Mind-Munitions

The Second World War 229
also reflected the sensitivity of many Americans to the type of
propaganda campaign that was felt to have duped America into
war in 1917. Nye and Clark had not seen most of the films they
were accusing and the hearings that took place in September 1941
were largely a farce. And although the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor three months later made the investigation somewhat
redundant, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Resolution
152 was not without foundation, even if its proponents lacked the
detailed knowledge to see it through.
Japan and Germany were to place the American government
firmly on the Allied side by their actions in December 1941.
Hollywood was quick to mobilize and in the next four years kept
up a relentless pace of film production that was to serve the
national propaganda effort well. As Roosevelt stated: ‘The motion
picture industry could be the most powerful instrument of propaganda
in the world, whether it tries to be or not.’
The Bureau of Motion Pictures was right to consider that every
film enhanced or diminished the national reputation abroad. And
film could help to overcome the sheer distance of a war fought on
the other side of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Characters such as
Tarzan (Tarzan Triumphs [1943] and Tarzan’s Desert Mystery
[1943]), Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of
Terror [1942]), and cartoon characters such as Batman, the
Masked Marvel, and Secret Agent X-9, were recruited into the
service of the propaganda war to fight Nazi agents around the
world. Africa was a popular setting for such plots and served to
reinforce the ‘Europe First’ policy of the American government,
which had decided to knock out Germany before seeking revenge
for Pearl Harbor. The war in the Pacific was, of course, covered by
Hollywood in such films as Wake Island (1942), Guadalcanal
Diary (1943), Bataan (1943), Corregidor (1943), Destination
Tokyo (1943), and Objective Burma! (1945). The last of these
caused such a storm of protest in Britain, due to its suggestion that
the Americans were bearing the brunt of the war in Burma, that the
studio withdrew its exhibition in the UK. Most of the films
contained some form of ‘Yellow Peril’ propaganda, although it is
interesting to note by way of contrast that anti-Italian stereotypes
are rare in the films about the European war. The Germans, on the
other hand, were portrayed as gangsters and thugs, abusers of
women and the innocent (Hitler’s Children [1943], Women in