Weigel
Western Kentucky University


The background of the Second World War is reflected through Chester Gould’s popular comic strip Dick Tracy in both periodic references and in two major storylines. The occasional allusions to conditions on the homefront are primarily to gasoline and rubber shortages and rationing, to labor displacements caused by the war, including the shifting of traditional male jobs to women, to the need for draft cards and for informing the draft board of address changes, to civilian preparation to detect potential saboteurs and enemy sympathizers among them and to prepare for possible attacks, and to individuals in the military, including both a war hero and a Navy deserter, and Tracy’s girlfriend Tess Trueheart as a WAC.
        
Cartoonist Chester Gould may have been somewhat slow to integrate themes of war and the homefront into his detective comic strip, but he did include several references to these themes over the course of the war, and he created two classic, stereotypical Nazi characters in Pruneface (Boche) and the Brow, and a third, in an ancillary role, in Mrs. Pruneface.
        
Max Allan Collins points out that Gould worked on his strip “months ahead” and this may explain the delay in incorporating war-related themes into Dick Tracy (cited in Gould 7.20). In a New York Times editorial on December 29, 1941, titled “Doing Without,” rationing of new tires was recognized as “causing hardship at first, but it is a necessary price of victory.” Gould’s first reference to the wartime economic situation comes on March 8, 1942, when Tracy notices that B-B Eyes’s car has new tires. He says, “And new tires are not easy to get.” B-B Eyes and his gang are bootlegging tires and the detective begins to track them down by posing as a “customer” needing new tires. On March 11, Tracy says to the first tire salesman he approaches: “Where can a fellow pick up a...couple of tires without a priorities order?” The man angrily threatens to call a cop and dismisses Tracy’s request saying that would be “breaking the law,” and he replies patriotically: “There’s a WAR on and it’s fellows like you we have got to keep our eyes on.” This is the first “citizen alert” Gould includes in the strip, sending the message to his many readers that everyone needs to be on constant watch and that some among them may secretly be helping the enemy.

After B-B Eyes and his boys meet their appropriate end, Gould introduces the strange story of the great actor Yollman, his understudy the jealous Van Dyke, and Yollman’s wife, who is loved by both men and waivers between them. When Yollman escapes to a small town, thinking that he has killed his rival, he sees some young people putting up a sign to advertise their class play. In the strip of May 24, 1942, they tell Yollman: “Our dramatic coach enlisted last week.” Yollman then offers to help them prepare for the play. In several follow-up strips, there are references (May 28-31; June 1, 6, and 7) to Yollman’s draft registration card, which is lost and later recovered. The enlistment of civilians who leave their jobs at home and the increasing role of local draft boards were certainly familiar themes in this period.

In the strips starting on July 8, 1942, Gould introduces a young lady called Frizzletop who has recently returned from the war zone in the Far East. She had been “an army nurse in the Philippines at the start of the war.” She was engaged to a soldier named John, who was stationed at Manila, but who was badly wounded and later died during an air raid by “the Japs.” Frizzletop had lost an arm in this bombing and she fled to Australia, Africa, and finally America. Her mission is to inform John’s brother, Tiger Lilly, who is coincidentally the criminal Tracy is tracking down, of John’s death. When the detective refers with sympathy to Frizzletop’s disability, she says, “I can take it! Just as thousands of others can take it.” Here Gould first makes an attempt to bolster the morale of American servicemen, but it is also interesting that he chooses to feature a woman as a casualty of the war, along with her dead husband. Frizzletop then gets Tiger Lilly’s address from Draft Board No. 2 after stating the following: “Draft registrants have to notify their draft boards when they move.” It is humorous of course that even a criminal such as Tiger Lilly would comply with that demand. When she gets to Tiger’s “hideout” with the draft board’s help, she reveals to his henchmen when they ask her if she is an M.P. (Military Police) that she is not, but she nursed “plenty of M.P’s" (July 15). On July 18, she adds: “The Draft Board told me he (Tiger) was here and they know.” The strip of July 19, 1942, has Frizzletop informing Tiger Lilly of his brother’s death. She says, “The Japs killed him – in an air raid.” On the same day, Tracy reemphasizes the importance of the Draft Board: “Registrants have to keep the Board posted on where they are.”

On September 20 and 21, 1942, Gould reintroduces the rubber shortage theme when Tracy is thankful that he had a rubber band that saved him in an emergency, and he comments that he had forgotten to turn it in during the rubber drive. A few weeks later, on October 4, Gould raises the issue of poison gas, a topic he had first addressed in 1938 (Roberts 94). The fear of poison gas, either in a war situation or used against civilian populations, was very real and a regular theme in newspaper articles (see “What to Do”; Kearney). Russia had accused Germany of using poison gas against them, but Hitler denied it (“Use of Poison Gas”). Gould has Tracy and Junior discover a laboratory, a dead body, and the smell of fumes. In the October 4 strip, Frizzletop says: “From my war training I can tell that’s a poison gas.” The dead man turns out to be George Bullet, Chief of the County Highway Police. A week later Tracy is talking with the Chief’s son, Cal, and tells him: “Your father was on the trail of someone who was producing a poison gas – probably for the enemy.” Cal replies, “Father was a loyal patriot. I can understand his action.”

However, it turns out that Cal had killed his father after the laboratory was uncovered and that Cal was working to create a poison gas for a villain called Prune Face. On October 18, Cal refers to his boss as "Boche," a derogatory French term for Germans, particularly during the period of the two world wars. On October 23, Prune Face is shown, his face shriveled with vertical lines, reporting on the phone and asking that “Number 20” be informed Cal’s experiments would begin that night. Cal is pleased with his new laboratory, and he even has a gas mask. On October 25, he says to himself: “This deadly gas will be dispensed from airplanes in the form of mist. One drop on the skin – instant death. Now for my final tests.” The next day’s strip shows Cal adding more chlorine to his concoction. On October 30, Frizzletop says: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” This line was a classic typing exercise, but it also underscores the need for all men to serve in some capacity.

 

 

Prune Face, a.k.a. Boche

© Tribune Content Agency, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.




In the November 1 strip, Prune Face says: “A gas to be used purely on civilians. Dispensed over streets, sports stadiums and public places – to blast morale and create panic. This boy, Cal, is a genius and a Quisling of the first water – but greedy, both for money and for power.” Vidkun Quisling, of course, was the Norwegian leader who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers and whose name soon became a word in numerous languages. The cartoonist’s message is clear: Poison gas is a real threat to American cities and we must all, if we can’t volunteer to serve, at least be active in looking for subversives among us, and those who work with them, who will stop at nothing to destroy us.

When Prune Face discovers in the November 5 strip that Cal has led Tracy and his men to his hideout, he tells Cal: “You have violated the first rule of a good saboteur. You have brought us to the attention of the police.” The next day Cal explains to Boche why he is valuable: “Look! I brought samples of the perfected gas sealed in gelatin! Capsules for you to send your country for tests.” His arguments make no impression, and in the November 8 strip Cal is tied up and about to be killed by the fumes of his own gas. He confesses to Tracy through an air vent that he had killed his father for greed and says: “I had perfected a poison gas – I made a deal with the enemy for five hundred thousand dollars! – A deadly gas.” In the November 13-15 strips, Boche escapes in a helicopter he had stored for just such an emergency. He flies only two buildings away and lands on a hydraulic roof section that accepts the helicopter and then is covered by a tarpaulin. Controlling this roof is Gould’s only Japanese character from this period – a bespectacled little man named, appropriately, Togo, to associate him with the despised Prime Minister Tojo. Gould describes him as “the Jap accomplice.”

In the November 18-20 strips, a telephone lineman called to the first building is hit with the deadly gas. His face breaks out in blisters, and he coughs heavily. His colleague refers to the Civilian Defense lessons he had taken at the telephone company to become an Air Warden and confirms that his buddy has been gassed. The Air Warden recommends bathing the blisters in a soda solution and giving the man plenty of hot coffee. A few days later (November 25-28), Gould shows Togo calling Boche “Master,” and he has Boche refer to “little Togo” when he deserts him. When Togo realizes that Boche has abandoned him, he calls him “the dirty Aryan dog.”

When Boche, pretending to be a seminary student, rents a room in the Trueheart home, he sets up a “short-wave radio sending bug” with an aerial umbrella stuck out his window. He needs to contact his countrymen to inform them of his move. After contacting “Number 20,” he begins to check out the Seilla Company, a large manufacturing plant that had been converted to defense work and now makes parts for bomb sights (December 3-13). Boche photographs the plant with a miniature camera strapped to his leg. His plan is to send a fifty-pound drum of nitroglycerin on a monorail pulley car, attacking the plant from nearby railroad tracks. Mrs. Trueheart, who is proud that she “has her eyes open,” and Junior help Tracy foil the plot (December 17-27). On Christmas Day, Gould greets his readers and encourages them that “everything’s going to be all right.”

The cartoonist includes newspaper headlines announcing “Spy Sought Here” (December 27) and “Doctor Kidnapped by Saboteurs” (January 17, 1943), the latter referring to the physician who had set Boche’s broken leg and who was kidnapped by him and “Twenty” (December 17, 1942; January 17, 1943). Tracy enlists the help of the F.B.I. and the U.S. Post Office in looking for their hideout. When the police close in, “Twenty” starts to escape, saying: The Fatherland can’t lose us both,” but his secret passage is blocked by a police car, and when he returns, Boche kills him (January 23-26). When Tracy catches the dying Prune Face in the February 2, 1943, strip, he says: “Crime against nations or people always loses out in the end.”

Gould raises the labor displacement issue again when Frizzletop is planning to move to Texas to help her father run his ranch because "his help has all gone to war” (February 5). On February 7, Tracy meets Mrs. Potter who has a plan she is sure will be a direct help to the war effort. She wants to convert her mansion “into a nursery for small children whose parents work in defense plants.” To care for almost thirty children, Mrs. Potter needs a nurse, and Tracy convinces Frizzletop to accept the job. The cartoonist introduces Myrtle Wreath as a “women truck driver” with a small child, thus emphasizing that the labor shortage caused by the war also creates a gender shift in many professions previously viewed as exclusively for men. When Mrs. Potter accepts Myrtle’s child into her nursery, she says: “I think you women are doing a splendid thing in taking over essential jobs" (February 14) (see Kersten, cited in Gould 8.15).

When Myrtle’s son is kidnapped by his father and then lost in a snowstorm, Tracy finds him and, seeking shelter, sees an old newspaper headline (March 27-28) that brings to mind  Eddie Rickenbacker, the WWI pilot who had recently been stranded on a raft in the Pacific. The headline reads: “Dying of Hunger Rickenbacker and Crew Pray – Rains came and men catch bird for food” (“Rickenbacker Tells Story”). Gould’s message is to focus on what is most important, survival, and he encourages readers to keep trying no matter what the odds against them might seem to be.

In May and June of 1943, Gould introduces the story of piano player and orchestra leader 88 Keyes. He brings up the “severe labor shortage” again along with gas rationing (June 13). Keyes cheats a gas station attendant by giving him only one gas coupon, when six are required, and driving off (May 12). The cartoonist sets some of the action in an employment agency where 88 gets a farming job and is sent on the “fourth bus full of farmhands shipped out today” (May 31). Farmer George Wheaten is troubled by Keyes’s lack of farm skills and says: “If times weren’t so bad, I wouldn’t put up with help like you” (June 8). 88 decides to tear up all of his identification cards except his draft card, so no one will discover his true identity (June 10). He then runs off with the farmer’s daughter who stole her father’s car and “Pappy’s Gas Ration Book” (June 24). 88 stops at a gas station, and the daughter recognizes Red Bluff, a sailor who turns out to be a deserter sought by Naval Intelligence (June 27-28). He claims that he was sent home for “socking an officer.” Red teams up with 88, but he is soon killed because his status as a deserter makes it too "hot" to be with him.

In the July 17 strip, Tracy’s concern for “the gas situation” causes him to walk home in the rain in the middle of the night rather than calling a squad car when he is kidnapped by Mrs. Pruneface. She is a brutish giant who only wants revenge for her husband’s death and does not appear to be involved in his activity as an enemy agent. She carries a black snake whip, sits in a rocking chair knitting (reminding the readers of Madame Defarge), is addicted to homemade onion soup, and has a pet rat named Toodles. She explains that her skull-like face “got this way as I fled the Old Country through enemy lines in a Z4 tank with two soldiers. Someone hurled a bottle of gasoline” (August 1). She devises a torturous death for the detective, who is chained to the floor between two 100-pound blocks of ice with a large spike slowly descending into Tracy’s chest under the weight of an old refrigerator as the ice melts (August 2-16). This story generated such suspense that seven soldiers who had been deployed to Italy wrote to the New York Daily News asking what the resolution was (see Binder and Jaediker; Roberts 95, 97). After Tracy escapes, Mrs. Pruneface uses makeup and a wig to hide her ghastly appearance and is immediately hired as a chef at a fancy restaurant, “with help the way it is today” (August 26). Although she uses her husband’s connection with “Otto” from the “Old Country” to secure new rooms (August 19), she soon bludgeons her personal servant to death with a lamp for disobeying her orders (September 2-4). Mrs. Pruneface is a sadistically cruel and vindictive “beast,” but she is not also a foreign agent or saboteur.

In the strips of December 15-18, 1943, Gould introduces a war hero, Lieutenant Kirk Smith, who had been “set upon by a band of Japs while heading a landing party” and machine-gunned thirty of them. Tracy greets him as the “hero of New Guinea” and then learns that he is the brother of the criminal Laffy Smith, whom he wants to visit since he had been “sent to the U.S. for a rest.” (“British New Guinea"; “Roosevelt Cites Japanese Retreat”). On December 19, the war hero refers to his feat as “punctuating Japs with an Army typewriter.” The lieutenant does visit his dying brother, and he is given a reception by the mayor and paraded through the streets in an open car with a big sign saying “Welcome Pacific Hero,” but he then must “return to the battlefront to fight for his country and humanity” (December 19, 21). In the December 24 strip, Tess says: “It won’t really seem like Christmas, Dick, till everyone’s sons and brothers are back. And may that day come sooner than any of us suspect.” As Dick and Tess arrive at the Trueheart Mansion, a service flag is displayed with one star and the name of a serviceman, Ray. Because this strip was in black and white, it is not clear whether the flag represents the Gold Star Mothers who had lost a child in the conflict or the Blue Star Mothers, who had one in the service. Gould’s holiday message is as follows: “To all of our friends at home, and to all of our boys overseas, a merry, merry Christmas!”

As 1944 dawns, the cartoonist introduces one of his most popular criminals in Flattop. Jeff Kersten claims that the name comes from “U.S. Navy jargon for an aircraft carrier” (cited in Gould 9.7). Margie, who lives in the apartment below Flattop’s, plans to join the WACS and enter the Signal Corps Division. She practices her skills using a telegrapher’s sending key and dry cell (January 6, 8, 1944). Her mother is very proud that her little girl is going to be a WAC. When Flattop kidnaps Tracy and holds him to extort more money from the men paying him to kill the detective, Tracy taps out a message in Morse Code that Margie relays to the police who free him (January 9-11). Flattop next secures a room from Mrs. Jenkins, whose husband is dead and who works at a war plant, the Acme Foundry, in the night shift (January 23, 28; February 1). In March comic strips, Flattop discovers war bonds in the coat of a man he has killed. One of these is lost out the window, and it helps identify where he is hiding out (March 5-8, 10, 12, 1944). Kersten points out that Chester Gould entertained more than 5,000 sailors at the Great Lakes Naval Station  and was very supportive of War Bond Drives (cited in Gould 7.13). He even met with “soldiers recovering in the hospital at Camp Grant” (cited in Gould 8.15).

In May, the cartoonist introduces the Navy Coastal Patrol and its Captain Bowline who assists Tracy in tracking down Flattop (May 2-3, 7, 17-18, 1944). On May 18, Tracy expresses his gratitude to the Captain for their cooperation with the police that resulted in finding Flattop’s body, and Captain Bowline tells Tracy he would make a “swell Navy man.” In the May 21 strip, Captain Bowline, citing the detective’s patriotism, valor, fidelity, and abilities,” appoints Tracy as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve so that he can assist in the Office of Naval Intelligence branch when the occasion may arise. The next day, Bowline informs Chief Brandon that Tracy “has been commissioned Lieutenant, Senior Grade, in the Naval Intelligence,” but “it won’t interfere with his regular work.”

Gould’s next storyline involves the Summer Sisters, who tell Tracy they are trying to meet their Navy brother at the Service Center, but are lost, when they are actually trying to pick Tracy’s pocket (May 21). After they escape and rent a room, it turns out that they are lodged adjacent to a man who is observing the harbor with field glasses and is the subject of Tracy’s first Naval Intelligence assignment (June 9-10). Although the suspect puts his field glasses on the Summer Sisters’ windowsill to escape detection, he is arrested and turns out to be Ship Spotter 26, who works for one of Gould’s greatest characters, the Brow (June 13-14). Tracy and Naval Intelligence interrogate their captive and discover through fingerprints that he is Noffel, likely another German, who had been convicted of espionage in World War I and had entered the U.S. illegally in 1938 (June 15).

 

 

The Brow, after breaking the wrist of each Summer Sister

© Tribune Content Agency, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.

 


Brow, whose forehead is furrowed with several horizontal ridges, is shown reporting ship movements through a microphone to his superiors: “Ship 29 on chart departed N.E. toward Newfoundland 12:00A.M. Convoy forming off Cape Ness. That is all – Brow” (June 17). Agent 12 brings the field glasses and the Summer Sisters to Brow, and he hires them to perform “ship spotting and other duties.” To demonstrate the cruelty of this German agent, Gould has Brow “brand” the Summer Sisters as belonging to him by breaking one of each sister’s wrists (June 25). On the same day, Brow is shown reporting the following: “Ship 26 loaded with ammunition headed N.E. to join convoy off Cape Sable. Ship 4 on Chart still in port – Brow.” Although Cape Ness appears to have been fabricated, Cape Sable is an island off Nova Scotia and suggests that Brow is reporting on ships headed across the Atlantic.

Brow next tells the Summer Sisters that he will use them to pick up code messages from his operatives, but that when one is out on an errand the other will be sitting on his spike machine with her leg locked between rows of spikes that will pierce her flesh if her sister does not return in the exact number of minutes allocated (June 29-July 1). May Summer is sent to a doctor’s office, also overlooking the harbor, and the doctor bandages her broken wrist, inserts his coded message inside, and seals the bandage with wax. June Summer is already in some pain when May returns one minute late (July 2). The next day June Summer is sent out to retrieve a sealed envelope from “a man in a janitor’s uniform, while June suffers in the spike machine” (July 6). Although the Summer Sisters briefly turn the tables on the Brow and he even suffers the torture of his own machine, Brow has Doc knock their car into the lagoon and they drown. Just as with the poison gas used earlier by Boche, the brutality demonstrated by Brow in breaking the girls’ wrists and torturing them with an infernal machine suits the public’s image of what the Nazis, and particularly the Gestapo, were practicing in Europe during the war (see “Catholic Leader”; “German Torture"; “Nazis’ Torture Orgies”).

In August of 1944, Tess Trueheart is shown in a WAC uniform, and her friend Jean tells her how “becoming” it looks. Tess is on furlough after serving as a WAC for three months, and she is soon on a beach with her friends saying: “How peaceful and relaxing it is to be a civilian!” and "It’s wonderful to be able to sleep till you’re good and ready to get up” (August 4-6). However, Tess doesn’t notice when twelve “B” gas coupons blow out of her handbag and land where the Brow is lying on the beach with his face covered by a towel. He contacts “Doc,” who has to steal Tess’s license plate, so the two men can get out of town using the matching gas coupons (August 6-12). The coupons must have authorized five gallons each because Brow calculates that sixty gallons of gas will take them “at least 7 or 8 hundred miles.” In his September 24 strip, Gould brings Brow’s career of evil to a very dramatic and appropriate end. Having captured Brow and brought him to the Emergency Room ward on the eighth floor of the jail, Tracy is stunned when Gravel Gertie grabs a policeman’s revolver and tosses it to the Brow. As Brow fumbles for the safety release, Tracy instinctively grabs an inkwell from the desk and hits Brow on the head, knocking him out the window. Beneath the window is a scene familiar to many American towns in this period, a park with an American flag and “a plaque with names of the boys in service.” Brow falls directly on the flagpole and Gould states: “Thus. The Brow, foreign agent and espionage leader, lies impaled by a pole bearing the flag of the country he tried to harm.”

In the final year of the war, references to the war or the home front support are less frequent. In March of 1945, Measles finds a hideout with a family living in a boxcar shack near the railroad tracks. When the mother says they don’t have enough ration points to continue feeding an extra person, Measles gives her his dead mother’s Ration Book and cash (March 23-24), and she asks her husband to stop at the store and get meat. Shortages and rationing was a recurring theme for the cartoonist. In May when Breathless Mahoney and her mother go to the safe deposit vaults to retrieve Shaky’s money, the bank representative sees Mrs. Mahoney’s knitting bag and comments on her knitting (May 25). She replies: “Oh, yes indeed! Sweaters, helmets, sox. I try to do my part.” She pretends to support the war effort, and perhaps she does because she did have some knitting, but in this case she was using the bag to conceal cash.

In May and June of 1945, the cartoonist inserts a Mighty 7th War Loan poster into his strip several times (May 28-29; June 1, 15-16, and 28, 1945). The inclusion of this poster complements Gould’s involvement over the war years in supporting these war loan drives. As the war was wrapping up in August, the cartoonist raises the gasoline rationing one last time when Breathless Mahoney offers a couple of teenagers a hundred dollars to drive her in their jalopy to the city, almost fifty miles away. One comments that the tires are not good for such a distance, but money talks. He also says that he “could siphon some gas out of [his] old man’s car” (August 5-6). When Breathless stiffs the boys and escapes, Tracy gives them five dollars each and states: “The Ration Board has allowed you enough gas to go back home” (August 19). When Breathless uses her money to rent a room and the tenant is evicted for being two weeks behind in rent, he complains to the landlady and says: “I’ll see the O.P.A. about this” (August 14). On August 17, he tells his buddy about the eviction and says: “I think I should go to the O.P.A. or something.” In both cases, he appears to be referring to the Office of Price Administration, whose regional boards controlled prices on food and various other items for sale and also kept an eye on rent control (“OPA Will Continue Control”).  In one final reference to the wartime shortage of labor, the cartoonist shows the Bird Club, with a Door Man Wanted sign out front and has B.O. Plenty hired because “Doormen are hard to get”  (August 22-24).

Jeff Kersten suggests that Vitamin Flintheart is a “combined caricature of...John Barrymore and President Franklin D. Roosevelt” (cited in Gould 9.8). He cites the strip (April 2, 1944) in which actor Flintheart greets his agent as Wallace, seeing this as a reference to Vice President Henry Wallace. Although many readers could recognize some Roosevelt characteristics in Vitamin, I do not think that most regularly associated the character with FDR and have not included the actor as a World War II connection.

Although Chester Gould does not have his detective serve abroad against the enemy, as some other cartoonists did (see “War in the Comics” 60-61; Hutchens 14, 42), he does connect Tracy to Naval Intelligence at home, and he inserts numerous references to the war and the homefront that communicate his patriotism, his hatred for the enemy, and his belief that Americans must accept shortages of food, gasoline, and rubber during a time of economic dislocation as well as be vigilant against potential foreign agents among the civilian population who could spy on or even attack them. In 1944, John Bainbridge estimated that the comic strip is “bought every day by 13,500,000 people and is probably read by twice that number” (43). Most would agree that the cartoonist and Dick Tracy “did their part.”


Works Cited

Bainbridge, John. “Chester Gould.”Life 14 August 1944: 43-53.

Binder, Al and Kermit Jaediker. “Just Before the Battle, Tracy.” New York Daily News 9 May 1944.

“British New Guinea is Declared Won.”New York Times 4 October 1943: 5.

“Catholic Leader Tells of Nazi Torture.”Washington Post 2 January 1942: 6.

“Doing Without.” New York Times 29 December 1941: 14.

“German Torture Bared.”New York Times 24 January 1944: 5.

Gould, Chester. The Complete Dick Tracy. Volumes 7-9. San Diego: IDW Publishing, 2009.

Hutchens, John K. “Tracy, Superman, et al., Go to War.” New York Times Magazine 21 November 1943: SM 14, 42.

Kearney, Paul. “Afraid of Poison Gas?”Los Angeles Times 5 July 1942: H13.

“Nazis’ Torture Orgies Pictured.”Los Angeles Times 3 January 1942: 3.

“OPA Will Continue Control of Rents Through Next June.”New York Times 28 August 1945: 1.

“Rickenbacker Tells Story of His 23 days on Raft.”New York Times 20 December 1942: 1.

Roberts, Garyn. Dick Tracy and American Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.

“Roosevelt Cites Japanese Retreat In New Guinea as a Real Defeat.” New York Times 6 October 1943: 1.

“Use of Poison Gas Denied by Berlin.” New York Times 12 May 1942:. 5.

“War in the Comics.”Newsweek 13 July 1942: 60-61.

“What to Do in Case of Poison Gas Attacks.” Los Angeles Times 19 December 1941: 8.

 
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